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! •

The post Mr Modi goes to Bollywood… and beyond appeared first on Inside Story.

The mass adulation came as Albanese — like a swathe of Australia’s politicos, strategic thinkers and business leaders — embraced India as the best available escape from dependency on China. Add to that the fact that the fast-growing Indian community is made up of the ideal sort of migrant: well-educated, professionally skilled, prosperous, English-speaking, pious but moderate and even cricket-loving.

India may well turn out to play a key economic role for Australia one day, and the Indian community, now nearly 800,000-strong and the second-largest foreign-born component of the population (after those from Britain), has all the qualities claimed for it.

But since the mass rally in Sydney’s former Olympic stadium in May, the lustre has come off Narendra Modi. Longstanding concerns about where he is taking India are getting more air, and other members of the Quad grouping lined up against China, and their Five Eyes intelligence allies, are questioning his scruples.

Most pointedly, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau revealed in September “credible allegations” that India was responsible for the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist gunned down in British Columbia in June. Canada immediately expelled India’s chief intelligence official in Ottawa

India called the allegations “absurd” and responded to the expulsion by sharply cutting the number of Canadian diplomats in New Delhi. But the following month, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess told the ABC he had “no reason to dispute what the Canadian government has said in this matter.”

Then, on 29 November, the US Department of Justice announced the prosecution of an Indian man allegedly commissioned by a senior intelligence official in New Delhi to organise the assassination of another Sikh separatist, US citizen Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, on American soil. The plot was thwarted when the hired gunman turned out to be an undercover anti-drug agent.

According to a contributor to the respected US journal Foreign Affairs, any intelligence plans to kill Pannun and Nijjar would most likely have been cleared with Ajit Doval, Modi’s national security adviser: “He is known to be hands on, and the Indian intelligence bureaucracy is too hierarchical for something as high stakes as an international assassination to happen without Doval’s approval.”

The ripples spread further. A well-regarded Indian news outlet, the Print, reports that the British government asked a senior official of India’s Research and Analysis Wing, the external intelligence agency reporting to the prime minister, to leave his station in London. The US also expelled a senior official with the same agency from his station in San Francisco and blocked the agency from replacing its station chief in Washington. US president Joe Biden, has since declined an invitation to be chief foreign guest at India’s big Republic Day parade on 26 January.

That kind of foreign interference, and its alleged source, was not what Australia’s government and security apparatus had in mind when they introduced controversial laws to criminalise clandestine influence-building in 2017. Their aim was to keep an eye on Australia’s Chinese-origin community, numbering about 1.2 million, and on efforts by Beijing’s spy agencies and Communist Party “united front work” operatives to manipulate its members and recruit gullible or venal figures in the wider population.

Now it appears our spooks and analysts need to worry about the possibility of India’s intelligence service working in illegal ways to further the political aims of its ruling party. They need to educate themselves about how Modi’s brand of communal politics plays out in the diaspora, and reassess the lengths to which they believe New Delhi is ready to go.

This isn’t likely to be a short-term problem either: after nearly ten years in office, polls show Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, to be as popular as ever and his Congress Party–led opposition failing to gain much traction, pointing to another Modi victory in elections due early next year.

Modi’s campaign to turn India away from the secular, minority-inclusive model of its modern rebirth into a Hindu-majoritarian state is likely to get fresh impetus after that likely win. At the recent G20 summit in New Delhi, he seemed to float a name change from India to the ancient, pre-Muslim, pre-British Bharat. The new Indian parliament building, opened in April this year, includes a mural showing India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and part of Afghanistan as forming Akhand Bharat (“unbroken India”), an idea pushed by the far-right, Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Order), or RSS, the movement from which Modi sprang.

