India Page 20
“Probably”? Balji advances no grounds for his supposition that the porters were motivated by criminality rather than the pursuit of custom. But the message is clear, and is underscored a couple of paragraphs later when “four scruffy-looking middle-aged men” aid him uninvited to secure his bags to the roof of a taxi and the driver suggests they should be tipped. “Weren’t these people working in cahoots?” speculates Balji. “The Mafia, Madras-style, perhaps.” This is preposterous; Balji could have simply told the men he didn’t need their help, or tied the bags to the roof of the car himself; everywhere else in the world, he would be expected to pay for services rendered.
Balji seems to have had an enviably easy passage through customs (which he attributes with apparently characteristic gaucherie to his “nonchalance and a touch of the Englishman’s accent plus some pomp and style”), but this does not prevent him from launch ing into an excruciating litany of the harassment to which he might have been subjected had he been less sophisticated. The rest of his journey — and his article — proceeds in the same spirit. A rushing porter on a crowded railway platform barges into his daughter; Balji abuses and hits him. Indian railways “offer many lessons for me and my daughter,” says Balji. “The filthy toilets in the trains, the push-and-hit crowds, the children who eat leftovers thrown from the train. My daughter’s experience on the train journey disturbs her sometimes — when she has her meals or when I remind her of it. Looking out she saw girls and boys of her age, with runny noses, flies all over their bodies, eating leftover food thrown out by passengers. Back home, when she does not finish her dinner and when I remind her of that scene, she makes an effort not to leave anything on her plate.”
So that is supposed to be the edifying experience with which India helped “educate” the girl. Of course there’s no denying that poverty, squalor, and misery exist in India; but surely exposure to them should teach an eight-year-old compassion, not self-righteousness. The inability to distinguish between the “horrors” of filthy toilets and those of hungry children is a lamentable enough failure of sensibility in an adult; to use it to teach a “lesson” to an eight-year-old is appallingly crass and smug. Bias and conjecture are supplemented by ignorance and inaccuracy. Balji writes of meeting a “talented” lawyer who fails for six years to find a job because he is a “former communist sympathizer” (this in a country where half a dozen Communist patties flourish, where Communists have held ministerial office and Supreme Court judgeships, and have run the governments of three states). He goes on to meet a Singaporean now settled in India, living in “palatial” comfort but “not enjoying his life” because he cannot get ballpoint pens and writing paper (this in a country where there is a profusion of writing implements available and whose decorated notepaper is a successfully exported gift item). “I smiled,” reports Balji in triumph. He would.
So why is this silly article important? The answer is distressingly simple. The Baljis of this world abound across the globe, not only in Singapore and Malaysia but in Kenya, in Nigeria, in Britain. They (or their ancestors) have left India, but their mirrors and their identity cards limit the extent of their escape. They look Indian; most have Indian names; despite their current passports, they cannot flee the crippling bonds of their ethnicity. To outsiders they might even be Indian. Their reaction is to protest their rejection of India, to find comfort in echoing the most superficial of India’s critics. In doing so they are curiously reassured: they have vindicated their emigration; they are better off than if they had remained.
So the India that emerges in the Balji article is the India that most overseas Indians want to congratulate themselves on having left behind. It is an India where porters are crooks and customs men are venal, where a pseudo-Englishness alone can open doors, where life is cheap and property is not respected, where toilets are filthy and garbage is food, where the able are unemployed and even the rich do not have access to pen and paper. That this bears no relation to a complete or accurate picture of India is entirely irrelevant. Its real purpose is to reaffirm the prejudices of an expatriate community, remind them of the deprivation they have escaped, and so vindicate their emigration. Balji’s title was disingenuous. India can never change someone like him.
