India Unbound - Couverture rigide

Das, Gurcharan

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 037541164X ISBN 13 : 9780375411649

Editeur : Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2001

Synopsis

Book by Das Gurcharan

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Chapter One

Ranting in English, Chanting in Sanskrit

I can measure the passages of my life by the nation's milestones. When I was born, we were fighting to get the British out of India. By the time I went to school, we were free and we thought we would soon enter a new paradise. During my school days in the 1950s, Nehru set about building a proud new nation based on democracy, socialism, and secularism. When I went to work in the sixties I discovered that we had become economically enslaved and socialism was leading us to statism. By the time I got married and we had children, Indira Gandhi was creating dynastic rule and leading us into a ditch. When she declared the Emergency in the mid-seventies, we knew that political freedom was gone, and paradise was lost. Mercifully, the Emergency lasted only twenty-two months, and we soon recovered our political freedom. Just before I took early retirement in the early nineties, Narasimha Rao delivered us our economic freedom. It doesn't matter who will be ruling India when I die, because democracy has got entrenched and its institutions are best run by modest men. Thanks to the reforms, we have glimpsed paradise again and are on our way to regaining it. We have climbed to a 7 percent economic growth rate, and if we grow at this rate for a few decades and keep raising our literacy level, the nation will turn increasingly middle class and the degrading poverty of India will begin to vanish.

I was born soon after Mahatma Gandhi challenged the British by launching the Quit India movement in 1942, which led to Independence five years later. My birth also coincided with a second event, the Great Bengal Famine, in which three million people perished. Both these events would never be repeated, and have become remote in public memory. They were the last examples of what were commonplace happenings during my father's and grandfather's days. In a sense, the year of my birth brought down the curtain on an age.

The Quit India movement was born of frustration. For twenty years, Gandhi and the leaders of the nationalist movement had tried to negotiate with the British. It was a nonviolent struggle, based on Gandhi's belief in satyagraha, or "truth force." Because "truth" was on his side, Gandhi believed that he would shame the rulers into giving us freedom. Twelve years earlier, on 11 March 1930, he had informed the British that he was going to violate the salt-tax laws and collect salt from the sea. On that day, in a single stroke, he aroused the whole of India. Fishermen began collecting salt; then the peasants were making salt; the housewives followed suit. Soon the whole country was breaking the law and the people began to court arrest. But how many could the police arrest? Thus, year in and year out, Gandhi provoked the rulers with civil disobedience and drove them to distraction. In the end, they just gave up and left. India won freedom without a single English casualty--and this happened in a world filled with Hitler's and Stalin's shadows. No wonder we felt that we were a nation created by saints.

I grew up in a middle-class home in Punjab in northwest India. Most of Punjab was arid, but over three generations the vision and toil of engineers like my father created a network of canals that irrigated the land and made it a granary. The lower Chenab canal was one of the first to be built in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. With it came an orderly and planned town called Lyallpur, so named after the ruling lieutenant governor of Punjab, Sir James Lyall. It was to this town that my mother's ambitious father proudly moved in the early part of this century to start a law practice. I was born there a generation and a half later. In the middle of Lyallpur was a brick clock tower where eight roads crossed and around which the town spread out in concentric circles. Our house was off one of these roads, called Kacheri Bazaar, on the way to the Company Bagh, whose gardens sprawled sumptuously over forty acres.

We were a professional middle-class family not particularly given to patriotic enthusiasms. We never thought much of Gandhi--he was merely our "liberator with clean hands." My uncle specialized in uncovering the latest scandal in our neighborhood, and that always took precedence over politics. Famines, of course, were too unpleasant to be the subject of polite conversation. Nevertheless, the famine in Bengal did intrude into our complacent world. My grandfather's nephew, Sat Pal, decided one day to help in the relief work. He took a train from Lahore to Calcutta, and from there he went on to the Bengal countryside, where he experienced the trauma of the riots and deaths that took place. On his return, he told us that he did not understand the insanity of the situation. The supply of food had declined only marginally, but its distribution had failed completely. The only thing he could say for sure was that there was a human agency involved in a criminal and nasty form. He spoke vividly of a peasant who had fallen dead on a street in Calcutta--he spoke as though he knew him intimately. When it came to explanations, Sat Pal tended to see everything in class terms, and the others would lose interest. Much to my grandfather's disappointment, Sat Pal had spurned a brilliant professional career and become a communist.

