That was the year when Indira Gandhi ended her seventeen months of authoritarian rule (“the Emergency”) and called elections she expected to win. It was a make-or-break decision: if she prevailed, her opponents feared she would cement the authoritarianism of the Emergency.

Critics have described the spirit of prime minister Modi’s government during the past few years as “the Emergency you have when you’re not having an Emergency.” Techniques to harass your foes, pioneered by Mrs Gandhi and her cronies, have been deployed by the BJP with the efficiency of modern management and the relentlessness of digital technology.

In the elections of 1977, Indira Gandhi and her Congress party lost decisively to a hastily formed alliance of old politicians, some of whom had been jailed during the Emergency. A varied crew, they included fist-shaking socialists, heavyweight dropouts from Congress and future BJP prime minister Atul Bihari Vajpayee. They formed a government committed to undoing the excesses of the Emergency. India, they promised, would get a new start. Voters seemed to share their hope.

The top box-office film that year, Amar, Akbar, Anthony, had everything a Hindi film of its time needed: big stars, including the young Amitabh Bachchan, music, dancing, car chases, crime, murder, slapstick comedy and a happy ending. It was also cheap: filmed in a month entirely in Mumbai.

The plot carried a message. Three small boys are abandoned and separated. Amar is found and raised by an upright Hindu policeman, Akbar by a kindly Muslim tailor and Anthony (Bachchan) by a Catholic priest. Three filmic hours later, the brothers discover each other and together vanquish the criminals who have caused their distress; the family is reunited; the blind mother has her sight restored; the ne’er-do-well father repents, rejoices at the unity of the family — and is packed off to jail.

You don’t have to be into semiotics to get the message about national unity and “out of many, one.” Amar, Akbar, Anthony was so popular it got remade in three south Indian languages, each with a locally appropriate name change (including John, Jaffer, Janardhanan in Malayalam, the language of Kerala).

Today, a number of recent films and those announced for 2024 pack a different punch. They focus on international enemies working to destroy India. Pathaan, the box office favourite of 2023, is about international terrorists, viruses and cloak-and-dagger struggles between Indian secret agents and evil-doers in the employ of shadowy figures in Pakistan. It has earned hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide.

This year’s previewed films don’t pussyfoot around when it comes to messaging. The new releases include Bastar, focused on the Naxalites, murderous would-be revolutionaries in a rugged district in central India who killed more than seventy paramilitary police in 2010. “Urban Naxalite” is a common term of abuse for human rights activists and critics of the BJP government. In the film’s trailer, a police officer says that those “supporting” Naxalites “are pseudo-intellectuals, Left liberals” and promises to gather them in the street “and shoot them in public view.”

Pro-government? On the contrary, says the producer, it’s “pro-India”: “Our film talks about what is good for India. Now, if the BJP speaks similarly, it is their political stand.”

Another example with a political kick: Swantantrya Veer Savarkar (“freedom warrior Savarkar”). A prolific real-life writer and translator, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) was imprisoned for years on the Andaman Islands for complicity in plots to murder British officials. He later became a leader of the Hindu Mahasabha and a favourite ideologue of the BJP. Savarkar was never incriminated in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, but he didn’t much like Gandhi either. Savarkar “does not hate Gandhi but hates non-violence,” says film’s director.

Kunal Purohit, author of H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindu Pop Stars, an impressive new book on Hindu-supremacism in popular music and publishing, estimates that ten of the films due for pre-election release demonise Muslims and opponents of Hindu ascendancy.

Films like these highlight the political contest going on in Indian popular culture via the country’s digitisation and its almost 900 million broadband subscribers. The BJP and its many subsidiaries are drowning out other voices.

The film business offers another significant angle on electoral politics. The films mentioned above, all in Hindi, come out of Mumbai (Bollywood). But the south Indian film industry, based in Hyderabad and Chennai, has “taken over the commercial and critical reins,” according to one of India’s most experienced film critics. The south, on this view, is where the most original and successful films are being generated.

The south Indian film that made movie people around the world pay attention, and crowds flock to the theatres, is the Telugu-language RRR, set in colonial times. The British and a Muslim prince provide the main villains. It is an expensive production with spectacular fight scenes and box office collections estimated at A$230 million internationally. (“A Netflix top 10 hit in 62 countries,” according to the streaming service, which screens a Hindi version).

South India will be a key focus in the coming elections. Just as its films are enjoying wide success, the region is registering India’s most impressive economic activity and social statistics. The telling number is estimated GDP per person, which is more than four times greater for the southern states than for India’s two most populous states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the Hindi-speaking north. Together, UP and Bihar are home to about 25 per cent of India’s 1.4 billion people; the five southern states have 20 per cent. Female literacy, infant mortality and life-expectancy data are all better in the south.

Mr Modi and the BJP have had notable success in only one of the five southern states, Karnataka (capital, Bengaluru), where they won twenty-five (out of twenty-nine) parliamentary seats in 2019. But the BJP lost state elections to the Congress last year and didn’t hold a single parliamentary seat from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu or Kerala in the 2019 parliament.

On the surface, this inability to win in the south doesn’t matter. The BJP doesn’t need the south to win national elections, and that advantage will grow if a redistribution of seats, which hasn’t happened for fifty years, is carried out next year. The number of seats will be increased and reapportioned on the basis of population. On those calculations, the five southern states together will elect only about fifteen more members than Uttar Pradesh alone.

To people in the south, this looks like power being embedded in regions with poor records in health, education and economic growth. The feckless will be rewarded at the expense of the virtuous. That impression doesn’t fit well with Mr Modi’s frequent proclaiming that his main mission is economic development and material prosperity.

With victories seemingly assured in much of the Hindi-speaking north, the BJP is throwing talent and money at the southern states and at West Bengal. All these states have their own languages written in distinctive scripts, and they don’t regard the BJP’s pressure to use Hindi as the national language of Bharat (the BJP’s preferred name for India) with great enthusiasm.

Opposition leaders around India have as much reason today as in 1977 to be apprehensive about their futures in the event of a thundering victory for the government. Nevertheless, an attempt last year to coordinate opposition election campaigning has fallen apart even before the election dates were announced. Key political leaders in West Bengal, Bihar and Odisha have either aligned with the BJP or, in West Bengal, decided to fight on their own. Elsewhere, the BJP picks off potential adversaries with offers they can’t refuse.

Congress, the only opposition party with national recognition, is frail and easy to deride. Rahul Gandhi, its fifty-three-year-old leader, has few qualifications other than being the descendant of three prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. His elderly Italian-born mother, Sonia, is still part of decision-making.

A big BJP victory will assure the party of fifteen years of power from 2014 to 2029. It will embolden the party to incorporate in the constitution provisions advocated before independence by the ideologues of Hindu supremacy. One of those goals was a centralised government in which the states would be simply implementers of the national program. Changing from a parliamentary to a presidential system has also been discussed in the past.

The long-term project of the BJP and the Hindu-supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh movement, of which Mr Modi was a member from adolescence, is an India in which all citizens subscribe to a common version of what it is to be a Hindu. Non-Hindus may continue to live in India but they must be prepared to be at the back of every queue and expect no favours from the state. In this way, Bharat will reclaim its pre-Muslim, pre-British glory.

Today, someone making an updated version of Amar, Akbar, Anthony might feel the need to recognise how the spirit of the times has changed. The film would tell how a brave Hindu boy saved his two hapless brothers, his blind mother and his country from powerful internal and external enemies. It might also be a good idea to call the film Modi! Modi! Modi! •

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In Bengaluru, the leaders of twenty-six opposition parties reached a joint agreement to fight next year’s national elections as allies. They even produced a name, an acronym and a slogan.

The name is tortuous — the India National Developmental Inclusive Alliance — but the creators love their acronym: INDIA. And lest anyone think their opponents will ridicule them for displaying such a “colonial mentality” by using the English word “India,” they chose a slogan of Jeetega Bharat — “Bharat will win.” Bharat is the term for the South Asian land mass used in Hindu religious texts and much preferred by the BJP and its spin-offs.

Getting twenty-six different sets of politicians into one place and ready to adopt a united statement required a lot of diplomacy. Desperation helped: there is a feeling that if Modi and the BJP win a third five-year term, BJP dominance, and doctrines of Hindu supremacy (Hindutva) will become irreversibly embedded in the apparatus of the state.

One man near the heart of the conclave was the Congress party’s eighty-one-year-old president, Mallikarjun Kharge. Kharge is a Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) from the southern state of Karnataka. Though he is a long-time devotee of Sonia Gandhi and her family, he is also an experienced warrior, “efficient at soothing ruffled feathers… Nobody can call him a lightweight,” according to an informed journalist.

The multi-party meeting was held in Bengaluru because the Congress party, with Kharge as a key organiser, defeated the BJP state government in Karnataka’s elections in May. Here was a success story that suggested the BJP, which controls only half of India’s twenty-eight state governments, could be beaten.

At the 2019 parliamentary elections, the BJP and its allies won 332 seats out of 543 with 47 per cent of the vote. The twenty-six parties gathered in Bengaluru won 144 seats and 39 per cent of the vote. By competing against each other as well as the BJP, in other words, the INDIA parties split the opposition vote.

This time, the leaders say, only one candidate will run under the INDIA banner in each seat. But this sort of agreement will be hard to achieve in many seats, since a number of the parties are fierce rivals in their states.

The INDIA initiative provoked a more nervous response from the BJP than might have been expected. It summoned a meeting of its own National Democratic Alliance to coincide with the INDIA meeting. This seemed surprisingly defensive, because the thirty-eight allied parties assembled in Delhi offer the BJP little more than a dozen additional seats.

The BJP president took the opportunity to remind audiences that participants in the INDIA alignment revealed “only one unity — that of taking care of their family interests.” He reeled off names of eight INDIA parties led by offspring of long-established politicians. Narendra Modi, on the other hand, has long portrayed himself as single, selfless and dedicated only to the nation.

What is the relevance of 1977 and 1989? In both years, opposition groups were desperate to prevent continued election victories of the Congress party of Indira Gandhi (1977) and Rajiv Gandhi (1989). They made alliances and even formed governments. Yet the 1977 effort crumbled in two years, and by 1980 Indira Gandhi was back as prime minister. The minority government that emerged from the 1989 coalition collapsed within a year, and by 1991 Congress was back in government.

Today, a handful of commentators see cracks in the BJP machine. They point to the problems of managing an organisation claiming 180 million members. As the party extends its grip to every Indian state, they reckon, it is getting caught up in the horse-trading, corruption and disillusion that eroded Congress.

Top-down direction will undermine belief in a party whose members once provided input and could rise from the ranks. Long-time true believers will be alienated by the arrival of drifters and grifters climbing on a bandwagon they hope is also a gravy train. It happened to the Congress party: once the idealism of the national movement was gone, little remained except a weak appeal to a disappointing “socialism.”

Today, there are two big differences. First, India has 900 million broadband subscribers and every party member of the BJP and its affiliates has a smartphone. A party structure based on participation and discipline can be maintained on a daily basis. At the level of the polling booth, BJP “booth captains” are capable of reporting, transmitting and acting. Party members can be held close.

Second, the Hindu-supremacist project of the BJP has a powerfully simple ideology that can constantly renew itself. There will always be another mosque built where a temple should be, an inter-faith marriage that cries out to be rectified, or a Christian plot to convert innocent tribal people to a foreign faith. If the economy goes bad, the reason probably lies with such “foreign” tumours.

The INDIA allies are scheduled to meet in Mumbai in August, ideally with key state leaders like Nitish Kumar, chief minister of Bihar (forty seats in the Lok Sabha, parliament’s lower house), and Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of West Bengal (forty-two seats), playing leading roles. But the Gandhi family will continue to be central, and Mallikarjun Kharge will need all his feather-smoothing skills if a credible electoral alliance is to take flight. •

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Karnataka is the eighth most populous state of the Indian federation. It has the largest per capita GDP of all the major states, and Bengaluru, India’s swinging IT centre, is its capital. It is the only southern state where the BJP has managed to win government.

This time the party lost forty seats and was reduced to sixty-six seats in a 224-seat house. The rival Congress party took 43 per cent of the vote, won 135 seats, and will form the next state government.

Turnout was strong, at 73 per cent of the fifty-three million eligible voters. (Only 260,000 took advantage of an endearing feature of Indian elections: every ballot paper has the option to vote for NOTA — None of the Above.)

The BJP threw everything into the campaign to retain its foothold in the south. The endlessly energised Narendra Modi, seventy-two, spent ten prime ministerial days campaigning in Karnataka and did a five-hour, twenty-five-kilometre road rally through the streets of Bengaluru and its suburbs. That may have paid off: the BJP gained seats in Bengaluru even as it was being clobbered in the rural areas around the big city.

The loss was not a complete surprise. Karnataka hasn’t returned an incumbent government for nearly forty years, and the outgoing administration was widely seen as corrupt and incompetent.

But the extent of the defeat may have surprised even the Congress party. The BJP ran a well-financed campaign fuelled by predictable attempts to keep Hindu antagonism towards Muslims on the boil. But the party pinned its hopes on what is now referred to as “the Modi magic.” It may have helped in Bengaluru, but not elsewhere.

Rahul Gandhi, the weary fifty-two-year-old national leader of the Congress party, campaigned in the state and did a walking tour a few months before the election, but his presence counted for much less than competent local leadership, a canny sense of caste configurations, and motivated party workers.

To an Australian observer, accustomed to hand-counting of ballots and Senate results sometimes taking weeks to determine, the administration of these elections was remarkably fast, efficient and fair. Voting was done on standalone voting machines, with one control unit for each of the 58,500 polling stations. Counting began Saturday morning, two days after polls closed, and the results were clear by lunchtime. The system — single ballot, first-past-the-post — makes the process simple, but the Election Commission of India continues to provide a model for the world.

National elections are due next year, and Modi and the BJP look strong favourites to win a third term. Yet the current political map of the federation seems at odds with such domination of the national parliament. The BJP controls only eight of India’s state governments and is in coalition in six others. The other fourteen states, comprising more than half the population, are ruled by local parties or the Congress.

The map of the federation now shows a chunk of saffron BJP states stretching from western Gujarat to the vast Uttar Pradesh. There’s also saffron in the less densely populated northeast, which is a complex mix of eight smaller states. The fringes of the map — the south, east and west — have non-BJP governments.

Will the centre hold? India’s electoral map following the Karnataka result. Courtesy of Scroll.in

On the same weekend the Congress won the Karnataka election, a new political party won a parliamentary seat for the first time in a by-election. The candidate of the Aam Aadmi Party (common man’s party), founded in 2012, which already rules Punjab state, defeated the Congress, the BJP and a Sikh-based party in the industrial town of Jalandhar in Punjab.

The AAP has already won two elections for the government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, but the BJP central government, which controls the police and appoints the lieutenant-governor, has gone out of its way to hobble it. The upstart party, however, got another win in the same week when the Indian supreme court ruled that the elected government of Delhi had the right to run Delhi without having constantly to clear decisions with the lieutenant-governor.

With national elections due next year, some analysts speculate that a coalition of the Congress and parties like the AAP could win a majority. The chances of such unity, however, seem slight. Even if it were stitched together, similar experiments in 1977 and 1989 suggest it would soon fall apart in government.

And Narendra Modi’s big orange bus has plenty of spare tyres, skilful mechanics and financial fuel. It also has a well-tried capacity to find dangerous Muslims, “urban Naxalites” (revolutionaries), “presstitutes” (journalists) and decultured pseudo-intellectuals. One of its goals, its leaders have said, is a “Congress-mukt Bharat” — a “Congress-free India” — and old BJP ideologues have hankered after a single strong central government.

The BJP and its associates may, however, run the risk of appearing to be too much of a Hindi-speaking operation, based in north India and promoting a doctrinaire version of what a proper Hindu should be. Such a conformist version of Hindu beliefs may appeal to Hindi-speaking Hindus in northern states, but it may alienate speakers of Bengali, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi and Malayalam.

India’s remarkable seventy-five-year survival as a single unit has depended on its flexible federation and its democratic capacity to let regions do many things as they please, and even for the central government to carve out new states when demands are irresistible.

But the big saffron bus carrying BJP ambitions will be back on the road in a wink: there are elections in three more states due by December. •

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Let me start with the good stuff — the connections. Australia–India relations have had enthusiastic moments in the past, but the visit of prime minister Anthony Albanese this month, coinciding with a cricket tour, made the biggest splash by an Australian PM since Bob Hawke’s bromance with Rajiv Gandhi in the late 1980s.

Albanese’s Australian companions included leaders from education, business and government. The Quad — the strategic engagement between the United States, Australia, Japan and India — was tactfully discussed, and two Australian universities bravely proposed to set up campuses in India. Albanese rocked gracefully in the decorated golf cart that carried him and Modi around Ahmedabad’s vast cricket stadium for the Indian prime minister’s lap of honour on his home turf.

What was underplayed in the commentary was the third pillar of a dynamic relationship: people. The other two pillars — shared economic and strategic interests — are already there in burgeoning trade and the enthusiasm for the Quad.

But the permanent ingredient is people — people going back and forth between India and Australia every day for family, business and professional reasons. When Bob Hawke and Rajiv Gandhi were courting in the 1980s, fewer than 20,000 Australian residents had been born in India; today people of Indian origin number closer to a million. And that’s excluding people from India’s South Asian neighbours, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Afghanistan.

The arrival of Indian-origin Australians in public life will gain enhanced national attention now Labor’s election in New South Wales has resulted in Daniel Mookhey’s becoming treasurer. Mookhey is the nephew of someone I taught in years 6 and 7 in the Boys’ Basic High School in Chandigarh. His uncle and late father came to Australia in the 1970s.

The list of recognised high achievers is growing rapidly. The NSW Australian of the Year in 2022 was Veena Sahajwalla, a professor of materials science. The Victorian Australian of the Year in 2023 is Angraj Khillan, a medical doctor, and the NSW Australian Local Hero is Amar Singh, founder of the charity Turbans 4 Australia. You’ll find similarly talented people throughout business, medicine, law, education and the public service, all of them in addition to the thousands of young people making a start in Australia by doing some of the tough jobs, most visibly in transport.

This growing presence brings assets Australia urgently needs: initiative, talent and youth. But the assets come with challenges. People from other places invariably bring beliefs and ideas that can prove a puzzle to the new country.

Prime minister Modi identified one such challenge when he admonished Albanese for not preventing hostile graffiti on Hindu places of worship in Melbourne and Brisbane.

The graffiti are part of an international attempt, made easier in a world of Twitter and its many cousins, to revive the fifteen-year Khalistan insurgency that subsided bloodily thirty years ago. “Khalistan” was the demand for a sovereign state for Sikhs, who form a majority in the Indian state of Punjab and are a large component of the Indian diaspora in Britain, Canada, the United States and Australia.

The secessionist movement of forty years ago grew out of political upheaval in India and its neighbours in the late 1970s. It was compounded by a sense that Sikhs had long been taken for granted and by a lack of employment in Punjab, where green-revolution agriculture brought a margin of prosperity but a decline in the need for labour. The fact that some of those conditions are still noticeable helps to explain the recent aggressive Khalistan demonstrations in Britain, the United States and Canada.

The notion of Khalistan is likely to puzzle most Australians. Those bloody days in north India and overseas had largely disappeared from international media by the mid 1990s, but many wounds remain. Australia’s current high commissioner to India says he’d not encountered the term “Khalistan” until he arrived in India.

Modi’s Khalistan reprimand highlights the need for broader understanding within all Australian institutions of the pulls and pressures the diaspora may face.

Other issues also require recognition of both political sensitivity and enduring scars. An example is the different suppositions about marriage and family that prevail in India and Australia. The subtitle of Manjula O’Connor’s recent book, Daughters of Durga: Dowries, Gender Violence and Family in Australia, captures some of the strains faced by migrants, and by people who work with them.

A third issue is caste. Caste discrimination is illegal under the Indian constitution, but still widely encountered. Prejudice against Dalits (formerly disparaged as “untouchables”) now shows up sufficiently in Britain and the United States for Seattle’s city council to pass a motion banning it. A bill to ban such discrimination in California has also been introduced in that state’s senate.

Finally, Australian governments and institutions need to decide how they deal with Narendra Modi’s government. There would be much to admire in Modi’s life story and in the political and social apparatus he has helped to build. But the scaffolding rests on the founding principles of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, the Hindu-supremacist organisation Modi joined as an adolescent and made his career in. The RSS was inspired by the racial-superiority movements of interwar Europe.

The leader of today’s RSS captured aspects of this outlook in an interview in January. “Hindu society has been at war for 1000 years,” he said, and “this fight has been going against foreign aggressions, foreign influences and foreign conspiracies… This war [today] is not against an enemy outside, but against an enemy within… Foreign invaders are no longer there, but foreign influences and foreign conspiracies have continued.”

Modi’s India steers towards a narrow authoritarianism, demanding conformity to an RSS vision of what it is to be a Hindu. International media organisations like the BBC are held up as examples of the “foreignness” that needs expunging. A BBC documentary reflecting poorly on Modi when he was chief minister of Gujarat during fearful riots in 2002 was banned in India earlier this year.

The ban was followed by “surveys” (not “raids,” the government said) of BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai looking for financial violations, and outrage at George Soros’s suggestion a few weeks later that “Modi is no democrat.” Soros pointed out that Modi and business figure Gautam Adani, whose vast holdings have suffered since a critical report by a US-based short-selling specialist, have been close over twenty years and Modi “will have to answer questions from foreign investors and in parliament.”

Questions in parliament are looking less likely since the speakers of both houses have effectively closed off discussion. Rahul Gandhi, the most prominent of the opposition MPs, has been expelled from parliament and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on charges of “criminal defamation.” (If the same grounds for defamation prevailed in Australia, the prison system would need expanding.)

None of these internationally publicised incidents touches on the everyday harassment that many Muslims, Christians and even Dalits experience at the hands of grassroots zealots implicitly encouraged by their leaders.

Most Australians don’t share “values” such as these. In future, Australian speakers at bilateral occasions, when they feel the need to praise India, might choose to endorse the words written in capital letters in the prologue to India’s 1950 constitution: JUSTICE, LIBERTY, EQUALITYand FRATERNITY. Give “democracy” a rhetorical rest. •

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The two fifty-five-minute programs that make up India: The Modi Question contain almost nothing that has not been known in India for years. But the BBC’s involvement brought the stories to a global audience.

Part one unfavourably portrays Narendra Modi’s role as chief minister in the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat state in 2002. It includes awkward and embarrassing videoclips of Modi’s speeches and interviews at the time. Part two focuses on the unenviable human rights record of Modi’s national government, and especially its treatment of India’s Muslim minority of close to 200 million people, or around 14 per cent of the population. The Indian government has banned the showing of the first but not the second part.

The documentary was immediately denounced by the Indian external affairs ministry for “the bias, the lack of objectivity, and frankly a continuing colonial mindset.” The documentary, the ministry’s Arindam Bagchi added, “is a reflection on the agency and individuals that are peddling this narrative again.”