On 22 January, Modi will inaugurate a lavish new temple at Ayodhya to mark the legendry birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. To hundreds of millions of poorly educated Hindus, mainly in India’s north, the new Ram Birthplace Temple marks a historical truth rather than a legend. It is described as a replacement for an ancient one torn down centuries ago by a Muslim conqueror and replaced with a small mosque. That mosque was notoriously destroyed in 1992 by Hindu mobs fired up by earlier BJP leaders, initiating decades of communal strife and friction between Hindus and Muslims.

No wonder Biden didn’t want to chance standing alongside Modi four days after the new temple is opened. If he did, he might also have gazed down New Delhi’s majestic Edwin Lutyens–designed avenue — the avenue that ends in a memorial arch to the Indian dead of the British forces in the world wars — and noticed a new structure alongside, inaugurated by Modi last year. Under a stone canopy is an 8.5 metre black granite statue of Subhas Chandra Bose, the independence fighter who rejected the non-violent campaigns of Nehru and Gandhi and aligned himself with the Axis powers. After being smuggled by Nazi agents to Germany, where he met Hitler and Himmler, Bose was delivered by U-boat to the Japanese, for whom he raised an anti-British army among Indian prisoners of war. In Modi’s eyes, Australians, the British and the Americans were on the wrong side in the Pacific war.

Although Indians have been in Australia since first British settlement, the community’s present numbers were reached by a fivefold expansion only in the last twenty years. Its social and political streams are still in formation. But pointers to emerging internal pressures can be found in British historian Edward Anderson’s important new book, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora.

Of an estimated thirty million worldwide, Anderson focuses on those living in Britain, making comparisons with the United States, in both cases communities that grew large a generation earlier than Australia’s. If our diaspora follows the same pattern, a Hindu identity will grow in importance over an “Indian” one, and even more than a “South Asian” one, for its members of that faith. And that identity will increasingly be flavoured by a Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”) wider than religious belief and worship.

Hindutva is almost synonymous with the Hindu nationalism pursued by Modi and his BJP: a majoritarian, conservative and militant political ideology and ethno-religious movement (in Anderson’s description) that rejects pluralistic secularism and is ascendant in contemporary India.

Strangely, Hindutva also has wide support among Hindus living outside India, who simultaneously favour a chauvinistic, majoritarian ideology in India while negotiating recognition and rights in their new homes as a “model minority” noted for peaceful and prosperous integration. “Why is it that some of the most outspokenly patriotic Indians are those who have chosen to live outside of their motherland, or may have never lived in India at all?” Anderson asks.

It’s not just an assertiveness masking insecurity or guilt about leaving for a better material life, he says, but the result of decades of cultivation by Hindutva idealogues centred on the RSS. Founded in the 1920s, the RSS has nurtured generations of pracharaks (cadres) dedicated to hardening up India’s Hindu population to throw off the influence of Muslim and then British overlords.

“The life of a pracharak,” Anderson tells us, “is in many ways modelled on an ascetic: itinerant (as and when required), abstinent and unmarried, and renouncing of material possessions (receiving no salary, but provided with accommodation and vegetarian diet).” They are often from middle-class and upper-caste backgrounds, university-educated and English speaking, and well travelled, though they don’t mix much outside RSS circles.

Although he comes from a low caste, from where he was put into a teenage marriage (apparently unconsummated), Modi spent his early adult years as an RSS pracharak. He was then placed as the BJP’s chief minister in Gujarat, just ahead of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom there that stained his reputation and kept him barred from the United States until he became prime minister. His humble origins count as a plus for a BJP often accused of trying to keep the Hindu upper castes in charge.

The RSS began its external proselytising in the 1940s among the Indian communities in East Africa, mostly from Gujarat, which thrived as commercial intermediaries between the British and the Africans. Expelled after independence, they were able to settle in English cities, notably London, Birmingham and Leicester, by virtue of their British passports. The RSS followed them, setting up in 1966 in England as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, or HSS, an organisation that remains active today.