During the Great Bengal Famine entire villages ceased to exist. The tragedy of the Bengali people's suffering was equaled only by the indifference of the British authorities. It was largely a man-made event, caused not by a decline in the food available but by the inadequacy of the response. The reports of the district officers of the province and clippings from the Statesman reveal the progress of the tragedy: "Rangoon falls to Japan--rice imports cut off" (10 March 1942); "Cyclone hits Bengal" (4 October 1942); "Rice price doubles in Birbhum district" (6 November 1942); "Wholesale price of rice in Calcutta is Rs 13 compared to Rs 7 a year ago" (11 December 1942); "Hunger marches organised by communists" (28 December 1942); "People having to go without food" (10 February 1943); "Acute distress prevails" (26 March 1943); "Paddy looting cases have become frequent" (28 March 1943); "Major economic catastrophe in the making" (27 April 1943); "Bands of people moving about in search of rice" (12 June 1943); "Death in the streets" (12 June 1943); "Town filled with thousands of beggars who are starving" (17 July 1943); "Disposal of dead bodies . . . a problem" (27 September 1943).

Lord Wavell, the British viceroy, summed up the situation in 1944: "The Bengal Famine was one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule and damage to our reputation here . . . is incalculable." The problem, it seems, was Winston Churchill's attitude. Mountbatten wrote in 1944 that Churchill was impossible on the topic of India and regarded sending food as "appeasement of the Congress Party." Churchill said, "I hate Indians. . . . They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." Though food was available, it was sent to Holland but not to India. Wavell noted in his diary "the very different attitude towards feeding a starving people in Europe."

Churchill's advisers frustrated Wavell's efforts to secure grain for India. One of them, Lord Cherwell, felt that the famine was a "figment of the Bengali imagination." It escaped Churchill that India had given two million fighting men for Britain's war effort. Field Marshal Alan Brooke commented that Churchill "seemed content to let India starve, while still wanting to use it as a base for military operations." The British army generals did let in some food, but much of it was diverted to their troops.

Reports of famines were familiar news to my parents and their generation. Today, famines have vanished from our memory. When the monsoon failed in 1979 and again in 1987, few people noticed. It is not only because the green revolution (to be discussed in chapter 9) has increased food supply in India. It is also because democracy and a vigorous press force politicians to act for the sake of their own survival, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen reminds us. Nowadays, the government routinely carries three to four months' supply of food grains in the national warehouses and the public distribution system. In China, on the other hand, despite higher nutritional standards, more than twenty million people died from famines during Mao's experiments in the late 1950s (though, amazingly, the world did not learn of these tragedies until the eighties). This happened partially because of the absence of democracy and an active free press. Sen's point is that merely having more food is not enough. What causes hunger is the inability of the poor to buy food. Hence, even if Wavell had succeeded in getting more food for Bengal from Churchill, he would not have saved the starving masses unless he had had a plan to create purchasing power among the poor.

The year 1942 was a watershed. The Second World War was raging in Europe and had now spread to Asia. Following their devastating raid on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had begun to advance on British colonies in Southeast Asia. The tired nationalist movement in India had acquired a new vigor. There was an unstoppable momentum towards independence. The spectacular Japanese victories in the East had unnerved the British. The surrender of Singapore, in particular, had been a staggering blow to their prestige in India. It had also opened the Bay of Bengal to the Japanese navy. My family wondered if we should support the British in their war with the Japanese. They asked who were our real enemies--the British or the Japanese? Would the British really give up India? Would the English split the country before they left?

These questions were on the minds of many Indians in those days. Although our family was apolitical, dinnertime conversation would often veer around to politics. My grandfather used to get impatient with people who did not realize that the Japanese posed a bigger threat. My uncle would retort that we were already under alien rule, and who was to say that one foreigner was better than another? My mother would add that we should be neutral in a conflict that did not concern us. My uncle confessed that he had secretly enjoyed Britain's discomfort in the East. He had applauded the successive fall of Hong Kong, the Philippines, then Malaya and Indochina. He was amazed at the speed of the Japanese advance. It meant that the colonial empires were flimsy structures built on pillars of rotting clay.

The British sought Indian support to fight the Japanese, who were practically knocking at our eastern door. Gandhi asked for what he thought was reasonable--a commitment in principle to India's freedom after the war, and in return the Indian people would fight the Japanese. But Churchill was unwilling, saying, "I did not become the Prime Minister of England in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." Even President Roosevelt, who was a great champion of Indian independence, could not persuade him. From this frustrating deadlock was born the Quit India movement.

If we hated Winston Churchill, we loved Roosevelt for supporting us. In 1942, President Roosevelt sent a personal envoy, Averell Harriman, to liaise with Churchill, and he promptly began an affair with the attractive Pamela Churchill, the wife of Winston's son Randolph. The British establishment did not seem to mind the liaison, as it might help "drag" America into the war. "To have FDR's personal representative, the man charged with keeping Britain safe, sleeping with the Prime Minister's daughter-in-law was a wonderful stroke of luck," said Lord Beaverbrook. But the establishment did resent Harriman's pressure for India's freedom. The disastrous collapse in the Far East had made Britain heavily dependent on Roosevelt, who was not amused by the irony of Churchill claiming to fight a war on behalf of freedom yet making no concessions for freedom to the second-largest country in the world.

