India’s modern mutinies

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It has often been said of the Indian government that in trying to do too much, it has done too little. Socialist planning in the decades that followed the country’s independence in 1947 created state-owned steel mills, hotels and airlines. It also brought economic isolation and stultifying regulation. Meanwhile, New Delhi had neglected more basic needs such as primary education, public hygiene and women’s health.

Fast-forward and everything would seem to have changed. The growth rate has risen sharply over the past two decades to about 8 per cent and a vast Indian middle class has enticed billions of dollars in foreign investment from western multinationals seeking new consumers. Yet the unfinished economic reforms begun in 1991 have a poor report card in areas where the government must take the lead. The majority of the population still lacks access to a toilet, the average time children spend in school is about four years, and about half of those under the age of five are severely malnourished – a record worse than that of many countries in sub-Saharan Africa.Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights or use this link to reference the article - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c899f6e6-d3be-11e0-bc6b-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1WrEyU8BW

India is the land of paradox. And one of its central contradictions is that this most dynamic of economies also has many characteristics of a failing state.

The shadow of inept and iniquitous government looms large in each of the four books under review. A recurrent theme of Mark Tully’s India: The Road Ahead, Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned, Arundhati Roy’s Broken Republic and Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing is that for all the progress of recent decades, the country’s growth has been far more corrupt, unequal and disruptive than it needed to be.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the forests running from Orissa in the east through Madhya Pradesh in the central part of the country to Andhra Pradesh in the south. Historian Ramachandra Guha has likened the treatment of the tribal groups living in these regions to that of Australia’s aboriginal population – with the difference that in India things appear to be getting worse in recent years as voracious demand for iron ore and coal has accelerated the pace of displacement and disrupted ancient local economies.

Mark Tully, a legendary BBC correspondent in India who ran its Delhi bureau for two decades, devotes a couple of chapters of India: The Road Ahead to their plight. Visiting a housing project built to resettle tribal people who had been moved to make way for a power station in Singrauli, Madhya Pradesh, he writes: “The houses were little more than tin shacks, cheek by jowl, standing in straight lines, with no shade, no horticulture at all in fact.”

When locals complain to the officials that they had no electricity, they are told brusquely: “You can’t afford electricity so you can’t have it.” This is despite the fact that Singrauli has so many power stations that it has been renamed Shakti Nagar, or Power Town. As Tully notes: “They had lost their land and livelihood to provide the rest of India with a basic facility they were never going to enjoy.”

The arbitrary displacement of villagers and the seizing of land from farmers has recently exercised India’s Supreme Court. In July, it ordered the provincial government of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, to return land taken from hundreds of farmers to make way for apartment blocks.

But India’s politicians show a sense of urgency only when forced to do so by a crisis – and often not even then. For more than three years now, there has been legislation pending in New Delhi to replace an 1894 land acquisition bill with one that would better protect local rights and ensure adequate compensation. Rahul Gandhi, scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family and one of the most powerful members of the ruling Congress party, has made the issue a rallying cry, but the bill will be introduced only in the next session of parliament.

Siddhartha Deb, an Indian novelist who divides his time between India and the US, also meets rural discontents in The Beautiful and the Damned. But he is strongest on the iniquities of the industrial sector, where millions work without health and disability insurance or pensions. Employers get around complicated labour laws by enlisting contract workers, who are often not covered by any regulations because they are hired through middlemen. Deb details the result in a visit to a steel factory in southern India, “a vast open-sided shed filled with deafening noise and the blast of heat from furnaces operating at 1,200 degrees Celsius. The men visible through the smoke and noise were infernal creatures, rags wrapped around their faces to protect themselves from the heat.”

There is a telling anecdote in Deb’s book that illustrates the cocooned complacency of India’s bureaucracy. He is waiting to interview the most senior government official in the southern Indian town of Nizamabad (the official’s title, “collector”, aptly describes the role of government). Suddenly, out of nowhere appears a crowd of 100 small children, shouting slogans and hoisting placards. Policemen run out brandishing sticks and then turn away, feeling foolish.

The children are there to protest that the government hadn’t filled vacant teaching positions in the local school. “But the collector remained on his conference call and refused to meet the children,” Deb writes. “In keeping with the refinement of the Indian bureaucracy, the collector’s deputy dispatched her ‘camp clerk’ to take their ‘petition’. The children left after presenting their case and so did the collector, surrounded by a flurry of attendants and officials as he disappeared into a white Toyota Innova with an official red light revolving on top.”

