A jugaad of chalta hai blogs

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IMPLOSION
India's Tryst with Reality
John Elliott
HarperCollins Publishers India
x+478 pages; Rs 699

Oh no, not another book by a foreign correspondent on India growing/stagnating/declining (choose one). That was my initial reaction to the volume by John Elliott. I had previously abandoned reviewing a couple of others of the genre. I suspended my judgement, however, because of the author's background. He worked in the India bureau of the venerable Financial Times. He now contributes to The Economist and New Statesman, lives in India and has a rather prolific blog appearing in The Independent. He also claims the coinage of privatisation, no less! And I must admit, the title is alarming enough to compel reading.

Mr Elliott takes the reader through contemporary India, along a road much travelled. Deteriorating environment, land scandals, crumbling cities, unchanging villages, corrupted defence, tangled telecom, cesspits of mining, unlimited bribery, rampant nepotism and dynastic hegemonies - all appear on the scene. In fact, scarcely a blemish on the Indiascape escapes the author's attention. He then casts his eye abroad and finds India woefully lacking in either presence or influence in both bilateral and multilateral arenas, despite its desperation to be taken seriously.

This guided tour is patchy at best, and far from being a tour de force. Some of the side stops are interesting to an extent, since they bring out Mr Elliott's earlier claim to fame, of being an industrial reporter. These include his crisp, if all too brief, descriptions of the kumbh mela arrangements, the Tata Nano project, and the Delhi Metro. But they do little to liven up the sombre tone throughout. Mr Elliott devotes plenty of attention to social protest and the horrific Delhi rape of December 2012, stopping just short of sensationalism. Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal get the space they deserve, but not Narendra Modi, which makes one wonder about the author's journalistic instincts.

Mr Elliott begins by saying that the question people now ask is, "Why is India failing?" He proceeds to answer that planet aspirational India is eclipsed by Rahu and Ketu of jugaad and chalta hai. He interprets these as making do and anything goes respectively. Coping and resignation could be better translations, but that is a quibble. He says, "Internal factors ... are eating away at institutions, organisational procedures, and the functioning of authority... Contributing to this creeping implosion [sic!] are self-serving politicians and officials, plus endemic and widespread corruption and a lack of interest in tackling problems" (page 13).

After all the aforesaid stops, more than 400 pages later, he concludes, "Democracy has ... become ... [a] fig leaf covering what is not achieved. It allows the negative and underperforming aspects of Indian life to flourish." He fears that if this continues, "systems will deteriorate further, possibly leading to implosions" (page 447). Having set up a hypothesis, the author returns to it with selective evidence - mainly anecdotal and reportage - and says quod erat demonstrandum! Mr Elliott is entitled to his pessimism and must not be faulted for it, but other problems would bother a reader prepared to overlook it.

A reporter is expected to be thorough. So when Mr Elliott presents rather dramatically a pre-swearing-in meeting between P V Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh in 1991, one expects him to mention that I G Patel was Rao's first choice as finance minister. That Indian economist of all seasons makes no appearance at all in Mr Elliott's account. Mr Elliott deals with the trauma of India pledging its gold reserves in 1991 and transferring 67 tonnes physically to the vaults of the Bank of England, but only in the context of Dr Singh. He does not even mention that that painful decision was largely the work of the Chandrashekhar interregnum, piloted by Yashwant Sinha and S Venkitaramanan. Mr Elliott is rather prolix about proving Montek Singh Ahluwalia to be the true author of the reforms of the 1990s, relegating Dr Singh to being a spectator, and ignoring altogether Mr Sinha, then finance minister in the National Democratic Alliance government.

What troubles this reviewer the most is the broad quantum jump from reportage to finding system fault lines. Mr Elliott's ambitions are not matched by industry. His references include few of the many excellent serious works on the Indian polity and society. Scholars such as Rajni Kothari, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Ashis Nandy and Myron Weiner appear to make no impression on Mr Elliott, even as he quotes numerous current reporters, hardly the last words on the tectonic faults of a continental country. Even Amartya Sen rates only one cursory mention.

With all due respect to Mr Elliott's formidable credentials, here is the concluding observation of this humble occasional contributor to the commentary space. A tourist in a plush resort reorganising his photographs into a slide presentation should not expect them to turn into a memorable film. Nor should a correspondent rewriting his blogs in comforting retreats expect them to turn into a major book.