Recasting India (2 page)

My collective memory of India had undergone a change, a “gush-up” in Roy's words, of Per Capita Hope. But Antilia pushed it right back down. That was the problem with Antilia. Not that it was said to have a domestic staff of 600 people, not that there were said to be three helicopter landing spots on it, not that some whispered it had cost perhaps not one but two billion dollars—the problem with Antilia was that it made most of us feel static, no matter how far we had actually climbed.

And the last two decades had been all about climbing up—the sort of dramatic burst of social mobility that changes the course of a nation. We had begun to believe in an India where you might not go to the Doon School or St. Stephen's College or Oxford or Cambridge but could still do something and be someone that everyone loved and looked up to. It was a heady time that let people fantasize about escaping their pasts.

Antilia would not let us forget or escape.

When the Commonwealth Games came in 2010 and a powerful politician showed us yet again that he could steal anything he liked at will, circumvent any law with no consequences, and laugh in our faces, it brought that ancient feeling of helplessness right back. All those years when we could do nothing, change nothing.

When the comptroller and auditor general of India announced that illicitly regulated auctions for the 2G mobile telephony spectrum had cost the exchequer Rs 1.76 lakh crores (around $39 billion at 2011 exchange rates), it was not the enormity of the sum that stupefied us, but the audacity of our rulers who, two decades after reforms, didn't bat an eye.
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Our anxiety was exaggerated because somewhere in the flight of our hope, we had also left our old support structures behind; now when we fell, we fell uncushioned. This, I realized, was at the root of my parents' anxiety.

My parents had been convinced that they were going to return to Calcutta, where I grew up and where we still have a home, once I was settled. But as Bengal and Calcutta grew more and more violent—first with the warring Trinamool Congress Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M), and then with the escalation of bloodshed and hooliganism after Trinamool swept to power in 2011—they gave up hope of ever returning.

As they grew older, my parents began to worry about the onset of helplessness and dependence. They had no real friends in Delhi; their extended family was all in Calcutta, as were old friends and neighbors. We were not alone in this. We were part of the C5 segment, what Indicus Analytics describes as the “eighth largest among 33 urban consumer segments, with nearly 250,000 households of around three to four members.”
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We were what was called twice removed—immigrant and nuclear. “Nuclear families” is a curious phrase used for families consisting of only a couple and their children, in which the grandparents and/or other relatives do not live with the family. Such households in India have swelled as the traditional joint family system has crumbled. Indicus calculated that 88 percent of such households have only three or four members and no “senior members” like a grandparent in the home. Just 11 percent have more than two children—something my parents never forgot, since I am their only child. They worried about slipping and falling when I was out, about crippling disease with no one else nearby to help.

My vision of a world with a tremblingly exciting rise per capita seemed to be dying out, crashing like the rupee in tailspin. In their book
An Uncertain Glory
, the economists Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze described the income inequalities in modern-day economically growing India as creating islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa.
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Boats that had been set afloat with much difficulty after liberalization seemed to be under the threat of sinking with a slowing economy and rising income disparity.

The cracks that we thought were getting filled seemed larger than ever. Fifty percent of Indians still defecated in the open, while newspaper headlines focused on government efforts to build a low-cost tablet called Aakash that seemed endlessly mired in controversy and ultimately found few takers.

In 2013, the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) said 18 percent of parliamentary and assembly candidates had had criminal cases filed against them, and 8 percent had been accused of serious crimes like rape or murder. People who were under criminal indictment and were re-contesting elections increased their wealth. More than 75 percent of them raised their assets by an average of Rs 2.34 crores, from Rs 1.74 crores to Rs 4.08 crores.

Just when the Indian capital seemed to be slowly becoming more civilized, a gang rape and murder, in which iron rods were driven into the vagina of the victim and used to tear her intestines, revealed that rapes had gone up by more than 800 percent in 40 years.

So I set out to discover this anxious India, this India the world saw when millions protested against corruption with the septuagenarian social reformer Anna Hazare, and thousands more fought pitched battles with police after that gruesome gang rape in Delhi in December 2012.

I found islands, yes, but they didn't always reek of Californication. I found pockets of incredible enterprise and dexterity that very few people ever talk about. This is a book about the extraordinary enterprise of ordinary people. People just like you and me, as annoyed, as excited, as helpless—and about how they are tackling the myriad contradictions of an aspiring country—a fascinating spectrum of journeys. These are their stories.

There are two kinds of democracies—measured democracy and experienced democracy. India is a measured democracy, which means that once every five years we can measure the number of votes cast, the vote swings and all that paraphernalia. The other is a democracy that you can feel every day, in which you feel that your elected representative actually speaks for you.

The original title of this book was
The Mango People.
It comes from an irritated statement posted on Facebook by Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of Sonia Gandhi, the president of the Congress Party, India's longest-ruling political party, and present head of the Nehru-Gandhi family, the first family of Indian politics.

In 2012, his assets and business interests were part of an exposé ostensibly showing questionable ties between Vadra and a real estate giant. The source was the Aam Aadmi Party, a reform party launched in the wake of Anna Hazare's anticorruption campaign. The revelations made headlines, but nothing really came of it because once again nothing could be proved. But Vadra was driven to the edge by the flurry of headlines and posted the line “Mango people in a banana republic” on his Facebook wall. This he later deleted, along with the Facebook account.

