On the Grand Trunk Road (8 page)

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Authors: Steve Coll

BOOK: On the Grand Trunk Road
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How the South Asian state formed, swelled, creaked, split, recovered, and fought to protect itself from challengers in the four decades after 1947 is a story too long and complex to be recounted fully here. In the present debate over what to do about its decrepit condition, however, one important theme concerns historiography. There are two basic schools of thought about the state’s rise and decline. One holds that the Nehruvian ideal was sound, inspired, humane, and appropriate for its time, and therefore any adjustment ought to be a matter of tinkering and adaptation to changed circumstances. This is what most members of the South Asian elites believe. The opposing view, calibrated in different ways by various dissenters, is that the state was fundamentally flawed and unjust in the first place, and that saving it will require radical, even revolutionary measures.
 
Jawaharlal Nehru would be appalled to hear this discussion. An upper-caste lawyer whose ancestors emigrated from Kashmir and settled in the Gangetic heartland along the Grand Trunk Road, Nehru helped for three decades to lead the independence-seeking Indian National Congress, predecessor of the Congress Party. He then served continuously as prime minister of independent India for seventeen years, longer than any other national leader in modern South Asian history. The state that bears his name—best thought of as an ideological model, rather than a particular government at a particular time—took form during the 1950s and early 1960s, the coldest years of the cold war. Like Egypt’s Nasser, Nehru saw himself as a historic cold war statesman treading a neutralist, balancing “middle way” between communism and capitalism. In international affairs, his neutrality was less consequential than he believed. But in domestic affairs his outlook shaped the lives of many millions.
 
His model is a prescription for constitutional democracy, social advancement, and economic growth for poor, exploited, preindustrial societies. Its principles include federalism, socialism, parliamentary democracy, ethnic and linguistic pluralism, and rapid industrialization to be led by a strong central government. In arguing that extensive government planning was essential to take a backward society like India’s rapidly into the industrial twentieth century, Nehru borrowed from Stalin. He even appropriated Stalin’s impressive-sounding idea of government-led five-year plans, the first of which Nehru announced for India in 1951. Unlike Stalin, Nehru did not seek to achieve industrialization and improved agricultural efficiency through coercion or violence. He was a genuine democrat and strengthened institutions such as parliament and state government at the expense of his own power. It is certainly arguable that his emphasis on the omnipotence and benevolent wisdom of an elite class of federal bureaucrats and planners, who controlled the state’s meager resources and directed the economy from commanding heights, was from the beginning a prescription for injustice and corruption. It also must be recalled that in the 1950s, when this system was erected, sanctified, and taken over by the South Asian elites, the superiority of a “mixed socialist” approach to Third World development was a tenet of the conventional wisdom; the theory was being implemented in various forms across Western Europe and the neocolonial countries, and was nearly as popular, for example, on some American university campuses as theories about capitalist “shock therapy” are today.
 
The institutional by-products of these ideas everywhere dot the South Asian landscape. One feature of the great bureaucracies and “public-sector enterprises,” as the hundreds of largely money-losing state-owned industries are known, is their enthusiasm for sign-painting. All along the highways and back roads are signs pointing this way and that to such obscure-sounding entities as the “Haryana Co-Operative Scheme for Sugar Warehousing” or the “Sind Regional Development Authority’s Public Service Building Society Housing Scheme Part IV.” The signs tend to be in better repair than the facilities they advertise, which often consist of water-streaked concrete hallways reeking of mildew, and acres upon acres of dimly lit desks manned by armies of the gratefully—but not gainfully—employed. At least half of the public-sector enterprises in India and Pakistan lost money in 1990, the last year for which statistics were available, contributing to budget deficits considerably larger in relative terms than the enormous one in the United States. The nationalized banks have been forced to dole out so many bad loans to political cronies or unworthy public-sector businesses that a number of the banks would be insolvent if subjected to rigorous accounting. Laying off workers, which might improve the prospects of some of these “sick” companies, as they are called, is politically and often legally forbidden, even in the recent reform climate.
The Economist
noted in an influential 1991 survey of India’s economy, which it dubbed a “caged tiger,” that the Indian bureaucracy’s rules and regulations had become so duplicative and impenetrable that extreme violence would have to be committed on them simply for the capitalist economy underneath to glimpse the light of day.
 
The Nehruvian state fit well over South Asia’s colonial inheritance. In service of the empire, the British had constructed a vast hierarchical administrative apparatus, which Nehru and his colleagues converted to their own, initially idealistic, ends. For the socially privileged leaders of the independence movements, the conversion was convenient because it left in power much of the elite colonial class the British had used for several centuries to control their territory and earn their riches. The variously nationalist, leftist, and Gandhian rhetoric of South Asia’s several independence movements suggested that the colonial structure would be torn down and replaced with an egalitarian model. Attempts of this sort were indeed made after independence and some of them succeeded, but in such crucial areas as land reform, higher education, caste, and access to English—the language of power—not enough changed, compared with what was promised. In India, this was in part because of the evolutionary, tolerant, democratic character of the Nehruvian ideal, which rejected purges. It was also because the indigenous elites used for centuries by the British had the wisdom to switch sides during the independence struggle and then claimed the mantle of victory when independence arrived. Some of the old princes and local aristocrats had to give up their country estates, but many of them moved straight over to the rapidly expanding federal ministries to get on with the business of building “socialism,” effectively trading one sort of fiefdom for another.
 