Living in group housing in Leicester, the pracharaks organise rank-and-file recruits, the swayamsevaks, at regular shakhas that start with a Sanskrit prayer and hoisting of the saffron-coloured flag of Hinduism, followed by marching drills and practice with bamboo staves, sessions of the Indian game kabaddi, closing prayers, and singing of the RSS anthem “Namaste Sada Vatsale Matrubhoomi” (Hail to Thee O Motherland).

Physical development is very much part of the ethos. The aim, Anderson says, has been “to ‘rebuild’ a population of strong Hindu male figures, largely to countenance (while simultaneously justifying) the threatening construction of the Muslim Other…” Tolerance and Gandhian non-violence have been shelved in favour of warrior models from history and legends.

“The promotion of physical training, toughness, and group unity also relates to the perception that individualism and material comforts of the West constitute a danger for Hindus,” he writes:

Second-generation Hindus overseas are considered particularly susceptible to picking up bad habits from morally bankrupt host societies, and many have discussed the “disdain” South Asian migrants have for the lax ethics of the West, its declining parental authority, licentiousness, culture of instant gratification, weakening family units, and so on. The HSS has performed a specific role in this context, providing segregated spaces for socialisation away from “corrupting influences,” in which curative “Indian” values can be transmitted.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the following is not large: the eighty-two shakhas operating in Britain have an average weekly total attendance of 1903. They are notably more casual than those in India (where volunteers turn out in uniforms), many participants are female, and the dropout rate is high. The local volunteers often find visiting RSS cadres from India possessed of a much more hard line against Muslims than they themselves feel, or are willing to express.

Recognising this tension, the cadre-based RSS and its mass affiliate the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) have slipped into the background in recent decades, pushing forward more worldly figures to head councils claiming to speak for the one million Hindus among the 1.8 million Indian-origin residents of England and Wales. The same trend is found in the Indian diaspora of the United States, which has grown to 4.2 million from one million in 1990.

The message is also much the same, expounding the virtue of ancient Hindu theology and social organisation. All religions that began in India — Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism — are claimed to be branches of Hinduism. The theory that Hinduism itself flourished among Indo-Aryan migrants from Central Asia, imposing the caste system on darker-skinned Dravidians, is portrayed as being wrong. The real invaders were the Muslim conquerors of the last millennium. Marriage and the rearing of children are the principal roles of women. The ideal diet is vegetarianism. Homosexuality is “against nature.” Caste provides social space and closer identity, and was much more tolerant and accepted until the British raj started classifying everyone. And watch out for those young Muslim men waging a “love jihad” to seduce and convert Hindu girls.

Any criticism of these historical distortions and attendant social ills is increasingly attributed to “Hinduphobia.” In fact, Hindu councils in both Britain and the United States consciously borrow the example of Jewish organisations using charges of anti-Semitism to deflect criticism of Israel. Indeed, India’s previously lukewarm, sometimes hostile relations with Israel have been transformed under Modi, who made the first visit by an Indian prime minister in 2017 and often speaks of his friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Beyond defence and corporate interests (Modi’s favoured entrepreneur Gautam Adani runs Haifa’s port) and shared suspicion of Muslims, Modi would like to follow Netanyahu’s pathway to a state with two-tiered citizenship that gives the religious majority more rights than minorities.

Alongside this assertive victimhood, which Anderson calls a “soft” neo-Hindutva, have been occasional flare-ups of a harder version, often attributed to new arrivals from India. In 2006, a vandal forced the closure of a London exhibition of paintings by the Mumbai artist M.F. Husain, a Muslim forced into exile for his depictions of Hindu goddesses. In Leicester last year, hundreds of masked young Hindus paraded through a Muslim neighbourhood shouting Jai Shri Ram (Hail Lord Ram) after watching an India vs Pakistan cricket match.

Internet trolls in India and among the diaspora fire threats of murder and rape at academics who criticise Modi and Hindutva. In 2014, Wendy Doniger, an eminent Indologist and Sanskrit scholar at the University of Chicago, came under attack by a US-based online firebrand, Rajiv Malhotra, for her book, The Hindus. Malhotra’s campaign eventually resulted in Penguin India pulping its local edition.

