Is there an increasingly surreal quality to Indian reality? I ask the question seriously because in recent days I have been on long drives in rural India, and been appalled by the squalor and low quality of life. Then, on returning from these excursions, I have attended glittering conclaves in fancy hotels, where I have heard political leaders declare confidently that India will become a fully developed country by 2047. I love the idea of India rising out of the depths to become a fully developed country. And believe that it is wonderful that we should aspire to making this dream real in just over twenty years. It is better by far to aspire to reaching new, seemingly impossible heights than to continue to whine about poverty, misery, and the injustice of the caste system.
If the polls are right and Narendra Modi wins a third term, it could be because his vision of the future is that of a developed India by 2047. As the general elections approach nearer, he repeats this more and more because he senses that voters find the idea inspirational. If Rahul Gandhi looks as if he is unlikely to prevent the Congress Party from losing a third general election, it is because during his recently ended Nyaya Yatra, he has talked mostly about poverty and caste. Indians at the bottom of the heap are those he hopes to appeal to, but they already know more about degradation and poverty than he ever will. What they want to hear more about is how their degradation will end some day in the not too far future.
This is where Modi scores. It is important here to point out that he does this with the unstinting, almost slavish, collusion of our private, supposedly independent, news channels. Last week, when he had his ‘chai pe charcha’ with Bill Gates, I was astounded to see that every English news channel covered it live, as if it was the main news story of the day. I happened to be watching because it was just before my deadline, when I usually switch from news channel to news channel to make sure that nothing so big has happened that I would need to rewrite the column. The only news on offer was the Prime Minister’s private tea party with Mr Gates, where they talked about AI and its future in India, and this is when that sense of a surreal reality hit me hard.
Images of those drives through rural India floated before my eyes. The broken roads and squalid villages. The drab, ugly towns that rose out of clouds of dust and the stench of rotting garbage. The new highways on which something as fundamental as easily readable signage was absent. The schools in which small, barefoot children sat on raggedy rugs on the floor, glancing with tired eyes through tattered textbooks. The windowless kitchens in which village women sat on grimy floors cooking midday meals. And the dilapidated, unclean toilets that rural schoolchildren are forced to use.
This is the real India. It shows no sign yet of reaching that goal of becoming fully developed by 2047. When Raghuram Rajan said last week that Indians must stop believing the ‘hype’, he came under a fusillade of barbs from Modi’s army of social media warriors. He was just a ‘parachute economist’ they sneered and should mind his own business. What nobody appeared to notice was that he had made an important point that we should pay attention to. The former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and currently Rahul Gandhi’s unofficial economic advisor, said that until more was invested in improving the school system, it was reckless to think of India as a fully developed country in twenty years. He pointed out that more than twenty percent of our schoolchildren dropout before high school and that the literacy rate in tiny Vietnam is higher than India.
In recent years we have lived in a state of hyper-nationalism and paranoid patriotism, so whenever I have drawn attention to how bad India looks in real life, I have been attacked for being ‘unpatriotic.’ It is a charge that is thrown about casually these days and because it can sometimes get the targeted person into trouble, far too many ‘journalists’ choose to remain silent. This in my view is being truly unpatriotic. So as someone who believes in real patriotism, I would like to say some things loudly and clearly. We will become a fully developed country one day, but to get there we must not hesitate to confront some harsh truths.
There is no question that in the past ten years we have seen many things happen that should have happened decades ago, but much more needs to change. It is shameful that the average Indian still lacks access to clean water. Shameful that millions of Indians still lack access to sanitation. Shameful that millions of Indian children leave school without learning to read or count. And, shameful that millions of Indians live in windowless hovels in filthy slums and villages.
To achieve the dream of becoming a fully developed country, this is a short list of problems that we will need to acknowledge and change. It is my hope that if Modi wins a third term, as predicted by every poll, he will make the changes India so desperately needs.
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We will become a fully developed country one day, but to get there we must not hesitate to confront some harsh truths
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31.03.2024
Is there an increasingly surreal quality to Indian reality? I ask the question seriously because in recent days I have been on long drives in rural India, and been appalled by the squalor and low quality of life. Then, on returning from these excursions, I have attended glittering conclaves in fancy hotels, where I have heard political leaders declare confidently that India will become a fully developed country by 2047. I love the idea of India rising out of the depths to become a fully developed country. And believe that it is wonderful that we should aspire to making this dream real in just over twenty years. It is better by far to aspire to reaching new, seemingly impossible heights than to continue to whine about poverty, misery, and the injustice of the caste system.
If the polls are right and Narendra Modi wins a third term, it could be because his vision of the future is that of a developed India by 2047. As the general elections approach nearer, he repeats this more and more because he senses that voters find the idea inspirational. If Rahul Gandhi looks as if he is unlikely to prevent the Congress Party from losing a third general election, it is because during his recently ended Nyaya Yatra, he has talked mostly about poverty and caste. Indians at the bottom of the heap are those he hopes to appeal to, but they already know more about degradation and poverty than he ever will.........
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