Harsh Mander's new book Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and
Indifference in New India talks about the growing inequality and the lack of
compassion amongst the rich for the poor in India. Darryl D'Monte reviews the
book which despite its candidness about the grim realities offers a message of
hope and promise.
01 September 2015 -
Without putting too fine
a point on it, the images of Indrani Mukerjea, who has allegedly murdered her
own daughter, reveal a somewhat different plot than what has so far appeared in
most of the media.
She is usually portrayed
in a sleeveless top with a plunging neckline, holding a glass of wine or a
cocktail. The backdrop is usually one of a bar, with its neon-lit garishness
betraying more than a hint of hedonism.
The Times of India has likened her to a female Gatsby – someone who came out of
nowhere, had nothing much to show for herself apart from her sultry looks, and
yet catapulted herself to the highest echelons of society through
relentless self-promotion.
The few images of her
slain daughter, Sheena Bora, indicate someone who shares a likeness with her
estranged mother. Indrani’s husband Peter has been at the top rungs of the
media and has endowed her with the highest profile that any parvenu could hope
for.
Indeed, he was the CEO
of Star TV, which is owned by the world’s most ruthless
media mogul, Rupert Murdoch. Star introduced India to a
new world of glitzy entertainment just as the country liberalised its economy
in the early 1990s. No wonder that critics have called the entry of Star the “Murdochisation of the Indian media”.
I wondered about l’affaire Mukerjea after putting down Harsh Mander’s new
book,Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India. The media may carry image after image of the
bold and beautiful in daily newspaper supplements and late-night shows on TV
news channels, but these party-goers and givers and others of their ilk have
turned their backs on the rest of India or “seceded” as Arundhati Roy puts it.
Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and
Indifference in New India,
Harsh Mander, Speaking Tiger, New Delhi, 418 pp, 2015, Rs 495. Pic: Darryl D'Monte
Mander documents in an
almost cold-blooded manner not only the terrible disparity this country has
promoted but how, like Marie Antoinette, we have insulated ourselves from
“Bharat” and averted our gaze.
India now has the fifth
largest concentration of dollar billionaires, after the US and China; the third
largest middle class after China and the US; and the single largest
concentration of the poor.
A few years ago, as I
have noted earlier elsewhere, the annual UN Human Development Report introduced
a “multi-dimensional poverty index” in collaboration with an Oxford-based
institute, which showed that India had more poor people in absolute numbers in
eight states than the 26 poorest sub-Saharan countries put together. Madhya
Pradesh had the worst indices.
Mander notes how Amartya
Sen and Jean Dreze refer to “revenues foregone” through policies and measures
to benefit the private sector, which since 1991 has been bloated through
LPG–liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation. In 2011-12, even during
the so-called pro-poor policies of the previous Congress government and its
president Sonia Gandhi, Rs 5300 billion of corporate taxes, customs and
excise duties were written off, a staggering 5.7 percent of GDP.
Of this waiver, just
exemptions on diamond and gold imports – a dire necessity for our Marie
Antoinettes -- were estimated to leave the country poorer by Rs 570 billion.
This was twice the estimated additional cost of the much-maligned National Food
Security law.
As Mander observes, all
hell broke loose over the food security bill, with conservative commentators
like Surjit Bhalla and Gurcharan Das calling it daylight robbery. Das believed
that cheap food would disincentivise work. The Economic Times characterised it as “money-guzzling”, citing an
estimated annual burden of Rs 1,250 billion, figures which, the author says,
have to be taken with a fistful of salt.
The author recalls that
there was hardly any response from the same brigade when Narendra Modi, then
Gujarat Chief Minister, made over 1,100 acres of fertile land to Ratan Tata to
relocate his Tata Motors plant, which ran into rough weather in Singur, West
Bengal. Tata got this at Rs 900 per sq metre, with dedicated power supply and
water thrown in. This was in addition to a loan at 0.1 percent interest,
repayable after 20 years. No wonder Tata publicly hugged the CM at the plant
launch, much to the dismay of human rights activists opposed to Modi for
presiding over the 2002 riots.