The Baljis of the world know, but prefer to overlook the fact, that India is, after all, a developing country (or, as I once wrote, a highly developed country of the past, in an advanced state of decay). It is also an overpopulated nation. If its airports have more porters than the workload justifies, travelers should surely prefer their importunate offers of service to the alternative of heaving their own baggage to the taxi-rank. As for the customs, no Indian who has voyaged abroad will seek to defend the modus operandi of these gentlemen, but we have to remember that they operate within laws designed to curb imports, which they apply with more zeal than judgment. On unemployment, no one could suggest that the country is teeming with unfilled job vacancies, since the curbs on investment and the pressure of numbers have resulted in applicants vastly exceeding available posts; but what is untenable is Balji’s suggestion that qualified persons are denied opportunities on purely political grounds, because India tolerates a diversity of political opinion rarely found in the countries to which Indians have emigrated.
Indians are ordinary human beings like Americans or Europeans (or even Singaporeans), but unlike these others they have to struggle to attain and maintain the standards that NRIs like Balji are able to take for granted. To some degree that struggle has been imposed upon them by nature, but they are aware that a lot of their problems are man-made, and they are trying through a democratic constitutional system to overcome them. When your children ask about Indian poverty and dirt, I want to say to NRIs, tell them about the lack of resources, the historical iniquities from feudalism to colonialism, the misguided policies of post-independence bureaucrats; and tell them also of the attempts to evolve Indian answers to these Indian problems, of land reform and Dalit rights, of free elections and a free press. Your outrage at injustice or suffering is echoed in thousands of Indian voices; and if you want to do your bit to help overcome these Indian evils, there are dozens of Indian organizations that would welcome your time, your efforts, and your remittances. But what India does not need, as it tries to rise to its challenges, is the contempt and the contumely of those who have left India.
Yet it keeps coming: a different sort of India-hating NRI syndrome exists as well. It has become customary in recent years for the Indian media in particular and Indian opinion-makers in general to take up the cudgels on behalf of Indian immigrants abroad, especially in Britain. Whether it was the notorious practice, now abandoned, of British immigration officials in effect peering up the saris of Indian women to establish their virginity at Heathrow Airport (the British thought “virginity tests” were the best way of establishing the authenticity of the claims of immigrant brides), or the somewhat less objectionable stipulation that Sikh motorcyclists in Southall must crown their turbans with helmets, we in India have always granted our ex-compatriots publicity and sympathy. The presumption has largely been that they are flesh of our flesh, and that their humiliation should therefore provoke our outrage.
In this vein, a significant proportion of the limited amount of space available in Indian publications for foreign news has been devoted to tales of the defenestration of subcontinental immigrants — the Gillingham Gujarati wife unceremoniously ejected from England after her divorce, the Birmingham Bengali woman expelled from Britain following the death of her husband (in each case the lady’s claim to residence in the U.K. was based on her marriage, and expired with it). Such tales are (sometimes) undoubtedly moving, though I for one failed to find anything especially tragic in principle in the return of either lady to what is after all her homeland. But one instance of the application of the official British boot to a displaced Indian posterior led me emphatically to question where, indeed, our sympathies as Indians ought to lie.
The case was that of Rodney Pereira, or perha
ps one should refer to him as Rodney Pereira, Esquire, late of Bishop’s Waltham, Hampshire, an undistinguished little hamlet near Southampton. Pereira arrived in England as a twenty-six-year-old Indian engineer on board a merchant navy ship in 1977, and didn’t leave. He found work as a salesman in a local double glazing firm, was soon joined by an Indian girlfriend, Gail, whom he married in England, and their union was blessed by the arrival of a daughter, Keira, three years later.