What happens when the children grow up to be impatient youths, hardened by a lifetime of neglect and exploitation? It is not coincidental, perhaps, that Nizamabad lies at the southern end of the so-called “Maoist corridor”, a violent communist insurgency that uncoils like a snake through central India.

A few years ago Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, famously described the Maoists as the country’s most potent internal security threat – quite an assessment, given the smorgasbord of options ranging from militant Islamist terrorists to decades-long insurgencies in Kashmir and the north-east of India. Maoists have claimed responsibility for the derailment of trains and for ambushing the paramilitary troops sent to subdue them.

Novelist and activist Arundhati Roy takes us to the heart of this conflict in Broken Republic. Her essay entitled “Walking with the Comrades” begins with an encounter with a child soldier named Mangtu. It is a testament both to Roy’s genius as a wordsmith and her partisan excesses that her writing reads alternately like Joan Didion’s courageous and caustic reporting on El Salvador in the early 1980s and a gushing travelogue about trekking in pristine jungle.

Mangtu has arrived without carrying the signs that indicate that he is the person who will lead Roy into the jungle to meet the Maoists. These signs include a bunch of bananas and a copy of the Indian news magazine Outlook. “He took out a soggy note from his pocket and handed it to me. It said ‘Outlook nahi mila.’ (Couldn’t find Outlook) ‘And the bananas?’ ‘I ate them,’ he said. ‘I got hungry.’ He really was a security threat. His backpack said ‘Charlie Brown – Not your ordinary blockhead’.”

Sleeping under the stars, she writes: “It’s the most beautiful room I have slept in a long time. My private suite in a thousand-star hotel. I’m surrounded by these strange, beautiful children with their curious arsenal ... Why must they die? To turn all of this into a mine?”

It’s not always clear what the Maoists stand for, other than the violent overthrow of the Indian state, but as Tully, Deb and Roy observe, better governance would help douse the tinder-box of resentment. Instead of addressing problems with any sort of urgency, the government of Chhattisgarh, the state most badly affected by the Maoist insurgency, has piled one human rights abuse upon another. Six years ago it founded a vigilante army comprised mainly of teenagers to fight the Maoists, who also use child soldiers. In July, India’s increasingly activist Supreme Court ordered that this force be disbanded.

Roy is right to rail against the Indian government for not doing more to curb these excesses and at least try to negotiate with the Maoists but, as Tully points out more even-handedly: “[The Maoists’] declared ambition is to overthrow the state by 2025, and no government can agree to obliteration. The only option would be winning over the forest-dwellers by providing them with good governance and protection so the Naxalites [communist militant groups] have nowhere to hide.”

In this country of multiple mutinies, it is often the silent who suffer the most. No amount of legislation, it seems, can bring about a reversal of the discrimination that Indian women face from cradle – or rather from conception – to grave. As incomes have risen in the past decade, so too has the incidence of aborting female foetuses. Girls are routinely fed less at home, resulting in life-long anaemia. A recent government contract for producing low-cost sanitary towels – unavailable to some 90 per cent of Indian women – inexplicably went to a manufacturer with no prior record of making them.

Beautiful Thing, the non-fiction debut of Goan-born journalist Sonia Faleiro, turns the spotlight on Mumbai’s bar girls, who dance for money in dimly lit establishments and often sleep with the customers. The protagonist is a wise-cracking youngster named Leela, whose father started hiring her out for sex at the age of 13 to policemen in the northern Indian town she grew up in. Leela decided to work for herself and escaped to Mumbai. It turns out that every one of the bar girls living in her tenement “had either been sold by a blood relative or raped by one”.

For Leela, earning her keep as a bar girl is a journey in female emancipation: “If my mother talks to a man who isn’t her son, brother or cousin she will hear the sound of my father’s hand across her face. But you’ve seen me with men? If I don’t want to talk, I say, ‘Get lost oye’.”

The rich, gaudy tapestry that Faleiro weaves is a reminder that some of the best recent books about India, such as Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, also about Mumbai, give us the big picture by focusing on the microcosm. Deb and Tully have written uneven books, largely because they cover too much ground. VS Naipaul pulled this off in a series of beautifully observed mini-biographies in India: A Million Mutinies Now, but the Naipaul of 21 years ago was a force to reckon with. Deb’s glib chapter on software engineers in Bangalore is unrepresentative and given over to dull people who indulge in bombastic rants against Muslims or America.

In 2011, we know India is a country of slums as well as skyscrapers, of software engineers with stock options and farmers with large debts. Future writers on the teeming country ought to give us one or the other. A country as multitudinous as India – and, on this evidence, with more grim narratives than all of Dickens – is simply too unwieldy to tackle in a single book.