Not surprisingly, the ban on part one led to curiosity in India about what it contained. Illegal showings were organised, and zealous police clashed with student groups screening the documentary in universities.

A month later, on 14 February, the national government’s income tax authorities began what became a three-day “survey” of BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai. It was not a “raid,” officials emphasised; “raids” happen after dark.

The survey, said the authorities, was the culmination of a longstanding investigation into the BBC’s alleged “deliberate non-compliance with Indian laws including transfer pricing rules and diversion of profits illegally.” Four days after the survey, authorities let it be known that “the income/profits shown by various group entities was not commensurate with scale of operations in India.” The BBC was reported to be waiting for an official notification of the charges.

For people whose memories extend back to 1975 a sense of déjà vu kicked in. The BBC was expelled from India in the first month after prime minister Indira Gandhi proclaimed an “emergency,” arrested political opponents and introduced censorship of the press. “Indira is India and India is Indira,” her supporters chanted, as she and her younger son attempted to build a personality cult around the prime minister. In India today, it is hard to look, listen or read without encountering prime minister Narendra Modi’s image.

The notion of a conspiracy against India had gained momentum earlier in February when the US financial firm Hindenburg, which specialises in short-selling, released a damaging report on the vast corporate structure of Gautam Adani, one of the richest men in the world. Adani and prime minister Modi are both Gujaratis, and their rise to international prominence in the past twenty years has coincided.

This epic has a long way to go, but listed shares in Adani companies have lost a lot of value, and Gautam Adani’s close connections with the prime minister have given the opposition in India’s parliament the first opportunity in years to challenge the government convincingly. Portions of speeches in parliament attacking the prime minister were ordered expunged from the record by the speaker.

The Adani group issued a 400-page rebuttal claiming the Hindenburg report was “a calculated attack on India, the independence, integrity and quality of Indian institutions, and the growth story and ambition of India.” Its rhetoric projected the Adani business empire as a symbol of India.

The most recent feather-ruffling came on 16 February when billionaire George Soros said, in the course of a long address, that the troubles of the Adani group and its links to the prime minister and his government might “significantly weaken Modi’s stranglehold on India’s federal government and open the door to push for much-needed institutional reforms.”

Soros’s remarks, declared an Indian magazine that supports Modi’s government, “largely validate the existence of a larger conspiracy to derail the Modi government.” Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar, visiting Australia, described Soros as “old, rich, opinionated” and “dangerous,” and pointed out that India’s years under colonial rule had alerted it to the dangers of “outside interference.”

When Indira Gandhi was directing her “emergency” fifty years ago, the bitter experience of colonialism and the dangers of the “foreign hand” were frequent themes.

The flutter over the recent affronts to prime minister Modi and to India have been interpreted in two very different ways. At one pole, a respected and reflective columnist saw the possibility that “the first cracks” were appearing “in the hegemonic empire Modi and his BJP have built.” An activist who is also a serious electoral analyst had already calculated that a BJP victory in next year’s national elections could be difficult given the strength of local parties in many of India’s twenty-eight states.

At the other interpretive pole, the recent incidents are seen as opportunities for India to show its muscle and strut its stuff. According to pro-Modi figures, the “Western democracies” need a growing India more than India needs them — for economic and strategic reasons. Underlining India’s ability to wield economic and strategic influence, they point out that two Indian airlines have ordered almost a thousand passenger jets from Boeing and Airbus, and India is seen as a key element in making the Quad — an alignment of the United States, Japan, Australia and India — a significant entity.

The way to deal with the BBC, a BJP supporter noted, was not with clumsy denunciations and tax surveys. Rather, “the Indian diaspora” in Britain should be encouraged to join the movement to defund the broadcaster “unless the BBC gets out of bed with… left-liberals and Islamists of various hues.” A vast, influential diaspora with Indian roots was something Indira Gandhi didn’t have. Rishi Sunak and others should be expecting calls. •

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“I had worked [in Morbi] in the post-disaster relief activities as an RSS worker,” Modi later wrote, referring to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu-chauvinist organisation. “The town was full of mud and swampy garbage. A huge cleaning up operation was undertaken and I was part of it. We all ensured that the town was restored to pre-disaster levels and an epidemic was averted.”

That work put his name in the national media. On behalf of the RSS he received a donation of 500,000 rupees “for carrying out flood relief work in Morvi [sic] and other affected areas,” the Times of India reported at the time. He was just twenty-nine and had belonged to the RSS for more than ten years. “Armed with this experience,” as he put it, he was preparing for bigger jobs.

Modi was born and grew up in Gujarat. He built a reputation in the RSS as an organiser, joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in 1988 and was credited with being a key planner of a nationwide political road trip made by BJP’s leaders in 1990. The so-called rath yatra (chariot journey) used symbols from a popular religious television series to spread the party’s Hindu supremacist message and energise widespread enthusiasm, especially in north India, for the BJP.

Another disaster, this time in 2001, also affected Morbi and Modi’s career. A huge earthquake centred on Bhuj, about 140 kilometres from the town, brought down hundreds of buildings across Gujarat, including in Morbi, and left thousands dead and homeless. Morbi suffered widespread damage. When Gujarati voters seemed dissatisfied with the speed of the recovery, the BJP, which had ruled the state since 1995, decided a change in chief ministers was needed. Modi got the job.

Within a year, anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat, following the murders of Hindus at a railway station, killed hundreds around the state. Modi denied having encouraged the riots, but he did not try to stop them. Within the year, he won a thundering majority in state elections.

Over the next twelve years as chief minister, he won three elections and created a legend based on roads, electrification, an open door to investment, and hostility to Muslims (Gujarat is about 10 per cent Muslim). He led the BJP to national victory in 2014 and became prime minister.

Modi’s faithful home minister, Amit Shah, is also a Gujarati, and the pair pay close attention to state politics. Modi told an emergency meeting of officials and politicians in Morbi that an “impartial and extensive inquiry” must be held into the bridge disaster and “nobody should be spared.” Elections in Gujarat are due next month (results on 8 December), and newly refurbished bridges that fall down are not part of the legend that Modi has cultivated.

Opponents are holding the government responsible for the disaster and calling for the immediate resignation of the state government. Modi has made similar demands when failures have happened in non-BJP states.

The state elections are complicated by the new presence of the Aam Aadmi Party (the common man’s party), which has ruled the union territory of Delhi since 2015, winning re-election in 2020. The AAP won elections in the state of Punjab earlier this year is aiming for a state-by-state expansion. And the enervated Congress party, once India’s dominant force, retains more of a presence in Gujarat than in most other states.

Modi’s popularity in north India is indisputable, and he and his party are in no danger of losing office in New Delhi. But a setback in his home state would dent reputations.

Citizens of Morbi are seeing rapid response to the bridge disaster. On 1 November, the day of the prime minister’s visit, officials began visiting homes of victims distributing compensation payments of 400,000 rupees (about A$7500) for each person killed. •

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The boys grew up to become two of the most accomplished scholars, writers and administrators of their generation. Contemporaries in age — Wang Gungwu will be ninety-one in October and Amartya Sen eighty-eight in November — they both recently published absorbing memoirs of their lives as outstanding scholars and exemplars of a humble cosmopolitanism that is becoming increasingly rare.

Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998 and has been an international public figure ever since. He has been a faculty member of Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, an adviser to governments and sought-after speaker.

There are many eminent Professor Wangs in the world, but anyone who has read into the history of Asia soon discovers there is only one “Gungwu.” As well as being an immensely productive and wide-ranging historian, Wang Gungwu has been a distinguished scholarly leader at the Australian National University and the National University of Singapore, and for nine years was vice-chancellor of the University of Hong Kong.

The professional lives are public knowledge. Many readers, however, will find the early lives of the two men tantalising. They provide an opportunity to ponder two questions: how the British Empire in its declining years affected two clever children; and the extent to which practices and traditions of China and India shaped two outstanding intellectuals.

As the titles of their books indicate, each has grappled with “identity” and the need to reconcile the values of family and mother tongue with the English language and the legacies of the British Empire. Wang was a national of China until 1949, when he became a citizen of the Federation of Malaya; later, in 1979, he became a citizen of Australia. Sen has remained an Indian citizen, in spite of being “very used to standing in long queues at passport checkpoints.”

Wang was born in 1930 in Surabaya in today’s Indonesia (then the Netherlands East Indies), where his father was headmaster of the town’s only Chinese high school. The Depression impoverished the school, and the family moved to British Malaya where his father became an inspector of Chinese schools in the town of Ipoh. When Wang was growing up in Malaya, “home” was China.

Sen’s experience of “home” was more certain and omnipresent. It was Bengal, perhaps the proudest region of India, and there was no dispute that Bengal was within India. His father, a PhD in chemistry from London University, taught at Dhaka University, but Sen was born at his mother’s home at Santiniketan in western Bengal. Until the age of eight, his family lived in Dhaka in eastern Bengal (today the capital of Bangladesh).

Three aspects of their childhoods contributed powerfully to making them the men they became. Their early experiences also highlighted similarities and differences between being Chinese or Indian in the last days of European empire.

First, both boys delighted in embedding themselves in the culture and languages of their families. “For many years,” Sen wrote, “Sanskrit was close to being my second language after Bengali.” He learned Sanskrit from an adored maternal grandfather, a teacher of Sanskrit and philosophy at Santiniketan, where the Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore had begun a progressive school before the first world war.

Out of empire: Sixteen-year-old Wang Gungwu with his parents, Wang Fuwen (left) and Ding Yan in front of their home in Green Town, Ipoh, Malaya, on the eve of their departure to China. From Home Is Not Here.

Wang Gungwu’s first language was “a variety of Mandarin,” and he soon learned “that there were many kinds of Chinese” — Hakka, Hokkien and the Cantonese he learned from the family’s servant. His father, a trained teacher of languages from what became Nanjing University, “decided to teach me classical Chinese himself.” Father and son sat together each night to read classical texts. “My father wanted me to learn a language that was not spoken and rarely used except in formal documents.”

It proved sound preparation for a scholar of Chinese history. Sen experienced a similar but less direct augury of his future when he discovered that “there was a strong complementarity between my interest in Sanskrit and mathematics.”

A second important element of the two childhoods was the encounter with English. Here their experiences differed, but the outcome was the same: both became masters of their third or fourth language.

In Sen’s family, there had been English speakers for at least three generations. It seems to have been expected that he would become fluent simply from lessons at school and occasionally hearing English spoken around him.

Wang’s father, on the other hand, was the first in the family to learn the foreign language. He had studied English in high school because he felt “he knew enough Chinese literature and needed to improve his understanding of the outside world.” He determined that his son should also learn and sent him to an English school in Ipoh. By early adolescence, with the help of lots of movie-going, “at a very basic level, I was now comfortable in both languages, Chinese and English.”

Sen, however, felt “my progress in English was very slow,” and even on the ship to Britain when he was twenty, he was perplexed by the question, “Would you care for some chocolate?” which, for a budding philosopher, opened up various possibilities about what caring for chocolate might entail.

The third great impact on both children was the second world war. For Wang it was close and personal. After the Japanese landed in Malaya and occupied Ipoh in December 1941, he and his parents fled the town and for a few weeks hid on remote rubber estates and in caves. When the fighting passed on, they returned to town, and eventually his father was absorbed back into the education system, now overseen by the Japanese.

To make ends meet, Wang and other children sold soap and small items in the bazaar. “One day, the Japanese came to the market entrance and placed several human heads on a high stand not far in front of our stall.” It was to warn looters. Later, he was part of a crowd that witnessed a beheading. “I was horrified and had nightmares.”

Sen’s experience was grim and insidious. In 1943 the “Bengal famine” killed up to three million people. In Calcutta, Sen saw human skeletons “dying on the streets.” Even in distant Santiniketan “perhaps 100,000 destitute people had passed through… on their long journey to the big city” where they hoped to find food. “The continuous cries for help… ring in my ears even today.”

His maternal grandmother told him to give one can of rice to anyone who came to the door, but only one — we “have to help as many people as we can.” As an economist, Sen earned a large part of his fame from his work on the causes and prevention of famine.

The war, however, had a curiously beneficial effect on both lives: it freed them from the regimentation of colonial school systems and from the rote-learning that had been part of classical education in China and India.

For Wang, these were wonderful “years of unfocused learning,” He mixed with people of all sorts — Malays, speakers of various Chinese dialects and Indian labourers with whom he occasionally drank toddy. In the two disorganised years after the war, he indulged his passion for movies, saw 400 films and, like a diligent historian, made notes about many of them.

For Sen, the war meant that he was sent away from Dhaka and Calcutta to the safety of Santiniketan. His education from the age of eight was “at the remarkably progressive school” founded by Tagore. The school’s emphasis was “on fostering curiosity rather than competitive excellence… I loved it.”

Moves to great colonial cities marked the end of childhood for both men. Wang left Ipoh for Singapore and the University of Malaya in 1949. Sen left Santiniketan for Calcutta and Presidency College in 1951. By coincidence, they both arrived in Britain in 1954 — Sen on the way to Cambridge, Wang Gungwu to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

There is much, much more in these memoirs than childhood reflections, and it would take a far longer essay to do them justice. They trace personal lives, careers and the circumstances that shaped research. Wang Gungwu’s two volumes include sections written by two of the women in his life — his mother and his wife Margaret, who co-authored Home Is Where We Are.

Sen’s is a great portmanteau of a book — the sort of suitcase you’d pack for days on the road with entertainments, lectures, historical visits, formal dinners and philosophical reflections. At one pole, there is a delightful dry humour and personal tales of ill health and undergraduate life. At another, there are exchanges with economists and philosophers, mini-essays on Indian history and ruminations on the research questions, such as social-choice theory or the economics of famine, that have occupied a lifetime.

Both men appear to have resolved the contests about where “home” is in favour of being “at home in the world,” concluding that friendship, respect and “home” can be found wherever we are — if we are curious and open to learn. It’s an enviable attitude in the current world of closures. •

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That’s how the daily emails from India seem these past two months.

I’ve been in a relationship with India for fifty years. I’m very fond of the place, and that fondness has given me the good fortune of friends and associates from Thiruvananthapuram in the south to Assam in the northeast. They are middle-class people who have places to live; they don’t push a plough or drive an auto-rickshaw; and they all have internet connections.

Their messages tell the story…

31 March. Pune, Maharashtra. Writer caring for elderly relatives:

We are okay here, but India seems to be seeing a fresh wave of infections. My [elders] have had their first dose of the vaccine but till the second is done in April, I’ll remain stressed.

13 April. Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. Writer home with extended family:

We continue to be pandemic-stricken as our govt revels in political rallies and letting the kumbh mela [river festival at Haridwar] be a centripetal virus breeding farm.

20 April. Guwahati, Assam. Scholar home with family:

The working classes simply can’t afford another lockdown. Assam started a new lockdown today… Our wonderful and hardworking helpers at home… are wearily discussing this situation over chai as I write this to you.

20 April. Thiruvananthapuram. Kerala. Teacher:

We are better off than people elsewhere, but things are really, really horrible. Even worse are the things you hear from friends and family. Everyone has links with people in Bangalore and Delhi and everyone has a horror story to tell.

22 April. Pune. Carer:

We are barely moving out of the house, but we do have domestic staff coming in. We’ll probably have to tell them to stay home for the next few weeks.

23 April. Pune. Carer:

Going out has been reduced to a bare minimum. Luckily everything is delivered to the door so direct exposure is minimal.

25 April. New Delhi. Scholar:

Things are not good here. Nearly 350,000 cases per day are going beyond coping capacity… We are all under great pressure. Our vaccination for people over 18 will start from 1st May. I expect that the cases will go down after 15th May. No one is sure of anything.

30 April. Thiruvananthapuram. Teacher:

Cases are rising in Kerala, too, to uncomfortable levels. People are talking of shortage of beds and a full lockdown. Kochi and Calicut are the worst hit. Trivandrum [Thiruvananthapuram] is not far behind.

5 May. Calicut, Kerala. Scholar home supporting family:

Today’s Covid-19 count in Kerala is above 40,000 and many acquaintances are down with it; a few have even left this world. It’s looking scary now and very near now.

8 May. Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. Writer:

I am doing okay… physically well, mentally a bit tired of all the bad news. Being confined at home, I fail to find inspiration. Writing entails not just typing and thinking but long walks, a space to call your own and for me, the whistle of the kettle. But that’s another life.

10 May. New Delhi. Academic:

The boys [seven and ten] can’t go out. They used to play on the open level of the building, but not now.

My friends acknowledge that they manage because poor people must move around to earn a living. Poor people deliver supplies, collect garbage, clean sewers and move the vast quantities of food that must come to towns and cities every day.

You’d like to think that Covid in India is generating a “binding crisis,” a crisis so frightening and unpredictable that it affects the rich and the poor alike and leads to changes that improve conditions for everyone. The “great stink” of 1858, when the Thames flooded with raw faeces under the noses of parliament at Westminster, produced London’s sewerage system in record time. Hamburg had similar experiences with cholera and typhoid in the nineteenth century, and the Indian city of Surat had a panic over “bubonic plague” (it turned out that it wasn’t) in 1994 that turned the city from the “dirtiest in India” to one of the cleanest.

The London Blitz had similar effects. Shared suffering led to a greater readiness to share benefits. After the war, a Labour government had a mandate for vast improvements in public housing and the National Health Service. (The latter is being suggested in India.)

Could India’s Covid affliction produce long-term improvements in health systems, reduce rural–urban disparities and attack the huge gap between social classes? It’s true that the coronavirus and its mutations are democratic in that they can carry off the wealthy as well as the poor. But the wealthy have far better chances of avoiding infection, getting vaccinated and finding treatment, though it has been much harder even for them during the second wave.

The poor and low-status will also be heavily represented among the tens of millions of sufferers who are missing from the Covid official statistics released each day. And it appears the Covid crisis is accentuating class divisions.

Media outlets are under pressure from national and state governments to minimise numbers, stories and images that show the disease’s pervasiveness. Yesterday’s widely circulated stories showing bodies floating down the Ganga after being released by villagers too poor to burn them (wood is becoming expensive) will no doubt send government media managers into panic mode.

National leadership has been lacking in India’s Covid response. The prime minister and his powerful pal, the home minister, spent large chunks of time and effort campaigning in state elections in March and April and relishing large, mask-less crowds as evidence of their pulling power and their party’s chances. (The party won two small elections and lost the three big ones.)

Over the years, the prime minister and his party have excelled at electoral organisation and media management. What’s needed is to turn that expertise and capacity towards a campaign that trumpets the maxim that “none is safe until all are safe” and accompanies it with measures that fulfil the words. That will be difficult for leaders of organisations that have specialised in emphasising division, but they have the know-how. Highly effective media presentations have been one of their greatest strengths.

If Covid proved to be a binding crisis and “none is safe until all are safe” its legacy, tens of millions might have grounds to feel that the sorrow and misery have not been totally in vain. •

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Gmail and I had been working happily together for twenty years. It stores thousands of my bits and pieces in its electronic guts. Nothing exciting, revealing or incriminating; just useful bits and pieces that one refers to from time to time.

Last Wednesday, after an unsuccessful attempt to use the Medibank app on my relatively new iPhone, I got the “Verify it’s you” message when I hit the Gmail icon. Easy: I’ve done it before. Answer the questions, provide your previously lodged alternative email or mobile phone details, wait for a code, enter the code and bingo, you’re back into your account.

But not this time. Having performed the required tasks, I got the dreaded “Account disabled because of suspicious activity” message. Mata Hari no doubt felt the same way when the Sûreté knocked on her door in 1917.

I probed the Gmail beast and found the “Tips to complete account recovery steps” and then the “Why your account recovery request is delayed” page.

It appears that “suspicious activity” is determined by algorithms that also govern your recovery attempts. Get the answer wrong when you’re asked “What was the name of your first teacher?” and you can say goodbye to your account. (Did I tell Gmail long ago that she was “Miss Brown” or just “Brown”? I can’t imagine ever referring to her as “Brown”…)

The official Gmail messages are not clear about what happens to your attempts to recover “disabled” accounts. On the one hand, they suggest that once you have a case number relating to your inquiry, you should wait — three to five days, one page says — for your request to be reviewed.

On the other hand, there’s a suggestion that what’s gone is gone. You won’t see that account again, and the people who are sending mail to it will never know what happened to you. The gas and electricity companies, and all the others, won’t be able to send electronic condolences to your digital funeral. They’ll never know.

That’s the official Gmail line: be patient, there may be hope, but perhaps not much.

The news gets worse, however, when you find user-group sites on the web and enter a world of broken dreams. The begging messages, sent fruitlessly into cyberspace, cry for mercy: “Please, please, won’t somebody at Google help me. I need this account for my exams/rent/medicine.” “Without logging in to that email… I can’t work,” writes another pilgrim on this vale of tears. “I will soon be going hungry.”

Because Gmail is a “free service” (we pay by sowing our data for digital combine harvesters to mow through like wheatfields in the Wimmera), Gmail owes us nothing. There’s no helpline leading to nice young women in Manila. Or good guys in Gurgaon who can sometimes be lured into abandoning their I’m-John-how-can-I-help-you personas to discuss Virat Kohli and fix your problem.

The clearest description I’ve found of my Gmail doomsday comes from Ron Miller, a techie journalist, who had his account blocked in early December 2017. He got it back three weeks later after constantly harassing a public relations contact at Google. “Without special contacts like I had because of my job,” he wrote, “you are out in the cold.” In a later piece he gave a couple of suggestions about how to get an account unlocked, but neither worked for me.

The advice varies on what to do while you wait to see whether the algorithms will be merciful. One school says keep attempting to get into the account. Let them know you care. Another school says don’t try too often or the algorithms will get angry and block you as a digital nuisance.

There are hints that somewhere there may be human beings. One optimist says that if you get a registration number for your request for review that means you are in a queue and, somewhere, life forms are looking at your case. They will, the optimist believes, eventually see that your account is as innocent of “suspicious activity” as a newborn cyber lamb. They’ll free it to gambol again in cyberspace.

Can a person protect against Gmail doomsday? I’ve seen no suggestions, other than to stay away from Gmail and find other providers. Your security questions, backup email addresses and mobile phone numbers are no protection once the algorithms target you. And there’s no way, either, of informing your correspondents that their messages are not reaching you.

So I wait, prodding Gmail every day or so in the most polite way so that the algorithms won’t get cross.

And I’m also being especially nice to our postman. He, at least, has never held back my copy of RoyalAuto for suspicious activity. •

Postscript: Yes, Virginia, there is a Google Claus

Twenty-five days after I wrote this article, Google Claus guided his digital reindeer into my computer and gave me back the Gmail account that dark, algorithmic forces had locked away.

As you’ll know from the article above, my longstanding Gmail account had suddenly told me it was locked for my own protection because “suspicious activity” had been detected. Thousands of useful bits and pieces, lazily left by me in Gmail messages, were now beyond my shaky grasp.

So, every night for twenty-four days I muttered incantations and went through the designated routine to restore a locked account. I’d tax myself on how I had answered the Google security question. Did I say Miss Brown, my Grade 1 teacher, was my first teacher? Or Miss Black, my kindergarten teacher?

