Nowhere Nation , livre ebook

Penguin Books Ltd - Ashok Mitra

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148 pages

English

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Questioning the image of India as a nascent superpower or putative economic powerhouse that has been the flavour of the decade, Ashok Mitra draws on his experience as India s chief economic adviser and West Bengal s finance minister to look at critical current issues that include the policies of liberalization, the Indo US nuclear deal and the attempt to take away land from peasants for industrialization. His clear sighted analyses of the roots of such societal tendencies as communalism and corruption force us to re-examine our assumptions about contemporary Indian realities and, indeed, question if there is a single Indian reality at all. The Nowhere Nation argues that India embraces several historical ages at a single point of time. Three-quarters of Indian citizens are horrendously poor; of which at least a quarter is below the level of subsistence. The rest do well, some very well indeed. But how does this all work? India, writes Mitra, simmers in its incongruities . The classes, castes and communities live their parallel lives and sort out their own economics. Reforms will not pry open up the exclusive saloon the Indian superstructure is accustomed to claim; and the usual trickle-down defence ignores the difficult truth that jobs do not grow in the short run; in fact they shrink. Furthermore, the West Bengal experiment has proved that even when the opportunities are available to attempt social and economic restructuring in a miniature frame, contamination seeps in. These forcefully argued, elegantly written reflections first appeared in The Telegraph

