Progress is not always pretty, straightforward or even legal, but India is changing fast, writes Ben Doherty in his final piece as the Herald’s South Asia Correspondent.
Bearing witness: Ben Doherty (centre) at work in India. Photo: Kate Geraghty
About the same time as I came to Delhi, a family moved in around the corner.
A couple of hundred metres from my neat, whitewashed house in a middle-class south Delhi neighbourhood, a Rajasthani family took up residence on the side of the road.
Their new home was a blue tarpaulin tied to the fence outside a 12th century Mughal tomb, between a stinking rubbish dump where the rag pickers and the drunks spend their days and a busy road.
A better life: Vikram working outside his family’s home, which is wedged between a stinking rubbish dump and a busy road. Photo: Ben Doherty
A narrow strip of dirt, three metres at its widest, between the fence, the rotting garbage, and the road, was their existence.
They came in winter, as I did. It was cold in Delhi that year.
Whenever I passed, the family – how many members there were was hard to tell – seemed pressed together under as many blankets as they could gather. It rained.
Difficult choice: BJP candidate Narendra Modi. Photo: AFP
But gradually the weather warmed, and the family took confidence that a couple of weeks without eviction had become a month. Their home became more substantial.
They built a wooden house, with some scavenged tin for a roof, held down with rocks. The hessian sack at the entrance was replaced by a wooden door, with hinges they forged themselves in a pit fire at the front door.
The family, I learnt, consisted of two brothers, their wives and children.
Delhi’s Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, chief of the Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party. Photo: Reuters
Soon they built a second wooden hut, leaning off the first, then illegally rigged electricity from a nearby wire to bring power.
They got a small TV from somewhere and set it up in a corner, and charpoys (stretchers) for beds. Lately, they’ve been wrestling with a discarded old washing machine with a broken lid, trying to get it to work.
Their shelter has become a home.
Retiring prime minister Manmohan Singh. Photo: AFP
The head of the family, the older brother Vikram, is a gruff, taciturn fellow. Heavy shouldered and bearded, his face, when at rest, seems set in a scowl.
He’s not been the easiest man to get to know. But gradually, with my regular passage on foot past his front door, a nod of recognition has become a ”namaste” and, now, the occasional conversation.
We sit, perhaps once a week when I’m in town, over chai and puri, bought from a food cart down the road. He barely eats himself. He spends our conversation tearing up the warm, fried bread with his fingers and feeding it to whichever of the children is wandering by at the time.
The change in his face is extraordinary. The scowl is gone, and he appears suddenly friendly, all bright, shining eyes and strong, white teeth.
He finds it funny that I’m so tall, but he is disappointed I’m not yet married. He wants me to bring him some red wine from Australia so we can drink it together.
He and his brother Mani are from Rajasthan. There are 18 people in their combined families: wives, children, mothers and in-laws. They are from a nomadic tribe known as the Gadia Lohars, the literal translation of which is ”blacksmiths on the wheel”. And so it is with them.
Like their father and his father before, Vikram and Mani are smiths, spending their days over fire pits outside their front doors, banging at the red-hot metal, forging picks and hammers and skewers for tandoori ovens.
Stacked by their homes is their stock, from which they make a modest industry selling to passers-by, tradesmen and local homeowners.
Their family has come to Delhi to seek a better life. Gradually, over three years, they’ve found it.
From their Spartan first shelter, their homes have become liveable, and even, Vikram insists, comfortable. The house has no plumbing or toilet, but their lives are better here than they’ve been before.
Vikram has four children, all of whom attend school, in between helping with work.
The youngest carries around her books and pencil case. She has a white-and-green uniform, which her mother rips from her back every afternoon to start furiously washing for the next day.
”All of my kids are in school, I want to see at least one of them, any one of them, become something,” Vikram says.
The family tries to make each day a little better than the last. There is something new to save up for, an improvement to the house, shoes or a book for a child, a new tool to make work easier, or more profitable.
I see India in Vikram’s story.
Vikram’s family shares the irrepressible energy of this country’s huge population.
Progress is not always pretty, it’s not always linear (Vikram’s house has blown over a couple of times), it’s not always legal, but it is progress undeniable. It is chaotic and ad hoc and imperfect, but, little by little, it is headway.
So it is with India.
There is a sense almost of disappointment from Western powers that India has not developed as rapidly as hoped, or in the way it was hoped.
Economic progress is slower than predicted, social ills appear unaddressed, and governance failures, inefficiencies, and obstructionist economic protectionism still stubbornly exist.
India is hyper-sensitive to censure or maltreatment, real or imagined, from the West, in particular its old ruler Britain, or most powerful friend, the US.
Criticism from outside, no matter how carefully couched in diplomatic language, receives an overtly aggressive response.
This country keenly feels its history, and is adamant it will never be dictated to again.
