[Marxism] John Pilger -- India

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

When I discovered (after sending it) that the NS link was only to paying
subscription, I didn't know whether to post Bill Totten's download of the
article.  Mindful of Louis's strictures about wasting bandwidth, not to
speak of reaching heights of scholarship, I decided against it.  But there
has been a request for it, so here it is. -- JD

*****************************************

The crows beat their wings against the bay windows, waiting to ascend and
dive. Their cries are incessant; it is their apocalyptic swarm that is
different in India. They dance in the rain and wait in the yellow heat of
unyielding farmland turned to dust and hover above corridors of refugees
fleeing flood and war. Now, in the late monsoon in Mumbai, they perch on a
billboard image of young businessmen, who are white-skinned and joyful and
celebrating their ownership of a mobile phone that combines a TV screen. The
young businessmen and the fat crows overlook a pyramid of rubbish, which is
inhabited by a scabrous dog and darting rats (with an eye to the crows) and
a tiny sari-clad figure, digging methodically with her hands.

Mumbai is India's richest city. It handles forty per cent of the country's
maritime trade; it has most of the merchant banks and two stock exchanges
and Asia's biggest slum. Delight and shock are simultaneous responses. Raise
your eyes and the magnificent gothic edifices of the Raj seem hardly real:
the Rajabai Clock Tower, which once chimed "Rule Britannia" on the hour; and
epic indulgences such as Victoria Terminus, the greatest railway station in
the world, through which a million workers pass every day; and the Prince of
Wales museum
(it is still called that on the streets, as Mumbai is still Bombay), with
its remarkable collections and perfect dome dominating the Crescent Site,
leading to the Gateway of India.

Then lower your eyes to the concave human forms under rattan and hessian,
aliens to the beaming faces on the billboards, and the question is always
the same: why should such a rich and resourceful and culturally wise
society, with its democracy and memories of great popular struggle, live
like this?

When I was last in Bombay, a generation ago, I asked the great Bollywood
film director Raj Kapoor why poverty was so resistant in India. "Outsiders
misjudge us", he said. "We are a dynamic society. But most of us are forced
to live a life preordained by powerful groups for their benefit. The point
is, they need the poverty, which is very good for their enrichment, for
raising political hopes, for passing out food parcels, so to speak, and for
reinforcing divisions of religion and caste. However, all that is
distraction: just as my movies are distractions. When people fully
understand this and act, things will change in India".

A few years earlier, in 1971, I asked Indira Gandhi, then prime minister,
the same question. She and the Congress party had just been re-elected by a
huge majority. Her campaign had been one of promises, and the poor voted for
her. "After independence", she said, "I realise that somewhere along the way
our direction changed. We had a choice. Either we bought foreign goods or we
helped the industrialists to grow rich. So now we have a middle class and we
have poor people who know they are poor. That is the beginning of our great
change."

The "great change", apart from her disastrous imposition of martial law
followed by her own assassination, never happened. Rather, it happened with
the arrival of a strain of extreme capitalism, designed in England in the
early 19th century and known today as neoliberalism. With the defeat of
Congress and the rise of the Hindu nationalist BJP-led government in the
1990s, the divided society was shorn of its paternalism and licensed by the
International Monetary Fund. The barriers that had protected Indian industry
and manufacturing were demolished; Coca-Cola entered what had been forbidden
territory, along with Pizza Hut and Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch. "Shining
India" was invented by the illusionists of its beneficiaries: the expanding
middle class (a misnomer in India; there is no effective middle) and
transnational capital. They said that India would catch up China as an
economic power and that poverty would be eradicated.

Indeed, official figures appeared to show that, at the close of the
twentieth century, the number of Indians living in absolute poverty had
fallen by ten per cent. However, in his study Poverty and Inequality in
India: getting closer to the truth, Abhijit Sen says that the Indian poor
actually increased and that, for them, the 1990s were a "lost decade". In
2002, those in absolute poverty made up more than a third of the population,
or 364 million people. "Inadequate nutrition is actually far more widespread
than either hunger or income poverty", he wrote. "Half of Indian children
are clinically undernourished and almost forty per cent of all Indian adults
suffer chronic energy deficiency".

Certainly, India's growth rate has leapt above six per cent, but this is
about capital, not labour, about liberated profits, not people. All the talk
about a new high-tech India storming the barricades of the first world is
based largely on myth. The new technocratic class is tiny. The famous
call-centres, where educated young Indians affect knowledge of Britain and
American "lifestyles" in order to service the likes of American Express,
employ only 100,000 people, or 0.01 per cent of the population. Since 1993,
the so-called consumer boom in India has embraced, at most, fifteen per cent
of the population; and, for the majority of these people, the new prosperity
has meant the acquisition of basic modern living amenities, rather than cars
and mobile phones.