Then, on the twenty-fifth day, with hope almost gone, I went through the nightly routine, using Miss Black from kindergarten and an old password. And there it was. The reindeer had landed! There was even a message signed by Lily at the Google Accounts Team.

The moral of the story is that if this happens to you, do not despair. Persevere. And before the worst happens, check your security questions, backup email address and phone details.

There are small pluses with a visit from Google Claus. You don’t need to clean the chimney, and he doesn’t need milk and cookies left out for him. Any cookies will be digital, and of course they’ll be left by him. •

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One of those governments — the one that runs the National Capital Territory, or NCT — held its scheduled five-yearly elections earlier this week. Close to sixteen million people were eligible to vote, 63 per cent cast their ballots, and the Aam Aadmi (“common man”) Party returned to power with sixty-two out of seventy seats (down five) and 54 per cent of the vote. The party’s leader, Arvind Kejriwal, a former public servant, became chief minister for the third time.

What those figures don’t reveal is that this was one of the most vicious campaigns in India’s seventy-year history of rambunctious elections, nearly all of which have been enviably free, fair and efficient. Since its resounding victory in last year’s national elections, prime minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has been hungry to win government of the nation’s capital, where it cleaned up all seven of Delhi’s parliamentary constituencies.

Nationally, the BJP has pursued an aggressive Hindu-chauvinist agenda. It has divided the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir into two “union territories” directly under the central government, curtailed civil rights there, and detained a number of its politicians for the past six months. It has passed a Citizenship Amendment Act giving undocumented people from neighbouring Muslim-majority countries straightforward routes to Indian citizenship — providing they are not Muslims. (Tamil-speakers from Sri Lanka also miss out on the fast-track provision.)

The government has also promised to complete a national register of citizens, which will require people to demonstrate citizenship by documenting their Indian origins. Poor people often don’t have such documentation, and Indian Muslims are disproportionately poor. An inability to provide citizenship will lead to loss of privileges and, potentially, to “deportation” — but to where?

Delhi has been a centre of opposition to these measures. Muslim women in one Delhi locality have blocked roads for weeks in protest. Two of Delhi’s universities have been riven by demonstrations and bloody confrontations with vigilantes and police, who are controlled not by the NCT government but by the national government through its appointed lieutenant-governor. (In Australia, the senior police officer in Canberra reports to a minister of the Australian Capital Territory’s elected government.)

To get things done in Delhi takes immense persistence. As well as the NCT government, the city has five municipal corporations, plus the lieutenant-governor as representative of the national government. Hemmed into its 1500 square kilometres by two unsympathetic states, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, the city has nowhere to grow. (Canberra’s 400,000 people have 800 square kilometres on which to graze their kangaroos.)

Not surprisingly, the Aam Aadmi Party campaigned on its considerable achievements, especially the provision of much-improved local schools and health clinics, and the predictable supply of water and electricity even to poorer parts of the city.

Kejriwal appears to have outgeneralled the BJP’s oft-proclaimed master strategist, home minister Amit Shah. Shah, the clear number two in the central government, has been described as creator of “the most formidable election machinery in contemporary India.” As home minister, his responsibilities extend to all of India, but he threw himself into the Delhi elections, addressing dozens of rallies and doing face-to-face canvassing. Prime Minister Modi himself addressed two major rallies.

According to the BJP’s pitch, the Delhi elections were about national unity in the face of dangerous opponents of its agenda on citizenship and a great Hindu nation. Those opponents, it said, were Muslims, students and “anti-national” cosmopolitans. A junior minister in the central government called on his Delhi audiences to “shoot the traitors” (it sounds racier in Hindi). Others cast the election as a contest between India and Pakistan.

“I have been covering politics for three to four decades,” one Indian journalist wrote. “I do not remember ever the rhetoric going down to this level.”

The AAP team stayed aloof, neither siding with the protesters nor supporting the Modi–Shah vision. Instead, they pointed to tangible achievements of the past five years. When accused of not being a good enough Hindu, Kejriwal shot back by reciting Hindu texts. The AAP team’s strategy was said to have benefited from the work of a political marketer, Prashant Kishor, who has worked for various parties, including the BJP.

In his victory speech, Kejriwal aimed to have a rupee each way. He used three invocations (think “God bless America” for US politicians) — “Bharat Mata ki Jai, Inquilab Zindabad and Vande Mataram.” That’s “Victory to Mother India, Victory to Revolution, Praise to the Mother [India].” The first and the last are much-loved by Hindus; Inquilab Zindabad has been a call of the left for nearly a hundred years and has the flavour of Urdu, the form of north India’s lingua franca now associated with Muslims.

The AAP’s victory in Delhi is another small roadblock for the BJP steamroller, which has lost six state and territory elections in the past year. India’s federation gives voters the option of having Hindu nationalists running the country and practical, local people running things closer to everyday lives.

Nationally, the BJP’s 37 per cent of the vote last May looks unshaken, and no other party is likely to get close to it in the near future. The once-powerful Congress Party is moribund; it couldn’t win a single seat in the Delhi NCT and managed only 4 per cent of the vote. Although it is still a lively presence in some states, Congress finds it impossible to shed the Gandhi family and produce a credible national leadership.

Faced with this week’s jubilation, a shrewd, long-time analyst, sympathetic to those who see the BJP’s path leading to tears and regret in years to come, summed up realistically: “the romance with the Delhi outcome must halt.” The BJP, he wrote, controls the playing field and is rewriting the rulebook. For the immediate future, election success in the units of India’s federation lies in demonstrating that education, health, water and power mean more to voters than tales of past glories, current “enemies” and religious oneness. But that doesn’t mean the glories-and-enemies story won’t win a national election. •

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The BJP and its four allies in the National Democratic Alliance look like improving their result in 2014 and winning more than 340 seats in the Lok Sabha and as much as 40 per cent of the vote. They have swept the north and west of the country, captured most of the state of Karnataka in the south, dominated the far-flung northeast and made inroads for the first time into West Bengal, once a communist bastion.

The re-election of a party with a majority in its own right for the first time since 1984 is the result of three interrelated factors: the “Modi story,” an ideologically driven organisation and the media tsunami of the past thirty years.

Let’s begin with the Modi story. The first time the name Narendra Modi appeared in the Times of India, as far as I can discover, was on 23 May 1978 when he was listed as a participant in a discussion about “the youth struggle during the emergency” on a television program called Yuvadarshan (youth vision). Part of the Modi story is that he was a daring young underground organiser during Indira Gandhi’s cooked-up “emergency” and period of authoritarian rule from 1975 to 1977.

That connects the Modi story with the second element in this week’s victory — the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, the Hindu-chauvinist organisation Modi joined as a young man. Modi’s second appearance in the Times of India came on 1 October 1979 when he received a cheque for 500,000 rupees as a contribution to RSS-led relief work after a disastrous flood that killed hundreds of people in the town of Morvi, in his home state of Gujarat. He had established himself as someone who got things done.

Founded in 1925 and modelled on Mussolini-style organisations in Europe, the RSS now has more than a million members. Fifty years ago, when I rode my bicycle on winter mornings to the school in north India where I taught, I used to marvel at the few dozen men in white shirts and khaki shorts who drilled with lathis (staffs, or rods) on a school parade ground before going off to their jobs in shops and offices. They were members of the RSS.

The ideological foundation of the RSS is the belief that India is a “Hindu nation,” suppressed for a thousand years by Muslim and European invaders and enervated today by “secular liberals,” an equivalent of the “rootless cosmopolitans” demonised in twentieth-century Europe. The goal is to establish a strong Hindu nation, enforcing higher-caste beliefs and requiring non-Hindus and other deviationists to conduct themselves as grateful guests.

In the early 1950s, the RSS formed a political party, the Jana Sangh, which reconstituted itself as the BJP in the early 1980s. The relationship between the party and the movement can sometimes be rocky, but they find plenty of common ground at election time. Even as party leader, Modi remains a product of the RSS, and the dedicated RSS cadre has been essential to the rise and rise of the BJP.

Modi’s own rise in the 1980s owed something to the third element in this week’s BJP victory. In 1989, India had a single government television service covering only 50 per cent of the country. There were no more than twenty million TV sets in a population of 800 million, and most programming was ponderous. In 1987, however, a religious serialisation of the epic Ramayana brought the country to a stop on Sunday mornings. Over many weeks, the story of Lord Ram was told, and neighbours, servants and passers-by piled up in front of any available television set. The Ramayana series was followed by the other epic, the Mahabharata. The two series provided a “standard version,” a homogenisation of two great tales that had often been told in distinctive, local ways.

The BJP, far from power in the 1980s and desperate to mobilise support, staged a number of “chariot processions” around the country, echoing how the deities in the TV epics had ridden in chariots. Modi appears to have been a key roadie and organiser for one or two of these popular events.

By 2000, India had seventy million television households receiving dozens of land-based and satellite channels. It was possible and profitable to telecast to all of India and create a single market. This was especially true in the north, where Hindi, spoken by about 40 per cent of all Indians, was the prevalent language.

From the 1990s, benefiting from the expanding possibilities for Indians to see and speak to each other, the BJP’s parliamentary strength grew, and Modi’s prominence with it. He visited the United States in 1994 and 1999, partly to study media practices, and handled the party’s dealings with journalists.

Each of India’s six general elections since 1998 has exploited the latest innovations in media, and the BJP has usually been better at it than their opponents. For a lad who grew up in a world where “media” meant government radio, Bombay movies and a big, bakelite telephone locked in a box in a senior official’s room, Modi has been an eager and astute learner.

Today, no one in India is far from a mobile phone, and smartphone use is into the hundreds of millions. In the current election, the BJP deployed a vast stable of media professionals to out-WhatsApp and out-Instagram its opponents. The BJP had the money to do it well: its coffers overflowed, while the Congress, once the moneybags party, lacked such spending power.

The Congress was unable to stitch together a plausible opposition alliance, and Rahul Gandhi, its languid leader, had little to tell voters that they wanted to hear. Modi, on the other hand, benefited from the bloody scuffle with Pakistan, provoked when a suicide bomber killed more than forty Indian paramilitary police. In retaliation, the Indian air force launched what was portrayed as a brilliant “surgical strike” against “terrorist bases” in Pakistan, and the bold prime minister took some of the credit. A spoonful of patriotic fervour helped the electoral medicine go down.

Modi’s government could also point to visible achievements — roads built, villages electrified, an ambitious attempt to create a “clean India” that showed some modest achievements, and a national health insurance scheme. A well-resourced social media operation and a largely compliant press and television disseminated the good news.

What happens now? If it is more of the same, that means the continued transformation of state institutions into clients of the ruling party — in education, law, regulation and defence. It means the continued favouring of particular capitalists and entrepreneurs, Gautam Adani among them.

It also means more name changes: “Muslim” places on the map replaced by “Hindu” names. It means more nudge-nudge, wink-wink opportunities to put “liberals” and non-Hindus — Muslims, but also Christians — in their place. “Teach them a lesson” is a phrase you sometimes hear. Modi, of course, was chief minister of Gujarat during such a teaching session in 2002, when hundreds of Muslims were murdered around the state in retaliation for the murders in a small-town railway station of a carriage full of Hindus, apparently by a Muslim mob.

The hollowing out of India’s shaky institutions will continue. Already, the Election Commission of India, one of the country’s most respected institutions, is under scrutiny because its three commissioners are at odds. One of them asserts that his colleagues let the prime minister and BJP get away with flagrant breaches of the campaign code of conduct.

Looking at the electoral map of India, one sees that the north and west, stretching from Karnataka in the southwest to Bihar in the east, have overwhelmingly returned the BJP. But the rest of the south and portions of the east coast, including Odisha and West Bengal, have voted for local political parties.

India’s federation offers a resilient flexibility, but the BJP and the RSS often proclaim that they want to dominate the whole subcontinent. They now have the opportunity to focus on the states that have spurned them so far.

The party will soon also control the upper house of parliament, the Rajya Sabha, whose members are elected by the members of state legislatures. It takes a two-thirds majority of both houses to amend the constitution, something the BJP is likely to want to do to introduce “Hindu principles” and eliminate aspects of “secular liberalism.” In this sense, India seems part of a global pattern of states welcoming “strongmen” who emphasise “national values,” as defined by them.

The BJP and RSS are way ahead of this trend. The Jana Sangh, forerunner of the BJP, laid down in its manifesto long ago that “Bharatiya [Hindu] culture is thus one and indivisible. Any talk of composite culture, therefore, is unrealistic, illogical and dangerous.”

Yet India, with its twenty-two official languages, twenty-nine states, hundreds of castes and millions of Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists, constitutes a rich biriyani full of herbs and spices, cashews and sultanas. Trying to make a biriyani into a smoothie may not produce particularly digestible results. •

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The current Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, government under Narendra Modi won a remarkable victory in 2014. Modi and his party promised economic development and good days ahead. The record in the past five years has been rather patchy.

Growth in gross domestic product has averaged about 7 per cent a year, a figure most countries would relish. But this has not translated into the millions of jobs that are needed for the two-thirds of the population (850 million people) under the age of thirty-five. Unemployment has increased and participation of women in the workforce has fallen.

The new national goods and services tax should facilitate movement of goods and improve revenue collection over time. But the tax is said to be a nightmare for small businesses, many of whose owners are long-time BJP sympathisers. Other economic reforms have still to show results.

Perhaps the most notable of the government’s achievements has been the Clean India campaign, a heavily publicised, top-down program to transform public sanitation. It has built tens of millions of toilets, instituted cleanliness rankings for towns and cities and funded state and local governments to improve management of waste and public sanitation. Critics point to failures of follow-up and maintenance, but never has such an effort been driven so hard from so high up. By comparison, a national health insurance scheme for the poorest people, announced a year ago, seems underfunded and more show than substance.

An opinion poll in January predicted that the BJP would emerge as the largest single party in the May election, though its National Democratic Alliance would not win a majority. But these calculations went out the window in mid February when a suicide bomber killed forty paramilitary police in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. India accused Pakistani intelligence agencies and their clients of having organised the attack, and launched a bombing raid into Pakistani territory. Pakistan replied by bringing down an Indian fighter jet.

Not surprisingly, Indian patriotism became supercharged. The BJP will harness these emotions in election campaigning. The party, and organisations close to it, have long promoted an aggressive one-size-fits-all version of Hinduism and of India — or Bharat, as they’d prefer to call it. Divergence from their line is “anti-national.”

Muslims, who make up nearly 15 per cent of the population, or 190 million people, are particular targets. Sporadic attacks on Muslim “cow killers” and “beef eaters,” and intimidation of despised “secularists” and lower castes who don’t toe the line, are seldom condemned by BJP leaders. At the same time, the party has steadily inserted and promoted its sympathisers throughout the country’s institutions.

The prospects of the opposition Congress Party appeared to have improved in November after it won elections in three states. But the border crisis allows the BJP to continue contrasting “weak” Rahul Gandhi, the Congress leader, with the tough, decisive Narendra Modi.

Rahul Gandhi, the critics argue, is a product of inheritance not ability. He has three prime ministers among his ancestors, and his mother, though never prime minister, is a prime minister–maker as president of the Congress Party. The BJP characterises the Congress as a dynasty without a philosophy or program. The BJP has both: Hindu supremacy and friendship towards businesses large and small.

Champions of an older, more cosmopolitan version of India are hopeful that Rahul Gandhi has recently been showing more enthusiasm and commitment. His sister Priyanka, forty-seven, who joined the election campaign in January, may also help to revive the party.

Appealing to younger women, tens of millions of whom now have a Year 10 education or better, Priyanka could prove an attraction in many electorates. The BJP does little to hide its patriarchal beliefs and practices, and though many families may be withdrawing educated women from the workforce for reasons of status, women can — and do — vote as they please.

Voting is fair, free and simple. It’s a first-past-the-post system with ballots cast on standalone electronic voting machines. Polling will be spread over three or four weeks to allow the election commission to move administrators, equipment and security forces around the country.

Even with the increased patriotic fervour, the BJP will find it difficult to repeat its sweeping success of 2014. An unclear result, with four or five regional parties winning a substantial number of seats, could produce an unstable, anti-BJP coalition government. Its collapse would likely lead to a new election in which a frustrated electorate would turn again to the BJP.

If the BJP finds itself leading a minority government, Modi will need to reveal new abilities. For the last seventeen years, he has mostly had things his own way. He governed Gujarat for twelve years with large majorities, a supine party and a hardworking, obedient bureaucracy. As prime minister of a successful coalition, he would need to find the skills and patience of a negotiator and conciliator.

India’s federal, democratic, secular structure has enabled it to accommodate immense diversity — 1.3 billion people, twenty-nine states, twenty-three official languages, eleven different scripts, and members of all the world’s great religions. A comprehensive BJP victory in May will intensify the attempt to impose an unfamiliar cultural conformity. That may not be the wisest path for a country with a size and diversity surpassing the European Union. •

This article first appeared in East Asia Forum.

The post A struggle for India’s soul appeared first on Inside Story.

Journalists who have followed Russell over the past 160 years have tended to thread their post-India experiences around themes that captivated or assailed them. The Grand Old Person of the genre is eighty-three-year-old Mark Tully, the legendary BBC correspondent, who has lived on and off in India much of his life and has half a dozen books to his name. Billionaire Raj and River of Life are worthy contributions to the genre, for both their engaging writing and their demonstration of why sturdy media organisations are crucial in an age of “fake news.”

Mallet and Crabtree both worked in India for the Financial Times, Mallet in New Delhi from 2012 to 2016 and Crabtree in Mumbai from 2011 to 2016. Their books stem from their research, travels and encounters, paid for by a great global news organisation. Such organisations hire talented, well-trained people and give them time and resources to stick their echidna-like snouts into the affairs of the day.

Mallet and Crabtree had privileged access to business and political leaders, and to events like the great Kumbh Mela on the Ganga in 2013 (next one, 2025) and the election victory of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014. Mallet recently added a further distinction to his journalist’s CV by being ejected from Hong Kong in October when the authorities refused to renew his visa. As vice-president of the territory’s foreign correspondents’ club, he had organised a talk by an activist associated with a party advocating independence from China.

The trigger for both Mallet’s and Crabtree’s books lay in gob-smacking early experiences in their cities of residence. For Mallet in Delhi, it was the River Jamuna, once a glorious tributary of the Ganga, now a festering drain — but a festering drain with a “boat club”! Mallet confesses, “I love boats,” and a book was born.

Mallet relishes the chance to pass on boating vignettes, such as a method of travelling downstream “by means of an empty earthenware jar (well corked) under each arm.” In 1814, this seemed to work well, “but there is great peril from the alligators.” There still is. In spite of appalling pollution, the great river sustains fish, crocodiles and dolphins, with tigers along the banks in a few places.

Most of the eighteen chapters of River of Life, River of Death focus on themes related to the river. The technique provides scope to comment on bureaucracy, politics, economics and religion. The river is hideously polluted with human and industrial waste, yet its sanctity in the eyes of tens of millions of believers renders public-health science irrelevant. Believers continue to use the river for bathing, drinking, cooking, irrigation, defecation and cremation. Such reverence makes the task of cleaning the Ganga far more difficult than that faced by the people who transformed the Thames and the Rhine.

Narendra Modi, elected to parliament from the Varanasi constituency, took on the challenge of not only cleaning the Ganga, but also cleaning India. On Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday in October 2014, he vowed to create a Swachh Bharat — a Clean India — in five years. Cleaning the river is a key measure for the success of the Clean India campaign, on which the national government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars.

Will the river be clean by October 2019? “The pollution crisis of the Ganges and its tributaries,” Mallet wrote in 2017, “is as grave as it has ever been.” He gives failing marks on three counts: abysmal systematic data about the state of the river; uncertainty about policies; and ineffectual implementation of previous clean-up plans.

Cleaning the Ganga, he concludes, “will be a measure of the success or failure of Modi’s projects to modernise India.” He gives the last word to a Hindu holy man who tells him that the river will improve and “the journey will be from filth to faith.” Mallet makes it pretty clear his money is on filth. But he does have one last dip in Ma Ganga — well up in the Himalayas, near the relatively clean headwaters.

Mallet’s trigger was a boat club. Crabtree’s was a building. “Nothing symbolises the power of India’s new elite more starkly,” his book begins, “than Antilia.” Antilia is the soaring monument to ostentation and immense wealth that looms over central Mumbai — 160 metres, close to half the height of the Empire State Building. That’s the home of Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest billionaire and senior member of the Ambani family.

As a business journalist in India’s commercial capital, Crabtree’s attention to the Ambanis, their fellow captains of “crony capitalism” and their capricious ways was a daily duty. The Billionaire Raj is built around them, and the book begins with a section called “Tycoons,” which profiles three of them — men who, in Australia, would be referred to as “colourful identities.”

Crabtree draws comparisons with the so-called Gilded Age of the United States, from the 1870s to about 1910, when swashbuckling entrepreneurs stole national resources, bought politicians and broke trade unions. It’s a shiny lure to hook the interest of North Atlantic readers and an effective device to invite readers to think comparatively.

But there’s not a great deal to be gained by comparing today’s India with a country of fifty million (the United States in 1880) spread across a landmass of 7.6 million square kilometres. For a start, India is twenty-six times more populous (at 1300 million people) than the United States of the Gilded Age, and its area (3.3 million square kilometres) is less than half.

This recognition makes India’s situation appear all the darker. When a captain of finance today gets away with public money or acquires a public resource at an op-shop price, he — for all Crabtree’s featured tycoons are men — is grabbing a very scarce commodity. It’s not the vast open spaces of nineteenth-century America, where the only obstacle was the need to ruthlessly dispossess Native Americans.

In “Political Machines,” the book traces the symbiotic relationships between the outrageously wealthy and India’s politicians. The wealthy need politicians to pressure government-controlled banks to extend and refinance huge, perhaps unrepayable loans. Political favours also enable business empires to latch onto public assets (such as mining concessions and telecom spectrum) at bargain prices.

In the third part of the book, “A New Gilded Age,” Crabtree introduces a gallery of lesser, but still colourful, tycoons. They, too, benefit from drip-feeds of public money to make bad loans look sustainable.

Critics sometimes bemoan “poverty porn” — books or TV programs that parade the agonies of the poor for the entertainment of the better-off. The flipside might be called tycoon titillation — the chance for lesser folk to savour the antics of the outrageously, gaudily, shadily wealthy. As Crabtree deftly shows, India has a strong set of runners in that race.

But India also has many millionaires who keep honest books, publish transparent annual reports and turn some of their wealth toward public good. You wouldn’t know it from The Billionaire Raj, and that means we are missing one of the pieces of the great jigsaw of India.

There are other missing pieces that make the Gilded Age an uncomfortable comparison. Fifteen per cent of India’s population — Dalits, formerly “untouchables” — are still overwhelmingly poor and marginalised (try finding a Dalit on TV, for instance). The word “Dalit” occurs only a few times in the text and does not appear in the index. Another 7 per cent of the population are tribal people, living in remote areas with few of the resources they need to protect themselves from the incursions of the modern world.

