Today

India Today

by Anita Pratap

Former CNN bureau chief for South Asia, freelance journalist, and columnist for Outlook, India's weekly newsmagazine

There are many ways to describe "modern" India, but perhaps the most fitting is "Land of Paradoxes." For whatever your understanding of India today, the exact opposite is probably equally true. Life has changed dramatically in the last decade, when India began to liberalize its economy, and yet it remains a land where several centuries exist simultaneously. If you visit one of its scientific centers, you could well believe you are at NASA, but walk to a village that still has no connection to a driveable road (and there are thousands of them), and you will find people living exactly as they did 2,000 years ago. More than 25% of the world's software engineers are Indian, but another 25% of the Indian population go to bed hungry every night. Women have risen to top positions of power and authority, yet millions struggle without the most basic human rights. India has the world's highest number of malnourished children, yet obesity in urban children is a new and menacing problem. The country has armed itself with nuclear weapons, but has difficulty providing drinking water to millions of its citizens. It ranks extremely low in the United Nations' Human Development Index, which measures quality of life (124th out of 173 countries), but in terms of purchasing parity, India is the fourth-biggest economy in the world after the United States, China, and Japan. No wonder India is confusing, confounding, incomprehensible. How can you make sense of this land? It's like emptying an ocean with a spoon.

All through the 1970s and even 1980s, Western diplomats and journalists predicted the "Balkanization" of India. It didn't happen. They predicted India would be a basket case. It didn't happen. In 1991, India's foreign exchange reserves plunged to a catastrophic $1 billion, barely sufficient to service 2 weeks of imports. India was forced to embark on a liberalization program, reducing aspects of government control such as high import tariffs and privatizing key sectors. Since then, India's economy has grown by an average of 6% annually, and today the reserves have reached a staggering $80 billion. According to statistics, the overall standard of living has improved since liberalization, but no doubt it has also aggravated disparity -- India still has the world's largest concentration of poor. Nearly 300 million people live without the basic necessities of life: water, food, roads, education, medical care, and jobs. These are the Indians living on the outer edges of the nation's consciousness, far away in remote tribal areas, barren wastelands, and dirty slums, totally outside the market economy. Their tragedy is that they lack the basic skills needed to gain entry into the marketplace. And no one is even trying to equip them.

This brings us to the inherent weakness of Indian politics. India is the world's largest democracy. Every national election is the biggest spectacle of fair and peaceful democracy that humankind has ever witnessed. And yet, increasingly one cannot deny that democracy is often a masquerade for a modern version of feudalism. Clan loyalties propel electoral victories. The victor rules his or her province like a medieval tribal chieftain, showing scant respect for merit or rule of law. Cronies are handpicked for jobs, rivals are attacked or harassed, public funds are misused to promote personal agendas. Modern-day versions of Marie Antoinette abound in Indian democracy -- during the acute summer water scarcity of 2003, the chief minister of Delhi, Sheila Dixit, actually urged her citizens not to bathe in tubs! Not only do a mere few thousand of Delhi's 12 million have access to tubs, but taps are perpetually dry in summer. And while the poor were dying of cold in January 2003 in nearby Uttar Pradesh, its chief minister, Mayawati, was strutting around in diamonds and celebrating her birthday with a cake the size of a minibus. One assumes that the withering media criticism that came her way would have wilted her arrogance but, far from being humbled, the lady turned her wrath on the media, countering that her low caste was the real reason for their criticism. Surprisingly, many low-caste people, whose cause she is supposed to champion, support her reasoning, marveling that she too can celebrate her birthday like India's rich. Never mind the waste of public funds that could have been used to buy blankets to save many people from freezing to death -- Mayawati's outrageous behavior only filled them with pride and nationalistic fervor.