In the end, Churchill had to resort to a lie to get Roosevelt off his back. He telegraphed Roosevelt under his famous code name, "Former Naval Person," informing him that "he had no wish to allow Indian Muslims to be governed by the Congress Caucus and Hindu priesthood when 75 percent of the Indian soldiers were Muslim." This was clearly false--the truth was that less than 35 percent of the Indian army was Muslim, and Gandhi and Nehru's Congress freedom movement was by no stretch of the imagination a Hindu priesthood. At any rate, Roosevelt was unmoved. Churchill had to agree to dispatch a political mission--the Cripps Mission--to India a few days after the fall of Rangoon. It failed and Churchill was delighted. He said to FDR, "I feel absolutely satisfied we have done our utmost." However, Roosevelt did not think so. He knew that Churchill had stacked the deck against the mission. He telegraphed Churchill to try again, saying that Britain's unwillingness "to concede to the Indians the right of self-government was at the root of failure." Churchill was so furious that he released a "string of cuss words, which lasted for two hours in the middle of the night."

One of the intriguing "what-ifs" of history is that if the Japanese had succeeded in overrunning India, we might have been tempted to follow the successful Japanese model of export-led economic development after Independence, much like the Asian tigers. At the very least, it might have been a foil to British Fabian thinking, which did us incalculable harm. One can now say with some conviction that Fabian socialism failed everywhere, and that the Japanese model succeeded everywhere (notwithstanding East Asia's troubles a few years ago). The fact, of course, is that we also inherited a democracy from Britain. If it came to a trade-off between East Asian capitalism and liberal democracy, most Indians today would still opt for democracy. However, there need not have been a trade-off. If Nehru had not been mesmerized by the Soviet Union's economic success, or if Indira Gandhi had changed course when Korea and Taiwan did and opened our economy in the late 1960s, we might have lifted our growth rate and become an economic success without in the least bit compromising democracy.
Men like my grandfather and my father were typical of a new professional middle class that emerged in the nineteenth century under British rule with the introduction of the English language and Western education. This class produced not only clerks for the East India Company but also lawyers, teachers, engineers, doctors, bureaucrats--all the new professions that were required to run a country. Since passing an exam was the only barrier to entering this class, its members came from various castes and backgrounds. Although opportunities were open to all, the upper castes were the first to seize them and hold on to them. Once they learned English, acquired an education, and cleared an exam, rewards and prestige were showered upon them. They became the new elite and closed ranks.

The rise of a new Westernized urban elite matched the decline of the landed gentry. The Mughal aristocracy was the first to be destroyed, beginning in the late eighteenth century. Then came the gradual fall in the status of the regional Muslim and Hindu nobility. To be sure, local landlords, chieftains, and zamindars continued to hold sway, but men of new learning like my grandfather and father threatened their social position. Equally, this new middle class endangered the intellectual monopoly of the Brahmins. But the Brahmins were clever. With their traditional agility, many of them took to English education, passed exams, and became part of the new middle class. Though English administrators spoke contemptu...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

India Unbound is the riveting story of a nation s rise from poverty to prosperity and the clash of ideas that occurred along the way. Today s India is a vibrant free-market democracy, and it has begun to flex its muscles in the global information economy. The old centralized, bureaucratic state, which stifled industrial growth, is on the decline; the lower castes have risen confidently through the ballot box; and the middle class has tripled in the last two decades. This economic and social transformation is one of the major themes of this book. Gurcharan Das recounts the hope and despair of the last fifty years. The Licence Raj created a work environment in which a cousin of the author, on his first day at work in the railways, could precipiate a strike just because he was honest. And on one occasion, the author, even though a seasoned executive, was driven to sit by the polluted Yamuna and weep after a fruitless meeting with a bureaucrat. The transformation began in the golden summer of 1991, when a reticent reformer, Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, finally changed the nation s course through sweeping economic reforms. A restrictive regime, in which the state dictated everything, from a woman s choice of lipstick to the programmes on television, gave way to the optimism of a rising middle class eager to compete with the rest of the world. It was a quiet revolution, one that has not been chronicled before. Gurcharan Das examines the highs and lows of independent India through the prism of history and his own experiences and those of numerous others he has met following the reforms, from young people in sleepy UP villages to the chiefs of software companies in Bangalore. Defining and exploring the new mindset of the nation, India Unbound is the perfect introduction to contemporary India. The powerful story of a nation's transition from poverty to prosperity. Examining the highs and lows of independent India through the prism of history and his own experiences, Gurcharan Das defines the new mindset of the nation in riveting prose.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Date d'édition: 2001
• ISBN 10: 037541164X
• ISBN 13: 9780375411649
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 406