It’s understandable, of course, that a journalist covering business and finance would not meet many Dalits. Although there is a sprinkling of Dalit millionaires (in a population of 190 million), there are no billionaires. But the Dalit fact — not to mention the suspect, prove-your-loyalty status of close to 190 million Muslims — is a further reason why the Gilded Age comparisons don’t take us far in comprehending India’s current state and possible futures.

The book concludes with a comparison of the two Gilded Ages and the observation that “India’s new Gilded Age can blossom into a Progressive Era of its own, in which the perils of inequality and crony capitalism are left decisively behind.” It’s a happy thought, but hard to imagine happening in a foreseeable future.

Mallet and Crabtree are talented professionals who know how to ask questions, tell stories, write fluently and promote their work. Crabtree even has a three-minute, animated version of The Billionaire Raj on YouTube. And they benefited from having worked in India for a great news organisation. For most of their stays, the Financial Times was owned by the Pearson group, which was then a sprawling giant of British publishing. Pearson sold the FT to Nikkei, the Japanese media empire, in 2015.

What is important for journalism as a profession, and for “non-fake news” as an ideal, is that clever, well-resourced truffle-hounds have the time to follow stories that take them up and down the Ganga or track absconding businesspeople to their lairs. These two books exemplify the more enduring products of what good journalists do every day. •

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That sounds familiar. Here’s Ellerston Capital’s Ashok Jacob, speaking earlier this month in Sydney at the launch of An India Economic Strategy to 2035: “Any CEO, any board, that does not take a good hard look at India will be asked in ten years’ time, did you at least look at it, did you visit the place, do you know what your competitors’ markets in India look like?” Jacob is a long-time figure in Australian big business, a member of one of India’s great business families and chair of the Australia–India Council.

The trail to 2018 is littered with weighty documents making similar points, among them India: The Next Economic Giant (2004), India: New Economy, Old Economy (2001), Australia’s Trade Relationship with India (1998), India’s Economy at the Midnight Hour: Australia’s India Strategy (1994) and Australia-India Relations: Trade and Security (1990).

So, has anything changed?

Yes. Lots. The times are different, and so is the report Jacob was helping to launch. To begin with, its author, Peter Varghese, is one of the outstanding public servants of his generation, a former high commissioner to India and secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. His family’s origins are in Kerala, on India’s southwestern coast, though he would probably describe himself as a proud Queenslander. He is currently chancellor of his alma mater, the University of Queensland.

As Varghese observes, bilateral relationships are built on three elements: commerce, strategic interests and people. Ideally, a relationship has all three; in the past, the Australia–India relationship lacked the lot. India’s economic policies, focused on import substitution and self-sufficiency, gave a major role to state-run enterprises and produced a prickly thicket of regulation. Its “non-aligned” foreign policy equated the Soviet Union with the United States, a position that seldom lined up with Australian views. And, as late as 1981, Australia had only about 15,000 India-origin residents who were not Anglo-Indians. It was a negative trifecta.

Since then, the most obvious and important change is in the demography. Today, Australia has 700,000 residents of Indian origin. The number has trebled in ten years and continues to grow.

It’s a bit early to look among them for Silicon Valley–style entrepreneurs, or a Nikki Randhawa Haley (the former governor of South Carolina, now US ambassador to the United Nations), a Harjit Singh Sajjan (the Canadian defence minister) or a Salman Rushdie. But Australia has an unmissable group of young Indians who will connect the two countries by their constant coming and going. They will be looking for ways to turn their India skills and contacts into assets in Australia. And they’ll arouse in Australian friends and partners a readiness to connect with India.

Indian newcomers also have an asset shared with the British, Americans, South Africans, New Zealanders and Canadians who live here: a knowledge of English that ranges from okay to mother-tongue. The new diaspora gives the Australia–India relationship one of the three dimensions on which nation-state relationships are built: people.

What about the other two elements — strategic interests and trade?

Although the report is entitled an “economic strategy,” it argues that “an India economic strategy cannot exist in isolation… India should be seen not only as an economic partner but also as a geopolitical partner.” In the new world of a declining, frenzied United States and a rising, muscle-flexing China, lesser players look anxiously for friends and partners. “We have moved from Asia-Pacific to Indo‑Pacific to describe the crucible of our strategic environment,” Varghese writes. “And a large part of that shift is driven by how we see India.”

The term “Indo-Pacific” has been in vogue since the beginning of this decade and represents an effort to involve India in international agreements and discussions and thereby to dilute the effects of a powerful China. “The Indian Ocean provides a meeting point for Australian and Indian interests,” Varghese reminds us. “It extends the scope of our growing strategic congruence.”

It’s not that India is about to become an Australian “ally,” in the way that Australia is bound to the United States by treaty. But as maritime law assumes greater importance, from northeast Asia to the islands of the Indian Ocean, Australia and India will find growing cause to consult and act in concert.

But the focus of Varghese’s report is, of course, commerce and “the underlying complementarity between our two economies.” It presents two ambitious targets: to make India Australia’s third-largest export market and its third-largest investment destination by 2035. Using Australian Treasury projections, the report assumes an Indian growth rate averaging 6 per cent a year for the next twenty years. “There is no market over the next twenty years which offers more growth opportunities for Australian business than India,” Varghese argues in his letter submitting the report to the prime minister.

The report emphasises four areas of prime opportunity — education, agribusiness, resources and tourism. The “flagship” is education, where Australia has already succeeded in attracting tens of thousands of fee-paying Indian students. But there is potential for much more. India’s immense population of young people needs vastly more educational options. This is especially true of vocational training, in which only seven million Indian people are currently enrolled, compared to an estimated ninety million in China.

Tertiary education of all kinds is jealously regulated in India, and foreign participation can be viewed with suspicion. But vocational education also suffers from strong prejudices. Being a mechanic, an electrician or even a hands-on engineer is not something to aspire to, even if the salary might be good. India is looking for institutions that can navigate the regulatory jungle, deal with large numbers, make a profit — and, perhaps hardest, make vocational education attractive. Online programs may satisfy some of these requirements. The potential market is huge.

At the white-collar, clean-hands end of education, the Varghese report points out that although Australia has successfully attracted fee-paying students, it still lacks the prestige of universities in the United States and Britain. The report recommends enhancing Australia’s reputation as an educational destination by setting up a well-publicised program of Alfred Deakin Scholarships for outstanding doctoral candidates and supporting the existing New Generation Network of postdoctoral fellows established by the Australia–India Institute.

Among the report’s priority sectors, the education “flagship” is followed by three “lead sectors” (agribusiness, resources and tourism) and then by six “promising sectors” (energy, health, financial services, infrastructure, sport and innovation).

Varghese emphasises the importance of working with India’s federal system — “competitive federalism” is a feature of prime minister Narendra Modi’s government, based on his thirteen years as chief minister of the state of Gujarat — and commends the efforts of Australian states to maintain a presence there. (Victoria, for instance, has offices in Bengaluru and Mumbai.)

Ten of India’s states are singled out as places of opportunity for Australian businesses. Eight of them are obvious — the two western powerhouses of Maharashtra and Gujarat; the Delhi National Capital Region and Punjab, once India’s leading agricultural state, in the north; and Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, in the south.

The two other states are dark horses — West Bengal and its once great capital Kolkata, and the vast northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The inclusion of the latter draws attention to two aspects of the Varghese report that echo its predecessors: Australia’s need for (a) cultural and linguistic capacity and (b) patience. Uttar Pradesh is an immense potential market that will require plenty of both. Its population is 220 million; female literacy was 59 per cent in 2011; and in 2016 the infant mortality rate was the worst in India, at sixty-four deaths per thousand births. Education and health services beg for attention.

As Varghese emphasises, “regional languages become more important when directly engaging states and cities,” and this is especially true of Uttar Pradesh. Hindi, its common language, has 520 million speakers across India but is taught at only two Australian universities — the Australian National University in Canberra and La Trobe University in Melbourne. “Austrade’s current portal for international students can be viewed in eleven languages, including Russian and Italian, but there are no Indian languages.”

Six case studies of success reflect the title of one of the report’s sections, “The long view: patience, perspective and preparation.” All six enterprises explored the market carefully, maintained a constant presence in India, and planned to stay for the long term. None is a small-time player. They include the Macquarie Group, BlueScope Steel, the ANZ Bank, Monash University, the Future Fund and Simtars, Queensland’s mining safety research organisation.

So what, as they say on television, could possibly go wrong? A constructive critique of the report from an Indian perspective pinpoints a lack of focus on India’s goal of becoming a manufacturing colossus and providing jobs for tens of millions of young job-seekers. (“Make in India” is one of the BJP government’s signature campaigns.) Australian commercial propositions that offer little in these areas are likely to find muted enthusiasm among Indian businesspeople, politicians and policy-makers. The report, however, discounts the chances of India’s following an East Asian path of development, with large factories propelling rapid growth. It may be right, but India may not respond enthusiastically to this approach. “What employment prospects do your proposals offer?” is likely to be a regular Indian question.

On this view, the report’s other deficiency is its suggestion that greater commercial ties lead to closer strategic alignment. India has always seen trade and foreign policy as separate. India has a Ministry of External Affairs; Australia has a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. To assume that commerce and foreign policy go hand in hand might be to invite disappointment.

But even if the strategic and commercial flowers in the relationship bouquet don’t blossom as Australians might hope, the third flower — the India-origin population, 700,000 and growing — means the relationship has changed irrevocably. The Varghese report marks the beginning of a new era for Australian demography, commerce and foreign policy. ●

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The contrast with another of India’s recycling enterprises — the one that deals with the tiniest of items, strands of human hair — is tantalising. When you break up a ship, the dismantled components acquire value. When you collect hair, it’s the combining of millions of individual strands into a new product that creates value. Collect enough hair and you can feed your family — or even, in rare cases, become a millionaire. Ship breaking brings the world’s waste to India; hair collecting carries India’s discards to the world.

One of us, Assa Doron, first encountered the hair business when he met a group of young boys scavenging for recyclables on the outskirts of Varanasi, in Uttar Pradesh. Carrying white polypropylene sacks full of stuff collected through the morning, the boys were happy to unload the day’s catch for inspection. At first glance, the contents looked like rubbish: disordered, moist and sordid. But as the British anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote, order is established by acts of elimination and discretion — by identifying items and judging their potential.

The boys sorted their collection on the muddy ground. They picked out strands of hair and separated them carefully from the rest of the refuse, which included a fluorescent-green flip-flops, empty henna bottles, a grey wristwatch, a green soda can, a white cassette tape, and various other items, all of which were put back into the bag. The clumps of hair were placed carefully into a plastic container, where they formed a substantial black mass. “We just pick it up along the way, anywhere, on the road and drains,” said one boy. “But what do you do with it?” Doron asked. The boys explained that they sold it to a nearby Bengali hair trader.

The boys lived in a slum that housed a community of poor migrants, mostly Muslims. Their huts were made of salvaged materials: gunnysacks and tarpaulins stitched together to form walls held in place by bamboo and metal poles. The roofs were a puzzle of corrugated iron and coloured plastic sheets weighed down with automobile tyres. Most of the inhabitants relied on waste work for income.

A few of the children described the scavenging routes they followed throughout the day. With specific rubbish heaps guarded as the prized territory of particular families, they tended to forage on larger, more formal rubbish sites near roadside bins. But this could be tricky because those sites were often under the jurisdiction of municipal cleaners (safai karmachari) who had first pick of whatever came to the site.

What was especially intriguing in this encounter in Varanasi was that the waste-pickers of this slum specialised in human hair. And it was everywhere. Bundles of it lay outside the huts, drying on plastic sheets. “The hair is washed and gathered until we have a large enough quantity, and then we sell it to Mr Khan,” explained one of the boys. Water was essential for cleaning the hair, and this community, unlike others, had ready access. Throughout the day, women and children armed with buckets waited their turn at a well.

Mr Khan was a specialist, a necessary link in any chain that processes waste to give it new value. His humble office was across an alley opposite the slum, located in a small compound that served migrant rickshaw pullers from Bihar. During Doron’s visit a boy brought in a bag of hair to be weighed on large mechanical scales hanging from the ceiling. He was given ₹600 (about A$12) for 500 grams. The quick transaction represented the fruits of a few weeks of collecting.

The wad of hair was then added to one of the large gunnysacks lying against the wall, each stuffed with hair. Mr Khan described this as black, kaccha hair — raw hair. It fetched a better price than grey hair from the elderly, which he called pakka, or matured, hair. The most prized bags contained women’s long black hair, probably shaved for ritual purposes. Varanasi is a leading pilgrimage centre, and head-shaving rituals commonly mark key milestones of life.

The anthropologist Emma Tarlo examines the global hair industry in her fascinating book Entanglement. As she shows, the temples of southern India are famous for the pristine hair collected when pilgrims shave their heads there before worship. Although it is commonly known as temple hair, in professional circles it is called remi, or virgin, hair and is regarded as the purest in quality. This black gold sustains a multimillion-dollar global industry of wigs and hair extensions.

Indian women’s hair is coveted because it is usually unadulterated by dyeing, bleaching or streaking, and temple hair enjoys its reputation because much of it comes from devout rural women who have carefully groomed and oiled their hair for decades. Tarlo traces the commodity chain — whether it’s comb waste or temple tresses — as it travels along unanticipated routes, from Myanmarese hair-processing villages to Chinese factories to an international hair expo in Jackson, Mississippi. Entangled in social and cultural meaning, the global hair trade is anything but straightforward.

The specialist: weighing and bagging waste hair in Varanasi, 2015. © Assa Doron

Human hair has long been an object of fascination and reverence in India. For Hindus especially, writes researcher Eiluned Edwards, “the removal of hair is seen as an act of purification and, at a metaphysical level, represents the abandonment of ego (ahamkara), the extinction of individuality, which is a prerequisite of achieving the soul’s release, nirvana, or ‘perfect bliss.’”

Hair figures in various life-cycle rituals and pilgrimage rites. Hindus mostly speak of pilgrimage and sacrifice as a form of gratitude to God for granting good fortune, health or economic success. At Tirupati, the most famous pilgrimage centre in south India, thousands of pilgrims line up every day to have their heads shaved in purpose-built tonsuring halls, where barbers employed by the temple authorities do nothing but shave heads. Once shaved, pilgrims go to receive the blessing of the Tirupati deity.

Temple employees collect, clean and store the hair until it is auctioned to dozens of dealers eager to bid for premium material. At one auction in 2016, the Tirupati authorities reported a return of ₹50.7 million (about A$1 million). A year earlier, the starting bid for “first variety” hair, which is black and eighty centimetres or longer, was ₹25,500 (about A$505) a kilogram. The temple had only 1.3 tonnes of “first variety” to auction, but it had 194 tonnes of “fifth variety,” less than five inches long, with an opening-bid requirement of a mere ₹35 (about 70c) a kilogram.

This was a far cry from Mr Khan’s venture in Varanasi. The majority of the hair that came to him had been collected by scavengers. If he was lucky, he occasionally received high-quality long hair, usually from widows who shaved their heads to mark their new social status after seeking refuge in this sacred city. “This kind of lengthy hair,” Mr Khan explained, “could fetch up to ₹1500 per kilogram — but it is rare to get.” Most of the hair came from pavement barbers and the daily brushing of women; but another source, he added, was the countryside, where roving traders (pheriwalas) collected strands of hair that village women gathered from their combs and brushes.

So far, Doron had found four broad groups of participants in the chain that captures and gives new value to thrown-away things. There were the small boys who first caught his eye in Varanasi. They were connected indirectly to the women who discarded strands of hair. There were the pheriwalas, the travelling traders who collect hair on their rounds of small towns and villages, and there was Mr Khan, who aggregated what had been collected. In south India, there were the great temples, devotees, barbers and the authorities who organised the auctions. But to find out what happened after hair left Mr Khan’s premises, Doron was directed to Delhi.

There, on the top floor of a nondescript building near Paschim Vihar metro station, was Mr Ashok’s export business. Several women worked in a large room processing hair, some using large purpose-built combs called hackles to refine and measure it. Others packed bundles of hair. A couple of men worked on sewing machines that stitched wefts (loose hair sewn together to make a lock of hair). Outside, on a small verandah, black hair soaked in buckets of chemicals and treated hair dried on the balcony.

The adjacent room functioned as the front office, from where Mr Ashok, his wife and his brother conducted the business. The room had a large desk and brown leather sofas and was decorated with specimens of hair hanging on the walls — Brazilian, curly, raw, single, double-drawn and coloured. Everything was neat and clean.

Mr Ashok was the son of a farmer in a village near Agra. Like many of his generation, he found little appeal in following his father’s occupation. He completed vocational training at Ambedkar University and, in 2011, a master’s degree in business administration from Galgotia University on the outskirts of New Delhi. “I then began working in B2B [business to business],” he said, “in a job in sales as a marketing manager for three years. This way I could repay my [university] debt.”

The chain continues: a small-scale hair processing factory in New Delhi, 2015. © Assa Doron

Another dealer of comparable size but longer standing to Mr Ashok is Mr Sonu, whose trajectory illustrates the deep roots of waste traders. His grandfather, a Khatiik farmer from Haryana, came to the hair trade by chance in the 1970s. Most of the hair he procured ended up in Mumbai, intended for wigs and the entertainment business. Poor-quality hair was sold for stuffing mattresses. But Mr Sonu had bigger ideas for the business and looked beyond the domestic market. After some extensive web-based research, he decided to travel to Brazil, his first-ever overseas trip.

His parents disapproved of his frivolous adventure. “Why go to Brazil? Business is just here,” they told him. Eventually, he convinced them and set off for Brazil with a new passport and bundles of waste hair in a couple of suitcases. “It was amazing how fast I managed to sell the hair,” he said, “and the money covered my flight tickets and accommodation, and I even had some money left; I could not believe it.”

Mr Sonu began to travel regularly to Brazil, carrying suitcases full of hair. But smuggling hair in this way had its limits, as he discovered during the soccer World Cup of 2014. Airport security was beefed up, and the kilograms of hair in his luggage were confiscated. “That’s when I realised I must do things differently.”

Over the next few months he acquired the right documentation and licences and “lubricated the right people, otherwise nothing gets done here.” In 2015, he exported between fifty and one hundred kilograms a month to his Brazilian partner. “Business is getting better every day,” he said as he showed off recent text messages from clients in France, Angola and Spain. “Next month I am off to Norway. Have you been there?”

The hair trade earned its moment in the national limelight in 2015 when the president of India presented an award from the Federation of Indian Export Organisations to the self-styled king of waste hair for his company’s stellar export performance. A pioneer of the industry, D.C. Solanki claimed to be exporting an astonishing sixty tonnes of waste hair a month. “Last year,” he said, “my business was named the top export business in India. We are the largest traders in raw waste hair in India, which is used for wigs, hair extensions and many different products.”

A wall-size poster of India’s president with Mr Solanki and his family adorns the entrance to the company’s factory in north Delhi. “I don’t deal with temple hair, it’s too expensive; here we only use waste hair,” Mr Solanki said. “I have lakhs [hundreds of thousands] of workers all over India.” He was referring to the armies of freelance waste-pickers whose collections reached his factory through a chain of middlemen like Mr Khan in Varanasi.

The Solanki factory spans a whole block. At one end, a roofed bay contains hundreds of large polypropylene bags stuffed with hair. Once unpacked, the hair is processed in several large halls. The sacks of hair are piled at one end; brown boxes, ready for export, are stacked at the other. Workers comb, cut, measure, classify and weigh bundles of hair before packing and loading them onto trucks, destined mainly for China, Africa and Europe. The factory floor is a typical production line, but instead of producing automobiles or grading apples, workers use specialised tools to ensure quality and uniformity.

The colour code: hair being sized and packed in New Delhi, 2015. © Assa Doron

The male employees were dressed in dhotis and colour-coded t-shirts (yellow, orange and pink) that indicated their role in the factory. The yellow shirts operated in a hall that housed dozens of large plastic crates piled high with waste hair. Young men sat cross-legged on the concrete floor, combing the product on machines that looked like miniature fakir beds — long rectangular planks of wood fitted with nails pointing up. These were designed for refining large bundles of hair, after which it was measured for length and quality. The now-smooth hair was then divided into small, silky bundles, wrapped with different coloured ribbons, and placed in one of the plastic crates according to its grade and length.

This repetitive work continued in another large hall. The classified and colour-coded hair was measured again, trimmed to size and gently laid in cardboard boxes. Like glassware, luxurious hair has to be handled with care. The boxes were weighed and an information slip placed on top, noting the amount, type and length of hair. Once sealed, the boxes were moved to another large hall before being loaded onto trucks.

The trucks that took Mr Solanki’s processed hair to the airport might appear to be the end of the waste-transforming chain. The waste hair was purged of its former life, transformed into a commodity and subjected to the forces of the market. But hair is a commodity in a global market, and so it is subject — as are other recycled objects — to further surprises in the form of unexpected price fluctuations. In 2004, for instance, the hair industry received a setback as a result of the actions of a Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York.

In many Orthodox Jewish communities, women must cover their hair after marriage as a mark of modesty (tzniut). They wear head coverings (sheitel) such as hats, scarves or wigs. Wigs have become increasingly fashionable among Orthodox women, some investing thousands of dollars in wigs made of human hair. Often it is the best quality in the market — Indian hair. But in 2004, an Israeli rabbi who discovered that most human-hair wigs came from Indian temples deemed such wigs to be idolatrous and issued a ban. As the New York Times’s Daniel Wakin reported:

Synthetic wigs flew off the shelves yesterday at Yaffa’s Quality Wigs in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. On the crowded streets of the neighbourhood, an increasing number of Orthodox Jewish women were seen wearing cloth head coverings, having left their wigs at home. Sarah Klein, a neighbourhood resident, said that until the confusion was cleared up, she would leave the house only if she wore a baglike snood.

As Emma Tarlo observes, the tainted wigs were seen as too vile and dangerous for anything other than destruction by fire. Orthodox Jewish women largely stopped wearing wigs made of Indian temple hair, and the Indian hair industry had to adjust to the shock of losing a section of its market.

This globalisation story is instructive in two ways. The most obvious is the complexity of the global chain of recycling. The boundaries between the informal and formal sector are blurred, entwined and interdependent. Strands of hair like those that first attracted Doron’s attention when he saw the boys pulling them out of the gutter in Varanasi can cause a minor religious panic in New York City, which in turn causes a temporary collapse in the demand for waste hair in the back lanes of north India.

These stories also highlight the less obvious qualities that inhere in waste and recycling. Material things have histories arising from everyday personal rituals as simple as combing hair. Waste can become highly symbolic and produce strong reactions, and even discarded hair can acquire abstract qualities. ●

This is an edited extract from Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India, published this month by Harvard University Press.

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Shashi Tharoor is as sleek as Malcolm Turnbull, as prolific (almost) as Thomas Keneally and as big a media tease as Nick Xenophon. There’s nobody quite like him in Australia. (This book, he writes, would not have been finished without the “generous hospitality and support” of the King of Bhutan, who enabled him “to escape into the mountains of his beautiful country and write undisturbed”… as one does.)