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Political economy

Humanities

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	15 février 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184752922
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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ASHOK MITRA
The Nowhere Nation
Contents
Dedication
Introduction
The Reality of Disarray
Beyond the round table
A serenade to Gujarat
Clans do not make India
Merit and milieu
Heathen under every bed
Outrageous stratagems
Mother fixation
A sense of humiliation
Anniversaries
Ego and destiny
A tribute and a critique
Beyond the veil
Beyond invectives
A way out for Singur
A country, not a nation
In the Name of Reforms
Impolite predictions
Reveries of equilibrium
Standing apart
The part is not the whole
Deconstruct, then panic
Be global, be mediocre
Rest in peace
Beyond arithmetic
Off the agenda
A crippling indifference
Trickling out
Neo-baseball, anyone?
The time bomb
Inflation and morals
Cat changes colour
Predators and Profiteers
Bountiful happiness
Remember Dabhol?
The venal layer
Poison as prescription
Troubles are here to stay
Illusory well-being
Hour of the comprador
Big is beautiful
Daddy knows best
The battle for habitat
Bunker Hill
A sense of proportion
All fall down
India be proud
Economists unbound
Women and Men
The brothers Sahni
A weekly is born
Quietly, in English
The miracle maker
He loved French cuisine
Happiness and beauty
Service before self
All spirit and grace
Unaware of gold
League of youth
We loved them once
The master of ceremonies
Enemies of the State
Wreckage artist
A moral man, a failure
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
Gouri would perhaps have liked this selection
Introduction
IS THERE SUCH a thing as contemporary Indian reality? As one tries to pick and choose a selection from pieces that appeared, mostly in the course of the past two-and-a-half years, in a column, one very nearly feels like giving up. The concern keeps nagging: is there really a common focus in the pieces gathered together here, do they convey a unity of thought or emotion or attitude? The reason for this disquiet is no deeply held secret. India may be an administrative datum, it stops short of being an immaculate polity though; it is also not an integrated society. Joan Robinson s casual remark, during a private conversation more than half a century ago, haunts the memory cells: whatever generalization you make about India, the reverse of it, she said, is equally true. India straddles several centuries at one go; it also embraces several historical ages at a single point of time. Firm believers in pre-Puranic marvels-cum-monstrosities jostle for space against the suave, brisk, no-nonsense information technology crowd. Extollers of the medieval creed of dynastic succession rub shoulders with the radical chic, who include as many post-Lunacharsky anarchists as post-colonial non-believers-in-everything. Fanatics coexist with the gentlest specimens who will not hurt a fly. Mathematicians and musicians, distinguished by extraordinary sensitivity as well as extraordinary imagination, live only a few furlongs away from brutes and barbarians of the most vicious sort. The menagerie is India. Musings on this or that Indian phenomenon always bears the imprint of an ephemeral quality. It may be fun to build some hypotheses on the Indian condition; the fun strains if you take it altogether seriously. India can therefore be a graveyard for scholastic initiatives. But, no, the moment this kind of judgement is exercised, the Joan Robinson rule-of-thumb acts as a damper.
Dyed-in-the-wood nationalists hate to be dragged to the confessional. It will break their heart to admit that India is not yet a nation in the full sense of the term but a jumble of nationalities. These nationalities can have linguistic or ethnic roots; they can have identities cast in the mould of clan, caste or denominational affiliations.
Three-quarters of Indian citizens are horrendously poor; at least a quarter survives, somehow, below the level of subsistence. Universal adult suffrage has nonetheless created an empire of pride of which everyone loves to claim a slice. That precisely is the reason why, while nationalities do not cease fighting amongst themselves like roadside cats and the level of consciousness inches upwards in all quarters, quantity is yet to turn into quality. It is an uneasy standstill, that is to say, an unstable equilibrium. The assumptions underlying the equilibrium change with every hour. Its shape and contents are in a state of constant flux. It is seemingly in danger of breaking down this very hour. But this odd chemistry of squalor and pulsating life has a way of sustaining itself, even if just barely: call it the inertia of large numbers or call it the fear of crossing the Rubicon.
An unstable equilibrium stays equilibrated while it does despite itself. The classes, castes and communities live their parallel lives and sort out their own economics. Those habituated to wielding power-the creamy layer from this or that party, never mind what its name is-interpret the concept of economic development in their own manner, development exclusively for their own class. It has prospered in recent decades because it has, apart from receiving strong external support-particularly from the standard-bearers of Western capitalism-mastered the art of managing the polls. Now that the United States is in some discomfort, with even firms bearing legendary names such as Lehman Brothers and General Motors declaring themselves bankrupt, the Indian elite is, in the spin-off, feeling a wee-bit shaky, but not much, for it is still winning the elections. There is also the capital stock of brazen optimism: what has not happened in the past is not likely to happen in the future too. A somewhat crooked interpretation might claim this frame of mind as a subset of the philosophy of maya. The threat of bad days is an aspect of maya; if we ignore it, it will go away. Besides, should worst come to the worst, foreigners, it is implied, are bound to bail us out; aren t we the world s largest democracy?
Whether this season of self-deceit can be stretched indefinitely or some nasty accident will take place depends on the pace at which the level of consciousness picks itself up within the different folds of society. For there is no question of awareness failing to penetrate into the psyche of the deprived classes, castes and communities for ever and ever. An urchin springing from a rundown neighbourhood may be without letters, ill-fed, ill-clad and lacking in the social graces that go with, for instance, urbanization at breakneck speed. The external economies bequeathed by global merchandise and globalized concepts nonetheless set to work. The urchin is capable of learning fast. He duly picks the knowledge that he is a free citizen of a democratic country where everyone has the right to vote and where opportunities and prerogatives are supposed to be evenly distributed. He soon learns the meaning of meaning. Allow him the minimum quantum of learning time; he will reach the determination to indulge in mayhem, if mayhem will enable him to attain the good life the television screen depicts. Whether such mayhem will sooner or later transform itself into organized fury can only be speculated upon. The timing and thrust of the social explosion that might occur are equally matters of speculation. True, some prognoses go sour, but, then, some do not. The scare-mostly fake-over national security is unlikely to stem the social dynamics urchins from underprivileged households could unleash.
Reforms of the globalized genre are again more likely to fail to gather in such urchins. No magic wand will pry open the exclusive saloon the Indian superstructure has habituated itself to occupy. Liberalism, as interpreted by today s craftsmen, has its origin in the doctrine of self-seeking. Self-seeking and inclusivity are contradictory categories. A more realistic position is to pin faith on the trickling-down argument: we spend, they get jobs; so what is the bellyaching about. One difficulty is jobs do not grow but shrink in the short run in fact shrink, and the short period-the immediacy-is at the centre of attention. The choice therefore lies between uninterrupted chaos and organized revolution. The latter can be safely ruled out for some considerable while; perhaps the only common point between the nationalities constituting the Indian polity is their distrust of any kind of organization. There is a lesser problem. The sorry West Bengal experiment has proved that even when the opportunities are available to try an experiment in social and economic restructuring in a miniature frame, contamination seeps in, liberal ideas act as a spoiler, the spoiling of the broth even occasions a disaster.
India, rest assured, will march from near-disaster to near-disaster, but, unlike Lehman Brothers and General Motors, will not confess to bankruptcy. Calcutta, from where the pieces included in The Nowhere Nation have been written, has always been a bit of a snob city and an ideal location for morose India-watchers. It has cultivated the mannerism of regarding itself different because it was the first city the British colonized. That pride dies hard. It is also the city which, along with Shanghai, was considered by Lenin as the prime ideal location to set up proper outposts of the revolution. As India simmers in its incongruities, somebody or the other will, it is a fair guess, continue to take potshots at the goings-on all over the country-and the world.
India remains an absurdity, almost an impossibility. It refuses to fit into a unifying whole. Even if recourse is taken to taxonomy-as in this volume, by dividing the essays into four sections-the frontiers of clarity are hardly advanced, for the sub-themes tend to run into one another. It has the capability to produce, whatever the climate, interesting people. Some will even suggest that India s many absurdities are a rich hinterland for people who believe in indulging themselves. The mix of such interesting peopl