The Hindu Business Line : India moving forward `on a remarkably stable trajectory'

Edward Luce's book In Spite of the Gods takes one on a quick ride across an India characterised as much by a `schizophrenic economy' and shrewd businessmen as by vedantic detachment and Gandhiji's legacy. D. MURALI recommends this meandering read.

India has attracted many seekers, both business and spiritual. One of the latest is Edward Luce, who has travelled around the country for four years as bureau chief for the Financial Times. He spends one more year hitting the roads of villages and cities to gather his findings about `the strange rise of modern India' and present the same as In Spite of the Gods, from Little, Brown (www.littlebrown.co.uk). "Over the years and in the most unexpected ways, India has taught me as much about humanity in general as it has about itself," writes Luce in the preface.

He opens the book with André, `a sixty-three-year-old Frenchman with a greying ponytail and a passion for Vedantic philosophy' in Auroville, Pondicherry. "India has thousands and thousands of years of practice at harmonising differences and penetrating to the unity beyond," André tells Luce. "There is an essence to India that other countries do not have, which tells you that behind the diversity of life there is a spiritual reality called unity."

Luce is sceptical, though. "India had laboured too long under the burden of spiritual greatness that westerners have for centuries thrust upon it and which Indians had themselves got into the habit of picking up and sending back (with a cherry on top)," he wants to tell André. Look at the poverty around, Luce points out. But André declares: "India is an unbelievably wealthy country because India alone understands the futility of materialism." Aren't Indians going for more visible signs of wealth? "If India is now acquiring all the TV channels and the mobile phones and trappings of modern living, then it will not misuse them or become intoxicated. It does not worry me. This is India," says André. Wish we were equally optimistic.

Right and wrong people

To Luce, what is more illuminating is to look at the country through politics, rather than through religion or nukes, Bollywood or BPOs. He draws insight from the meeting between Dhirubhai Ambani and Rupert Murdoch in the late 1990s, when the latter was on a visit to India `to explore launching satellite and cable joint-venture operations in the country's growing English-language market.' Writes Luce: "Ambani, who had a reputation as the shrewdest Indian businessmen of his generation, asked Murdoch whom he had met in Delhi. Murdoch said he had seen the Prime Minister, the Finance Minister and others. `Ah, you've met all the right people,' said Ambani, `but if you want to get anywhere in India you must meet all the wrong people." A story first told by Arun Shourie in 2003, and later confirmed to the author by Anil Ambani, informs a note. "In India, if you are the wrong sort of person there is a reasonable chance you will end up in politics," observes Luce wryly.

Behind "India's continued tariff bias against synthetic fabrics in favour of cotton (when the bulk of export demand is for the former), and in regulations that provide disincentives for textile companies to grow beyond `cottage industry' size, which penalises commercial success and protects failure," Luce sees vestiges of Gandhiji's legacy. Subtext of arguments `on Gandhian grounds' can be `vested interests that benefit from the status quo', even as India loses out to `more dynamic competitors' such as China.

Gandhiji is revered all over the world. But more important to millions of Indians than Gandhiji is Bhimrao Ambedkar, says the author. "Ambedkar gave India's most marginalised human beings their first real hope of transcending their hereditary social condition. He saw the caste system as India' greatest social evil, since it treated millions of people as sub-humans by the simple fact of their birth." Has democracy dissolved the caste system, as Ambedkar had hoped? No, says Luce. "Caste as political identity is alive and kicking in today's India... As the joke goes: `In India you do not cast your vote, you vote your caste.'"

`Schizophrenic economy'

Join Luce on a quick ride to see `glaring billboards, advertising mobile phones, iPods and holiday villas' and also `the unending vistas of rural India, of yoked bullocks ploughing the fields in the same manner they have for three thousand years and the primitive brick kilns that dot the endless patchwork of fields of rice, wheat, pulses and oilseed'. India's `schizophrenic economy,' Luce calls it. "There are growing pockets of rural India that are mechanising and becoming more prosperous, but they are still islands." Two most striking features of the current Indian economy, according to him, are: "modern and booming service sector in a sea of indifferent farmland."