Inglorious Empire originated in a debate at the Oxford Union in 2015 on the proposition that “Britain Owes Reparations to Her Former Colonies.” Speaking for the affirmative, Tharoor won in a trot, and the video of the event got three million hits on a single site. Organised as if it were an elaboration of Tharoor’s notes for that debate, Inglorious Empire lays out the evidence that the British empire harmed India and its people in ways that still torment the subcontinent. Nearly 200 years of rule by people who had no stake in the land except as a source of wealth produced famine, environmental degradation, social enmity and the deaths of millions.

Tharoor opens with an account of the opportunistic conquest of the subcontinent during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period in which East India Company employees and adventurers grew rich at the expense of Indians of all classes. Of those often brutal events, the grisliest came in 1769–70. The East India Company, having become the de facto ruler of Bengal only five years earlier, was determined to extract revenue and satisfy shareholders in London. It had no intention of mitigating a shortage (but not a complete absence) of food that led to the deaths of between ten and twenty million people.

That, Tharoor points out, was the beginning of British rule. Throughout the nineteenth century, famines were sporadic and famine deaths treated as normal and unavoidable. Another Bengal disaster came at the end, when another three million people died in 1942–43 as a result of wartime dislocation, incompetence and a bloody-minded belief among British rulers that European food stockpiles were more important than Indian lives.

Succeeding chapters address characteristics that, in the old days, were supposed to represent “the benefits of British rule.” Chapter 2 argues that the empire did not unite India. Chapter 3 contends that democracy and the rule of law were honoured in the breach more than the observance, were poorly established, were never properly funded and left a legacy of inappropriate practices and structures. Chapter 4 focuses on “divide and rule,” arguing that it suited British authorities to deplore, with crocodile tears, antagonism between Hindus and Muslims and at the same time to keep such pots simmering. Chapter 5 batters the idea that the rulers were benign agents of a “civilising mission.” With exceptions, Tharoor says, the vast majority were in India for as short a time as possible in order to earn the security to retire “home.” As further examples of the immorality of empire, he points to indentured labour and the opium trade, from which the government of India received substantial revenues well into the twentieth century.

In his sixth chapter, “The Remaining Case for Empire,” Tharoor takes apart the essay topic imposed on Indian students for generations: “The Benefits of British Rule.” Successful students were expected to reel off a list that included the railways, education and the English language. The railways were built to enrich British investors, move troops and extract raw materials. The English language aimed to colonise Indian minds and create caricature Englishmen like Nirad Chaudhuri, the anglophile Bengali writer, a favourite target of Tharoor’s. And the education system was woeful, pathetically funded, and created to manufacture low-cost clerks. Tharoor notes that he and his classmates were still getting fed Kipling in the 1970s (he was born in 1956) and that, as a student, he wrote his own wind-up to “The Ballad of East and West”:

East is East and West is West,
And never the two shall meet,
Except of course when you lie crushed
Under the Briton’s feet.

There were, though, a few minor benefits of British rule: Shakespeare, tea, cricket and P.G. Wodehouse, who “is loved by Indians who loathe Kipling and detest the Raj.”

Tharoor’s summing up comes in “The (Im)Balance Sheet,” in which he concludes that the “British state in India was… a totally amoral, rapacious imperialist machine bent on the subjugation of Indians for the purpose of profit.” A final chapter, “The Messy Afterlife of Colonialism,” argues that much of the distress of South Asia over the past seventy years can be traced to the mess that foreign rule left behind.

As Tharoor points out, there is nothing new in his critique: “similar things had been said by Indian nationalists in the late nineteenth century.” Dadabhai Naoroji published Poverty and Un-British Rule in India in 1902, the same year that the first volume of Romesh Chunder Dutt’s Economic History of India appeared. Both made detailed cases about the economic exploitation, despoilment and impoverishment of South Asia resulting from factors including the destruction of the textile industry and the enforcement of inflexible land taxation.

As a teaching tool, Inglorious Empire has enough over-egged puddings to keep attentive readers (and students) on their toes. Tharoor gives Kerala, where he holds a parliamentary seat and from where his family comes, a particularly rosy-spectacled treatment. As a politician with an election coming in 2019, he has good reason not to give voters cause for complaint. But readers may want to do a little more enquiry around the assertion that it was St Thomas the apostle who made Kerala’s first Christian converts, that “the first recorded instance in Kerala of violence involving the Muslim community” was in 1920 and that one of Kerala’s old princely states, Travancore, “became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory and free primary education for both boys and girls” in 1819. Kerala has had remarkable educational attainments, but “universal” and “compulsory” primary education in 1819 was not one of them. Travancore still struggled to get lower-caste children into schools a hundred years later.

There are assertions in the book that will set readers back on their heels (having hitherto been on their toes) and make them think about the meaning of words. “The thirty-five million who died of famine and epidemics during the Raj,” Tharoor writes, “does remind one of the twenty-five million who died during Stalin’s collectivisation drive.” It’s a question for an ethics as well as a history class: is “structural violence” — everyday systematic, inescapable deprivation that leads to immiseration and death — different from death squads?

The what-ifs in the book will also spark discussion. “Thanks to British imperialism, the organic development of the Indian state… could not take place, as it did… in Europe,” Tharoor writes. Well, yes, an Indian version of Bismarck’s Germany or Meiji Japan might have come about. But at this point — if you were setting an exam — you would give the instruction: “Why or why not? Support your answer with evidence.”

Inglorious Empire has another virtue as a teaching book: it invites discussion of sources and citations. Tharoor is immensely well read and has had some talented researchers working with him. But publishers of popular books don’t like footnotes giving sources. Footnotes put off readers, they say. Instead, this book sends curious readers to the back of the book. There they will find a few words in boldface type from the relevant section of the text and then a source for the statement.

For anyone wanting to evaluate evidence, it’s an annoying method and allows some assertions to dangle tantalisingly. A delicious vignette on page 84 about a forestalled annexation of Kashmir has no reference at all. In a classroom, the absence would provide a welcome lead-in to a discussion of the need to “cite your sources.” When one checks the origins of the Kashmir story, they appear less colourful than Tharoor’s version.

The clinching element in making this such a suitable book to provoke a want-to-know attitude about modern India lies in the interest it arouses about the author himself. The publisher’s note says this is Tharoor’s fifteenth book, and his Wikipedia entry declares that more than 50,000 copies have been sold. From 1978 to 2006, he worked at the United Nations, ten years as an under-secretary-general. He had a run for the secretary-general’s job in 2006. Today, he’s a two-time member of parliament for the moribund Congress Party. He’s been married three times. He’s only sixty-one, which by Indian standards gives him at least twenty years of vigorous political life ahead. As one marvels at his capacity, energy and restlessness, and notes (on page xxi) his cordiality with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime minister Modi, it’s hard not to wonder where both Tharoor and India go from here. •

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This is not to belittle Price’s engaging book, simply to point out that when it comes to conducting the media, Modi is unequalled. He has been a student of political communication for forty years and he makes few decisions about public presentations without calculating their impact. He chooses carefully those who get access, and he knows how to make them feel special. Modi may well have read The Spin Doctor’s Diary, Price’s insider account of the Blair government.

An account of the remarkable 2014 Indian election by an established Western political operator like Price also represents another gem in Modi’s political crown. “You can criticise me as much as you want,” he disarmingly tells Price, but what he wants to emphasise is the unique character of the 2014 campaign waged by his Bharatiya Janata Party. There’s been “no campaign before on this scale using social media and technology… anywhere in the world,” he tells Price, and he’s right. Indian elections are always astonishing, but this one was breathtaking.

Price offers the standard account of Modi’s origins and childhood. He was the son of a petty shopkeeper from a lower (but by no means the lowest) caste. He helped out on his father’s tea stall. He was an average student but a keen reader and was attracted to debating and drama. He joined the school cadet corps and then – the key youthful event – he joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, when he was about fifteen.

The RSS was, and still is, dedicated to creating a Hindu-dominated India in which its version of Hindu religion holds sway. Its roots date back to the 1920s, with some of its inspiration coming from the interwar fascist movements of Europe. It has a murky record of conflict with other religions and with those who advocate a “secular” India, in which the state maintains religious neutrality. Today, the RSS has millions of members. It also has an ideology – a body of beliefs that, however simplistic, motivates its members and makes them disciplined and active.

The official story is that Modi’s parents made an arranged marriage for him as a teenager. It was never consummated. Although his wife is still alive, the couple appears never to have lived together. Instead, Modi did what many young Indian men have done: he wandered through India as a pilgrim. A young man’s search for himself as a roaming ascetic is a time-honoured practice, as familiar to Indians as “going overseas” is to Australians. Modi was following in the footsteps of his great hero, Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), the nineteenth-century ascetic who brought Hinduism to the attention of the West when he appeared at the Chicago Congress of Religions in 1893. Vivekananda, Modi tells an interviewer, is “my spiritual and intellectual role model.”

By the 1970s, now in his thirties, Modi was a full-time RSS worker and was completing a correspondence degree from the University of Gujarat. “Until 1978 I was behind the curtains,” he tells Price, “but over the years I was picking up skills that were required and this made me a master organiser.”

Those skills were recognised in the mid 1980s when the RSS placed him with the newly formed Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. Modi’s role was to be a hinge between the two organisations, doing his best to ensure that the BJP stayed in step with the RSS. And so the full-time worker for an ideologically passionate movement became a political operative who had to build organisations to win elections. He cemented his reputation as an organiser in 1991 when he acted as advance man for a “chariot journey,” or rath yatra, a barnstorming propaganda tour by the BJP president covering much of India.

Modi’s fascination with media and organisational techniques marks him out among Indian politicians. As one profile, written after he became chief minister of his native Gujarat in 2001, quotes him as saying, “I was one of the first users of email in India. I used to chat a lot on my computer.” On Modi’s bookshelf the same interviewer noticed The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, the bestselling 1989 self-improvement manual by Stephen Covey.

Modi made two visits to the United States in the 1990s. During the 1994 trip, many photos of which are available online, he travelled widely on a visitor program. His 1999 visit is less well documented. According to one account, he had “media training” and visited for either three weeks or three months. But by 1999 Modi needed little “media training.” Indian journalists were already describing him as “the homespun saffron savant” with “an uncanny skill” for memorable one-liners.

Then, in 2001, he was shoehorned into the post of chief minister of his home state, Gujarat. A BJP government, facing elections in the coming year, was faltering, and a man who had never contested an election seemed to have the best chance of saving it.

Modi’s great stain came soon after, in February 2002. A train carrying Hindu devotees returning from a visit to a religious site stopped at Godhra, a railway station in rural Gujarat. What happened that day is unlikely ever to be clear, but a carriage was attacked, more than fifty people, most of them women and children, were burned to death and a Muslim mob was held responsible. The Gujarat government permitted the bodies of the dead to be brought in procession to Ahmedabad, and over the next few weeks at least a thousand Muslims were murdered in “counter-violence.” In one of the most widely publicised examples, an elderly Muslim, a former parliamentarian, was dragged from his home, butchered and burned.

Modi pleaded ignorance and helplessness, and went on to be exonerated by official inquiries. One of the ministers in his government, however, was convicted of murder. Modi went onto the persona non grata lists of Western governments, including the United States and Australia.

Price says that the 2002 riots were a subject Modi “refused to engage with” in his interviews. Modi’s position is that the allegations against him have been dismissed by the highest courts and he has more important things to do than go over old ground.

The riots served the BJP well. Muslims are less than 10 per cent of the population of Gujarat, and the BJP under Modi won a thumping victory in state elections in December 2002. Modi led it to further victories in 2007 and 2012. At the same time, he built a reputation as a can-do chief minister committed to vikas – development – and providing an economic environment in which ambitious people could do business. Gujarat gained reliable electricity and better roads than most of India.

On social indicators, the state hovered around national averages but well below southern states like Kerala or Tamil Nadu. The infant mortality rate, for example, was forty-eight per 1000 births in Gujarat. The all-India average was fifty; in Tamil Nadu it was twenty-eight; in Kerala, twelve. More than 40 per cent of Gujarat households did not have toilets. Primary school enrolments and retentions were close to the national average.

Though the unevenness of Gujarat’s social and economic performance was well documented, the listless Congress Party, which led the national government until last year, was unable to mount an effective critique during last year’s national election campaign. A large part of the reason for the BJP’s victory lay in the ineptitude of the outgoing government and the exasperation of voters around the country.

Price is most interesting when he describes that campaign. It was, as Modi claimed, a landmark operation that brought together a powerful combination: trailblazing technology and tens of thousands of devoted campaigners. Technology alone won’t win elections, but the right technology in the hands of fired-up supporters will.

Modi’s team organised close to 1400 “hologram rallies” – public meetings in isolated towns where his image was beamed onto a stage in 3D by telecom link. Not surprisingly, people came from far and wide to see the show. Modi, a commanding stage presence, made the most of it, even down to careful selection of his wardrobe.

As Price rightly points out, though, the unsung heroes of the campaign were the tens of thousands of BJP and RSS workers who ensured that the Modi message was emblazoned everywhere in every form – on t-shirts, in iPhone apps, on posters and on face masks. The election was won by a party of true believers, led by a ferociously motivated politician, deploying boldly innovative communication tools against a feeble incumbent government that even its sympathisers despaired of.

Price acutely highlights the fact that India’s admirable election codes and practices don’t place a ceiling, or reporting requirements, on what parties can spend. Candidates, on the other hand, have their expenses carefully monitored, and the maximum permissible expense in a parliamentary constituency is about A$120,000. But a political party can raise any amount and spend it however it likes – provided funds are not targeted for a particular candidate in a particular constituency. “It is quite possible,” Price writes, “that this was the most expensive election anywhere in the world.” Many of India’s big businesses relished the prospect of a Modi victory.

Price describes the Modi manner of functioning in well-known terms. Modi works incessantly and is financially honest. He’s in politics for the power and the glory, not the dosh. He’s ready to accept good ideas – if he can be convinced he thought of them first. He works through bureaucrats who he decides are able; he turns them loose; he is polite (and ruthless) in dealing with them and (unlike Australian prime ministers?) doesn’t phone them before dawn. He keeps political colleagues on a tight leash: nothing grows in the shade of this banyan. The only person with full access is the shadowy Amit Shah, a Gujarati politician, whom Price never gets to meet in spite of three appointments (all cancelled) and invited email questions (never answered).

Overall, what’s not to like about an honest, highly motivated man with a reputation for effectively running a state of sixty million people for twelve years?

Modi-sceptics harbour two main fears. First, the “Gujarat model” of development, crucial to the story that Modi and the BJP told so effectively to Indian voters, was never as good as the brilliant way they told it. And whether the techniques of an all-powerful chief minister in a single state can work nationally, with twenty-eight states and two dozen major languages in the mix, is an open question.

Second, Modi continues to delicately pirouette around the murderous events in Gujarat in 2002. He knows that many of his core supporters thought that the mayhem was just fine: Muslims were “shown their place” in a Hindu state in what should be a Hindu India. Modi’s attempt to express regret in an interview with Reuters in 2013 resulted in the embarrassing “puppy episode” in which he said, “If we are driving a car… and… if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is… I’m a human being. If something bad happens anywhere it is natural to be sad.”

In the year since he came to power, Modi’s supporters on the ground have steadily pushed the Hindu-ising agenda. Modi tries to stay aloof. Indeed, in June he appeared to chide overzealous (some might say inflammatory) supporters: “Some unfortunate comments have been made, which were totally uncalled for. Our constitution guarantees religious freedom to every citizen and that is not negotiable. I have said this before and I say it again: any discrimination or violence against any community will not be tolerated.”

This is what many Modi-sceptics expected: at the top, an appearance of being above the fray, focused on development and India’s place in the world; at the grassroots, and through various institutions, plenty of Hindu-chauvinist (not to mention patriarchal) seeds being planted and fertilised.

Part of the attraction of Price’s book lies in the comparisons he makes. He reckons that among Blair, Thatcher, Clinton and Obama, “none… ever engaged a crowd with such fervent, visceral passion as Narendra Modi.” Modi is also “the hardest to fathom” of the political leaders Price has encountered. Given such ambiguity, even critics might hope for the success of Modi’s “development” program and a fadeout of Hindu chauvinism. Such an outcome might result in a more prosperous, better-educated, cleaner India – something like a South Korea with a Hindu colouring no more noticeable than, say, the “Christian” colouring of Britain under its Church of England monarch. It’s a nice notion, but you wouldn’t bet the farm on it. •

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The crushing victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, and its anointed prime minister Narendra Modi brought joy to India’s stock markets, satisfaction to many millions of exasperated voters and apprehension to religious minorities and others who don’t subscribe to “Hindu values” as defined by the BJP. It was everything the Hindu-chauvinist party had hoped for: a majority in its own right in the 543-seat house, the first time India has had such a clear result since 1984. With its coalition allies, the BJP-led government will have more than 330 seats.

The defeated Indian National Congress Party, which has led coalition governments for the past ten years, was reduced to fewer than sixty seats – the worst performance ever by Asia’s oldest political organisation. A positive effect of the loss might be the withdrawal of Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born party president and widow of Rajiv Gandhi, and her son and daughter from Indian politics. The “family dynasty” has long stood in the way of a vigorous organisation founded on ideology, predictable processes and able leaders. But their voluntary exit might be too much to expect, since sycophants who depend on their patronage will strive to keep “the family” at the helm.

Business loved the result. Ballot counting began at 8 am Indian Standard Time, and by 10 am, when the Bombay Stock Exchange opened, a decisive BJP victory already looked clear. Within two minutes, the Sensex index hit a record high. It sobered up as the day went on to close about 200 points up. Significant was the fact that a favourite stock of the day was Sesa Sterlite, “a global diversified natural resources company” controlling a major lead-zinc mine in Rajasthan (junior partner, the Government of India). Sesa Sterlite’s share price rose more than 11 per cent on the day as investors relished a Modi-led, “let’s liberate business” government.

The election outcome exploded from a volcano of exasperated voters won over by a man totally committed to becoming prime minister. Narendra Modi stalked the office like a panther. He had won three elections in his home state of Gujarat and has built a reputation for having created a model state where entrepreneurs never hear a discouraging word and electricity flows all day. Motor traffic, too, moves pretty well along passable roads.

Modi’s supporters speak of the “Gujarat model” of economic progress. What they don’t mention is that among India’s states Gujarat ranks around the midway point on most indicators of human development, such as primary school education, female literacy and child nutrition. There is a lot of carefully crafted storytelling around Narendra Modi.

He has lived down the opprobrium of 2002. That’s when anti-Muslim riots, sparked by the murder of a railway carriage full of Hindus returning from a pilgrimage, ripped through Gujarat for days and killed more than a thousand Muslims, who were blamed for the railway carnage. Among the Muslim victims was a former member of parliament whose middle-class residential colony was under siege for hours before he and many others were butchered. Modi was chief minister at the time but apparently knew nothing of these dreadful events. A BJP government was in power in New Delhi.

Modi is a product of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, a militant Hindu organisation whose original inspiration owes much to the fascist mobilisations in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The RSS has thousands of disciplined, ideologically inspired members and many of them helped power the BJP’s current election campaign. The indefatigable Modi also enjoyed widespread media support. In the absence of rules preventing cross-media ownership, the Indian media are increasingly integrated and owned by big business. An industrial house may own television channels, the cables they use, a newspaper or two and some radio stations (though radio is forbidden from carrying news or current affairs). Modi had a dream run on television and in most of the press.

Industrial houses see a Modi-led BJP government as the best hope for ending paralysed government policy and triggering more investment. Ordinary people, sick of scandals and grand and petty bribery, heard that Modi was financially honest and surrounded himself in Gujarat with able, hard-working bureaucrats.

With this stunning victory, Modi will easily fend off suggestions from rivals within his own party that he doesn’t have national experience and is too divisive to lead a national government. At some stage, to be sure, he will have to reconcile the interests of big business (which likes foreign collaborations and investment) and the small traders who have been the BJP’s longtime supporters (and who fear foreign investment in areas like retail). But with his current mandate, his writ should run strong for many months.

Muslims, Christians, liberal educationists and women who don’t conform to the BJP’s ideas of “Hindu womanhood” will be apprehensive about what this BJP victory will bring. The party’s interpretation of “Hindu values” leaves little room for those who do not share them.

Modi has made a virtue of being the lower-caste son of a man who ran a tea-stall – in glaring contrast to the silver-spoon background of Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul. Now that the seven-week election soap opera has ended in precisely the way Modi would have wanted, the coming drama – long-running, if Modi has his way – might be called “Tea Shop to Top Spot,” an Indian version of “log cabin to White House.” •

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Question: When is an Indian political party like an American football team? Answer: When the party is India’s ruling Congress Party and the football team is the Denver Broncos.

The Broncos, you’ll recall, had a record-setting season, but when it came to the Big Game, the Super Bowl, they were the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. They dropped the ball again and again; they got blown away.

In 2009, the Congress Party returned to power at the head of a coalition government. Although it didn’t have a majority in parliament, the party improved its position and discarded troublesome allies. It appeared well-positioned to propel Indian prosperity and well-being.

Five years later, with general elections due sometime in the next four months, the Congress-led government is poised for a drubbing. It has repeatedly dropped the ball. Or, worse, many would say that it has looked on while someone stole the ball and sold it to a friend. The victim of its own internal structures, the Congress has overseen corruption, incompetence and an abrupt slowing of economic growth.

A laughable example of fumbling occurred recently when a high-caste Congress leader ridiculed Narendra Modi – who will be prime minister if the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, wins the coming elections – as the son of a tea-seller, fit to serve tea at Congress conclaves. Coming from a Tamil Brahmin, a member of one of India’s ancient, highly educated elites, the remark resonated, but not in the way that was intended.

India still rests on foundations of hierarchy and deference, but these attitudes are increasingly resented and challenged. Modi’s supporters celebrated the sneer about lowly tea-sellers with t-shirts proclaiming, “Chai-wala [tea-seller] my PM.” The party set up stalls in cities around the country to give away tea, sell Modi merchandise and deliver political pep talks.

For the Congress Party, the fundamental problem is that prime minister Manmohan Singh has almost no authority in the party or over his cabinet. He is a highly trained and experienced economist with a doctorate from Oxford. He is regarded as honest, and he has kept his family out of public affairs. But he has never won an election and is seen as the creature of Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress Party. And he sits in the indirectly elected upper house as a representative of the far-northeastern state of Assam. It’s almost as if Tony Blair were appointed to the European parliament to represent Greece.

For structural and cultural reasons, the Congress Party has never managed to dispense with the descendants of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and a nation-building hero of the twentieth century. That wasn’t how Nehru planned it. But when his successor died unexpectedly in 1966 within two years of taking office, Congress’s leaders, facing a near-famine and a general election, looked for a recognisable symbol to lead the party. They turned to Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi. She’ll be a “dumb doll,” they reckoned, easily manipulated after an election was won.