The only problem was that Pereira had no business to be in England in the first place, and the Home Office finally told him so, in 1982. But at this point the wonderful inconsistency of the British people asserted itself; the good villagers of Bishop’s Waltham rose in protest. It seems that during their years of illegal residence the Pereiras had been, in the words of a neighbor, “model citizens.” They had regularly attended church, charming Gail had always spoken politely to the grocer; little Keira, an angel in human shape, was taking ballet lessons; and Rodney himself — I loved this touch .— had played Santa Claus every Christmas at Yuletide celebrations in his daughter’s nursery school. Fortified by public meetings, the support of their parish priest (who declared they were “very much part of the community”), and mass petitions to the Queen and the home office, the Pereiras refused to leave Bishop’s Waltham. They embarked instead on the long series of appeals permitted by Britain’s civil procedures. (It is one of the lesser ironies of international affairs that illegal immigrants are invariably so inexhaustibly litigious.) The technical details of the appeals themselves need not concern us here; for the record, the Pereiras were rebuffed by two separate Immigration Appeals Tribunals, both of which upheld the Home Ministry’s deportation order.
What struck me, however, is what the Pereiras began saying publicly in order to stir popular sympathy in Britain to their side. India, according to one petition, is “a country that has nothing at all for them.” A commentary on the recession or on widespread unemployment? Not a bit of it. “As English-speaking Roman Catholics,” claimed Pereira, “we would face prejudice in India.” (This, incidentally, from a man who grew up in India, embarked on his merchant navy career there, and actually had relatives living in Bombay.) The former seaman claimed he would not be re-employed by India’s merchant navy (hardly surprising, since he had deserted it when he jumped ship in England), and as for his new profession, there was not much call for double glazing in India. But wait for the main reason: “We do not want to be sent back to a country whose language [sic] we do not speak.” Poor Pereira: “We have nothing to go back to — except hostility and prejudice because we are Catholics and cannot speak the Indian language.”
Of course this is absurd and appalling, but it is far from atypical. Whether it is a small-time sailor on the make, willing to lie about conditions in his country in order to persuade white Christians that he is really one of them, or an organized tour group of Sikhs claiming political asylum in Canada or Germany on the grounds that they are “persecuted” in India for their religion, Indians have proved themselves unhesitatingly able to put self-interest before principle abroad. If distorting, concealing, attacking, and deliberately misrepresenting the truth about Indian social and political tolerance can deliver a laminated green card or a Caucasian passport, some Indians will not hesitate to drag their own country through the mud. National loyalty, when seen from an economic, standard-of-living point of view, is hardly a sterling virtue. When it comes to personal material advancement, we are individualists par excellence.
The only “hostility and prejudice” Pereira might have encountered in India would not have been for his Catholicism or his linguistic limitations, but for his cheap attempt to deny an identity he could not lose unless he shed his skin. There are Pereiras and Baljis all over the world, whose hatred for their motherland is an essential condition of their ability to live with themselves in their new countries. (They, of course, qualify for the NRI label but are unlikely to lay claim to it.)
There are thus both positives and negatives in the NRI condition: grounds for fear and loathing, directed at both India and the NRI himself, as well as opportunity to exercise influence on India’s behalf, contribute to India’s development, and profit from India’s growth. In an emotional sense, NRIs are the prodigal sons of a motherland they have left but not forgotten, clinging to a sense of nationhood they cannot define but will not surrender. Many would argue that, especially given the Indian governments open doors in the “liberalization” era (of which more later), NRIs have the best of both worlds. As the United States-based physicist E. C. G. Sudarshan put it, describing the unique situation of the NRI in relation to his home country and his country of adoption: “If you look at the world with two eyes, you see more. It is possible to live in two worlds.”
* * *
It might seem an odd digression, to have been discussing India’s minorities and then to find oneself looking at Indians who are minorities elsewhere. But they are linked phenomena, and as an NRI myself (one who has Never Relinquished India), I am conscious of the enormous potential for constructive contribution that NRIs represent, and the difference they can make to India — just as I am aware that for some other NRIs the acronym could as well stand for “Not Really Indian.” The involvement of NRIs with the Indian predicament is, however, to me symptomatic of the perpetual pull of the motherland: whatever you feel about her, Mother India never really lets go.