In a chapter titled `the burra sahibs' meet `the long tentacles of India's state' a.k.a. the bureaucracy. "From the imperial corridors of New Delhi's loftiest ministry to the sleepiest rural magistrate's court, India's government offices and courtrooms share a number of instantly recognisable characteristics," says Luce. "These are trademarks of a state that is never absent from your life, except when you actually need it."

He discusses with V.J. Kurian, the IAS officer who turned around Cochin airport, the widely cited equation `M+D=C'. Short for `monopoly plus discretion equals corruption'. Not always, Kurian explains. "If you stand firm and you don't mind where you get transferred to, then usually there's nothing they can do to you." He also tells Luce that Keralites have a word for honest officials: pavangal, meaning naïve and gullible.

In the social sphere, the author notices a growing trend in `Sanskritisation'. The lower orders are copying the culture of the upper orders, with similarities in dress and dietary habits, he observes. "If you enter an urban home in today's India it would be hard to tell the caste of its occupants. The gods depicted in most small household shrines are the same. They follow the same traditional upper-caste rituals." But, in the political world, it works in the opposite direction; revenge gets played out, rues Luce.

Voting with wallets

The BJP and the RSS may have to take lessons from "India's modern breed of businessmen-gurus, whose marketing and public relations skills can reach people from many different backgrounds," suggests Luce, after meeting Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. "People no longer automatically associate Hinduism with poverty or celibacy. Whether Brahmin or Sudra, rural or urban, consumers are voting for a new kind of Hinduism with their wallets," he opines. And adds, "The BJP could well govern India again. It is much too soon to write its obituary."

What follows this ray of hope for the Opposition is a chapter titled `Long live the sycophants!' devoted to `the Congress Party's continuing love affair with the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty'. More than the ideology of socialism, to which little if ever lip service is paid, what is important to the party-men is status, writes Luce.

"It is also about preferential access to a wide range of public goods, including free first-class plane and rail tickets, the opportunity to jump queues, the ability to pull strings and the provision of free services for which the poor have to pay."

He decodes how New Delhi operates: "If you are rich and important, you rarely pay. If you are poor, you usually pay through the nose. And there is no guarantee that you will even get what you paid for." Useful reads are the chapters on `South Asia's divided Muslims' and `India's relations with the US and China'.

March of meritocracy

The author explores `the many-layered character of Indian modernity' and finds something more revolutionary than money in the IT success story. That `the sector is meritocratic'. Nandan Nilekani tells Luce: "Our only criterion is to select the best people." Infosys is moving into consultancy, where the fees are many times what can be earned from routine software tasks, notes Luce. "It is not just western software companies who are suffering from Indian competition: the big consultancies, such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and Accenture, are also threatened."

India has much to teach the world, be it tolerance or diversity, declares Luce. "But India continues to lack in practice — if not in principle — the basic condition of genuine citizenship," he laments. For, equal citizenship, despite being enshrined in our Constitution, and being generally presumed to be a reality, isn't always evident. "The persistence of certain traditional attitudes imposes a moral cost on Indian society."

The book concludes with a discussion of `India's huge opportunities and challenges in the twenty-first century'. Judging by the living conditions of ordinary Indians, rather than by `the drama of national events,' Luce is of the view that the country is moving forward `on a remarkably stable trajectory'. And, as opposed to China, India has given a higher priority to stability than it has to efficiency.

"India is like a lorry with twelve wheels. If one or two puncture, it doesn't go into the ditch," is a quote of Myron Weiner that he cites. That way, China may have fewer wheels so it can travel faster, but "people far beyond China's borders worry about what would happen if a wheel came off," notes Luce, extending Weiner's analogy.

Though investors are deterred by the babus, institutional advantages such as `an independent judiciary and a free media' may make India the proverbial tortoise that can overtake the Chinese hare, postulates the author. "India can also draw on a deep well of intellectual capital."

Yet, for those closer home, a word of caution is not to take our economic strengths for granted. "As the joke goes, `India never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity'. It is also suffering from a premature spirit of triumphalism," alerts Luce.

Meandering read for a mid-September afternoon, to know India from a refreshingly different angle.

(http://BookPeek.blogspot.com)

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India moving forward `on a remarkably stable trajectory'