When Indira Gandhi was assassinated eighteen years later, she left behind a party of obsequious courtiers. The queen was dead, and her panicked courtiers, none of whom had the support to go it alone, turned to her relatives. Indira’s son Rajiv was anointed prime minister and led the party to the biggest election victory in Indian history in 1984.

Five years later Rajiv Gandhi’s government was discredited and defeated. In 1991 he was assassinated by a suicide bomber sent by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam as payback for India’s role in the Sri Lankan civil war. Today, the key wire-puller and final authority in the Congress Party is Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi’s widow, a modestly educated Italian now in her sixties.

An idealised version of the Sonia story goes like this. An Italian girl doing a short course in Cambridge in the 1960s fell in love with an Indian boy. They married; she went to live with him in India. He was an airline pilot; his mother was prime minister. The couple were very happy; they had two lovely children; he flew planes and kept out of politics; she learned Hindi and busied herself with family tasks in her mother-in-law’s house.

Inexorably, though, she was sucked into politics after the assassination first of her mother-in-law and then of her husband. What could she do to honour his memory except serve her adopted country, as the flatterers in the Congress Party kept telling her she must? By 2004, when Congress returned to power at the head of an Irish stew of a coalition, she could have become prime minister, but she wisely chose to install the honest and proven technocrat, Manmohan Singh. Meanwhile, her son, Rahul Gandhi, was pushed into inner councils of the party with a view to his eventually leading it.

This version of the Sonia story focuses on reluctance, self-sacrifice and service to the nation. The negative version contends that there are so many skeletons in the Gandhi family’s closet that the family cannot risk giving up the keys.

Reluctance is an element common to both versions. Although Rahul Gandhi is a member of parliament, he has played little part in legislative politics and has refused to take a cabinet post. If he were to become prime minister after this year’s elections, he would be as untutored in the practices of government as his father was when he became prime minister thirty years ago.

Polite, sophisticated, overseas-trained, Rahul has spent recent years on “party organisation” – efforts to revitalise a political party his grandmother eviscerated forty years ago. If he were a steam train, he would not be Thomas the Tank Engine. Not enough fire in the furnace, many say. Whether his organisational efforts will bear fruit in the long run seems unlikely. What seems probable is that the Congress will not lead the government formed after this year’s election.

THE man who does have steam in his boiler is Narendra Modi, chief minister of the state of Gujarat. Modi works day and night, throbs with political ambition and lives to be prime minister. He claims to run India’s most go-ahead state, where entrepreneurs thrive and villages get uninterrupted electricity.

Modi is not interested in pelf. Though he likes a good meal and a nicely tailored shirt, no one suggests he solicits bribes or condones officials who do. Indeed, he has a reputation for identifying able officers, giving them resources and working them hard.

What interests Modi is power. Last year his party, the BJP, endorsed him as its candidate for prime minister. Modi had endorsed himself years ago.

Through 2013, his state government ran national conferences, involving 5000 or more delegates from around India, on matters of national concern – urbanisation, rural development and similar themes. The delegates were brought to Gujarat, entertained in sparkling conference centres and treated to serious discussions, as well as a speech by Narendra Modi, televised of course. Modi is in his element on the podium; he knows how to use the microphone and the camera and how to hold an audience.

So why isn’t he a shoo-in to lead his party to victory? Because many Indians fear him as an intolerant Hindu chauvinist who permitted one of the worst outbreaks of religiously based killing in India since 1947.

In 2002, a carriage of a train carrying Hindu devotees returning from a pilgrimage was set on fire in a rural station and more than fifty people burned to death. A Muslim gang, it appeared, had set the carriage on fire. It was a ghastly crime and should have resulted in swift arrests. Instead, Gujarat endured weeks of sporadic rioting, in which mobs led by anti-Muslim zealots itching for an excuse murdered more than 800 Muslims; more than 200 Hindus were also killed, according to an official source. Through it all, Modi and his government wrung their hands and did nothing. Indeed, critics say the government egged on the killers. A BJP-led government was in power in Delhi at the time.

Since then, Modi has won three thundering election victories in Gujarat. A substantial section of Gujarat’s Hindu population harbours a visceral fear and dislike of Muslims. (Think Northern Ireland.) Muslims are only 10 per cent of Gujarat’s population.

Today, Modi’s message is about economic development and improving people’s material circumstances. Though his opponents argue that Gujarat’s achievements are grossly exaggerated (primary education and child nutrition rates, for example, are relatively poor), India’s capitalists like the state’s apparent dynamism, its relatively good roads and its reliable power.

India’s English-language media now run a stream of stories speculating about a “Modi wave” and a BJP juggernaut. It is a safe bet, however, that Modi and the BJP will not get the 273 seats needed for a majority in the lower house of parliament. No single party has hit that target for thirty years. The BJP is largely a party of Gujarati- and Hindi-speaking north India. More than half of India does not speak those languages.

India’s leading English news magazine, India Today, which has a soft spot for Modi, ran a recent poll with more than 20,000 respondents around the country. The pollsters performed their alchemy and estimated the BJP and its declared allies would win 212 seats. The Congress Party and its allies would manage only 103. And more than a dozen other parties, many with locally powerful and nationally ambitious leaders, would wrap up 228 seats.

This is where a new entrant on the party scene comes in. The Aam Aadmi (Common Man’s) Party won power in elections to the New Delhi assembly last year. Founded by exasperated citizens pledged to fight corruption and provide honest, hardworking government, it carried great hopes and underlined the almost apoplectic popular frustration with the old politics and politicians. But the old parties have attacked Aam Aadmi relentlessly, and during less than four months in power, its judgement has been called into question and its reputation frayed. By the time national elections are held, its appeal may have waned further.

What sort of prime minister would Modi be? He has run a state of sixty million people for more than ten years and won three elections. But he is a loner, a man who loves a good idea, providing you can convince him he thought of it first. He is used to telling people how high they should jump, not persuading them to jump at all. Could he hold together the immense egos and regional differences that would have to be blended into a BJP-led coalition government? He would not fail for lack of guile or effort.

Elections have not yet been called, and Indian politics have never been more volatile. Today, through the spread of cheap mobile phones, more Indians than ever before get daily information, entertainment and appeals. Much depends on the strength of political organisations in India’s twenty-eight states. Through them, voters will be identified, energised and pestered to vote.

A hung parliament looks likely, with circumstances similar to those in 1996–99 when India experienced three general elections and four prime ministers. But those circumstances may suit Modi and his party if a large and exasperated section of India runs out of options. •

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The astute title, An Uncertain Glory, nails their colours to the mast. There is a sort of glory about today’s India. Its existence and endurance are gloriously improbable. India is the world in microcosm, yet with a single government holding the place together. That government mitigates the tensions that arise among 1.2 billion people practising all the world’s great religions (a little thin on Judaism, but it’s present nonetheless), speaking twenty-two official languages written in eleven different scripts, and divided not merely by wealth but by stubbornly resilient ideas of “caste.” Is this what global government might look like?

At its best, the Indian state espouses — and occasionally manages to practise — humane, rational and egalitarian policies. Its Election Commission is a model. If the world were a fair place and elections were run even-handedly and efficiently, US elections would be contracted out as an aid-to-America project run by the Election Commission of India. Its superior courts can be bold and independent. Its media world of 800 television channels and 160 million newspapers printed every morning is unique for its diversity and freedom. (Don’t take seriously the ridiculous Index of Press Freedom that recently ranked Burkina Faso more than ninety places higher than India.)

None of this, however, puts food in stomachs, combats disease or teaches children. The “uncertainty” of anything glorious about today’s India stems from its dismal record in improving the lot of vast numbers of its people. In the past twenty years, “nutrient levels… have decreased” — those are Drèze and Sen’s italics — for the population as a whole.

The authors emphasise two points they want readers to remember amid the gloomy record. First, India needs economic growth, expansion and capital, and it needs social development; and both need to be guided by a capable state. Second, India needs democracy, and it needs to use more effectively the opportunities that democracy provides. In 1959–62, an estimated thirty million people died in the Chinese famine; in the Indian food crisis of 1965–66, there was dearth, but people didn’t eat grass and starve by the roadside. A free press, Sen has argued previously, alerted and energised governments.

In spite of impressive economic growth over the past twenty years, however, the overall record of the Indian state is maddeningly poor when compared with many ex-colonial countries. In providing nutrition to children, for example, India has a poorer record than Bangladesh and the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. More than 40 per cent of Indian children under five are underweight, according to the World Health Organization; the proportion in sub-Saharan Africa is 25 per cent. “Many gender-related indicators are now much better in Bangladesh than in India,” report Drèze and Sen. Fifty per cent of Indian households don’t have toilets; more than 90 per cent of Bangladeshi households do. Comparisons likes these go on for thirty-five pages.

The book’s five middle chapters are its core. Each analyses an area in which the Indian state has failed to provide the great leaps forward that would lift hundreds of millions of people to decent levels of nutrition, health, education, shelter and human equality under honest, effective government.

At the centre of all this is government. Drèze and Sen argue that India needs public enterprises, but they need to be efficiently and honestly run, which they’re not at the moment. Electric power is poorly distributed and stolen from its transmission lines; in some states, bills go unpaid; farmers, especially well-off ones, get electricity for nothing, and they also get subsidised fertilisers for their fields and subsidised diesel fuel for their vehicles and water pumps. In fact, subsidies for the prosperous cost the exchequer more than US$90 billion in 2011–12, or 5 per cent of India’s GDP.

Corruption, which “has become… an endemic feature of Indian administration and commercial life,” helps to explain why institutions don’t do what they are set up to do. Drèze and Sen see some progress here. A Right to Information Act makes it easier to bring corruption to light, and modern media — cell phones, for example — make it easier to publicise and shame corrupt people. However, “the third front — effective prosecution” — is where little progress is made. Crooks beat the rap too often and easily.

In education and health, relatively small elites have looked after themselves. Today, they take their illnesses to an increasingly privatised health system. The public system, on which the vast majority depend when they are not relying on quacks, crumbles. Primary education in many of India’s states is pathetic. In a survey of educational attainment among fifteen-year-olds in seventy-four countries, India finished at the bottom with Kyrgyzstan. But India has excellent institutes of management and technology and some outstanding liberal arts colleges.

Drèze and Sen argue in favour of a universal system of subsidised food, as opposed to “targeting” of poor people. They are sceptical of plans to replace subsidised food with cash payments to the poor. Attempts to define a poverty line, they argue, are so arbitrary that millions of people get left out. And even with a rags-and-rumbling-stomachs definition of where poverty begins, 350 million people would have qualified as BPL (Below the Poverty Line) in 2010. The authors’ advocacy of universal access to subsidised food, and of the national program that entitles any Indian to one hundred days of work each year at a low basic wage, is not surprising. Drèze has been involved in the evolution of both schemes. His advocacy has to be respected because he researches relentlessly in rural India.

The authors acknowledge that “caste” makes India different from other places. Inequality exists everywhere, they write, but India “has a unique cocktail of lethal divisions and disparities.” In spite of sixty years of affirmative action to bring equality to the most disadvantaged groups (the so-called Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes), “caste continues to be an important instrument of power in Indian society” and reinforces disadvantages that come with gender and poverty.

India’s higher castes constitute no more than 25 per cent of the population, but they overwhelmingly dominate elite occupations. Drèze’s survey of organisations in the city of Allahabad in north India found that the leaders of everything from the police and trade unions to newspapers, justice institutions and universities were 75 per cent from these upper castes.

And running through these tales of disparity is the fact that girls and women fare worse than boys and men — in nutrition, education, wages, health and safety. One estimate puts the number of abortions of girl babies at between 300,000 and 600,000 a year.

WHY is a country that produces global sophisticates like writer Amitav Ghosh, prime minister Manmohan Singh and conductor Zubin Mehta unable to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of its people?

As their final chapter (“The Need for Impatience”) suggests, Drèze and Sen want to know, too, because time may be running out. They don’t say it in so many words, but implicit in what they write is a sense that the glaring inequalities of India cannot persist forever without some profound upheaval. As they put it, “The enormity of the social division… makes it much harder to use the normal tools of democracy… to confront the inequalities involved.”

They don’t suggest for a moment that political revolt is in prospect. India’s “Maoist movement” gets only three entries in the index. Indeed, “underprivileged Indians are reluctant to rise and demand a rapid and definitive removal of their extraordinary deprivation.” But behind the sorry tales they recount lurks the question, “How long can this go on?”

Drèze and Sen don’t suggest what sorts of upheavals might lie ahead. But globalisation is rapidly breaking down the deference and isolation that once kept poor and lowly people obsequious, ignorant and disconnected in the countryside. Increasing urban desperation and lawlessness are one possible outcome. Another possibility is major disaster brought on by ecological degradation or epidemic disease. A more appealing prospect is that the poor will organise and use the tools of democracy, as they have to a certain extent in some Indian states, to make constructive change happen.

Drèze and Sen argue that change is possible. Their book, indeed, is intended to accelerate a process — “public reasoning,” they call it — that puts hideous disparity and unfairness in front of India’s middle classes and power-holders every day. Relentless recognition and discussion, they contend, are essential to goad politicians and policy-makers to follow through on programs that have produced creditable social achievements in other countries and in a few regions of India.

It is clear that some of India’s states have done better than others in providing tolerable standards of life. Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the two most southern states, lead on most indicators of education, health and poverty alleviation. Do they have recipes that can readily be applied elsewhere?

The answer, regrettably, is no. The similarity between Kerala and Tamil Nadu is that both have had vigorous two-party political systems for more than fifty years. Well-organised, competitive political parties, driven by motivated workers, strive to deliver tangible benefits to voters. They know that if they don’t, voters will punish them by electing their well-organised, hyper-critical, desperate-to-be-back-in-power rivals at the next opportunity. The state of Kerala has only re-elected a government once in its history (and that was a special circumstance after Indira Gandhi’s 1975–77 “emergency”). Tamil Nadu has had ferocious two-party politics since independence.

But the political systems of Kerala and Tamil Nadu grew out of their own cultural soil. You can’t conjure up meaningful political organisations by waving a report from the World Bank.

This sobering book, with its thirty tables and eighty pages of notes and appendices, has the marks of diligent, able research assistants clawing together material. Readers may hanker after a little more Drèze and Sen and a little less United Nations report. One craves the telling anecdote or vivid experience that hammers home key points and makes them memorable.

The book would also have benefited from more attention from the publishers. The tables are not indexed in a single list, so the reader who wants to find a particular one must burrow page by page to find it. And though there is a map, it is buried in chapter eight, and it is intended only to show state disparities in the ratio of men to women. Since interstate comparison is a central aspect of the book, a little more effort in map-making would have given impact to some of the arguments.

Drèze and Sen take heart from Adam Smith’s assertion that if people can get into bad habits, they can also be guided by good ones. The hope for change must come from a number of sources: reform of administration and detection of corruption; more effective incentives for abiding by the law; legal reform; expanding the Right to Information Act; and “investigative journalism” that relentlessly exposes wrongdoing and inequity.

Drèze and Sen argue that many of the conditions for change already exist — the Right to Information Act, vigorous media, honest judges and durable political organisations in some states. One of the keys, in their view, is more effective use of these conditions. Media need to shed their “bias and selective focus — playing up some issues and events while ignoring others.” Something like that, they suggest, is what occurred in Kerala and Tamil Nadu: inequity was thrust in front of most people’s noses every day from the 1940s. In a democratic India, “public reasoning and social action” have the potential, they assert, to make the needs of “so many people” an inescapable issue of discussion and constant action. •

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“IT IS the girls who have gone astray,” a village elder told a journalist after the rape of a girl near New Delhi in early 2012. “The girls... are so scantily clad that it’s shameful... Mobile phones have given a lot of freedom to these girls and that’s why they are behaving in a wild manner.” It is a common theme. The autonomy provided by the phone leads young people, especially girls, to elude the authority of those who would have controlled and disciplined them in the past. In this, as in many other ways, the mobile phone symbolises the disruption of Indian life by much wider economic, cultural and technological forces.

Before the mobile phone, landlines existed in India, but they were the preserve of the privileged (and even they had to wait years for a connection). The mobile phone, by contrast, is said to have reached a stunning 900 million subscribers since its full-blooded arrival in India just over a decade ago. Cheap mobile phones mean that Indians of every status are able to speak with each other as never before.

For governments and great corporations, and for entrepreneurs who would like to be great, the mobile phone represented an immense challenge and opportunity. Between 1993, when the technology began to be deployed in India, and 2012 the country had ten communication ministers. One of them was convicted of corruption and sent to prison; a second was also charged with corruption; a third faced probes that would take years to unravel; a fourth was murdered (though in circumstances not directly related to telecommunications); a fifth was undermined, overruled and rancorously removed. For governments, bureaucrats, regulators and politicians, telecommunications offered a bed of thorny roses, and it is these contests over decision-making and power that we try to understand in the first part of our book – the Controllers.

The mobile phone expanded faster than the automobile. It was cheaper, of course, but many more people were involved in the chain that connected manufacturers to customers. There was nothing natural about wanting to have a mobile phone: the technology was alien and calls were expensive. The process to build infrastructure and create demand involved trial, error and millions of dollars invested in what was still an unknown future. As the technology spread in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a vast enterprise bubbled up alongside it, with a cascade of occupations and jobs.

These were the Connectors, people ranging from the fast-living advertising women and men of Mumbai to small shopkeepers persuaded by their suppliers to stock recharge coupons for prepaid mobile services. In between were the technicians who installed transmission equipment; the office workers who found sites and prepared the contracts to install transmission towers (400,000 in 2010); the construction workers and technicians who built and maintained the towers; and the shop owners, repairers and secondhand dealers whose premises varied from slick shopfronts to roadside stalls only slightly more elaborate than those of the repair-walas who once fixed bicycles on the pavement. The Connectors ensured even those with limited purchasing power participated in India’s booming economy.

Once the mobile phone reached “the masses,” the masses became the third group in the chain, the Consumers. Mobile phones were used for business and politics, in households and families and to commit crime and organise terror. But the phone was only a tool. Its effects depended on the knowledge and resources of the people using it, and “middle men” usually started with advantages that “lesser” men and women did not share. In politics, the mobile phone was a device that allowed organisations that were already bound together by convictions to exert influence in a manner that hitherto was impossible. Fancy technologies alone don’t win elections, but cheap, easy-to-use technology gives people with common interests a powerful new weapon with the potential to mobilise and disrupt existing political and social structure.

AS THE technology entered people’s lives, they had to deal with its varied effects: on household economies, parenting practices, intimate relationships, youth culture and much else. Values and meanings – how people regarded “public” and “private,” or the proper roles of men and women in controlling technology – were reshaped in the process. In India, the cheap mobile phone enabled young couples to talk to each other unknown to disapproving elders or for daughters-in-law to talk to fathers-in-law as they had been unable to do in the past. Transactions like these occurred in tens of millions of families almost daily from the early years of the twenty-first century. As they accumulated, like grains of sand on a windswept beach, the dunes of social practice began to shift.

Beyond India’s cities, and among conservative people in the cities themselves, the mobile phone became a metaphor for changing values and practices related to domesticity, sexuality and morality. In a time of rapid change and disarray, certainties were challenged by ballooning consumerism, relentless migration and unprecedented access to information. The mobile phone embodied the ills of an anxious modernity.

In the cities, it became common to see middle-class women, dressed in Western-style business suits or jeans, using their mobile phones wherever they went. Advertising campaigns were quick to tap into these changes, using images of alluring women to promote mobile phones; makers of music videos incorporated the apparent liberation bestowed by the mobile phone into songs and dances.

For new, “liberated” women, the phone was portrayed as a perfect vehicle for gossip (gupshup), romance or the promotion of exciting social relations. Many songs and videos featured women – popularly known as mobile walis – speaking on their mobile phones to their lovers. Though available in CD/VCD shops and later on YouTube, they were most popular on mobile phones.

Music clips featured seductively clad women using mobile phones, dancing in come-hither style and singing lyrics peppered with double meanings. Well before it entered the mainstream music market popular Bhojpuri music had been characterised by “clever phrasing, double entendres, subtle innuendos and suggestive imagery that enabled it to convey taboo sexual acts and desires.” For at least one critic, though, the “raunchy flavour” of Bhojpuri music in VCD/DVD formats and on mobile phones was indistinguishable from soft pornography. Yet the music also retained its capacity to satirise the “modern condition” and laugh at the antics of both women and men as they coped with new times and customs.

One video clip begins with Tiwari, well-known the singer, daydreaming of a woman he met in a bar. It cuts to a scene where a glamorous young woman in a halter-neck top, tight jeans and loose hair dances seductively while drinking alcohol and talking on her mobile phone. This mobile wali is depicted as a daring, sexy tease: a woman who defies the norms that usually bind Indian women. She dances, smiles, drinks, smokes and wears skimpy clothes – all with a mobile phone in her hand. This is her style, as the chorus says:

Mobile in [her] hand, she has a smile on her lips.
She radiates style whenever she moves sideways, forwards, up or down.
Everyone, including neighbours are dying [from excitement]
[Because] the babe, having drunk beer... Oh baby, having drunk beer…
The baby (babe) dances chhamak-chhamak-chham.

The following scenes revolve around the woman who makes men drool as she struts around with a mobile glued to her ear. She is both objectified as a femme fatale and empowered as someone who can choose from those around her or from others at the end of her phone. The song continues:

Forever ready to explode with anger [and] swear words on your lips,
You move the way life moves out of one’s body [when one dies].
The cap worn back to front, dark sunglasses, the cigarette is Gold Flake [a famous Indian brand],
I’m working at trying [to seduce you], there is still some time to go
before we get married.

The young woman remains remarkably composed, comfortably entering male-only arenas and adopting male-dominated practices, such as drinking alcohol in a bar and smoking in public spaces, all this while talking on her mobile phone. Only among urban sophisticates could such conduct be imagined. The singer and his rustic male companions go to pieces under her spell. The main male character warns his friends: “She shoots Cupid’s arrows with her eyes.” True to the Bhojpuri genre of satire, the clip ridicules the lewd, drunken men at the same time as it reminds viewers of the challenges that new attitudes and technologies present to old values.

The clip vividly illustrates the confrontations with tradition that cheap mobile phones provoked. The panicking priest reminds viewers of the precariousness of religious structures and the frailty of people in authority. In the final scene, the priest succumbs to temptation and joins the men in a dance around the woman, who still holds her magic wand – her mobile phone. Portrayed as a loose, urban woman, the mobile wali breaks long-established rules of conduct, partly empowered by her mobile phone. It could lead a village elder to apoplexy.

Another video clip, Mobile Wali Dhobinaya, betrays a larger anxiety: that of the “village” divested of its men, who have increasingly moved to the cities in search of work. The sari-clad wife roams alone in the fields, with only a cell phone to communicate with her absent husband. The theme recurs in many video clips where the bemused Bihari migrant labourer arrives in the city. He finds a forbidding place, filled with voluptuous mobile walis, riding on scooters and confidently chatting on their mobile phones in public. This time, however, it is the Bihari bhaiya (village guy), a shadow of his former male self, who is depicted as helpless and confused at the sight of these city women with phones clapped to their ears.

