Chicken soup for Middle India

Middle India (as in Middle America, a socio-economic grouping in the centre of the political spectrum) is in deep distress. Gurcharan Das, the present-day Sanjaya, the chronicler of today’s Mahabharata, talks about the concerns of middle-class India. But, clearly, his reference population transcends the conventional limits of the middle class. This India has felt shackled except for the first flush of post-1991 liberalisation. If it has grown, it is despite the government (hence the title, as the government apparently sleeps at night. During the day, it is presumably busy creating barricades to progress).

The capital of Middle India is Gurgaon (village of the guru, Mr Das tells us helpfully). It grew out of the dusty landscape into “the twenty-first century equivalent of the magical Indraprastha”. The government may have showered it with neglect, yet it “manages to flourish because … its self-reliant … citizens … dig borewells to get water … [use] diesel generators [for] power” and so on. Never mind the fact that watering manicured golf courses and running air-conditioners 24x7 make disproportionately large demands on common resources and cause environmental damage. Never mind also the fact that the gated havens overlook abysmal hovels, home to the help that runs this Shangri-La, including the guards.

Corruption is the chief villain. It breeds because of a weak state, which has been India’s bane from, you guessed it, Mahabharata onwards. The weak state-corruption nexus caused the Emergency and all that followed, until the knights of 1991 came to the rescue. Never mind the fact that many of the selfsame knights were also the architects of that evil empire, the licence permit raj. Now they have become acolytes to the Goddess Populism and forgotten reform, spawning more corruption.

This Middle India has clear heroes: “India might throw up a strong leader who is also a reformer — a Deng or a Thatcher. Since there is no guarantee of this happening … the next best hope may lie in the recent rise of a young middle class … reflected recently in the Anna Hazare movement.” Never mind the fact that the same young middle class also defies the rule of law, the core of the Das recipe of the chicken soup, when the me-first generation displays uncontrollable road rage and treats waiting one’s turn for anything as being effete.

The flag-waving rock star Anna Hazare commands more space in the index to the book than do those old fogeys, Gandhi and Nehru. How very unkind of fate, then, that just as the book was coming out, there should be an acrimonious falling out among these heroes of (literally) the yesteryear!

Mr Das pleads for a set of new chefs to cook this mystical chicken soup according to the practices of the Masterchefs of the Swatantra kitchen of the old. They should be guided by dharma, “the ancient Indian idea”. Mr Das thinks that dharma offering insights into the nature of the market “is on the face of it, bizarre”. Never mind the fact that dharma is the essence of the classic Protestant ethic, or that the original champion of the all-knowing “invisible hand” of the market, Adam Smith, was a professor of moral science. Also never mind the fact that the Hazare crowd deeply distrusts the market and capitalism of even the most benign kind. Mr Das, to his credit, does occasionally mention their illiberalism.

Mr Das makes numerous references to dharma not because it has a monopoly on morality, but possibly because he wrote a book on the Mahabharata after spending a year at Princeton. Poor Irawati Karve remained in Pune to produce her authoritative interpretation of the stoical dharma of the Mahabharata a good generation earlier.

Mr Das is aware of our inegalitarian growth, especially as it concerns agriculture and villages, but his soup could cause a severe reaction: “In the short run, the best way … to improve the lot of the rural poor might be … to shift [the] focus from peasant farming to agribusiness, and to encourage private business to lease land from farmers and to bring in the latest technology.” Never mind the fact that study after study has demonstrated that corporate farming has been a non-starter in India.

So, what happens to the peasants – the majority of the country – in the meanwhile? Mr Das piously intones the obvious, “one must be concerned about reducing hunger and poverty”, but warns against premature welfarism. His remedy? “When open markets are combined with genuine equality of opportunity via good schools and primary health centres, the result is shared prosperity for everyone.” How will we get there? Mr Das obviously believes that we will shortly wake up from our current bad dream of a sputtering economy: “India is likely to grow at between 7 and 8 per cent a year for the next couple of decades… Poverty will not vanish, but the number of poor will come down to a manageable number.” Alas, there is no road map to this nirvana.

India might well grow at night, but must Bharat wait endlessly in its darkness?

INDIA GROWS AT NIGHT
A Liberal Case for a Strong State
Gurcharan Das
Allan Lane/Penguin; xii + 307 pages; Rs 599