In fact, nationalism is one of the biggest growth industries in India, one that is guaranteed to stymie, if not wreck, genuine economic progress. In the last decade, the rise of Hindu nationalism has become a growing nightmare for India's Muslims and Christians. At the heart of this ideology is the belief that today's Muslims should be punished for historical wrongs perpetrated by medieval Muslim invaders and conquerors. The worst Hindu-Muslim rioting and looting happened in the western state of Gujarat in 2002, when Hindu mobs killed and maimed thousands of innocent Muslim civilians, including pregnant women and children, avenging another ghastly incident in which Muslim criminals roasted alive 58 Hindu pilgrims in a train. If unchecked, nationalism will also take its toll on the dangerous Kashmir dispute that bedevils relations between the nuclear-capable neighbors India and Pakistan. The two countries have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir, engaged in another low-level conflict in 1998, and come to the brink of another in 2002, prevented mainly through diplomatic intervention by the U.S. The situation is exacerbated by politicians who polarize Hindus and Muslims before elections in order to garner Hindu or Muslim votes -- with Hindus constituting 82% of the population, Hindu nationalism clearly has a better chance of winning the electoral stakes. The battle for votes may be won through this diabolical strategy of dividing communities, but the opportunity for India to achieve her true destiny as a stable, prosperous giant in the 21st century will be lost.

Bill Clinton once said: "India remains a battleground for every single conflict the world has to win." Certainly India copes with massive problems -- mounting corruption, joblessness, judicial bottlenecks with few convictions and delays of up to 20 years for delivering justice, AIDS, acute water shortages, poverty, disease, environmental degradation, unbearable overcrowding in metropolitan cities, crises of governance, sectarian violence, and terrorism. India adds one Australia to itself every year -- 18 million people. The rural poor (who form the majority) see children as an economic resource, the only security net for old age, and high child-mortality rates necessitate the need for more than one or two. Apart from India's huge natural growth rate, an estimated one to two million poor Bangladeshis slip into India every year in search of work.

It is really a miracle that India has not collapsed, but this is a country of remarkable stamina. The trouble is, India does not act until a crisis is full-blown. Indians are terrible at prevention, but terrific in crisis management. As it looms closer -- like the imminent judicial collapse -- it is exasperating and frightening to see citizens and authorities insouciantly lurch towards the abyss. But once they reach the precipice, Indians are adept at pulling back quickly and effectively. They don't descend into chaos because they are adaptable and resilient. For if disparity is India's weakness, diversity and courage are her strengths. India has a strong network of grass-roots-level institutions, NGOs, and activists that form a kind of coral reef, erecting little barriers on which political and economic onslaughts falter, such as the recent attempts to build an industrial belt around the Taj Mahal that, once exposed in the media, were shelved. These onslaughts come from an array of "threats" -- from local politicians to multinational corporations. Nobody can ride roughshod over India. Nobody can fool Indians. Foreigners may be smooth-talking, willing to bribe, have fancy degrees, and speak English with a beautiful accent. But they can neither arm-twist nor hoodwink Indians. The shenanigans of Enron were exposed first in India. India stood firm amid the Enron-orchestrated swirl of accusations of being difficult, corrupt, untrustworthy. All of which is true. But it was equally true of Enron. Eventually, it was Enron that went bust.

When they cannot do it their way and according to their schedule, politicians rail against the bureaucrats, trade unionists, judges, journalists, and NGOs. But this defensive "coral reef" is what has saved India from sliding precipitously to economic ruin. The pace of Indian economic reforms was widely attacked as too slow by the IMF and World Bank. And yet Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 and a former chief economist for the World Bank, now admits that India's caution and slow, deliberate steps are precisely what saved the nation from the catastrophic meltdowns and flights of capital that befell Asian and Latin American countries.

India has always been a giant and will continue to be a giant. But she will move at her own pace. She is not an Asian tiger. She is more like a stately Indian elephant. No one can whip or crack her into a run. If you try, the stubborn elephant will dig in her heels and refuse to budge. No power on earth can then force her to move. The desire for change and movement must come from within. India will move, but she will be slow, ponderous, circuitous. Progress will come, but it will come in measured steps, not in leaps and bounds. There is no point arguing whether this is good or bad. It is good and bad. And it is many things in between.

After all, this is India.