We found more than a dozen popular songs at this time that highlighted how young men and women could connect through the mobile phone. The mobile wali was anything but the demure maiden presented to a select group of future in-laws prior to an arranged marriage. Rather, she was flirtatious, uninhibited and confident, challenging established social conduct and “traditional” values. None of this, of course, was “pornographic” or contrary to the law. Yet for guardians of old values, the unconstrained freedom enjoyed by the mobile wali led morality towards dark, wayward ways.

The mobile wali–style clips are relatively innocent. But some Indian manufacturers of handsets, eager to eat into Nokia’s dominance, have used racier material to advertise their phones. The Lava brand marketed its Lava 10 phone in 2010 with a television commercial in which a supermarket cashier gives customers their change in the form of teabags, a common solution to a shortage of small coins. Then a handsome young man, and his even more handsome Lava 10 mobile and its “sharp gun-metal edges,” come to the checkout. The winsome cashier abandons teabags as change and gives him a packet of condoms. Lava, the tag-line declared, “separates the men from the boys.” In 2012, Chaze Mobile, manufacturers of ultra-cheap cell phones, hired Sunny Leone, a Canadian citizen of Indian origin and a leading actor in pornographic videos, as their “brand ambassador” for a new range of multi-featured yet very cheap phones. Gambling on Leone’s notoriety, the company aimed “to position its product in an extremely cluttered low-end handsets market.”

IN INDIA, the mobile phone was not the old landline that had slipped into daily life in Western countries as unnoticed, in the words of sociologist Claude S. Fischer, as “food canning, refrigeration and sewage treatment” and become “mundane.” The mobile phone, as Clay Shirky argues in Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens when People Come Together, now means that “the old habit of treating communications tools like the phone differently from broadcast tools like television no longer makes sense.” The potential to record and to broadcast, at one time limited to those who controlled presses and transmitters, was now available to the majority of people, even the poor.

Alongside music and screen savers featuring gods, WWF wrestlers and Bollywood stars, mobile phones have also brought cheap, full-colour, small-screen pornography to the masses. Pornography could be made available everywhere—from kaccha houses to penthouses. But though police and morality crusaders aimed mostly at the poor, the powerful too were vulnerable to the seductive properties of the cell phone. In an incident in the Karnataka state legislature that came to be dubbed as “Porngate,” two MPs were caught viewing what were said to be pornographic clips on a mobile phone while a debate was going on. The legislators belonged to the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, constant advocates of censorship in the name of preserving morality and Hindu values.

Mobile phones also facilitated crime and terrorism. Indeed, they created new crimes – harassment through text-messaging, for instance, and “faceless frauds” in which money disappeared without a victim ever seeing the criminal. And, as the Mumbai attacks in 2008 demonstrated, mobile phones enabled gullible young terrorists to be directed like human drones by remote “controllers.”

India experimented with a host of initiatives to establish mobile phone laws and cyber-security frameworks; but provisions were scattered through legislation, guidelines and rules. In 2012, proposals were made to establish a “telecommunications security testing laboratory” to certify that all telecom equipment conformed to government regulations and did not harbour illegal tapping or disruptive devices. Such an organisation, however, was many months or years away from functioning. State police forces established modest mobile cyber-crime labs that attended crime scenes and collected evidence effectively.

Indian governments, however, faced a problem that wealthy states such as those in Japan, western Europe and North America had not solved: how to mitigate the evils that mobile phones could generate while preserving their capacity to improve even a poor citizen’s ability to take advantage of the rights of democratic citizenship.

But mobile phones can both empower and disempower, and it can be a distraction to focus on questions of good or bad. The technology exists; immensely powerful economic forces, augmented by widespread social acceptance, have disseminated it widely; and it will only go away if a major cataclysm befalls humanity. We live with mobile telephony, and most of us relish the benefits. India in this sense is no different from other places. But its disabling inequalities and its diversity mean that the disruptive potential of the mobile phone is more profound than elsewhere and the possibilities for change more fundamental. •

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NINETEEN SEVENTY-FIVE was a bad year for governments in India and Australia, and 2011 isn’t looking all that flash either. In India, an almost leaderless government staggers like a battered boxer in the face of an “anti-corruption movement” focused around a village social worker, Anna Hazare. In Australia, Labor Party politicians confess that the party hasn’t been so out of favour with so many voters since the Whitlam years.

The Australian High Commissioner to India back in 1975, former journalist Bruce Grant, wrote a book called Gods and Politicians comparing the circumstances of the “emergency” declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975 with the operatic ending of the Whitlam government, dismissed by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, in the same year. (Irreverent commentators suggested that “god” in the title referred to Whitlam and “politician” to Mrs Gandhi.)

A few superficial similarities gave Grant’s book its starting point, though he had to draw a bow longer than Robin Hood’s to sustain the comparison. What worked was the fact that both the Whitlam and Gandhi governments of the early 1970s had been elected with tremendous hope and enthusiasm. Both had seen that support dissolve into sour antagonism, and both ended in constitutional crises.

Indira Gandhi’s government faced a widespread protest movement in 1974–75 led by a veteran nationalist, Jayaprakash Narayan. Convicted of electoral malpractice, Mrs Gandhi twisted the constitution, and the arm of the figurehead president, to impose authoritarian rule for nineteen months. For its part, the Whitlam government, though still commanding a majority in the lower house, was on the receiving end of contortions of Westminster precedent when the governor-general put Malcolm Fraser in the prime minister’s chair.

Today, Australians don’t need to be reminded of the dispiriting tale of the Labor-led governments elected since 2007. But in India, disillusion and alienation run wider, deeper and more dangerously. The worst likely to happen to Australia is a government led by Tony Abbott. India’s future, on the other hand, could head down one of a number of tunnels, some of them longer and darker than others.

India faces two anti-government movements that are so different they make chalk and cheese look like love and marriage. The movement focused around Anna Hazare, the seventy-four-year-old ex-soldier turned village-uplift leader, is urban and middle-class – and makes for great television. India has 140 million television households and 500 channels, fifty of them devoted to news. Hazare dresses in the homespun white cloth of the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi. He calls for simple solutions: empower super-honest super-executives to track down and punish the corruption that gnaws at all levels of life.

The second anti-government movement is less easy to televise and often produces grisly images. The “Maoist movement” in the hills and forests of east and central India is a violent revolt led by true believers. These high-caste ideologues of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) see themselves as leaders of a long struggle. For them, India today is China in 1930. Riding into Beijing (read New Delhi) in triumph is twenty years away; they will work and wait. They garner support primarily from tribal people exploited by economic interests hungry for the natural resources of remote places.

The television channels eagerly backing Anna Hazare are equally keen to denounce the subversive violence of the Maoists, whose television presence is usually associated with the bloody bodies of dead police officers. Hundreds of police, civilians and insurgents have been killed in the past ten years.

Neither the Maoists nor the Hazare followers present promising paths to India’s future. The Hazare people offer patriotic slogans, a pale Hindu-chauvinist tinge and an all-powerful anti-corruption superperson. Ironically, that is what Mrs Gandhi claimed to be offering in 1975. “Discipline,” the slogans said in those days, “is the need of the hour” and, for a time, offices ran on time and overt bribe-taking declined.

The superperson solution points down a path to authoritarianism. But dictators are particularly unrealistic in a country as diverse as India. The Indian state as we know it cannot survive unless it is democratic and federal. Only rule-based decision-making (however fraught) and meaningful local government can accommodate the linguistic, religious, regional and caste diversity of India.

India’s national government today is rudderless. The Congress Party president, Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of Indira Gandhi’s son, is seriously ill in the United States. Her illness and condition are treated like state secrets. Her son Rahul, though an engaging man, shows few signs of galvanising the nation. The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, is seen as an able scholar and an honest man, but also as a hopeless campaigner who has never won an election and consequently wields little authority in the Congress Party. (He sits in parliament’s upper house, whose members are elected by state legislatures.)

Elections are not due until 2014, but if the drift continues, and the anti-corruption movement waxes, Manmohan Singh’s coalition government could fall apart.

Three developments suggest, however, that long-term positives could emerge from the Hazare movement. The first is fundamental cultural change. Fifteen years ago, no one would have believed that Indian governments could, for example, ban smoking. The state of Kerala did in 1999, and Kerala today is remarkably smoke-free; scolded smokers quickly stub out their butts.

Second, the mobile phone is transforming India. By one calculation, there are more than 800 million mobile phone subscribers. That means seventy telephones for every hundred living Indians, from babies to octogenarians – in theory, a phone within reach of every adult.

Third, people are using their mobiles to record, photograph and harass officials and agencies that don’t do their duty. In the Maoist-affected state of Chhattisgarh, a tribal delegation, exasperated at being shouted at and told to go away when they brought grievances to a local official, recorded his rants on a mobile phone. They disseminated the recording through CGnet, a cell-phone-based news service geared especially for tribals; it became a national story; and some redress followed.

If the anti-corruption movement of Hazare can develop mechanisms for relentless exposure of petty corruption, it can engineer a substantial cultural change. Dealing with big-time corruption, on the other hand, requires insulating India’s existing institutions from the termites of political manipulation that often hollow them out. Adding a new institution – the super anti-corruption czar – may only add another tree, just as vulnerable to political termites as those already there. •

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Anand Giridharadas does agonise over being an American with Indian roots and connections. But he does it with art and insight. You feel he has bled to write this book. There’s a revealing tribute to his agent, who took on the author “when this was a book about democracy.” The manuscript must have changed a lot; it isn’t about democracy now, not in the way that a political scientist would understand it. It is about people, including the author, and the way in which he and we might try to understand a dramatically changing India through scrutiny of some very different lives.

Giridharadas uses a clever stylistic device to turn his journalistic experience to account. He builds the book around six chapters – Dreams, Ambition, Pride, Anger, Love and Freedom. Focusing on personal stories, each chapter helps us visualise the monumental changes that are eating holes in the social straitjackets that bound old India.

The best chapter is “Ambition.” Giridharadas goes to Umred, a town located slap-bang in the middle of India. He goes there to write about a riot, but he meets a young man called Ravindra who is organising Umred’s Mr and Miss Personality Contest. To Giridharadas, this seems bizarre – like someone organising Back of Bourke Idol or Woop Woop Talent Quest. But Ravindra brings off an event, modelled on television programs, that proves immensely popular with young people in and around the small town. Giridharadas is fascinated because this is not the way rural India worked in the old days when villagers, even high-caste ones, did not travel much, know much about the outside world or mingle freely on public platforms.

Ravindra comes from a low-caste family of farm labourers – oil-pressers once upon a time – ranking only a little above untouchables. He went barefoot till he reached Year 9 in school. Giridharadas tells the story of Ravindra’s exposure to television – “on TV you see the things of world-class standard” – his enrolment in English classes, his love of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, his commitment to self-improvement and entrepreneurship, and his unsuccessful romance. When the book leaves him, he has become manager of the Indian national rollerskating team. (Did you know India had a national rollerskating team? Neither did I. But, as they say, check out the website.)

Ravindra’s story makes the changes of the last twenty years real and vivid, and shows us how remarkable they’ve been. Giridharadas juxtaposes Ravindra’s story with the life of his maternal grandfather – a cosmopolitan from a merchant caste in Punjab who became a top executive with Hindustan Lever, one of India’s grand old companies. This grandfather, who reads the newspapers every morning, writes letters to politicians and knows how to dine with a fish knife, carries a lot of the book. His story is also set against that of the Ambani family, India’s ultimate nouveau riche family – ruthless, rule-less, vulgar and immensely wealthy and successful. Ravindra aspires to it; Giridharadas’s grandfather loathes it.

Giridharadas writes of Ravindra with delicacy, respect and curiosity. The people who populate the other outstanding chapter get a rougher ride. In “Freedom,” the protagonists are a joint family (we’d called it an extended family) of Punjabi merchants in Ludhiana. It’s a town that has already given the world some cruel and witty portraits of petit bourgeois life in Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana (1995). (What is it about Punjab state’s largest city that produces such Dickensian characters? Could it be its commitment to commerce? Wikipedia carries a long, “incomplete” list of Ludhiana’s shopping malls.)

The family whom Giridharadas visits lives in a large house as a joint family should. But it has an upstairs portion (clean, furnished, modern and in good repair) and a downstairs portion (none of the above). Upstairs Chacha (uncle) is trying to get ahead as a go-go twenty-first-century businessman with all the material goods that go with it. Downstairs Chacha is disorganised, old-fashioned – and constantly entreating Giridharadas to join him for “whiskeychickenmutton,” three big no-noes for a good caste Hindu and therefore all the more deliciously naughty.

Giridharadas does a fine job making me interested in Downstairs Chacha; but you have to wonder how Downstairs Chacha will feel when somebody points out to him – as surely they will – that someone to whom he opened his house portrayed him as a clown.

This raises another aspect of the book. In spite of his name, Giridharadas is an American, raised in Cleveland (what did they call him at school?). He certainly visited India regularly during his childhood, and went to Mumbai to work after university. Later, he became a correspondent for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.

Some Indian reviewers have given the book a sniffy reception, so sniffy that Giridharadas devoted his 26–27 February 2011 IHT column to the criticism – “Who is this foreigner to tell us about India?” – he received on a recent Indian book tour. To me, the answer to that question is that a book must be judged on what it says, not whom it’s by, and what Giridharadas says, he says well. He writes cleanly and thoughtfully, and the reader shares his struggle to make sense of what India was for his parents and grandparents and what it is becoming today.

The book’s other chapters are “Pride” (the Ambani family and Giridharadas’s maternal grandfather), “Anger” (a Maoist leader of southeastern India) and “Love” (the divorce courts of Mumbai and Giridharadas’s paternal grandmother). All three chapters grow out of Giridharadas’s fox-terrier, shoe-leather reporting. The first two tell stories that are fairly well known, but the last is enterprising, original and insightful. It revolves around his grandmother’s account of her marriage in 1942, played off against Giridharadas’s experiences with people at the Mumbai divorce courts.

This neatly executed book is artful, entertaining, insightful and humble. It concludes with Ravindra, the entertainment and rollerskating impresario, who stands for so much of the social upheaval that Giridharadas tries to understand. For Ravindra, unlike any of his forebears, “destiny is in the mind,” Giridharadas concludes – “you must imagine, not know, your place.” It’s not your dharma or your karma but your drive that determines your destiny. Tens of millions of young Indians now share such attitudes, attitudes that would have seemed strange, perhaps unthinkable, to their grandparents. •

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THE ARRIVAL of 100,000 Indian students in the past five years is the biggest thing to happen to relations between the Australian land mass and the Indian subcontinent since the 1790s. That’s when the Campbell family started trading between Kolkata (Calcutta) and Sydney. Scottish-born Robert Campbell later migrated from India to Australia, where he built the first “bungalow,” became “a leading public figure” and earned a long entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Similar happy outcomes, I hope, lie in the future for many of the students from India who are putting substance into the puzzling 220-year relationship between their country and Australia. You have to look forward to good things, because some very bad things have happened in the past couple of years. When people are murdered, attacked and abused, and when individuals are picked on because they are obvious and alone, a nasty side of Australian society is revealing itself.

As a result, we are at a crucial turning point in the story of Australia and its ties with India. The harrowing tale of the past year can foreshadow the broader, deeper relationship whose absence has puzzled analysts for years. But thought, effort and imagination will be needed to bring a positive ending to an anguished chapter.

There’s been much agonising over what has caused “the outbreak of attacks on Indian students” and over whether these assaults are “racist.” The Indian media have been keen to get Australian officials to use the R word. Australians twisted like circus contortionists to avoid doing so until Simon Overland, chief commissioner of the Victorian police, said the sensible thing late last month: “I have said from day one undoubtedly some of these attacks have a racist motive or there [are] racist elements to these attacks.”

The fascination with the word “racism” is understandable, and the fact that Australians have struggled so hard to avoid using it is a sign of better, not worse, times. From the Indian side, it was reasonable, once a number of assaults on Indian students were reported, to say: “Just as our grandparents told us: it is White Australia after all.” When I first lived in India in the late 1960s, there weren’t a lot of Australians – I worked with other Canadians, British and Americans – but if you mentioned Australia to Indian friends, their response was usually, “Oh yes, White Australia,” as if White Australia were the name of a country like North Korea or Papua New Guinea.

That’s not surprising, since Australians in the twentieth century had gloried in the fact that Australia was a White Man’s Country, and “White Australia” was a proud policy of Australian governments. As Gwenda Tavan writes, it was only in 1945 – Australians by that time having fought next to Indian soldiers in two world wars – that “government ministers adopted... the recommendation of External Affairs advisers that the White Australia slogan be dropped from public discourse.” It hung around, however, till well into the 1960s.

Australian immigration policy after 1945 searched initially for fair-skinned Europeans. Though colour and race declined in importance in the 1960s, I know people whose relatives crawled around Colombo cemeteries to find tombstones with dates that would help to establish “European ancestry” for Australian immigration purposes. It’s not surprising therefore that the people who run Mail Today, the cheekiest of India’s English dailies, should go straight for the “Australian racist” tag for the Indian-student story. They and I grew up on “White Australia.” It’s also worth pointing out that Mail Today is a clone of, and partly owned by, Britain’s Daily Mail. Its brief is to look like the Daily Mail and bring British tabloid journalism to India. Lucky India.

The other aspect to the “racism” squabble is positive. Today, “racism” in Australia is a dirty word that people don’t want hurled at them. That’s why everyone from the prime minister to cops on the beat and callers to talkback radio want to deny that Australians are racist. That’s a big change in two generations.

No one seems to have had time to define what “racism” or “being racist” entails. It seems to me, like any “ism,” “racism” needs a body of ideas behind it and groups that promote such ideas. There are mercifully few signs of either in Australia at the moment. The avowed racists who slithered out during the Hanson days of the mid 1990s have not made a noticeable comeback. Australia does not have a significant body of people promoting an “ism” about racial superiority.

But if racism means a kind of colour coding where brown people are known to be more vulnerable than white ones, you bet your boots that the louts of Melbourne and elsewhere are on the lookout for brown guys. The word has got around that brown guys – and that means mostly Indian students – are new to the place, on their own and unsure about how the system works. They have phones, computers and, often, ready money from having been paid in cash for long-hour jobs. They are less likely to go to the police because in India, police means hassles. They may also fear that they may be in breach of their visa conditions. No wonder Australia’s petty crims prefer coffee to vanilla when they colour-code people to pick on. And now there is drunken, copycat brutality, the result of the publicity of the past year.

But we lack research. While we know that assaults in Australia have increased by about 5 per cent a year since 1995 (four times faster than the rate of population growth), we don’t have analysis of the social characteristics of the victims. And we are just beginning to discover that perpetrators of the recent violence are very often juveniles under the age of 18.

BUT IS THE CHANGE in Australia–India connections really so dramatic and vast? Census and other data show how the Indian presence in Australia has changed in the past six or seven years. In the 2006 Australian census, Indian-born people numbered 147,000 – 3.3 per cent of all overseas-born people. No more than 25,000 of those Indian-born people were students; but in the next three years another 70,000 students arrived. In short, the Indian-born population appears to have increased by something like 50 per cent in three or four years. That’s big.

This unprecedented increase in India’s presence in Australia suggests an answer to the question Meg Gurry posed years ago: “does Australia neglect India?” She highlighted the host of reports and statements over fifty years in which Australians rhapsodised about obvious links between the two countries – and yet, Gurry noted, nothing much seemed to come of it all. Why? Robert Campbell, remember, made a fortune from the India–Australia trade in the nineteenth century, and Alfred Deakin in the 1900s believed that “Australian developments would be directly influenced by... India.” What was missing in the twentieth century?

The answer – or a big part of it – is people. The relationship has up till now lacked the flesh-and-blood connections that made interaction broad-based and enduring. The Australian census in 2006 asked people how many generations their families had been in Australia. Of the 235,000 people who claimed Indian extraction, nearly 80 per cent were first-generation in Australia, and only 2 per cent traced their families back to three generations in Australia. The contrast with Chinese was striking. Six times as many people of Chinese extraction traced their origins in Australia back three generations or more (32,000 versus fewer than 5000 Indians, or more than double proportionally). The 1954 census had counted only 2600 Indians in the whole of Australia.

In spite of the fact that the British Empire and the English language brought India and Australia together, Australia’s deeper connections since the mid nineteenth century have been with China. Chinese Australians founded the real estate chain of L. J. Hooker, made up 40,000 men on the goldfields of the 1850s, owned a couple of Shanghai’s swankiest department stores and played a significant part in Chinese nationalist politics in the first half of the twentieth century. India had no comparable connections. Another indicator of the greater depth of the Chinese presence in Australia is that there is no book about Indians that comes close to the richness and wealth of stories that John Fitzgerald records so well in Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia.

As it has grown in Australia from the 1960s the Indian community has been heavily professional and remarkably small. Indians visiting family and friends in Australia reached 5000 a year only in 1995. By 2008, such visitors exceeded 25,000. Business visitors from India have similarly grown – from 5000 in 1996 to nearly 30,000 in 2008. That’s why the student story is such a major landmark: numbers quintupled between 2004 and 2009 – from about 20,000 to 100,000.

Regarding that story, we don’t know enough about the circumstances in which Australia’s permanent residency rules were changed and the way in which dubious “training colleges” grew up to exploit the opportunity. Did reputable training institutes expand too rapidly to try to cash in on the fee-payers, for example? And we don’t know much about how the recruiters have operated in India and how they have linked up with “providers” in Australia.

It appears that many Indian students have come on their own, financed by loans and by families keen to send their young people out to seek their fortunes. Permanent residency in Australia adds a useful card to the hand life has dealt you. The worst of the training institutes had no way to support these new students – and probably no interest in doing so. There are plenty of stories of students being left to find their own accommodation, even from the moment of arrival.

This lonely exposure contrasts with the experience of students from China who have been coming to Australia in larger numbers for more than twenty years. Chinese student numbers have built up over time; those who come are monitored more closely by their authoritarian government; and their longer experience and their government’s control mean that they often live in larger groups in established accommodation and are less exposed to the nasty side of Australian cities.

There’s been a tendency to deplore the fact that a large section of Indian students chose Australia not because of its outstanding education but because it was offering easy possibilities for permanent residence. Is that a bad thing? Young people who are prepared to take out loans to travel thousands of miles from home may be called a number of things; but you can’t say they lack initiative. That’s a quality that generations of Australian migrants, now well settled, have often had.

Talk to a young Indian (or Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nepali or Sri Lankan – fewer in numbers but not to be forgotten in these discussions) driving a taxi in Melbourne and you will have an interesting conversation. My driver from the airport in September had finished a finance degree at Deakin University. Though he was from Haryana near Delhi, he had done his first Indian degree at Andhra University in south India. How had that happened? “Boxing scholarship,” he replied, and I noted the Kapil Dev-like build. He reported no trouble with his passengers. More important, he had met a fellow Indian student at Deakin, and they were going to marry. They planned to live in Australia but come and go frequently to India. That’s the kind of bone-and-sinew connection that the India–Australia relationship has so long lacked.