Although Hindu activists often accuse Muslims of living in ghettos, the Hindus in Britain are remarkably concentrated and have low rates of marrying out of their communities. Given the first-past-the-post voting system, this has made some British constituencies and their MPs captive to the Hindu vote. Periodically, British ministers invited to their functions are embarrassed when pictures circulate showing them standing next to dubious communalists visiting from India.

Where Indians were once more inclined to the Labour Party because of its warmer embrace of migrants, Hindu organisations have swung behind the Conservatives in the past decade. The diaspora’s advance into higher income brackets would have something to do with this, but the Tories are less likely to worry about human rights issues in India and have shelved a Labour initiative to outlaw caste discrimination in Britain itself. Britain’s first Hindu prime minister, Rishi Sunak, might be more representative of the secular, US green card–holding CEO class, but he does wear his Hindu identity as a temple thread on his wrist.

Conceivably, the United States could get a president of Indian ancestry in Nikki Haley, a US-born daughter of Sikh migrants (although she converted to Christianity when she married out of the community), or a part-Indian one in Kamala Harris if she were to take over from Biden.

Australia is probably a generation off seeing an Indian-Australian close to national political leadership, though many are already at the top levels of professions and corporations. But the diaspora’s generally sunny picture is already showing some of the tensions Anderson portrays.

The RSS has a local outfit, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh Australia, running forty-nine regular shakhas with an average combined attendance of 1230 volunteers. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad is also well established, as is a self-proclaimed umbrella body, the Hindu Council of Australia, which fits Anderson’s definition of soft neo-Hindutva. For Modi’s visit in May, a new body calling itself the Indian Australian Diaspora Foundation, which claimed to include 367 professional, caste, regional, religious, cultural and local groups as well as RSS and BJP branches, organised flights and buses for thousands of attendees at the Sydney meeting.

Hard neo-Hindutva showed up in 2019 when hecklers forced the Australia India Institute at Melbourne University, set up by Kevin Rudd’s government to further bilateral relations and knowledge, to revert from public lectures to closed seminars on issues relating to Modi and Hindutva. More than a dozen India scholars severed links with the institute in protest at the decision.

Probably in response, the Albanese government announced during Modi’s visit a new body to take over the task of promoting the bilateral relationship, implicitly leaving the Australia India Institute to function as an academic think tank. The new Centre for Australia–India Relations has a banker, Swati Dave, rather than an academic as its advisory body’s chair. It will be located in Sydney’s Parramatta, a focus for the city’s Indian diaspora, whose newly elected federal MP, economist Andrew Charlton, has just written an upbeat book about the India relationship, Australia’s Pivot to India.

But there’s an important reason to think that Hindutva’s appeal might never be as great among the Indian diaspora in Australia. Our Indian population is more diverse than the British one, with Hindus barely 50 per cent of the Indian-born population and many of them drawn from India’s southern states, which are resistant to the BJP message.

As well as a large number of Christians, the diaspora also includes as many as 200,000 Sikhs, some of whom support the movement for a separate Sikh state of Khalistan in India’s Punjab. In their meetings, Modi has ambushed Albanese with charges that these elements have vandalised Hindu temples with separatist slogans. Albanese doesn’t seem to have responded by pointing out that police suspect some of these to be “false flag” operations, or that the most violent clash so far has been an attack with bats and hammers on a Sikh group in Western Sydney in February 2021 by men recognised from a BJP–HSS rally. Or if he has, we have not been told about it.

In Sydney, as in London, New York and Texas, Indian groups opposed to Modi’s Hindutva campaigns picketed outside his mass reception. This book will help our politicians understand why. •

Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism
By Edward T.G. Anderson | Hurst | $57.99 | 488 pages

The post Modi’s expatriate army appeared first on Inside Story.

