India's new elite chases dreams of power while the poor starve

Nobody in Indian politics, business or upper society seems willing to address the problems of the nation's millions of desperately poor people.

Pep Montserrat for The National
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Earlier this month, the president of India, Pranab Mukherjee, signed an ordinance that seeks to provide subsidised food to impoverished Indians. The scheme has been extolled by its proponents in the governing Congress Party as revolutionary. But it's really nothing of the kind. Its purpose, in its current form, is not to enhance the lives of the poor through the provision of adequate nutrition but to feed them barely enough to keep them alive.

The poorest households in India were initially promised 35kg of grain per month - before this allocation was hastily reduced to 7kg per person within the household. In a family of two, that's roughly 77g of grain each per meal.

Why is a country that is so eager to claim the mantle of a great power so reluctant to feed its starving masses? It seems improbable but to some of the most potent voices in India, the Food Security Bill, as it was originally conceived, looked like a tremendous waste.

It signalled, to the supporters of the free market, a return to the "socialist" past of the pre-1990s, when the state occupied the commanding heights of the Indian economy. State intervention on such an ambitious scale, they argued, would create further avenues for corruption. Instead, they said, the government should foster conditions for economic growth and then use the revenues generated by it to finance social programmes.

The most influential exponents of this view are the American economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya. They appear genuinely to believe that a coterie of socialists controls the economic policy of India. But they cannot explain why, if their prescriptions for India are the right ones, so many Indians keep rejecting them.

It's perhaps because their most formidable obstacle is not socialism, but democracy. As long as Indians have the vote, they are unlikely to support "reforms" that dilute their rights, expropriate their lands, and justify the lack of public investment in areas as critical as health care and education in a fetishistic pursuit of growth. This is the reality of those who have been exposed to the rough edges of the so-called "explosive growth story" of India over the past two decades.

Indian business has always felt threatened by democracy. When Indira Gandhi briefly suspended democracy in the 1970s, her most enthusiastic supporters were in the business community.

Even as habeas corpus was terminated and thousands of young men were detained without charge - many of them doomed to disappear forever - India's most respected industrialist, JRD Tata, told a visiting journalist that the "parliamentary system is not suited to our needs".

Strikes and boycotts by workers demanding better wages had caused him to change his mind. Another businessman told the same journalist: "Now when [the unions] give us any trouble, the government just puts them in jail."

No business leader in today's India is likely to be as forthright. But since the late 1980s, when the Indian state entered into a compact with big business, successive governments have ignored the needs of the many to pander to the wants of the few.

The first set of reforms in 1991, which made a clean break with India's socialist past, were implemented in part by subverting democracy. Critical reforms were made as executive decisions, prices were increased when parliament went into recess and parliamentary opposition was overcome by exploiting legal technicalities.

This created in India what Atul Kohli, the author of Poverty Amid Plenty in the New India, calls a "two track democracy", where "common people are only needed at the time of elections, and then it is best that they all go home, forget politics and let the 'rational' elite quietly run a pro-business show".

The objective of the democratic republic that was founded by the Congress Party in 1947, following the departure of the British, was to give an equal say to all Indians. It was the most audacious project in the history of India, aspiring to undo the inequities that had accumulated over millennia by making Indians direct participants in their unfolding destiny. It succeeded for nearly three decades.

But soon enough old India - a savage thing - reasserted itself. Poverty, oppression, cruelty and atrocities of the kind associated with the very worst tyrannies on Earth are all on open display in India. Yet, there are millions of relatively prosperous Indians who have perfected ways of ignoring them while exalting their country as transparent, clean, open and democratic.

One consequence of this specious narrative is that vast tracts of India have now fallen to armed Maoists. For all the talk of "young India" engaging in politics, a great number of Indians are actually losing faith in democracy. Those who embrace violence are hunted down ruthlessly by paramilitary forces who operate outside the law.

But what of those who still respect the Indian constitution and adhere to non-violent protest? Are their grievances heard?

In 2007, as foreign dignitaries, including the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, descended on New Delhi to attend yet another conference on India's rise, thousands of tribal peasants and landless farmers from 15 Indian states marched on the capital to demand access to land.

The rally's chief organiser, the Gandhian PV Rajgopal, described it as an unprecedented event. "Non-violent direct action has never been tried so effectively", he said. "These people are living, walking and sleeping on highways since we set out."

But as soon as they arrived in Delhi, having walked over 600 kilometres to get there, they were herded into a roofless enclosure by the police and locked up for the day, without any access to toilets or drinking water.

Contrast this with the outrage that was provoked just the previous year when Luxembourg attempted to thwart the Britain-based billionaire Lakshmi Mittal's bid to acquire the steel company Arcelor.

Newspapers, television networks, business confederations and politicians united to condemn Luxembourg. Kalam Nath, then India's commerce minister, denounced European "discrimination" and Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, personally raised the matter with the French government.

Mr Mittal got Arcelor, and there were celebrations in New Delhi. An expatriate billionaire's bid to acquire a foreign company made the headlines, occupied the airwaves and kept the prime minister awake at nights. But the physical detention of more than 25,000 protesters in the scorching heat of Delhi barely scratched the conscience of first-world India.

Three years later, India hosted the Commonwealth Games in the same city. At the opening ceremony, the event's chief organiser described India as a "superpower".

He neglected to mention, of course, that thousands of the city's poorest residents were evicted from their homes to prepare Delhi for the games. Nor did he say that an army of children - some as young as four - worked without a break to make New Delhi tolerable for foreign visitors attending the games.

What kind of a vision must impel a state to spend in excess of $15 billion (Dh 55bn) in public funds to create an evanescent fantasy of greatness for foreign visitors to the country's capital when, all around, an overwhelming majority of its people have known only a life of absolute degradation? A vision that is blind to the poor and chases something called growth as people starve to death.

Kapil Komireddi is an Indian journalist writing on South Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East