IN A LAND OF
FACADES,
MARK THE FIRST SIGNS OF AN INDIAN SPRING
I loved India when I visited it. Indeed I think one could live their life out just exploring this glorious country, sampling the cuisine that varies so greatly from one area to another, one's senses almost overwhelmed by the richness of the culture. Indeed, I do not even know where to begin describing my experiences but I would go back if the opportunity presented itself and just keep on going. It is true, India changes you forever.
One day I watched a beautiful cow wandering down the street, busy men on the way to the office touching her then making a sacred sign with their fingers. A few minutes later I watched a small stick-limbed urchin milking the beast and squirting the milk alternately into her mouth and that of the infant sitting beside her.
The people work hard for almost nothing there, the poverty is indeed overwhelming. The poor are treated no better than the "yellow curs" that wander everywhere looking for scraps to eat. Meanwhile the wealthy still hold seven day weddings for their children, each day more extravagant than the last. Something will happen eventually, as Pilger points out. Considering that Israel and India are bestest buddies over the Pakistan issue, it will be interesting to see the outcome.
But it will be bloody, very bloody. Life is cheap; that is just how it is.
By John Pilger
December 30, 2011
When the early morning fog rises and drifting skeins from wood
fires carry the sweet smell of India, the joggers arrive in Lodi Gardens. Past
the tomb of Mohammed Shah, the 15th century Munghal ruler, across a landscape
manicured in the 1930s by Lady Willingdon, wife of the governor-general,
recently acquired trainers stride out from ample figures in smart saris and
white cotton dhotis.
In Delhi, the middle classes do as they do everywhere, though
here there is no middle. By mid-morning, children descend like starlings. They
wear pressed blazers, like those of an English prep school. There are games and
art and botany classes. When shepherded out through Lady Willingdon’s elegant
stone gateway, they pass a reed-thin boy, prostrate beside the traffic and his
pile of peanuts, coins clenched in his hand.
When I was first sent to report India, I seldom raised my eyes
to the gothic edifices and facades of the British Raj. All life was at dust and
pavement level and, once the shock had eased, I learned to admire the sheer
imagination and wit of people who survived the cities, let alone the
countryside ~ the dabbawallahs (literally “person with a box”), cleaners,
runners, street barbers, poets, assorted Fagans and children with their piles
of peanuts.
In Calcutta, as it was still known during the 1971 war with
Pakistan, civil defence units in soup-plate helmets and lungis toured the
streets announcing an air-raid warning practice during which, they said,
“everybody must stay indoors and remain in the face-down position until the
siren has ceased to operate”.
Waves of mocking laughter greeted them, together with the cry:
“But we have no doors to stay inside!”
When the imperial capital was transferred to Delhi early last
century, New Delhi was built as a modernist showpiece, with avenues and
roundabouts and a mall sweeping up to the viceroy’s house, now the president’s
residence in the world’s most populous democracy.
If the experience of colonialism was humiliating, this proud new
metropolis would surely be enabling. On 15 August, 1947, it was the setting for
Pandit Nehru’s declaration of independence “at the midnight hour”. It was also
a façade behind which the majority hoped and waited, and still wait.
This notion of façade is almost haunting. You sense it in
genteel Lodi Gardens and among the anglicized elites and their enduring
ambiguity. In the 1990s, it became a wall erected by the beneficiaries of
Shining India, which began as a slogan invented by an American advertising firm
to promote the rise of the Hindu nationalist BJP-led government.
Shorn of Nehru’s idealism and paternalism, it marked the end of
the Congress Party’s pretence of class and caste reconciliation: in other
words, social justice.
Monsanto and Pizza Hut, Microsoft and Murdoch were invited to
enter what had been forbidden territory to corporate predators. India would
serve a new deity called “economic growth” and be hailed as a “global leader,
apparently heading “in what the smart money believes is the right direction”
(Newsweek).
India’s ascent to “new world power” is both true and what Edward
Bernays, the founder of public relations, called “false reality”.
Despite a growth rate of 6.9 per cent and prosperity for some,
more Indians than ever are living in poverty than anywhere on earth, including
a third of all malnourished children. Save the Children says that every year
two million infants under the age of five die.
The facades are literal and surreal. Ram Suhavan and his family
live 60 feet above a railway track. Their home is the inside of a hoarding
which advertises, on one side, “exotic, exclusive” homes for the new “elite”
and on the other, a gleaming car. This is in Pune, in Maharashtra state, which
has “booming” Bombay and the nation’s highest suicide rate among indebted farmers.
Most Indians live in rural villages, dependent on the land and
its rhythms of subsistence. The rise of monopoly control of seed by
multinationals, forcing farmers to plant cash crops such as GM cotton, has led
to a quarter of a million suicides, a conservative estimate.
The environmentalist Vandana Shiva describes this as “re-colonization”.
Using the 1894 Land Acquisition Act, central and state governments have
forcibly dispossessed farmers and tribal peoples in order to hand their land to
speculators and mining companies.
To make way for a Formula One racetrack and gated “elite”
estates, land was appropriated for $6 a square metre and sold to developers for
$13,450 a square metre. Across India, the communities have fought back.
In Orissa State, the wholesale destruction of betel farms has
spawned a resistance now in its fifth year.
What is always exciting about India is this refusal to comply
with political mythology and gross injustice. In The Idea of India, wrote Sunil
Kjilnani,
“The future of western political theory will be decided outside
the west.”
For the majorities of India and the west, liberal democracy was
now diminished to “the assertion of an equal right to consume [media] images”.
In Kashmir, a forgotten India barely reported abroad, a peaceful
resistance as inspiring as Tahrir Square has arisen in the most militarized
region on earth.
As the victims of Partition, Muslim Kashmiris have known none of
Nehru’s noble legacies. Thousands of dissidents have “disappeared” and torture
is not uncommon.
“The voice that the government of India has tried so hard to
silence,” wrote Arundhati Roy, “has now massed into a deafening roar. Hundreds
of thousands of unarmed people have come out to reclaim their cities, their
streets and mohallas. They have simply overwhelmed the heavily armed security
forces by their sheer numbers, and with a remarkable display of raw courage.”
An Indian Spring may be next.
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