Its people are leaders all over the world: in business, sport, politics, science, literature, art and music. The country has made extraordinary progress in my instant of time here. But this is not to gloss over India’s problems, some of which are critical, and many of which are exacerbated by the country’s sheer size.
The good and the bad occur in extremes here, be it the world’s most expensive home, or the number of children who starve.
And the answers to India’s problems are, like the place itself, complex.
The shameful, disgraceful treatment of women in India will be improved not only when attitudes to girl children are altered, but when the way boys are brought up is changed.
Young men who grow up as little princes, allowed to misbehave with impunity, told that everything they do is wonderful, and taught that women exist only to serve and to gratify them, cannot help but have a warped view of the opposite sex.
The culture of corruption that allows government ministers to cream off tens of millions of dollars – then act affronted when caught – has its roots in workaday briberies: the 100 rupees to escape a traffic fine, the baksheesh demanded of a poor family for a ration card.
Indian friends cynically tell me ”the country grows at night, while the government sleeps”, in allusion to the governance failures that cripple progress. Many here argue it is India’s most pressing problem.
Sometimes it seems they are right, the place may be ungovernable.
But it is not so. India’s democracy – for all its vivacity and its passion, its polarity and its inefficiencies – is an example to the countries around it.
But the world’s largest democracy will hold elections in May, and it faces a difficult choice.
A move away from the Gandhi-dominated dynasty of Congress may be good for a maturing nation. And a new BJP administration under Narendra Modi may bring economic reform, but that may come to the detriment of India’s minorities.
There is, too, an emerging third force in Indian politics. The Aam Aadmi (Common Man) party is the political arm of a growing anti-corruption movement. It was swept to power to govern Delhi in recent elections on a promise of huge reforms and benefits for the poor.
But the poetry of its campaign has been reduced to prose in government. Aam Aadmi has found India harder to change than it hoped.
But hope remains, it is the vanguard of what may have to be a slow revolution.
Any reflection on India is, by necessity, an over-simplification. This country is too big, too broad and too diverse to bend to stereotype.
Winston Churchill neither liked nor understood India, but he was right when he said: ”India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator.”
The differences across India – in language, culture, religion, food, work habits, treatment of women, views on outsiders – from Jammu and Kashmir in the north to Kerala in the south, from Gujarat in the west to Nagaland in the east – are as dramatic as those from Dublin to Moscow.
And so, everything that is undeniably true about India is also completely false. At the same time.
This is a country that has sent a spacecraft towards Mars, but has more hungry children than all of Africa. A country that has 90 nuclear warheads, but where a third of women can’t read.
Outsiders often divide India into north and south, along a crude ethno-cultural line. But a more useful division may be longitudinal, separating east from west.
The Western world likes to deal with the west of India because it is the part that it understands: the financial epicentre of Mumbai, the entrepreneurial hub of Gujarat, the power base of Delhi.
But it is the east that is more deserving of international notice.
The east is where the government’s actual control of and attention to the country is poor. It is where girls don’t go to school, where women are trafficked for sex, where children are forced into labour, where policemen are killed by lawless militias.
People are poorer, jobs fewer and chances for education slimmer. The spirit of aspiration that drives so much of India is weakened here, by unrelenting, bitter circumstance.
There are huge swathes of India – Naxal-blighted Jharkhand and Orissa, the seven remote north-east states – where tens of millions feel dissociated from the world’s next superpower.
(There are exceptions, as with every Indian generalisation, to this east-west divide: the eastern cities of Chennai, Hyderabad, and Kolkata fit more naturally with the developing west, insurgency-riddled Kashmir in the north-west has greater similarities with the restive east.)
But when the West is speaking to the businessmen of Mumbai and the bureaucrats of Delhi, it must remember they represent a tiny minority. Most people in India are still poor. About half a billion people subsist each day on less than $1.25. Four in 10 of the children are stunted because they don’t have enough to eat.
For all the millions of words written in analysis, praise, or criticism of India, it is a place still not well understood by outsiders.
Those who write on India are often too-hastily categorised, either as ”boosters” or ”haters”. I argue one has to be both here: to love India while acknowledging its flaws, to bear witness to the extraordinary in this place, without being blind to that which is abhorrent.
It’s Vikram’s third winter in Delhi, and the floor of his house is still cold dirt. I am leaving Delhi. He is staying.
Vikram and I talk most often about his children, a universal enough theme for two people whose life experiences are so different. At least one child is always sick, it seems, another always in trouble with someone or another nearby. He wishes he could do more to give his children a better chance, an easier life than the one he’s had to endure.
Vikram sits on a low stool outside his home, barely a metre from the incessant noise and the belching smog of Delhi’s relentless traffic, next to the festering, foul-smelling rubbish dump.
The roof of his house leaks, and he worries someday, someone will move him on to somewhere even worse.
He sees and feels India’s faults more keenly than anyone.
And he thinks tomorrow is going to be better than today.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/india-a-nation-at-the-crossroads-20140131-31s0t.html#ixzz2s322Juni
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