Our poverty + their wealth = India

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Sometimes it takes a foreign eye to see India in perspective. Known statistics, for example, have been humanised by The Economist to paint a telling picture of the Indian reality in its post-election glow. The juxtaposition of facts goes thus:

“About 27 million Indians will be born this year. Unless things improve, almost 2 million of them will die before the next general election. Of the children who survive, more than 40 percent will be physically stunted by malnutrition. Most will enroll in a school, but they cannot count on their teachers showing up. After five years of classes, less than 60 percent will be able to read a short story and more than 60 percent will be stumped by simple arithmetic”.

This is by no means a damn-India editorial. Far from it. The cover story is headlined “Good news from India”. True, The Economist often adopts a know-all attitude and gives lectures to all and sundry. This is no reason why we should shy away from facts that are known to us, too, as facts.

The underlying fact about India is that six decades after independence, it remains an extremely poor country. There is widespread poverty in China, but not of the pitiable levels of human degradation we see in the slums of India. Countries like Malaysia needed only two decades to virtually abolish poverty.

Why have the many governments of India allowed the poverty of India to continue as a humiliating spectacle? The main reason must be that our politicians were busy with other things. When they did talk of poverty, it was only for purposes of gimmickry. Indira Gandhi sold the slogan “Garibi hatao”, won elections – and that was that. In his otherwise insubstantial book After Nehru, Who?, American author Welles Hangen wrote in 1963 what is true to this day. “The tragedy of India”, he said, “is not poverty, but the mentality that accepts, even condones, poverty”.

That mentality persists. When a film depicting the horrors of Indian poverty wins Oscars in Hollywood, we protest against foreigners looking only at the negative side of India. We don’t do anything about eliminating the negative side. In fact, we, too, try to profit from it by starting “slum tourism” in Dharavi.

Today we have a new union cabinet of mostly capable men and women, headed by one of the world’s most respected economists. Predictably, we hear of 8 percent and 10 percent growth. Spectacular growth has taken place since Nehru’s Socialist days. A nouveau riche class has arisen. But more than half of Mumbai’s population lives in slums. The very poor remain very miserably poor.

There are vital problems that do not depend on growth rates for a solution. The highly influential ministers from Tamil Nadu, for example, will need only a fraction of their influence to put an end to the shameful two-glass system in the teashops of the deep south. The powerful ministers from Punjab and Haryana can take effective steps to stop the practice of female infanticide. The high-calibre ministers from Kerala can help save their state’s rivers from being killed by sand mafias.

Of course none of them will do any of this. Our politicians are primarily self-centred. We will see poverty and misery continuing while the wealth of the ruling class increases. Organisations like the National Election Watch have computed that the average assets of MPs increased from 2004 to 2009 by 103 percent for Congress, by 155 percent for the BJP, by 463 percent for the DMK and by a breath-taking 831 percent for the JDS.
Poverty? What poverty?

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Adiga, Slumdog, Nargis – and India

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Do people in the west love to see the ugly side of India? We may talk big about the rising number of Indian billionaires, but does the world out there have a vested interest in applauding and promoting the horrible realities of India – its atrocious poverty, its way of degrading women, abusing children?

The question arose when Aravind Adiga’s ‘White Tiger” won the Booker Prize. As a literary work, the novel had its fault lines. But it was its theme that caught attention. Indian reviewers dismissed it as unworthy. The west hailed it as a new voice and as a ‘bald, unadorned portrait of India as seen from the bottom of the heap’.

That was the point: The bottom of the heap, not the top of the glittering malls and the exclusive clubs in hotels where a shot of single malt whisky sells for ten and twenty thousand rupees. These comfort zones of the few boost our national ego, the dehumanizing poverty of the many is uncomfortable and therefore ignored.

Adiga not only does not ignore it, he makes a visible molehill out of the mountain. Almost brutally he shows how poverty corrupts the mind, now hypocrisies colour most things Indian, from the naming of roads to that incomparable Indianism, “Indian made Foreign Liquor”. His sarcasm is biting when he refers to “the 36,000,004 gods” of India and to the country’s cockroach population (for which, mercifully, he does not give a figure). Is this spilling of the filthy innards of India that attracts westerners and irritates Indians?

Then comes “Slumdog Millionaire” with its Golden Globes. Did this movie win so many awards because it, too, is a brutal expose of the dehumanizing life in Indian slums? Bombay’s slums are an old shame. In Dharavi, the world’s biggest and most putrid slum, people live like insects, cooking their food while channels of excreta flow all around them. Whole lives are spent there with no escape from the appalling conditions that breed child trafficking, supari killings, incest, homosexuality, prostitution. It is difficult to imagine such inhuman existence, yet it exists.

Successive Governments have managed not to notice the presence of such a national disgrace right before their eyes. The rest of the population just close their eyes, their nostrils and their consciences and carry on. But now the whole world can see graphic, technicolor portrayals of India’s shame. Some filth scenes are so realistic as to be disgusting and shocking at the same time.

So even as we lionize A.R. Rahman for his trophies, will we dismiss “Slumdog Millionaire” as a dark movie unworthy of honours? Or should we have the honesty to accept that exposing a disgrace is not the offence; allowing the disgrace to exist is the real offence.

The tendency to shoot the messenger is fundamentally hypocritical, and we have been guilty of it from early on. When that all time classic “Pather Panchali” was released in 1955, its creator Satyajit Ray was viciously attacked. Not by any fly-by-night reviewer, but by Nargis herself. The Queen of the screen in the 1950’s Golden Age of Indian Cinema stood up in the Rajya Sabha and called Satyajit Ray a Peddler of India’s poverty. She said in a subsequent interview that “Pather Panchali” became successful abroad because foreigners wanted to see India in a groveling posture. Then came her unforgivable accusation – that Satyajit Ray made such films in order to win awards. Many NRIs in America had also complained about the depiction of poverty in that film. Delhi’s response to these criticisms was to tighten censorship rules to ban portrayal of “Disgusting Poverty”.

Which shows what our official policy is. Poverty is okay, portraying it is not okay. Killing newborn baby girls is okay so long as no one reports it. Dowry deaths and throwing acid on unobliging girls is okay so long as no books are written on them. Accepting bribe money in bundles is okay, but putting it on camera is a crime inviting nemesis. Raping minorities and ghettoizing the survivors of pogroms is okay so long as there are enough industrialists to talk of development.

We are experts in double-speak. We flourish on double standards. Jai Hind!