South Asians themselves often use the term “elite” in broadbrush fashion to encompass strata of the socially or economically privileged who may have little in common or even be in fierce competition with one another. No single approach to defining or understanding the elites is satisfactory. There are, for example, millions of impoverished high-caste Brahmins in India and a significant number of millionaire “untouchables” made rich by the state’s various affirmative action plans. At the same time, wealth alone by no means guarantees status, except perhaps within the narrow band of one’s own community. One of the richest men in my New Delhi neighborhood earned a fortune by selling tobacco while squatting in a wooden booth. Yet it would be impossible to consider him part of the elite; few of the less wealthy Nehruvian bureaucrats who bought his wares would consider sharing a meal with him. There are many such contradictions within the elites that span South Asia. The equations vary from region to region, from caste alignment to caste alignment, from nation to nation. In Pakistan, a rising if narrow middle class uses the cloak of Islam or the army or multinational business to challenge the landed feudal and tribal leaders. In Bangladesh, the army and the trading families carve up the state’s scant resources and collaborate against competitors. In northern India, leaders of the new coal and labor and caste mafias compete with the old land barons. Across South Asia, some elements of the elite are challenging the status quo, others are defending it, still others are sitting on the fence, wetting their fingers and lifting them to the wind. The political economy is defined by dynamism, struggle, and change.
 
And yet despite this complexity and swirling momentum, there is in fact a grouping of elites in South Asia that continues to share and protect the colonial inheritance. These elites have in common the centralized, sprawling, suffocating state, and they defend this franchise—even while competing for its spoils—against hundreds of millions of dispossessed. What Simon Schama wrote recently about the pluralist revolution of the French privilegentsia under Louis XVI, just prior to the French Revolution, applies in some ways to the present South Asian elites. The problem, he wrote of the French elites, was partly “a matter of attitude. Just because privileges were so widely available and no longer at all synonymous with birth or class, those who stood to lose status as well as cash constituted an ever-broadening coalition.” Nehruvian club membership may be dynamic, but for four decades in South Asia its purpose and uses have been largely static.
 
Besides special access to the state or the lucrative licenses the state confers, South Asia’s pluralist elites also tend to have in common the English language, which they use to define the terms of internal competition and exclude national majorities. Despite much genuflection since independence to the idea of linguistic pluralism, English remains the ultimate language of control in New Delhi, Bombay, Islamabad, Karachi, Colombo, and Dhaka. Some among the political classes who nourish themselves in various ways on the wealth generated by the state urge the unwashed masses to return to their linguistic roots—while they ensure that their own children are fluent in English and are thus prepared for international opportunity and domestic political inheritance.
 
Measuring the successes and failures of these reconstituted South Asian elites between 1947 and the present is a tricky, complicated business. My own view, in brief, is that there were many successes but more failures, and that some of the failures were catastrophic.
 
South Asia’s ever-expanding socialist bureaucracies, stretching their tentacles into far corners of the subcontinental hinterlands left to rot by the British, managed some improvements in literacy, health care, life expectancy, and agriculture. In a few places, such as the Indian state of Kerala and Sri Lanka, these improvements were spectacular. Literacy and life expectancy rates soared to become the highest in the world among comparably impoverished countries. But in most parts of the subcontinent the plans came to little, as slothful bureaucrats and abusive politicians siphoned off money or watched programs decay from neglect. Agricultural advances eliminated the threat of famine, which still gnawed at the subcontinent as recently as the early 1970s. But productivity growth was slower than in some other developing areas and was unbalanced. In India employment expanded with the new five-year plans, but the planners tended to direct resources into factories and power plants and sugar mills controlled by members of their own families, castes, and clans, so the pattern of development was sometimes duplicative. At least the factories were built. Private enterprise, forced to adapt and mutate in order to survive amid the strangulating public sector, nonetheless grew and sometimes even flourished. In contrast to what happened in some African and Latin American countries during the 1970s and 1980s—and despite excessive spending, absurd subsidies, great legions of unproductive public-sector employees, and the overall creep of corruption and rot—the bloated state did not implode. It kept on chugging, generating economic growth rates that varied between pathetic and adequate, but that contrasted with the shrinking economies of some Third World countries that had stood with British India at the postcolonial starting line following World War II.
 
On the whole, independent India did better than its South Asian neighbors, in part because it preserved its constitutional democracy, and thus its elite was more able to creak and bend and respond in a constitutional, evolutionary way to the injustices and stupidities and competing claims inherent in the new form of feudal, neocolonial socialism. The conventional wisdom these days in Pakistan, the Islamic state carved from Hindu-majority India in the bloody horror following the 1947 partition, is that Pakistan might have done just as well if its founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, had lived as long as Nehru did. It is certainly true that Nehru laid crucial democratic foundations for India between 1947 and 1964. It is also true that the successors in Pakistan to Jinnah, a lawyer and secular democrat who fell ill and died shortly after independence, botched things badly, leading to a series of military coups from which the country has yet to fully recover. The catastrophe of 1971, in which Pakistan split in two and the new nation of Bangladesh was formed in the midst of war and natural disaster, is the most gruesome testimony to the sometimes extreme mendacity of the Pakistani elite that took charge after Jinnah’s death. Sri Lanka’s feudal socialists did no better, bequeathing to their tiny island paradise one of the century’s most brutal civil wars, in considerable part because they hoarded the proceeds of the postcolonial state for themselves. The Indian elite has tended to look down its nose at the collection of militarists, plantation owners, and corrupt industrialists running the nations on its borders, but this attitude can be difficult to justify, especially if you wander through Kashmir or Punjab or the northern urban slums. Nonetheless, one remarkable thing about the state across all of South Asia has been its resiliency. Even amid catastrophes such as the ones in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, the bureaucracy and the political class have rebounded and reasserted themselves with impressive ability, strengthened not so much by the righteousness of their politics as by their positions of social privilege, whether inherited, acquired by force, or bought with money siphoned from or granted by the state.

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