Modi also bestowed this
largesse on the Ford car company and then on his perennial favourite, Gautam
Adani, who invariably travels with him on his frequent trips abroad, almost as
his Industries Minister. Adani was given land in the state at what Mander terms
“shocking, rock-bottom” rates of between Re 1 to Rs 32 per sq metre.
We must echo what
critics of the neo-liberal policy regimes which are sweeping across the world
demonise the ‘Bretton Woods Sisters’ – the World Bank and International Fund.
In a truly astounding case illustrating the yawning deficit in democratic
governance of these two key institutions, the former is almost always headed by
an American and the latter by a European (including the philandering Dominique
Strauss-Kahn). Some countries are more equal than others.
Records Mander: “It is
extraordinary that very recently, these very institutions have begun to
acknowledge that they may have been wrong, and drastically so. ‘In far too many
countries the benefits of growth are being enjoyed by far too few people. This is
not a recipe for stability and sustainability.’ These are not the words of a
Left-wing ideologue, but of Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF.
Mander continues, “She
goes on, ‘Let me be frank: In the past economists have underestimated the importance
of inequality. They have focused on economic growth, on the size of the pie
rather than its distribution. Today we are more keenly aware of the damage done
by inequality…It leads to an economy of exclusion, and a wasteland of discarded
potential.
“She compares rising
inequality in the US and India. ‘In the US, inequality is back to where it was
before the Great Depression, and the richest 1% captured 95% of all income
gains since 2009, while the bottom 90% got poorer. In India, the net worth of
the billionaire community increased twelvefold in 15 years, enough to eliminate
poverty in this country twice over.”
Mander quotes no less a
person than former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram who stated how the tax-GDP
ratio was 5.5 percent for direct taxes and 4.4 percent for indirect taxes, “one
of the lowest for any large developing country and will not garner adequate
resources for inclusive and sustainable development”. As the veteran rural
affairs journalist P. Sainath alleged, Chidambaram did nothing to raise taxes
but balanced his books by curbing expenditures in the social sector.
The virtue of Mander’s
book is that it isn’t a diatribe against anti-people policies but an
understated critique which is far more effective than a rant. What is more, he
illustrates all these dismal policies with accounts of people in dire straits,
which he gleaned from his peripatetic travels to the distant-most corners of
his city, Delhi and the country at large.
These anecdotes yield
reams of human experience which remain in one’s memory, much more than pure
economic or sociological analysis would. For instance, at a Big Fight programme
on NDTV with moderator Vikram Chandra which dealt with slum dwellers and their
demonisation as unwanted migrants, he asked who in the audience had
grandparents who were born in the capital. Only Chandra raised his hand; in
other words, we are mostly immigrants ourselves.
At an Urban Age
conference – organised by the London School of Economics and the Deutsche Bank
– in Delhi in November 2014, this columnist presided over a session in which
Mander took part. He recounted the answer a pavement dweller in the capital gave
him when asked why he slept on the traffic divider in the centre of a busy road
at night. Because the traffic fumes kept the mosquitoes at bay, he could catch
a few winks.
The author also
advocated that schools, which are only occupied for eight hours a day, could be
turned into dormitories for homeless children at night. His book details his
various encounters at relief camps for riot victims and other vulnerable people
throughout the country. He even spent a night at a camp in Ahmedabad after the
riots and is honest enough to mention that the single sojourn made him
physically sick for several days.
Mander has written a
remarkably candid and penetrating book which deserves to be widely read. It
isn’t, as might be imagined, a dirge, rather a message of hope and promise. It
could well be prescribed as compulsory reading not only for sociologists and
anthropologists but, even more urgently, by economists and business school
students, those who otherwise espouse the market without questioning it. The
hope then is that we will then not simply turn away, but confront what we see.
Darryl D'Monte
01 September 2015
01 September 2015