The explanations for this attitude tend to focus on these countries’ past connections with Russia and irritation with the West more than their lack of sympathy for Ukraine. The governing African National Congress in South Africa, for example, recalls Soviet support in the long struggle against apartheid. India has found Russia a useful strategic partner in the past and a source of advanced weapons. China and Russia entered into what was described in glowing terms as friendship “without limits” prior to the full-scale invasion.

The West, meanwhile, has been criticised for its focus on Ukraine’s plight compared with its relative indifference to the humanitarian catastrophes of the ongoing wars in Africa and the Middle East. During the war’s early stages the Biden administration framed the conflict as one between democracy and autocracy, which did not impress many of the relatively autocratic governments in the Global South. Lastly, members of the Global South consider the United States and its allies, notably Britain, hypocritical about a “rules-based international order” given their actions in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere.

Yet this narrative has become more nuanced over the course of this year. Partly this is because of efforts by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Biden administration to mend fences with these countries. Partly the shift reflects irritation with Russia over its stubborn and wholly unrealistic stance on what might serve as the basis for a peace settlement. A third factor is the harmful impact of Russia’s actions on food and energy prices.

For all these reasons, countries in the Global South are starting to find an equidistant position harder to sustain and are starting to take diplomatic initiatives of their own. These may be harder for Russia to resist than those sponsored by the West.

The “Global South” is one of those convenient shorthands that can keep conversations on international relations going without the need to list lots of different countries. If taken too seriously — as if it represents a homogeneous group with a shared agenda — the label can soon become misleading. It is the latest in a sequence of attempts to group countries according to what they are not instead of who they are.

During the cold war the countries that deliberately stayed outside the main alliances became part of the Non-Aligned Movement. They eventually combined with states with a policy of neutrality (such as Sweden and Switzerland) to become Neutral and Non-Aligned. Those many developing countries outside the main blocs were lumped together as the Third World because they were part of neither the First capitalist world nor the Second communist world.

Once the cold war was over these labels appeared dated and unhelpful, doing little justice to the variety and agency of these countries. It also became apparent that several of these countries that were behind the West on many key economic indicators were nonetheless showing considerable dynamism. Not only were they catching up but they also had shared interests distinct from those of the West. The most important of these countries were identified as the BRICS, standing for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

As well as the group’s growing economic importance it also included the world’s most populous countries. Although it had started as a convenient shorthand, BRICS eventually became a political entity with its own summits. Each of its members tended to complain about attempted US “hegemony” and argue for more multipolarity. Their dislike of America’s regular resort to economic sanctions was reflected in proposals for the “de-dollarisation” of the world economy.

BRICS excludes countries in similar positions, however, including the populous Indonesia and the oil-rich Saudi Arabia, and is already debating whether to invite more members.

The West has its own institutions, of course, including NATO and the European Union, both of which have grown in size since the end of the cold war and provide a degree of integration that is absent from other regional institutions (such as ASEAN and South America’s Mercosur). A Group of Seven industrialised countries (the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan) meets annually, always with the European Union and usually with other invited friends and relations.

The G7 was the G8 until Russia was expelled after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, with one consequence being there is one less place for diplomatic communications between Russia and the West. The obvious place for that contact, the UN Security Council, has been paralysed by Russia’s veto.

One other grouping is large enough to bring together the main international players more inclusively than either the G7 or BRICS. That is the G20, formed in 1999 in response to an economic crisis but now with a wider agenda. It is made up of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union. Indonesia hosted the latest of the G20’s annual summits; India will host the next.

This is an altogether more complicated picture than simply “the West” versus “the Rest,” or one in which, other than the permanent members of the Security Council, few other states count. The complexity of this evolving international system has become more evident as countries work out their responses to the Russo-Ukraine war.

A common complaint from non-Western countries mirrors that of internal critics of Western support for Ukraine: far too much effort is going into stoking the fires of war by sending arms to Ukraine and not enough into “diplomacy” to end the war. A persistent hope is that “dialogue” might find a commonsense way out of the morass.

