On the Grand Trunk Road (11 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
In the election and its aftermath, Rao squeaked in, and the man he appointed to marshal was Manmohan Singh, the Sikh finance minister. Quickly Singh announced the first phase of free market reform—a currency devaluation, tax cuts, reduced regulations. It was perhaps not enough but it was a beginning. And Singh seemed the one man in India with the courage of his convictions. He accused the entrenched bureaucracy of “selling poverty” to hold on to their positions. In a ground-breaking budget speech on the floor of the
lok sabha,
or lower house of parliament, he intoned that India could not be held “permanent captive to a fear of the East India Company,” by which he meant that it was time to stop using old fears of the colonial powers to block integration with a fast-moving international capitalist economy. Politicians of many stripes who had been feeding at the state’s protected trough for several generations were, of course, outraged. So were the public-sector unions, including the railway workers. But the urban, young, business-oriented middle class cheered, and it seemed immediately that they would provide the political support—backed up by the implicit promise of campaign money should another election be required—to push the reforms along. Shortly after he took office, I went to see Singh in his spacious office to talk about what he had begun. He spoke like a neoconservative—one who embraces socialist or social democratic ends, but who insists that capitalist means are necessary to achieve them.
lok sabha,
or lower house of parliament, he intoned that India could not be held “permanent captive to a fear of the East India Company,” by which he meant that it was time to stop using old fears of the colonial powers to block integration with a fast-moving international capitalist economy. Politicians of many stripes who had been feeding at the state’s protected trough for several generations were, of course, outraged. So were the public-sector unions, including the railway workers. But the urban, young, business-oriented middle class cheered, and it seemed immediately that they would provide the political support—backed up by the implicit promise of campaign money should another election be required—to push the reforms along. Shortly after he took office, I went to see Singh in his spacious office to talk about what he had begun. He spoke like a neoconservative—one who embraces socialist or social democratic ends, but who insists that capitalist means are necessary to achieve them.
“These reforms are not about enriching the rich people, as some people say,” Singh said. “Their purpose is to release the creative energy of our people, to accelerate the rate of growth of our economy, to accelerate the growth of the public revenues, which we can then plow back into those sectors of our society, of our economy, which market forces by themselves cannot look after. And this is education, more emphasis on health care, safe drinking water, rural roads, agricultural research ...” and on down the list of goals that the Nehruvian state had set for itself and failed to achieve. “We have to do a great deal in educating public opinion,” Singh conceded. “So I do not minimize the enormity of the task. But I believe that among thinking segments of the population there is already an awareness.... Now it is true, [to translate] admission in private [that the Nehruvian state is failing] into a broad, mass-based program is going to take a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of faith, a lot of courage, a lot of stamina. Only time can tell us. But I do believe, I think our country will have that strength.”
But in a society where a large and powerful class, including most of its politicians, has been enriched and entrenched by the state, how does a lone finance minister go about detaching so many people from their privileges?
“Many of our intellectuals, our social scientists, our people, have been brought up in the whole belief that somehow an overcentralized command economy provided all the answers to the problems,” he replied. “For a period of time, even the people in the United States were mesmerized by the high growth rates of the Soviet Union.... So I think we were not the only ones who believed at that time that somehow the Communist world had found an answer to solve problems of poverty and underdevelopment that no other society had found. A lot of people were brought up in that tradition. Now experience has shown that is a god that has not worked.”
4
Village on a Hill
I regard the growth of cities as an evil thing, unfortunate for
England and certainly unfortunate for India.
—
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Mohandas K. Gandhi
F
rom Chopta, you can see China. It rises beyond the stripped Himalayan foothills, a few jagged peaks dimly visible in the haze that slips over the Garwal on summer evenings. You can stare at China while sitting on the slate wall in front of the Chopta village chief’s stone house. The villagers talked of China as if it were somewhere over the rainbow, not so much a paradise as an unfathomable place far, far different from their own. If you turned around and looked hard at Chopta, the usefulness of this imagined China became obvious. To live and die here in the late twentieth century, you would need something strange and vivid to dream about.
rom Chopta, you can see China. It rises beyond the stripped Himalayan foothills, a few jagged peaks dimly visible in the haze that slips over the Garwal on summer evenings. You can stare at China while sitting on the slate wall in front of the Chopta village chief’s stone house. The villagers talked of China as if it were somewhere over the rainbow, not so much a paradise as an unfathomable place far, far different from their own. If you turned around and looked hard at Chopta, the usefulness of this imagined China became obvious. To live and die here in the late twentieth century, you would need something strange and vivid to dream about.
When we first arrived, we could not help but notice the dead trees—thousands and thousands of barren saplings lying on Chopta’s patios and narrow hillside fields. Most of the dead seedlings were still wrapped in plastic casings supplied by the World Bank and the government of India as part of a reforestation and poverty-alleviation program. On and off over two years, my researcher, Rama Lakshmi, and I came to Chopta, trying to sort out why the trees were dead. To do that, we had to try to unravel the relationship, in a single village, between rural poverty and urban-based government. It was no easy matter.
Chopta is a cluster of hewn-stone houses that rests on a mountain ridge in the corner of the Himalayas where India, China, and Nepal meet. For centuries, its residents have survived—barely—by farming small, terraced plots of wheat and rice. They have no electricity or running water. They do have flies. The flies buzz in black swarms through homes choked with smoke from cooking fires. They congregate on piles of threshed wheat stacked on porches and in doorways. They flit from face to face and arm to arm, creating a buzzing drone behind the odd burst of village noise: the clanging bells of wandering cows, curses shouted at wayward chickens by scythe-waving women, flutes blown by preteen goatkeepers on the rocky slopes above the village. In the evening, the flies retreat and their drone is superseded by tinny Garwali folk songs from Chopta’s lone cassette player, which is usually propped up near the slate wall by the village chief’s house.
About three quarters of South Asians still live in the countryside. Chopta’s 235 residents are among the poorest of South Asia’s poor, physically isolated on their steep ridge from the socialist bureaucracy. Measuring poverty in South Asia is not easy, since by Western standards there is so much of it. India’s government has set its poverty line at about 90 rupees per capita per month, a monthly income at present equivalent to about three dollars. The government estimates that 35 percent of the population live below this line; the World Bank puts the number somewhat higher. In Pakistan and Sri Lanka the unofficial percentages are a little better. In Bangladesh and Nepal they are markedly worse. Afghanistan has been so decimated by war that it doesn’t even have statistics anymore. In any case, what reliable regional statistics there are describe about half a billion people living in destitution, mostly in the countryside. Alan Heston, looking for a way to compare South Asian poverty with that in the West, has noted that in the United States, less than 0.5 percent of the population survive on five dollars a day or less. Yet an equivalent income in rupees would place an Indian or Pakistani firmly in the middle class. The poorest of South Asia’s poor live at a level of poverty that cannot be found in the West.
You can find it in Chopta, where poverty is the daily arbiter of life and death. Bacteria and viruses course through the village, felling residents at random. Women give birth in cowsheds or dirt basements. They and their children often die in the process. The nearest road is a mile’s walk down a rock path. The nearest doctor lives about three miles off. Reaching the closest hospital requires a seven-mile hike along a dirt track and then a sixty-mile, four-hour ride in a hired jeep. Even the dirt road is relatively new; before it arrived about a decade ago, the villagers had rarely seen a bus up close. They refer to an automobile, an even more recent arrival, as “son of a bus.” Medical problems are addressed through a vague faith in injections and pills administered by local, untrained quacks on the one hand and on the other a somewhat firmer belief in spirits and bad luck. A crippled girl is said by her mother to have been frozen by a cold wind. A teenager with seizures is said to be plagued by bad dreams. A mother whose two newborn infants died is said to be the victim of an evil gaze. In the still, moonlit nights, the villagers huddle in their cramped homes, afraid to wander alone among the ghosts and wild beasts that are said to roam the mountainside.
The women are preoccupied by work and procreation. They rise at five in the morning in a clatter of gossip and banging pots, cook breakfast, feed and dress the children, milk the cows, fetch water from drying springs, grind grain, work the fields, cook lunch, grind more grain, march off to gather firewood, clean the house, work the fields again, cook dinner, wash the dishes, and put the children to bed. The women manage the grain stocks and the harvests. They spend long hours squatting on the straw mats in their kitchens, which are filled with smoke from cooking fires. “Indoor air pollution,” the environmental scientists in New Delhi call it, as if it were a symptom of faulty valves. The women usually fall asleep around eleven at night and rise again at dawn to do it all again, seven days a week.
Their husbands help them out by getting them pregnant with great frequency. The cycle plays out like a game of Russian roulette. Just before our first arrival, Rameshwari Devi, the wife of a determinedly cheerful villager named Than Singh, lost out on the twisting dirt road that leads from the village to the jeep stand seven miles away. Ramesh Singh, an enterprising untouchable carpenter who lives just below the village chief’s house on the ridge, described the scene: Devi lay on a handmade wooden stretcher fashioned from logs and rope, shouldered by four village men, who walked rapidly through the dust. She had been in labor for two days—the baby’s hand was protruding—but she could not give birth. The men decided to carry her on foot to a jeep that would take her to the hospital. “We kept giving her water and sugar,” recalled Ramesh Singh, one of the bearers. “She was awake. She kept saying, ‘I’m all right. I’m okay.’ When we got to the bridge, nearing it, we said, ‘Look, there’s your jeep.’ She suddenly seemed to get very frightened. She said, ‘I feel heavy. My throat is heavy.’ And then she closed her eyes and died.... We carried her body up the mountain, into the woods to the cremation ground, and burned her.”
Many of the men in the village are unemployed high school dropouts—the Nehruvian state provided schools but not jobs. They sit around on chairs and benches during the day, talking. The only agricultural work deemed appropriate for them is plowing, and this they do infrequently. Some of them are hangers-on at the local offices of the state and federal bureaucracies, which run a few permanent outposts in the valleys below Chopta’s ridge. The bureaucracies recently have built a few more outposts with the World Bank’s money. In the evenings the village men gather on the slate wall outside the chief’s house and gossip about the day’s events beneath the ridge. Their wives and daughters trudge by with pots of water and great piles of wheat on their heads. The elected village chief, known as the
pradhan,
the last member of the Brahmin Dhondiyal family still resident in Chopta, works about fifteen hours a week at a post office several miles off. These duties appear to weigh heavily on him. His wife, as best we could count, works about 105 hours a week running his house, tilling his fields, and raising his children. At one point during the period of our coming and going, she nearly died in labor with a stillborn child. Nobody was paying attention—she was out in the fields cutting wheat when she began screaming in pain. “Oh God! Oh God!” Several women ran to her. One rubbed oil on her stomach. Another reached in crudely and pulled out the dead child. The mother rested a few days and then went back to work in the fields. If she didn’t nobody would.
pradhan,
the last member of the Brahmin Dhondiyal family still resident in Chopta, works about fifteen hours a week at a post office several miles off. These duties appear to weigh heavily on him. His wife, as best we could count, works about 105 hours a week running his house, tilling his fields, and raising his children. At one point during the period of our coming and going, she nearly died in labor with a stillborn child. Nobody was paying attention—she was out in the fields cutting wheat when she began screaming in pain. “Oh God! Oh God!” Several women ran to her. One rubbed oil on her stomach. Another reached in crudely and pulled out the dead child. The mother rested a few days and then went back to work in the fields. If she didn’t nobody would.
Shortly afterward, her husband, the pradhan, turned up at my office in New Delhi. He was in the city on unspecified business. Rama asked about his wife.
“She is better now,” the pradhan answered laconically.
“What happened, exactly?” Rama pressed him.
“Problems. But now she is better.”
“Was it a boy or a girl?”
“Dead child,” he answered.
Ranjana Kumari, who has written an extensive study of households headed by women in rural India, wrote that the men she saw in the villages she studied were “totally irresponsible toward their household affairs [but] they do extract enough money from activities like negotiating in land conflicts or campaigning during elections to manage their personal expenditures.” In some cases, these expenditures included “drinking liquor, going to films and to the market centres where they spent lavishly on different kinds of consumer goods.... Due to their unfinished education and in the process imbibing strong urban values they consider agricultural activities as undesirable.” This is the way it is, by and large, in Chopta. The Nehruvian state, by providing a partial education and no gainful local employment, taught the Chopta village men just enough to ensure the misery of their wives and daughters. Of course, wives and daughters in Chopta were no doubt miserable hundreds of years ago as well, long before the modem socialist state came along. The difference today is that on both sides of the gender divide, villagers move about in an atmosphere of self-conscious resentment about their lack of opportunity in the modern world. The creation of this atmosphere seemed to be the Indian state’s principal achievement in Chopta.
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