The phrase “mango people” literally translates to
aam aadmi
in Hindi, since the word
aam
means both “common” and “mango” (and
aadmi
means “man”). This book is for the common men and women of India. They haven't yet had their Arab Spring, or their Indian Summer for that matter, so instead, they're channeling their frustrations, fears, anxieties and dreams into entrepreneurial fervor. This is their very different tale of independence, the freedom they are only now beginning to feel free enough to even comprehend.

This book was later called
Recasting India
because that is what is happening. India is being recast, remolded and redefined. I started writing this book because I felt that a powerful moment of change in India was upon us—and it was being missed or misunderstood by much of big business and big politics, and indeed much of big media—but the people, the workers, the entrepreneurs understood it only too well. They could feel the throb and thrust of that change. They could see it play out every day, in every nook and corner. And they were contributing to that change. Their collective enterprise—in building, thinking, creating, sharing, protesting and pushing—is changing one of the oldest civilizations in the world. Even if some of that change comes with much cursing and snarling.

But what are they pushing against? They are fighting against the idea that India is, in essence, a socialist country in which the state is the key; this is a tale of India trying to rediscover, and retell, its history of astonishing enterprise. At a time when public thought in the West is increasingly telling of the demise of capitalism, when books are being written about why capitalism does not work, India is brimming with the aspiration of a billion entrepreneurial minds, what former prime minister Manmohan Singh once referred to as the “animal spirits” of the economy. In this, the Indian story is exactly the opposite of what is happening in the West, which despairs that the excesses of capitalism can never be controlled and that the destructive power of inequality is the Achilles heel of capitalism.

India has the opposite despair. When an Indian sees Antilia, he despairs not just because of inequality (though that's the story Roy and others like her prefer to focus on), but even more because of the lack of opportunity for him to build his own tower of success. Not per se a tall, tall building, you understand, but a chance to climb high and fast. This is the power of the aspiration and enterprise of millions of Indians that is not understood by most tellers of Indian tales. This is because their prism of analysis is Marxist theorizing—many of them were indoctrinated in the most left-leaning universities of America and England—and see in India's poverty only despair, not the yearning for one chance, one opportunity to break free. They believe that the state must play a welfare role—and indeed there is nothing wrong with that per se—but they fail to appreciate the role the state must play to enable enterprise: not just provide fish for the people to eat but also teach them to accurately cast the line for the biggest catch.

What does not help in this is that parts of history have been wiped out of everyday conversation.

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At the time of writing, $1 is equal to approximately Rs 59. The terms “lakh” and “crore” are Indian units of measurement. A lakh is 100,000 and a crore is 10 million. So Rs 1,000 = $17; Rs 5 lakhs = $8,500; Rs 1,000 crores = $168 million; Rs 2 lakh crore = $33 billion. All conversations are approximate.

 

When the name Tagore is mentioned, does anyone ever think entrepreneur? Not many do. The easiest association of that name is with Rabindranath Tagore, the first Indian Nobel laureate and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913.

Rabindranath Tagore was, like me, a Bengali. The Bengalis are known as the intellectuals and at the same time the effete of India. Both allegations are only partially true. It is true that the renaissance came first to Bengal, whose capital, Calcutta, was between 1772 and 1911 the second most important city of the Raj as India was becoming the jewel in the imperial crown. It is also true that even 30 years ago, Bengal was the cultural capital of India, producing, among others, the first Indian director to win an Oscar when Satyajit Ray, who lived and worked only in Bengal, accepted his for lifetime achievement in cinema from his deathbed in a hospital in southern Calcutta in 1992.

Today, Bengal is better known for having one of the worst rates of crimes against women in India and for elections in its villages in which scores are murdered in gun and knife battles between local political parties. Also, while generations of Bengalis have worked little to change their reputation as timid but egotistical argumentative sloths, the first and only organized army against the British Raj was raised by a Bengali intellectual, Subhash Chandra Bose. Some of the first intrepid bomb attacks on the colonial masters were the work of a Bengali, Khudiram Bose, who was hanged for murder having barely reached his eighteenth birthday. So much for being effete.

The Bengali is also said to be best fit for pontificating clerkdom, having little or no enterprise.

But long before Rabindranath earned the epithet “Gurudev” or the “Great Master” for his innumerable works of poetry, prose and drama of rare elegance, in fact, around three decades before his birth, another Tagore was already making history.

Dwarkanath Tagore was the grandfather of Rabindranath, a man so wealthy that he earned the epithet “Prince” though, strictly speaking, in an India full of kingdoms and pedigreed loyalty, he was merely a rich landowner. But unlike so many other landlords, who were at best profligate wastrels content with the serfdom of their poor farmer tenants and groveling servitude to the British masters, Tagore went into business.

His interests spanned coal and tea and jute, sugar refining, newspapers and shipping. In 1829, he was the first Indian to become the director of a bank. In 1834, he and his partners started the first Anglo-Indian (Indian and British) trading agency, Carr, Tagore and Company. He was a man who dreamed of bringing England's industrial revolution to the Hooghly shoreline.

In his 1976 book
Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India
, historian Blair Bernard Kling says that Tagore's dream was to take his state of Bengal, perhaps even all of India, from the mercantile to the industrial age, and put the steam engine to commercial use in the country. “Tagore organised the first coal mining company and the first steam-tug and river steamboat companies, and was among his country's pioneer railways promoters,” Kling writes.
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