In five-star hotels on Mumbai's seafront, children of the rich squeal
joyfully as they play hide and seek. Nearby, at the National Theatre
for the Performing Arts, people arrive for the Mumbai Literary Festival:
famous authors and notables drawn from India's Raj class. They step
deftly over a woman lying across the pavement, her birch brooms laid out
for sale, her two children silhouettes in a banyan tree that is their
home.
It is Children's Day in India. On page nine of the
Times of India, a study reports that every second child is malnourished.
Nearly two million children under the age of five die every year from
preventable illness as common as diarrhoea. Of those who survive, half
are stunted due to a lack of nutrients. The national school dropout rate
is 40 per cent. Statistics like these flow like a river permanently in
flood. No other country comes close. The small thin legs dangling in a
banyan tree are poignant evidence.
The leviathan once known as
Bombay is the centre for most of India's foreign trade, global
financial dealing and personal wealth. Yet at low tide on the Mithi
River, in ditches, at the roadside, people are forced to defecate. Half
the city's population is without sanitation and lives in slums without
basic services. This has doubled since the 1990s when "Shining India"
was invented by an American advertising firm as part of the Hindu
nationalist BJP party's propaganda that it was "liberating" India's
economy and "way of life".
Barriers protecting industry,
manufacturing and agriculture were demolished. Coke, Pizza Hut,
Microsoft, Monsanto and Rupert Murdoch entered what had been forbidden
territory. Limitless "growth" was now the measure of human progress,
consuming both the BJP and Congress, the party of independence. Shining
India would catch up China and become a superpower, a "tiger", and the
middle classes would get their proper entitlement in a society where
there was no middle. As for the majority in the "world's largest
democracy", they would vote and remain invisible.
There was
no tiger economy for them. The hype about a high-tech India storming the
barricades of the first world was largely a myth. This is not to deny
India's rise in pre-eminence in computer technology and engineering, but
the new urban technocratic class is relatively tiny and the impact of
its gains on the fortunes of the majority is negligible.
When
the national grid collapsed in 2012, leaving 700 million people
powerless, almost half had so little electricity, they "barely noticed",
wrote one observer. On my last two visits, the front pages boasted
that India had "gatecrashed the super-exclusive ICBM (intercontinental
ballistic missile) club" and launched its "largest ever" aircraft
carrier and sent a rocket to Mars: the latter lauded by the government
as "a historic moment for all of us to cheer".
The cheering
was inaudible in the rows of tarpaper shacks you see as you land at
Mumbai international airport and in myriad villages denied basic
technology, such as light and safe water. Here, land is life and the
enemy is a rampant "free market". Foreign multinationals' dominance of
food grains, genetically modified seed, fertilisers and pesticides has
sucked small farmers into a ruthless global market and led to debt and
destitution. More than 250,000 farmers have killed themselves since the
mid-1990s - a figure that may be a fraction of the truth as local
authorities wilfully misreport "accidental" deaths.
"Across
the length and breadth of India," says the acclaimed environmentalist
Vandana Shiva, "the government has declared war on its own people."
Using colonial-era laws, fertile land has been taken from poor farmers
for as little as 300 rupees a square metre; developers have sold it for
up to 600,000 rupees a square metre. In Uttar Pradesh, a new expressway
serves "luxury" townships with sporting facilities and a Formula One
racetrack, having eliminated 1225 villages. The farmers and their
communities have fought back, as they do all over India; in 2011, four
were killed and many injured in clashes with police.
For
Britain, India is now a "priority market" - to quote the government's
arms sales unit. In 2010, David Cameron took the heads of the major
British arms companies to Delhi and signed a $700 million contract to
supply Hawk fighter-bombers. Disguised as "trainers", these lethal
aircraft were used against the villages of East Timor. They may well be
the Cameron government's biggest single "contribution" to Shining India.
The
opportunism is understandable. India has become a model of the imperial
cult of "neo-liberalism" - almost everything must be privatized, sold
off. The worldwide assault on social democracy and the collusion of
major parliamentary parties - begun in the US and Britain in the 1980s -
has produced in India a dystopia of extremes and a spectre for us all.
Whereas
Nehru's democracy succeeded in granting the vote - today, there are 3.2
million elected representatives - it failed to build a semblance of
social and economic justice. Widespread violence against women is only
now precariously on a political agenda. Secularism may have been Nehru's
grand vision, but Muslims in India remain among the poorest, most
discriminated against and brutalised minority on earth. According to the
2006 Sachar Commission, in the elite institutes of technology, only
four out of 100 students are Muslim, and in the cities Muslims have
fewer chances of regular employment than the "untouchable" Dalits and
indigenous Adivasis. "It is ironic," wrote Khushwant Singh, "that the
highest incidence of violence against Muslims and Christians has taken
place in Gujarat, the home state of Bapu Gandhi."
Gujarat is
also the home state of Narendra Modi, winner of three consecutive
victories as BJP chief minister and the favourite to see off the
diffident Rahul Gandhi in national elections in May. With his xenophobic
Hindutva ideology, Modi appeals directly to dispossessed Hindus who
believe Muslims are "privileged". Soon after he came to power in 2002,
mobs slaughtered hundreds of Muslims. An investigating commission heard
that Modi had ordered officials not to stop the rioters - which he
denies. Admired by powerful industrialists, he boasts the highest
"growth" in India. In the face of these dangers, the great
popular resistance that gave India its independence is stirring. The
gang rape of a Delhi student in 2012 has brought vast numbers into the
streets, reflecting disillusionment with the political elite and anger
at its acceptance of injustice and a modernised feudalism. The popular
movements are often led or inspired by extraordinary women - the likes
of Medha Patkar, Binalakshmi Nepram, Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy -
and they demonstrate that the poor and vulnerable need not be weak. This
is India's enduring gift to the world, and those with corrupted power
ignore it at their peril.
This article first appeared in the Guardian, UK
Source: johnpilger.com
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