7
The Hindu Rate of Growth, and Other Agnostic Legacies
For most of the five decades since independence, India has pursued an economic policy of subsidizing unproductivity, regulating stagnation, and distributing poverty. We called this socialism.
The moment of truth about Indian economic policy — the moment when even its guardians had to accept that the old ways had not worked and could be sustained no longer — came in early 1991 when a large part of the nation’s gold reserves had to be flown out to London as collateral for a $2.2-billion emergency IMF loan. Without the loan, India would have had to default on its international debt, and the economy would, for all practical purposes, have collapsed.
The country’s foreign exchange reserves, which stood at just under a billion dollars in January 1991, would have covered just two weeks of imports; the Gulf War increased India’s oil bills at precisely the time that Indian workers were fleeing the area and depriving Indian banks of their remittances. This left the government no choice but to raise money to service its debts — against the country’s gold reserves.
One cannot imagine a greater psychological shock to the average Indian. We have, for millennia, placed our trust in gold as the ultimate security. In Indian culture, the woman of the house — the embodiment of the family’s honor — treasures her gold jewelry both as her soundest asset and as the symbol of her status. The notion that the country was, in effect, pawning its collective jewelry abroad in order to keep paying the rent sent shock waves through the polity.
Experts had long said it would take a real crisis to crystallize the growing impetus for economic reform. The gold crisis did it. This event — more than any abstract figures in budgetary calculations — drove home the indispensability of serious change in economic policy. Things simply couldn’t go on as they had.
The road to disaster was, as usual, paved with good, even noble, intentions. In 1954, Prime Minister Nehru, moved by the desperate plight of the Indian masses, got the Congress Party to agree to work toward the creation of a “socialist pattern of society.” Within a year his principal economic adviser, the Strangelovian P. C. Mahalanobis, came up with the Second Five-Year Plan. This enshrined industrial self-sufficiency as the goal, to be attained by a state-controlled public sector that would dominate the “commanding heights” of the economy. This public sector would be financed by higher income, wealth, and sales taxes on India’s citizenry. India would industrialize, Indians would pay for it, and the Indian government would run the show.
The logic behind this approach, and for the dominance of the public sect
or, was a compound of nationalism and idealism: the conviction that items vital for the economic well-being of Indians must remain in Indian hands — not the hands of Indians seeking to profit from such activity, but the disinterested hands of the state, that father-and-mother to all Indians. It was sustained by the assumption that the public sector was a good in itself; that, even if it was not efficient or productive or competitive, it employed large numbers of Indians, gave them a stake in worshiping at Nehru’s “new temples of modern India,” and kept the country free from the depredations of profit-oriented capitalists who would enslave the country in the process of selling it what it needed. In this kind of thinking, performance was not a relevant criterion for judging the utility of the public sector: its inefficiencies were masked by generous subsidies from the national exchequer, and a combination of vested interests — socialist ideologues, bureaucratic management, self-protective trade unions, and captive markets — kept it beyond political criticism.
But since the public sector was involved in economic activity, it was difficult for it to be entirely exempt from economic yardsticks. Yet, in 1992-93, of the 237 public-sector companies in existence, 104 had losses, amounting to some 40 billion rupees of the Indian taxpayers’ money. (Most of the remaining 133 companies made only a marginal profit. The figures have undoubtedly worsened: according to a report in Time magazine in March 1996, the country’s public-sector electric utilities alone lost $2.2 billion in the preceding twelve months, or 70 billion rupees a year. Other public-sector industries that experienced losses were not far behind.) Several of the state-owned companies are kept running merely to provide jobs — or, less positively, to prevent the “social costs” (job losses, poverty, political fallout) that would result from closing them down. In 1994, one British journalist, Stefan Wagstyl of the Financial Times, reported in disbelief from the government-owned Hindustan Fertilizer factory in Haldia, West Bengal, which employs 1,550 workmen but has produced no fertilizer since it was set up at a cost of $1.2 billion (and after seven years of construction) in 1986: