On the Grand Trunk Road (38 page)

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Authors: Steve Coll

BOOK: On the Grand Trunk Road
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For decades now, South Asian politicians and activists have been attempting sporadically to untie the hierarchical binds of history, religion, and culture through land reform legislation, speeches, symbolic acts, marches, electoral campaigns, industrialization plans, welfare programs, and government hiring schemes. Many of these efforts reflect the noblest aspirations of the Nehruvian state: social mobility and an end to caste distinctions through universal education, full employment, widespread health care, and a benevolent, leveling bureaucracy. That Indian society continues to honor these ideals is evident in the way it can still be shocked by dramatic instances of their breach. Indian newspapers, magazines, and video news programs controlled by the upper castes report regularly and prominently on the continuing murder, rape, and arson attacks carried out in the countryside by upper-caste landowners against the lower-caste landless. But often implicit in such reporting is the idea that these cases are archaic exceptions, abhorrent to the enlightened sensibilities of the cities, where castes and creeds mix freely and can stake their claims to the future. What the opinion-making upper-caste elite does not often wish to reckon with is how the Nehruvian state itself has been constructed to preserve caste roles—and especially in the cities. Too often what the state has created is not a level playing field but a series of interlocking, competitive clan- or caste-based mafias—vote banks, as they are called by Indian politicians—where the organizing principle is not merit but patronage. And patronage flows not only from the state machinery but from the advantages of birth. Upper-caste networks are enriched and often protected from challenge by inheritance of land and state-sanctioned business franchises obtained from the precolonial princes, and later, the British imperialists.
 
The independent Indian state has partially undermined the strength of upper-caste networks. In the cities and in such institutions as the bloated military, old caste and feudal identities are dissolving. A younger generation is rising with attitudes significantly more egalitarian than those of their parents and grandparents. New lower-caste mafias have attached themselves to the state, mainly through affirmative action and electoral politics, and have built up their own networks of patronage and wealth, lifting some of their members to new social and economic heights—in some cases, even overthrowing local upper castes who used to hold them down.
 
Yet progress toward the creation of a casteless society has been much slower than the Nehruvian idealists promised. One bit of anecdotal evidence was what Indians would say when I asked whether the old caste and feudal identities really made any day-to-day difference in their lives. I asked this question of hundreds of people in cities, towns, and villages. Almost invariably, those of high birth said that feudal and caste origin mattered less and less in swirling, modernizing South Asia. Younger Brahmins and Rajputs would say that they had lost their parents’ ability to determine the caste of a stranger with a few subtle, well-chosen questions about family background. But not once did a person of low birth tell me the same. They knew exactly how to determine the caste of a stranger and did so regularly; to them, caste and feudal identity made all the difference in the world.
 
It was not difficult to see why, even within a square mile of my supposedly exclusive neighborhood of “luxury” concrete-block three-and four-bedroom homes inhabited by upper-caste Indian bureaucrats and multinational businessmen. Just a few hundred yards from my driveway, on a sheltered hill up a dirt alley, lived a colony of untouchable “ragpickers” who made their living from the refuse of the Delhi rich. Their small compound, perhaps two acres square, consisted of a dozen low tar-paper shanties; a “school” constructed from a canvas canopy, rope, and wooden pegs; and heaps upon heaps of steaming, stinking garbage, which the residents collected, sorted, and sold off to Delhi scrap dealers. Flies and mosquitoes swarmed through the colony, far outnumbering the residents. Unwashed, unclothed children chased one another through the trash as their parents squatted beside the great piles, picking and sorting. In economic terms, the ragpicking colonies—there are scores of them nestled into major cities—are carefully integrated into urban life. They serve as partial substitutes for municipal garbage collection. There is little public refuse collection in India, in part because there is little household waste that the larger economy wants to dispose of entirely. One man’s scrap is another man’s house. One man’s newspaper is another’s shopping bag. One man’s lawn trimmings are another’s donkey feed. Ragpickers are intermediaries in these recycling transactions. But while they operate in a market-based, cash-driven subeconomy, they cannot be thought of as free agents. The roles they played centuries earlier as bonded, landless peasants in the rural villages many of them now play again in the new cities, despite the job set-asides and education schemes that have brought a relatively small number out of the trash heaps and into the dimly lit offices of the bureaucracy. The exploitation these urban untouchables face today is more complicated than it used to be, but to the ragpickers themselves it does not seem different because it arises not merely from poverty but from the stigma of low birth.
 
I drove up to the ragpicking colony one afternoon and sat on rope cots with a dozen residents to talk about caste and politics. Surely, I argued to them, despite the timeless degradation and poverty, there were scraps of progress here in the colony as well—the school provided by the government, for example, or the fact that they had escaped from the isolated oppression of the villages to a city where they could better protect themselves and their children. Didn’t it seem likely, at the least, that some of their children’s children might find a way off these heaps, propelled in part by the hard work and willingness to migrate of their courageous grandparents?
 
But it was difficult to find anyone who held this view. They understood my argument well, they wrestled with it privately themselves—they just did not believe it.
 
“I’ve been here since 1974,” answered one emaciated man, Om Prakash. “I haven’t seen anyone rise out of this. We have all stayed poor. Not a single person has become big. We only watch after our own children. I had a brother, he came to New Delhi and did a bachelor of arts degree. Now he’s back in Haryana working as a ragpicker. This is the place for us. We can’t get out of here. We hope and we try. There’s always hope, but we never reach anything. I’m sure my grandfather hoped, too. Even if I work hard, if I go forward one step, there are ten people pushing me back again.”
 
A few hundred yards from the ragpickers’ hillock lies the rutted entrance to an even more oppressive world: a colony of stone crushers. I first noticed them while landing at New Delhi’s international airport. In certain air traffic patterns, the planes sweep low over a vast scarred landscape of eroded red clay rock quarries just outside the airport grounds. If you peer down carefully into the pits, you can see small bands of shirtless men and scarved women and even children smashing rocks by hand with picks and axes. In summer, they do this work in temperatures of up to 120 degrees or more. There are about five thousand of them, mainly landless untouchables from neighboring, drought-stricken Rajasthan who are collected by unscrupulous labor contractors, forced into debt, and then set to work in the quarries for decades, even generations, until their loans are repaid. The workers live in shanty colonies on the rim of the pits. Shortly after dawn each morning they carry their picks and sledgehammers on their shoulders down into the quarries and begin smashing against the walls. When piles of rock accumulate at their feet, they lift the stones and hurl them into flatbed trucks that arrive to haul the rocks away. A family earns about $1.50 per truckload at present exchange rates, after commissions and expenses deducted by the quarry owners. On a good day, a fit husband and wife working hard together can fill two or three trucks. The pits are divided up among families until all the stones on a given wall are crushed. Typically, a single family will smash rocks on the same wall in the same pit for seven years or more, day after day. Sisyphus could not have known worse than this.
 
Before climbing down into the pits one day to talk with the crushers, I visited the manager of the quarry “labor society,” which skimmed a percentage of the crushers’ wages and in theory invested the money in housing and water. We talked for a while about how the quarry system works. I asked casually why all the crushers were either untouchables or tribals. “It’s the nature of the work,” the manager answered, laughing. “You wouldn’t expect a Brahmin to come and do this, would you?”
 
God forbid. Wandering that afternoon from pit to pit, dodging stones as they fell from hammers, I asked the crushers whether any of the Brahmin-born, socialist-bred labor organizers or politicians who lived in the big flats and houses just a few hundred yards away had ever accomplished anything for them. Nobody shied from the opportunity to complain.
 
“In the morning, you can’t work because of the heat and at night you can’t sleep because of the mosquitoes,” said Lal Chand, squatting on a pile of rocks in the shade. “We’ve got no electricity. The nearby slums have electricity, but we don’t. There are all sorts of people who come here and say you will get electricity. They want something from us—votes, money—then they go away. Nothing changes. They tempt us with a lot of things, but then they disappear.” He has been crushing rocks for six or seven years, he said. I asked Chand how he occupied his mind while swinging his sledgehammer. He said mainly he thought about riding the bus to buy liquor and get roaring drunk in Haryana, a journey he could afford to undertake about once every twenty days.
 
In a neighboring pit I found a young, attractive, muscular married couple, Choti Devi and Bahwaral Lal, rhythmically hacking at a wall and loading a truck with stones. They were born and raised on the rim of the quarry—their parents work in the same pit—and were married fourteen years ago, when he was twelve and she was eleven. They have two sons, two daughters. They have been chopping at this same wall for ten years.
 
“I keep thinking about food all day—that’s what makes me work,” he said, glistening with sweat.
 
“What about your kids—will they do the same job?” I asked. “My son will do the same thing,” she answered, hoisting stones to her head and heaving them into a parked truck. “I’ll send him to school, but there’s never enough money, so he’ll do this as well. This work is nothing difficult. I have the strength.”
 
“What’s so special about kids?” her husband asked, smashing stones for Devi to lift. “I was a kid and I did it. If there’s no alternative, why not? I studied math and science, but now there is no alternative.”
 
“He gets mad in this heat,” said his wife. “Two years ago he got mad and ran away. We both blame it on the heat. We’ve got to live this life. If we fight, it’s because of the heat. We’ve got to take our anger out on somebody.”
 
“It helps when she comes and works,” he said. “It helps a lot.”
 
I asked about New Delhi’s various labor organizers and socialist activists. What did they think of them?
 
“They come and tell us to become one,” he answered. “How can laborers become one? We’ve got pressures from the masters. If we get into the union, we’ll lose our jobs.”
 
“What worries you the most?” I asked.
 
“Tuberculosis.”
 
Silence. Then the rhythm of hammers on rocks, rocks falling on rocks, rocks landing in trucks. A jet flew overhead, banking low on approach to Indira Gandhi International Airport. I asked Lal what he thinks about when he sees the planes.
 
“We want to go there,” he said, stopping now to lean on his pick. “I feel angry when I see them. They’re looking at us. Even I want to fly. I want to sit on an airplane and see the world.”
 
“Perhaps it will happen,” I mused, foolishly.
 
“The only time I’ll fly from here is when I quit the world,” he answered.
 
Caste discrimination and bonded labor contravene the laws of independent India, but the state bureaucracy and its business auxiliaries, dominated by upper castes, have a common financial interest in ensuring that the old codes are preserved. The quarries by the airport, for example, are regulated by a typically obscure public sector outpost, the Delhi State Mineral Development Corporation, whose managing director is a senior member of the elite Indian Administrative Service. Some months after I visited the stone crushers, a friend put me in touch with a senior engineer in the DSMDC who was willing to explain in detail how the system at the quarries worked. We met for lunch in the air-conditioned dining hall of the India International Centre, a favorite watering hole of the federal bureaucracy. Sipping his soup, my informant explained that he had tried a few years back to attack from within the corruption and Byzantine side deals that helped keep the quarries’ five thousand untouchable crushers in a state of virtual slavery. But he had now given up. The system was too calcified to be changed from the inside, he said.
 
The crushers are recruited in groups of ten or twenty from villages in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh by local upper-caste landlords or by lower-caste emissaries of the landlords, my informant began. The recruits are provided with advances of five thousand to ten thousand rupees by a labor contractor, who takes them to the mines, arranges a shack, and allocates a pit. Few of the recruits appear on the books of the regulatory agency because petty contractors—to hide the degree of exploitation—load the official labor lists with false names and then employ twenty or so of these recruited untouchable crushers to work under each false name. DSMDC officers stand each afternoon at the gate to the quarry and skim money from each truck driver as he leaves. This money pays the DSMDC salaries and sometimes even produces a small profit for the government. Private companies licensed by the DSMDC to produce the stone within the quarry grounds pay the DSMDC bureaucrats additional money to manipulate supply and market conditions—for example, by keeping a competing quarry closed for purported safety violations. For these payments, bureaucrats auction their services to the highest bidder and do very well. Posting at the DSMDC is usually for one or two years on a rotating basis, so the bureaucrats who land there “feel that if they don’t make their money now, they will be transferred to some ministry far from the action, and they will never get rich,” my informant said. Everybody is on the take, some for large amounts, some for small. He estimated that in the previous fiscal year a senior IAS man at the corporation earned ten million rupees in payoffs, less kickbacks to politicians. Moreover, there is very little chance of getting caught. Tax collectors are brethren in the federal bureaucratic service and know that their turn to get rich will come, he said. They tend to be from the same upper castes and sometimes from the same regions. Their sense of collective loyalty is augmented by the shared experience of elite federal service. All the payoffs that bind the group are handled in cash. Members of parliament support the networks because the stone crushers form a vote bank that can be loaded into trucks and taken to voting booths or political rallies on demand—the crushers welcome any break from the pits. Most of the politicians who run this particular quarry by the airport are members of the Congress Party, he said, although lately there have been some defections to rival parties. It makes no difference what party they belong to, aside from the potential problem of excessive competition between political rivals, he added.

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