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172 pages

English

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A provocative, humorous, searching and deeply humane portrait of India Mark Tully is incomparable. No foreign commentator has a greater understanding of the passions, the contradictions, the charms and the resilience that constitute India. In India in Slow Motion, Tully and his colleague Gillian Wright delve further than ever before into this nation of over one billion people, attempting to unravel a culture that, famously, has always resisted unravelling. India in Slow Motion is the account of a journey that for Tully and Wright has no true beginning or end. Covering a diverse range of subjects from Hindu extremism to child labour, Sufi mysticism to the crisis in agriculture, the persistence of political corruption to the problem of Kashmir this book challenges the preconceptions others have about India, as well as those India has about itself. India is often depicted as a victim of forces too wild to be controlled of post-colonial malaise, of religious strife, of the caste system, of a corrupt bureaucratic machine. India in Slow Motion refutes this, probing into the heart of the Indian experience and arguing that change is possible and that solutions do exist. In the process it brings the country and its people brilliantly alive.

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Travel writing

India

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	09 octobre 2003
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351180975
Langue	English

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MARK TULLY and GILLIAN WRIGHT
India in Slow Motion
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Introduction
The Reinvention of Rama
Misplaced Charity
Corruption from Top to Tail
Altered Altars
Creating Cyberabad
The Sufis and a Plain Faith
Farmer s Reward
A Tale of Two Brothers
The Water Harvesters
Paradise Lost
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
INDIA IN SLOW MOTION
Mark Tully was born in Calcutta and educated in England. He was Correspondent for the BBC in South Asia for twenty-five years. He now works as a journalist in New Delhi with his colleague and partner, Gillian Wright, who also translates Indian-language fiction into English. Together they have worked on a number of books including Mark Tully s highly acclaimed No Full Stops in India and The Heart of India.
To all those who are striving for the good of India
The international boundaries of the map on this page are neither purported to be correct nor authenticated by the Survey of India.
Introduction
Not a word passed between them as they strode towards the town of Orcha with its temples to visit and its sacred river to bathe in. These were peaceful pilgrims, they carried peacock feathers as standards and sticks for dancing, not for doing battle. They were robed for rejoicing, with cowbells tinkling on their cross-belts, while round their waists gaudy green and red pom-poms bounced. Some wore vests embroidered with rosettes, and some pointed multicoloured clowns hats. There would have been loud praising of their gods too had this not been the end of a week of abstinence when not a word was to be spoken. The men of the villages of Bundelkhand, a region of central India, were on their way to celebrate one of their immemorial festivals when their silence was broken by the wail of a siren. An inspector of police in khaki uniform clutching the handle of his motorbike in one hand and imperiously waving everyone off the road with the other appeared round the corner. He was followed by a white car with a blue light revolving on the roof and one star above black number plates, the badge of office of a deputy inspector general of police. The convoy, completed by a pick-up full of armed policemen, hurtled past, scattering the pilgrims in a cloud of dust. They couldn t see whether the superintendent of police, the representative of the Raj which succeeded the British, even bothered to glance at their discomfiture shielded as he was from those he ruled by firmly closed, heavily tinted windows. Waiting in our car to pass the pilgrims I was reminded of the senior Indian civil servant who had said to me, Our police are only for the poor. They don t touch the rich and the influential.
We were on our way to see a cyber-caf that a non-governmental organization had set up in a remote village. There we were told that the computers had been much more useful when they could pull down material from a satellite. But then some bureaucrat had discovered that the NGO needed an Internet Service Provider Licence II and had ordered them to dismantle the aerials. The government itself had proved quite unable to provide any connection with the outside world. There was a wireless mast for one public telephone but the villagers said no one had come to maintain the battery for years. The villagers themselves were of course not allowed to touch government property. As I have found so often in India the government was the problem not the solution.
