Year-end thoughts

Those in India's public life need to stop hiding behind big numbers. Their honesty needs to be tried

The Chinese have long used the notion of comprehensive national power, and ranked countries accordingly. As a concept, it includes assessments of military and industrial capabilities, technological prowess, educational attainments and control over resources. All of them are given scores, which are then used to construct an index. India’s ranking has been going up.

Social stability is not one of the indicators used, perhaps because you can’t quantify it. If it were, India must surely rank close to the top. For the most extraordinary thing that has happened in the last 50 days is the manner in which millions of ordinary people have dealt with the country’s currency doing a vanishing act. People have stood patiently in long queues day after day, merchants have given customers credit without any IOU, customers have cut back on spending, those who lost their jobs have gone back without protest to their rural bases, and farmers who had to sell at distress prices have nevertheless planted a full rabi crop. The disruption has been on a continental scale, and touched by tragedy as dozens have died of exhaustion in bank queues. But most people have accepted a shaky narrative that it is all for a larger good, and borne the inconvenience and financial loss. When one thinks about it, it is extraordinary—and would have surprised the judges of the Supreme Court who had feared rioting in the streets.

One only has to compare this with the looting and chaos in Venezuela when that country tried a few weeks ago to demonetise 75 per cent of its currency base (compared to 86 per cent in India), to understand the horror that it could have been. Unlike in New Delhi, the government in Caracas had to beat a hasty retreat. The story this tells of India’s stability and national cohesion, lying mostly unnoticed deep beneath the surface chaos of contested politics, reminds one of the old comparison with China—where it has been said there is chaos beneath the surface calm, while it is the opposite in India.

Could there be a less complimentary interpretation, that this is just another manifestation of age-old Indian fatality? Perhaps partially so; people are used to hardship and setbacks, and take another one in their stride. Those at the edge of survival don’t protest, they endure—as so many families do routinely when sudden expenses relating to a health episode push them into unaffordable debt or back below the poverty line. But surely that is not the whole explanation in a country where those who are by far the weakest and least empowered, harassed tribals, take up arms against the state.

And what about those 75 or 80 who died in bank queues? Are they irrelevant to the larger national story? Surely not. As the old year gives way to the new, the time may have come to move the narrative (in journalism too) from the mass to the particular. When a billion-plus people stand together, the big numbers can be impressive—seventh largest economy, fourth largest military budget, etc. But do we care enough about individual lives to look at them as more than statistics—not just one more road fatality, or rape, or an adult life wasted without work? What urgency will that bring to our collective endeavours?

There’s a brief passage in Bob Dylan’s Nobel speech, read out in his absence, that is worth quoting. “…there's one thing I must say,” Dylan wrote. “As a performer I've played for 50,000 people and I've played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty… is tried.” Those in India’s public life need to stop hiding behind the big numbers. Their honesty needs to be tried.