All this is to the good. But I am not merely celebrating a triumph for the capitalists of India. What is truly wonderful about the “mobile miracle” (and I'm not embarrassed to call it that) is that it has accomplished something socialist policies talked about but did little to achieve — it has empowered the less fortunate. The beneficiaries of the new mobile telephones are not just the affluent, but people who in the old days would not even have dreamt of joining those twenty-year-long waiting lists.
It's a source of constant delight to me to find cell phones in the hands of the unlikeliest of my fellow citizens: taxi drivers, paanwallahs, farmers, fisher folk. As long as our tax policies keep telecommunications costs low and it's cheap for people to call on their cell phones, the greatest growth in the use of mobile phones will be in this sector. Communications, in the new India, is the great leveler. Pity Mr. Stephen is no longer around to see how wrong he was.
56. The Strange Rise of Planet India
ONE NEW INDICATION OF THE MOUNTING INTERNATIONAL interest in India can be found in foreign bookstores, where books about our country are proliferating like bougainvillea. Edward Luce's excellent In Spite of the Gods (a superb portrait of contemporary India, marred only by its awful title) attracted a great deal of well-deserved attention in 2006 and 2007. Hot on its heels comes Mira Kamdar's Planet India, whose subtitle runs, How the Fastest-Growing Democracy Is Transforming America and the World.
“India,” Winston Churchill once barked, “is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator.” Churchill was rarely right about India, but it is true that no other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices, and the range of levels of economic development that India does. Any truism about India can be immediately contradicted by another truism about India. I once jokingly observed that “anything you can say about India, the opposite is also true.”
And yet India is more than the sum of its contradictions. How does one come to grips with a land of such bewildering contrasts? The world's largest democracy that is also the home of the ageless caste system; a land steeped in superstition and spirituality that is a world leader in information technology; the nation of Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolence, that is convulsed by periodic bloodletting — the paradoxes abound. The country's national motto, emblazoned on its governmental crest, is “Satyameva Jayaté”—Truth Alone Triumphs. The question remains, however: Whose truth?
Edward Luce, a British journalist who headed the Financial Times bureau in Delhi at the cusp of the new century, ventures an answer in his insightful and engaging book. In the sharp-witted prose of a keenly observant journalist, Luce brings India to life with insight and irreverence (“If Gandhi had not been cremated, he would be turning in his grave”). His writing is richly evocative of place and mood, and sparkles with the kind of telling detail that illuminates an anecdote and lifts it above mere reportage. Almost the only thing not worth admiring in this book is its title, which suggests a nation struggling against the heavens, a thesis that has nothing to do with Luce's sophisticated and sympathetic narrative.
Advised early on that in India it is not enough to meet the “right people,” Luce travels through the country meeting the “wrong people” as well. He explores economic development from the ground up while never losing sight of the big picture (a “booming service economy in a sea of indifferent farmland”), punctures the myths surrounding India's IT explosion (which he correctly argues will not solve India's fundamental employment problems), and depicts the continuing allure of the secure and corruption-laden “government job.” Few foreigners have written with as much understanding of the skills and limitations of India's senior government bureaucrats, of their idealism and inefficiency, of the vested interests impeding growth and progress, as well as the extraordinary triumphs of India despite these obstacles.
On my annual visits home, I discover that India is anything but the unchanging land of cliché. There is an extraordinary degree of change and ferment. Dramatic transformations are taking place that amount to little short of a revolution — in politics, economics, society, and culture. In politics, single-party governance has given way to an era of multiparty coalitions. In economics, India has leapt from protectionism to liberalization, even if it is with the hesitancy of governments looking over their electoral shoulders. In caste and social relations, India has witnessed convulsive changes. And yet all this, which would have rent a lesser country asunder, has been managed through an accommodative and pluralist democracy. Luce tells this story remarkably well.
There is a gently sympathetic portrait of Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of the ruling Congress Party, for whom “the political is very personal.” Luce, who is married to an Indian, clearly admires much of India's culture: “If world trade were to be conducted purely in cultural products,” he writes, “then India would have a thumping annual surplus.” He answers the famous question of why Indian Muslims don't join al-Qaeda: “the political system under which they live” guarantees them “freedom of speech, expression, worship, and movement.” But Luce is a far from uncritical admirer. He is unsparing on the corruption that infests Indian politics and society, on the ersatz Westernization that has seen sonograms used to facilitate female feticide, on the “unimpressive politicians” who run India's “impressive democracy.”
No one speaks seriously anymore of the dangers of disintegration that, for years, India was said to be facing. Luce demonstrates credibly that, for all its flaws, India's democratic experiment has worked. Though there have been caste conflicts, linguistic clashes, interreligious riots, and threats to the nation from separatist groups, political democracy has helped to defuse each of these. The explosive potential of caste division has also been channeled through the ballot box. Most strikingly, the power of electoral numbers has given high office to the lowest of India's low. Who could have imagined, for three thousand years, that an “untouchable” woman would rule as chief minister of India's most populous state? Yet that has happened three times, most recently in mid-2007.
In 2004, in an event unprecedented in human history, a nation of a billion people, after the planet's largest exercise in free elections, saw a Roman Catholic political leader (Sonia Gandhi) make way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as prime minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) — in a country 81 percent Hindu. Luce is right to list the many problems the country faces, the poor quality of much of its political leadership, the rampant corruption, the criminalization of politics. But I'd like to have read a little more about the strengths of India's vibrant civil society: Nongovernmental organizations actively defend human rights, promoting environmentalism, fighting injustice. The press is free, lively, irreverent, disdainful of sacred cows. India is the only country in the English-speaking world where the print media is expanding rather than contracting, and the country supports the world's largest number of all-news TV channels. Luce disappointingly tells us nothing of this.