The police officer with his convoy, and the bureaucrats who ordered the aerials to be dismantled, were the unchanging India, the India which is still shackled by a colonial bureaucracy, the India which has become a byword for red-tape and corruption, the India described by one of its most distinguished civil servants as a kleptocracy. This was the India that, according to a recent World Bank report, still has social indicators that are poor by most measures of human development . But there is a changing India too. In the same report the World Bank also said that India s economy had, since the 1980s, been among the fastest growing in the world. Indian democracy has brought about a social revolution. The lower castes, because they are largest in number, have come to dominate the political scene. There is a sophisticated Indian elite and a sizeable well-educated middle class: thoroughly professional lawyers, bankers and accountants, academics, engineers, doctors, all admired by their peers in other parts of the world. India is renowned for its information technology skills. Civil society is vibrant, India has become the NGO capital of the world. Television has grown from a drab purveyor of government propaganda to a multi-channel independent media. The press, once obsessed with politics, now provides news and a bewildering variety of views on every aspect of Indian life, including the misdeeds of those who wield power.
Why then is India still in slow motion? Part of the answer lies in this story from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, or IIT, a symbol of modern India s potential - a first-class university, teaching the cream of India s science students. Rukmini Bhaya Nair is an effervescent enthusiast for the humanities, charged with persuading IIT students that there is more to knowledge than just science and technology. Apparently, if she travels on official business she is asked to fill in a form on which she can still claim for travelling by camel, or canal, depending on the version. The small print also sets out the rules for claiming second-class fare (without meals) on steamers, and mentions the furlongs travelled by trolley. What about more modern forms of travel? According to Rukmini Bhaya Nair: Our clerks of the government of India have simply added air-travel to the list of possible conveyances - a final palimpsest layer. And what conclusion does she draw from this? Despite our flirtation with the latest computer technology, our gleaming machines, and the constant talk of efficiency, we at the hi-tech IIT remain the hostages of history. The obfuscatory rites of colonial administration are with us still and everyone is caught equally helplessly in the toils of the paper chase. Those obfuscatory rites would have been done away with if politicians had concentrated on the most obvious issue facing India - bad governance. That would go against their own vested interests so they have distracted the voters attention by raising issues of caste and creed.
There have been many explanations for the failures of India. Some centre on India s past, its history of invasions and foreign domination - Naipaul has described it as a wounded civilization. Some blame India s culture, and its religions, seeing it as a land of fatalism, a society set in stone by the caste system. Some even blame the climate, saying it has sapped the will of the people. These explanations denigrate India, Indians, and an ancient culture that has been described by the poet Kathleen Raine as having more fully than any other civilization on earth, past or present, explored and embodied the highest and the most embracing realization of our human scope . It is these critiques that are fatalistic for they suggest that there is nothing that can be done, the flaws are fatal and India is fated to be a poor and backward country.
In this book we argue that one of the fundamental problems of India is a peculiarly Indian form of bad governance. The need to do something about governance was acknowledged by the Prime Minister of India, Atal Behari Vajpayee when he addressed the National Development Council in 1999. There he admitted, People often perceive the bureaucracy as an agent of exploitation rather than a provider of service. Corruption has become a low risk and high reward activity. Frequent and arbitrary transfers of government officials combined with limited tenures are harming the work ethic and lowering the morale of honest officers. While expecting discipline and diligence from the administration the political executive should self-critically review its own performance. Three years later his party became the junior party in a coalition in Uttar Pradesh, India s most populous state, headed by Mayawati, a formidable Dalit politician who when heading an earlier administration earned the nickname of Transfer Chief Minister . On assuming power this time she transferred two hundred and fifty officials within ten days.
The stories in this book tell not just of bad governance, but of the reason for it and also of those who are battling against it. We do not suggest that bad governance is the root of all India s problems, but, unlike so many of the more exotic diagnoses, there can be no doubt that it s a brake slowing down a country with enormous but unrealized potential.
The Reinvention of Rama
On 6 December 1992 Gilly and I were standing on the roof of a building with a clear view of a somewhat dilapidated Mughal mosque in the north Indian town of Ayodhya, a place of pilgrimage, hallowed by tradition as the home town of the god Rama. The right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its sister organization the VHP, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Council of Hindus, had been campaigning for six years to pull down this mosque, which they claimed had been built on the site of a Hindu temple marking Rama s birthplace. This was the day the BJP and the other organizations supporting it were to begin work on building the temple, but they had given a commitment to the government and to the courts that it would only be a symbolic start, a religious ceremony, and the mosque would not be touched. Below us saffron-robed Hindu holy men jostled with each other for a place on the platform where the religious ceremony was to be conducted. Arrogant, officious young men strode around ejecting anyone they thought had no right to be there. Khaki-clad police held back the throng threatening to break through th