The cabbie back to the airport the next day was from Kollam (Quilon) in Kerala in the deep south. He had an engineering degree and a wife and baby back home. His aim was to find work in the Northern Territory and bring his family as soon as he could.

As well as initiative, the other quality Indian students bring is a readiness to take on authority. Melbournians will recall the cab drivers’ strike of May 2008 after attacks on drivers. Indian drivers led satyagraha – civil disobedience – at Flinders Street Station and made the front page of the Age. Students from elsewhere in Asia come from cultures and political systems where you don’t mess with the government. In India, you have been told since primary school that Mahatma Gandhi was a great man, the father of the nation, and that he opposed the British government most of his adult life. It is a rare day in India when a demonstration or a protest does not happen somewhere.

Does Australia need more stirrers? The answer has to be yes if we mean people who take an intelligent part in public life. In Canada, where the Indian community is larger, more diverse and of longer standing, people of Indian extraction have been members of parliament, provincial premiers and members of federal cabinet for years.

THE RAPID GROWTH of an Indian student presence in Australia has been messy and tragic. But it heralds an important new chapter in Australia’s place in its region. A number of things now need to happen to turn the current distress into the substantial long-term relationship that benefits Australia, India and the people who live, work and trade in both places.

Changes to the permanent residency rules are probably less necessary than tighter regulation of non-government training institutions that offer courses with the potential to qualify a student for residency. Around 70 per cent of the almost 100,000 Indian students have been enrolled in such institutions. The Council of Australian Governments made a start with the decision in December 2009 to create a national regulating body for the “VET sector” (vocational education and training). What is crucial is that no student who came to Australia with a reasonable expectation of qualifying for permanent residency should be denied the chance to qualify under the old rules. Australia suffered no ill-effects from granting permanent residency to 30,000 Chinese students and their families at the time of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989.

We need substantial research on the new Indian presence in Australia – who the students are, how they finance themselves, what their aspirations are, how they relate to Australians and particularly to Indian-extracted Australians. We need, too, to teach and research more about India in our universities. The barrenness of Australian knowledge of Indian history and custom has been glaring in the media and official circles ever since the “Indian student question” hit the headlines. It’s not surprising: you’d be hard-pressed to find a course on India in the humanities or social sciences departments of an Australian university. No wonder public figures and officials often look so awkward discussing India or interacting with Indian students.

At a practical level, a little humility might be good. Why not ask the government of India for half a dozen “liaison advisers” – they could be police, administrators from India’s good colleges or education officials – to be seconded to Australia to work with our police and education authorities and with students. Let’s also host delegations of Indian educators – the people who run its best undergraduate colleges – to familiarise themselves with our system and to improve Australian understanding of what makes Indian education and students tick. Australia needs such knowledge, and the connections will have lasting benefits.

And symbolically, let’s be imaginative. Let’s create the “2009 Foundation” or the “Mahatma Gandhi Fund” – the name is not especially important – to commemorate a new chapter in Australia–India relations of which the events of 2009 made us all aware. The fund – say, A$10 million – would provide for the welfare of Indian students, reward outstanding achievements and encourage a flow of young Indians and Australians between each other’s countries. Let’s do something symbolic too. Make a garden, paint the Harbour Bridge in Indian national colours, establish an annual lecture, exchange the Taj Mahal in Agra for the Big Banana in Coffs Harbour, create an Outback-and-Bollywood film festival, put up a statue of the Mahatma, start a substantial program of youth exchange... Ponder the possibilities. Better ideas welcome.

But let’s not allow this moment to pass unmarked. First, let’s fix the education problems. Then let’s recognise that the missing link in Australia–India relations is now present as it has never been before: people. People in substantial numbers. Coming and going. Marrying, trading, studying, building. These links, though recently made, will not be easily broken; the task is to ensure that the birth pangs of recent years lead to a fruitful future. •

The post Australia–India: reimagining the relationship appeared first on Inside Story.

JUST WHEN you think you’re on the brink of something good, bad things happen. In this case, young thugs and goons who come out at night to rob and terrify for fun and profit have stumbled across new targets: students and workers from India and other South Asian countries. They work late, have nice electronic gear and (the thinking might go) are poorly equipped to complain. (Ever had your pocket picked in another country? Did you know what to do?)

For as long as India has been independent, Australians with an eye to Australia’s long-term interests have sought to put “substance” into the Australia–India relationship. In the past three or four years, such “substance” seemed to be arriving in the form of wider and deeper human connections, driven mightily (though not entirely) by the 100,000 students from India and its neighbours now studying here.

The robberies and assaults undermine these developments and have taken on a nasty life of their own. They make tasty morsels for a vast, 200-channel Indian television industry, hungry for stories. The attacks have also become a top story in India’s huge newspaper industry, which sells ninety million copies a day in a dozen languages.

Media pingpong is a great game: Australian outlets pick up Indian stories, which bring out wackier voices in Australian public life, which in turn generate equally wacky Indian replies. And all of this increases the possibility of copy-cat crimes.

Why should these attacks and their handling be of very, very serious concern to Australians who look to the future of this country? Why should far-sighted Australians want a relationship with India that has more “substance”? The answer is enlightened self-interest.

Australia is a population pimple on the Asia–Pacific elephant. It needs friends with genuine common interests. Since the days of Ben Chifley and Jawaharlal Nehru, wise folk in both countries have seen that Australians and Indians have unique things in common and can work with each other as few countries can.

Only last week, for example, Australia’s best known election analyst, Malcolm Mackerras, celebrated the fact that the Indian political system has overcome a deficiency attributed to the Westminster model of government. Manmohan Singh, India’s respected prime minister, sits in the upper house of parliament. The fact that that house is indirectly elected – by members of state legislatures – means that India can do something usually associated with the presidential systems inspired by the United States: it can bring into government outstanding people from other walks of life who would not fight and could not win a down-and-dirty election. India also has election procedures – especially its electronic voting machines – which should be the envy of electoral democracies everywhere. On the Australian side, we run things like schools, universities, museums, sporting bodies and a host of other institutions from whose practices and experience India can profit.

In a week when the world remembers – and the Chinese Communist Party encourages everyone to forget – the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacres, it’s worth recalling that India staged a different political drama in 1989. Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress government, which held a record majority of more than 400 seats in a 545-seat house, called general elections, was defeated and surrendered office without complaint.

Such common conventions of government, reinforced by India’s most recent elections, together with rapidly growing trade, give us a framework on which much should be built. Until now, this skeleton has lacked daily, material connections. One hundred thousand students now provide the potential for those flesh-and-blood links. The commercial opportunities they discover, the holidays their parents take, the friendships and marriages they make and their general to-ing and fro-ing bring Australia and India into concrete relationships that benefit both countries.

There is also language. About 5 per cent of Indians use English extensively – that’s 60 million people, or roughly three Australias. It is a substantial base on which to build relationships, a far more extensive headstart than Australia has in other Asian, European or Latin American countries. The potential to partner India in global cultural industries is immense. And India’s global credentials – three Booker prizes to Indian authors in the past eleven years and an Academy Award – are substantial.

What does this elusive “substance” mean in international relations? And why is the recent growth of the Indian student population so important for providing it? Substance means diverse and deep interests. It means trade – and not merely volume but diversity. It means communications – constant, extensive exchange of ideas and people. It means some common values and expectations – like regular elections and free (and therefore sometimes wacky) media. And it means a broadly shared view of international interests.

In the past, far-sighted members of Australia’s foreign affairs elite sought to enhance the relationship with India because they saw the advantages. But personal equations often got in the way. Robert Menzies and Jawaharlal Nehru talked past each other. To Nehru, Menzies was a second-rank imperialist whose small talk turned too often to cricket; to Menzies, Nehru was an underminer of the British Empire who’d had the Cambridge education that one suspects Menzies craved. Mrs Gandhi was prickly; Morarji Desai was stiff and of another era. Only with the arrival of Bob Hawke and Rajiv Gandhi did promising personal chemistry enter the equation, but that ended with Rajiv’s defeat in 1989 and murder in 1991, the same year Hawke gave way to Keating.

Even in the Menzies era, far-seeing Australian public servants like Sir Walter Crocker – twice high commissioner to India, who died at 100 in 2002 – had a vision and a fascination; in Crocker’s case, it enabled him to write a fine biography of Nehru. Nehru: A Contemporary Estimate, first published in 1966, was republished last year at the instigation of a Crocker admirer, the distinguished Indian scholar Ramachandra Guha. The book sold well enough to be reprinted a few months ago.

On the other side, India’s high commissioner to Australia from 1953–56, General K.M. “Kipper” Cariappa, the first Indian to command the Indian army, made himself feistily at home in Australian public life. According to historian David Walker, Cariappa was able to “expound the Upanishads and execute a perfect fox trot” with equal ease – and simultaneously. Walker tells us that on one legendary occasion in Gundagai, “Cariappa and his Sikh driver found the local war memorial neglected and overgrown with weeds. These two spectacular figures got to work with spades and hoses and soon had the memorial looking ship-shape.” Cariappa reminded townspeople, who came to see what was going on, about the need to respect the war dead. He had fought in the Middle East and Burma, on the same side as Australians.

In Cariappa’s time and until the 1990s, however, economic and global forces made Australia and India look in different directions. India’s economy grew like a snail in a straitjacket, and its foreign-policy outlook was northwest, towards the Soviet Union, Europe and North America. Australia tended to value its US alliance above all else.

Since the 1990s, India’s liberalising, fast-growing economy has brought large benefits for Australia. It has been the fastest growing destination for Australian exports since 2001, ranking sixth among trading partners in 2007–08.

We share intense environmental problems. A shortage of water plagues us both; we both need and consume vast quantities of energy. Australia has the capacity to fuel India. India has the capacity to show Australia how to be economical. (Watch a village woman cook a meal, if you seek models on which to base mindsets about careful use of resources.)

A rich, interactive relationship with a country of 1140 million people (sixty Australias) growing at 6 per cent in the recession year of 2008–09 is worth having. The current crop of Indian students forge links that will make trade diversify and grow. The presence of those students promises to provide the “substance” that has eluded the Australia–India relationship. The number of Indian students has grown by 40 per cent a year since 2002. Today, if there are 100,000 Indian students studying in Australia, their fees and living expenditure are worth about $3.5 billion a year.

To minimise further harm to students and to the India–Australia relationship, a number of things need to happen. Educational institutions need to identify the best support systems for their international students and ensure such systems are universally applied. We know there are good and bad operators: the best need to be imitated; the worst need to be shamed and made to improve.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that Australian higher education has been inadequately funded for fifteen years. Large class sizes, a shortage of accommodation and the need of cash-strapped institutions to trawl for fee-paying students reduce their ability to provide the tender loving care that an alma mater (literally, a bounteous mother) should. The trawling, too, means that students from small towns, less familiar with big cities and foreign ways, are increasingly among the cohort of international students. They need more support, not less; but less is what’s available.

More effective help to find suitable accommodation and more campus-based accommodation are two ways to improve conditions. Visa rules also need to be examined. International students are allowed to work for a fixed number of hours each week, but their visa conditions usually require them to be enrolled full-time in a course too. So you study forty hours a week and do paid work for another twenty hours, which is usually at night because classes are in the daytime. (You need, remember, to have $30–40,000 a year to pay your fees and your bills). And you don’t want to tangle with “authorities” in case they decide you have violated your visa conditions. To ease some of these pressures, it might make sense to allow part-time enrolments.

AT DEEPER, longer-term levels, more Australians need to get a grasp of India. It is not easy to learn about India and its neighbours in an Australian educational institution today. The recently inaugurated $62 million National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program explicitly excludes study of India. Only those wanting to study China, Indonesia, Japan and Korea may apply. Twenty years ago you might have found fifteen universities that could help you if you wanted to study India in Australia; today you’ll be lucky to find three. No wonder officials and spokespeople seem ill at ease in trying to talk about the problems of students from South Asia. There aren’t enough people in Australian public life who know Kannada from Canada.

The attacks on students reinforce stereotypes. Indians get described as poor, peaceful and non-confrontational, living in crowded conditions, likely to bring down house prices and push up air, water and energy consumption. Australians, on the other hand, get branded as loud-mouthed, bullying, racist braggarts. Stereotypes are substitutes for knowledge, but they will get bellowed with abandon unless quick, clever and enduring steps are taken to make the night safe and punish goons and thugs.

You might have noticed an irony in the terms: goons and thugs. Good Indian words enriching English: goondahs – bad characters, hired toughs; thugs – the bandits who strangled their victims with a deftly twirled handkerchief. In India these days, the same sort of people might be known as “Char Sau Biis” – 420s, after Section 420 of the criminal code which deals with nasty known offenders.

Another thing to remember is this. When you mess with India, you mess with people who have the professional and financial capacity to pursue you relentlessly through law courts and international forums. India exports outstanding lawyers, financiers and IT professionals. Two of the world’s top ten billionaires are Indians, according to the Forbes list. There are no Chinese in the top ten. Or Australians. You want to be friends of India, not antagonists.

The India–Australia relationship is on the cusp of something good, deep, long-standing and mutually beneficial – genuine “substance.” We must not let Australia’s Section 420s wreck the chance. •

The post The good, the bad and the Section 420s appeared first on Inside Story.

AS AN EXPLANATION for the results of India’s fifteenth general elections, one particular picture is worth a thousand words – or ten or twenty million votes. It shows an old man with spectacles, a white beard and a pale blue turban. His raised right hand acknowledges cheers, and his beard masks what may be just a hint of a smile. Next to him, slightly sturdier, is a good-looking, clean-shaven, clear-eyed young man. His hand also acknowledges cheers, and there is no question: he is smiling. He has a right to.

The duo is Manmohan Singh, seventy-five, prime minister of India, and Rahul Gandhi, thirty-eight, grandson of Indira Gandhi, great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru and red-hot hope of his Congress Party. The picture appeared in the Indian press on 17 May, the day after election results showed that the Congress had surpassed every prediction. In India’s first-past-the-post elections, it won 206 seats in the 545-member lower house – sixty more than it had held in the previous parliament.

Having governed for the previous five years through an unwieldy coalition, the Congress last week found it relatively easy to line up the necessary allies to form a new government. Rahul Gandhi is not to enter the cabinet – yet. He remains general secretary of the party and oversees the Youth Congress. His mother, Italian-born, Sonia Gandhi, is party president. They and the prime minister can take credit for the surprisingly successful election strategy. Against much advice, they eschewed alliances and contested every seat in India’s biggest state, Uttar Pradesh, where they were not expected to go well. They were told Congress would get badly beaten; instead, it re-established itself in the heart of India.

As analysts ponder reasons for the Congress success, the picture of the clever, honest older man and the pedigreed, untried (but also untainted) younger one looms large. It is particularly potent when placed against the images of the Congress Party’s various rivals. L.K. Advani, the eighty-one year old leader of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP, led an uninspired campaign that was unable to make poverty or national security vote-grabbing issues. The BJP’s other leaders lacked glamour, fire and ideas. The party’s attempt to rev up Hindu-nationalist enthusiasm by defending an anti-Muslim speech made by Rahul Gandhi’s clod-hopping cousin, Varun, flopped. Indeed, the episode may have drawn Muslim voters back to a Congress Party from which they had drifted. (Varun, however, did win a seat.)

If you had gone to the polling booth uncertain of whom to vote for but with images of Advani and of the Manmohan–Rahul combination in your head, your finger on the button of the electronic voting machine might well have twitched in the direction of the wise elder and the young brave. (You would not, however, have had the chance to vote for Manmohan Singh. Not much of a stump politician, he sits in the indirectly elected upper house of the parliament.)

Of course there was much more to it than that. Attempts to divine the “mind of the Indian voter” are notably unrewarding. That’s not surprising, given that there are more than 700 million eligible voters and more than 400 million of them voted – and that India has twenty-two official languages and 350 million mobile phones, major newspaper industries operating in ten different scripts, and more than fifty television news channels feeding into 110 million households and working in all the big languages. If there were a “mind of the Indian voter,” it would be a delirious place.

What this election does suggest, however, is that the communications revolution transforming India creates possibilities for “nation-wide” movements and verdicts.

This contradicts the assumption that as more and more local groups organised to take part in politics, India’s electoral system would fragment – that the destiny of the world’s largest democracy would lie in a succession of shaky coalition governments based on constantly changing alliances of regionally based parties.

To be sure, the Congress Party is a long way from the days when it commanded comfortable majorities in its own right. But in 2009 it has won seats in every major state, and to most observers’ surprise it is back in business in north India, where it won seventy out of 191 seats across six states.

Overall, the Congress won just over 27 per cent of the votes cast, which delivered 38 per cent of the seats in the Lok Sabha (house of the people – the lower house of the parliament). The BJP, which led a coalition government from 1999–2004, won 18 per cent of the vote and 116 seats (21 per cent of the seats). The next largest vote-share went to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) with just over 7 per cent – not enough to stop it being rolled back to sixteen seats from the influence-wielding forty-five it held in the previous parliament.

This may be the end for India’s two old Communist parties, the CPI (Marxist) and the even weaker CPI, which is down to two seats from ten. The CPI (Marxist)’s leaders are urbane and highly educated, but they are locked in a worldview formed during the Cold War. Their party machines in West Bengal and Kerala too often look like standover rackets that alienate more citizens than they benefit. And the parties’ concerns often seem remote from those of the toiling masses they seek to represent.

IT IS NOT as if toiling masses were in short supply. A 2007 government report estimated that more than 75 per cent of the Indian population spent less than 20 rupees a day on food (50c Australian). The report termed such people “poor and vulnerable.”

In Indian elections, poor people vote in larger proportions than the upper classes. So where did their votes go? They did not significantly favour the Communists. Nor did they go as strongly as expected to the party of Mayawati, fifty-three, the fierce Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state with a population of 190 million. Mayawati is a Dalit (the favoured term today for “untouchable”) who built the Bahujan Samaj Party, which governs her state. Her party won only twenty seats, not the thirty or so predicted, though it took nearly 6 per cent of the vote nationally.

About 15 per cent of Indians – close to 180 million people – are Dalits, most of them heart-rendingly poor. Another 7 per cent of the population (80 million people) are “tribals”, marginalised people living in hill country which is increasingly valued for the minerals that lie under it. These poor and stigmatised Indians are confronted with three political possibilities. The first is electoral politics – the Mayawati option. But Mayawati, though flamboyantly symbolic, is yet to deliver material improvements.

The second possibility is revolt. A “Maoist” movement operates in about 180 of the remotest of India’s 600 districts. Maoists tried to disrupt the first phase of the elections, though without much success. But with South Asia awash in weapons that overflow from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, Maoist movements will continue to confront governments that try to displace traditional occupants of land to dig mines and dam rivers.

The third option for the poor is religious and social revival. Some of the tumultuous consequences of such movements were seen in the past week halfway around the world in Vienna, where a preacher associated with a Dalit-improvement movement among Sikhs was murdered. The apparent reason was that the low-status preacher was held by higher-status people to be committing sacrilege. When news of the murder reached India, rioting followed across Punjab state, and the army had to be called out.

In this election, poor voters seem to have chosen a variation on the first option, returning to Congress in significant numbers. Post-election interviews indicate that two programs launched by the previous government have had an impact among the poor in rural India, where 75 per cent of the population still lives (though less than 20 per cent of GDP now comes from agriculture). The National Rural Employment Guarantee Program aims to provide, as a right, 100 days’ work at a basic wage for anyone in the countryside who asks for it. A related program has absolved small farmers from repayment of bank loans. For all their flaws, these programs touch millions of people and have bolstered support for the Congress Party.

SO DOES the new government lie on a bed of nails or roses? It’s not totally made up of nails. India has been relatively cushioned from the global recession. The stock market liked the election results, and growth is estimated to be about 4 per cent for the current year and 6 per cent in 2009–10. The new ministry will be largely free of the shackles that hobbled its predecessor, which depended on a dozen minor parties plus the left. The new government will have the opportunity to renovate the education system, continue economic reform and improve infrastructure.

There are two views about whether this will happen. Some argue that, having seen the electoral benefits of expenditure on the poor, the government will concentrate on such activity and that the pace of other change will be slow. Others argue that the old prime minister is now a man with a mandate and an urgent mission. He is not expected to serve the full five-year term, and the betting is that efforts will be made to install Rahul Gandhi as leader at some midway point. According to this line, Manmohan Singh will press hard for accelerated economic change – increased foreign investment and sell-offs of public-sector enterprises, for example – and that external pressures will help him to achieve this. He is, after all, an economist whose first book was called India’s Export Trends and the Prospects for Self-Sustained Growth, published in 1964 when India’s economic nostrum was “import substitution,” not “export-led growth.”

There will be pressure to strengthen India’s global diplomacy. Its foreign affairs bureaucracy has brilliant people at the top, but it does not have enough of them, and it lacks the capacity to talk to the world in sustained, sophisticated ways. China outnumbers, outspends and outshines it, as senior Indian diplomats have pointed out.

One hint that this may change is the presence in the outer ministry of newly elected Shashi Tharoor, aged fifty-three, novelist, diplomat and a former under-secretary general at the United Nations. On the other hand, the new external affairs minister will be an old Congress politician, S. M. Krishna, seventy-seven, US-trained in the 1960s, and a former chief minister and governor.

Other key cabinet posts have also gone to Congress veterans: Pranab Mukherjee, seventy-three, from West Bengal, a long-time devotee of Indira Gandhi and her family, moves from External Affairs to Finance; P. Chidambaram, sixty-three, from Tamil Nadu retains Home and A. K. Antony, sixty-eight, from Kerala, stays at Defence. Kapil Sibal, sixty, well known to Australian diplomats and policy-makers for his work as science minister in the previous government, is likely to get Human Resources, crucial for the reform of education.

One of the heroes of this election was again the EVM – the electronic voting machine, used extensively since 1999. About 1.1 million of these robust, self-contained little boxes were deployed in 800,000 polling booths. Though the elections took five weeks and five phases of polling to complete, the results were known within a few hours once the computerised count began on 16 May. Coupled with a photo identification card and photo electoral roll, which now includes 85 per cent of voters, the system makes malpractice difficult and labour-intensive. A mark of the system’s success was the result in West Bengal, where the CPI (Marxist), reputed to have the country’s best-organised electoral muscle, suffered its first big setback in decades and voter turnout exceeded 80 per cent.

In India, however, diversity prevails in all things, and a squeal of complaint against the EVMs has come from the southern state of Tamil Nadu. The party of former chief minister and film star, the mystique-laden Jayalalitha, claims the EVMs were rigged. Her AIADMK party won a disappointing eight seats.

India’s electoral system is now so embedded in daily life that it can cope with such complaints. Back in 1971, defeated candidates took a case to the Supreme Court claiming that they had lost because the government of the day had doctored the ballot papers with invisible ink. That was ten general elections ago. •

The post A bed of nails and roses appeared first on Inside Story.