For most Indians, the "new market" has another meaning that is familiar
across the "globalised" world. As the images of role models with white skin
and good teeth have gone up, so public services have deteriorated. According
to UN figures, India today spends less than one per cent of its gross
domestic product on health and, in the health services available to most
people, ranks 171st out of 175 countries, just ahead of Sudan and Burma. And
yet spending on private health, which only the well-off can afford, is one
of the highest in the world.


Indian newspapers reflect this in striking ways. The Indian Express presents
a searing investigation into appalling hospital conditions, then trumpets
India's inclusion in a facile "best countries in the world" list drawn up by
Newsweek and based entirely on the rise of the "new market".  Maharashtra's
director of health, reports the Times of India, is off on "a plum
assignment" with the World Health Organisation. He will be away for months,
conducting a survey in south-east Asia. During the past year, in his domain,
some 9,000 tribal children - the poorest - have died from malnutrition and a
lack of medical care. The acting chief justice has criticised him for
"negligence" of duty. "The deaths are common", the director replies, "and I
have done enough in the past ten years. Now why should I sabotage my career
for this issue?"

There is much about this story of almost casual betrayal that explains why
the majority of Indians voted as they did in the general election last May
and with such evident anger. Although aimed specifically at the BJP-led
government, the principal sponsor of the "new market", their anger was
described by one commentator as "a scream against an elite that has made
them all but invisible since independence".

Like Indira Gandhi, her mother-in-law, Sonia Gandhi spoke against poverty,
but rarely against the elitism that controlled it. The man who replaced her
and became prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has made it clear there will be
"no rollback" of the "new market"; like new Labour, Congress will be as
neoliberal as its rivals, if not more so. After all, wrote Jawaharlal Nehru
in 1936, "Congress's outlook is essentially petty bourgeois". He added
prophetically, "It is not likely to succeed that way".

More than seventy per cent of the population live off agriculture. Not only
are malnutrition and discrimination rife among the minorities, the
70 million tribal people and 150 million Dalits (untouchables), small
farmers from all ethnic groups have suffered during the "lost decade".
Suicides among sharecroppers "now run into many thousands", the
environmentalist and writer Vandana Shiva told me. "Governments dare not
admit the true figure". Debt, often owed to moneylenders at interest rates
of up to 120 per cent, is aggravated by an open market in the patenting of
seeds, plant life and natural fertilisers by foreign bioscience companies:
"the piracy of our life source", as Shiva calls it.

Alternatives exist. Since the 19th century, mass movements in India have
demonstrated that the poor need not be weak. Since it was elected in
1978, the popular socialist government in West Bengal (officially,
communist) has operated Operation Barga, a campaign to keep track of and
register every one of the state's 2.3 million sharecroppers. Each tenant
farmer is sought out and his rights are explained, and the state
government's political organisation in his village ensures that he can get
long-term loans and is not intimidated by landowners. Operation Barga is
regarded throughout India as a success, especially as rice production in
West Bengal has soared.

The antithesis of this is to be found on the fringes of the cities, which
offer a warning to the world of what happens when farmers are driven off
their land. It was sheeting rain when I visited the "railroads" area of
Mumbai. Many of the people here have fled their land tenancies in utter
hunger; they barely subsist. Once, the city offered work in and around its
textile mills, but these have been replaced by "ITES parks" (IT-Enabled
Services). Even the lowly messenger is being superseded by the computer.

The conditions these people live under are barely describable: an extended
family of twenty is squeezed into a packing case, the sewage ebbing and
flowing in the monsoon; in the dry season it stays. The fat crows ride on
people's skeletal umbrellas; pariah dogs chew at nothing. Yet glimpse inside
this stricken Lilliput and there is new-pin neatness, clothes wrapped in
plastic and the children in vivid colours. It is both haunting and humbling,
always, to see such dignity. I met a man from Bengal who had been saving
weeks for the equivalent of ?6, which would buy him a shoeshine stool; he
discussed his predicament with me; he asked for nothing. Along Chowpatty
Beach, where the Quit India movement once held its great freedom rallies, is
property said to be worth more than in London or Paris. The speculators call
it "brown gold".

At the Oxford Book Store in Churchgate, I went to the launch of a book by
Rajmohan Gandhi, the Mahatma's grandson. He has written a biography of
Ghaffar Khan, the inspirational "Muslim Gandhi" who opposed Partition.
"India is in many ways a violent country", he told me. "The fact that we
have democracy today is largely due to the non-violence of the main freedom
movement".

Democracy perhaps, but freedom waits.


John Pilger's Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs
will be published in October by Jonathan Cape

Copyright New Statesman 1913 - 2004


Bill Totten     http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/

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