This line has appealed to those who wish to sound progressive even while supporting a vicious, nationalist aggressor state, or “realists” who take it for granted that at some point Ukraine will concede territory to Russia. Those taking this view also tend to assume that the United States is in the position to get a deal done because it can lever Kyiv into a compliant position.

This was always a dubious proposition. It would not be a good look for Biden, and certainly would be divisive within the alliance, to attempt to strongarm Ukraine into an unequal treaty that Russia would probably not honour anyway. Most importantly, Putin has not offered any encouragement to those urging active negotiations.

Early in the war the two sides were exploring a possible settlement, looking for language on the Donbas, Crimea and neutrality with which the two sides could live. That proved elusive, and the Ukrainian position hardened once Russian atrocities were revealed as troops abandoned their positions close to Kyiv. Now Putin demands that Ukraine agree to the permanent loss of territory unilaterally claimed for Russia, which is even more than it currently occupies. That is not going to happen.

The peace camp has thus faded in the West. The most serious proponents argue that preparations must be made for when the time is ripe, accepting that this is not yet and must await changing attitudes in Kyiv and Moscow. The agreed Western stance follows Ukraine’s: Russia’s behaviour, along with its claimed objectives, means that there is no basis for negotiations. The only development that is likely to shift Russian views is evidence that it is losing the war, and so the main effort needs to be put into helping Ukraine with its military operations.

This position has created a gap that many non-Western countries have been eager to fill, casting themselves in the role of peacemakers. The process began last February when China stepped forward with its proposals. Because of Xi Jinping’s “no limits” partnership with Putin, and his accompanying anti-NATO rhetoric, these were treated sceptically. Zelenskyy, however, appreciated at once that, taken at face value, they were more favourable to Ukraine than Russia. The core principles — staying in line with the UN Charter and respecting national sovereignty, territorial integrity and international humanitarian law — give no support to seizing the territory of a neighbouring state and bombing its cities. The plan was followed up by a discussion between Xi and Zelenskyy and closer diplomatic relations between the two.

Brazil, African countries, and most recently Saudi Arabia have since taken similar initiatives. The last of these was Brazil’s. Although it condemned the Russian invasion, it has not supported sanctions against Moscow or sending arms to Ukraine. After president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva welcomed Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to Brasilia and objected to Western arms deliveries as prolonging the war, he came under heavy criticism. He then declined an invitation from Putin to visit Russia, but repeated “Brazil’s willingness, together with India, Indonesia, and China, to talk to both sides of the conflict in search of peace.”

Lula da Silva has not spoken directly to Zelenskyy and now seems disillusioned. His initiative made little headway, leading him to conclude that neither Putin nor Zelenskyy were ready. “Brazil’s role is to try to arrive at a peace proposal together with others for when both countries want it,” he has said.

Africa’s initiative was announced by South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa on 16 May. In June, representatives from South Africa, Egypt, Senegal, Congo-Brazzaville, Comoros, Zambia and Uganda visited both Ukraine and Russia. The mission was not a great success. As the delegation arrived in Kyiv it was struck by Russian missiles. Then, when they met with Putin on 17 June, the Russian president showed no interest in a plan that required accepting Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders. One South African academic, Professor William Gumede, observed that the African leaders were humiliated: “Putin didn’t even bother to listen to the delegation, basically interrupting them before they’d even finished speaking, implying there was no point in discussing anything as the war would continue.”

This visit was followed in late July by the Second Russo-Africa Summit in St Petersburg, which had been postponed from October 2022 when it would have taken place in Ethiopia. At one level, Russia might have counted the summit a success, with forty-nine delegations attending, although this only included seventeen heads of state (compared with forty-three at the first summit in 2019). But some of the continent’s most important leaders were present, including Ramaphosa and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.

One of the odder features of the event was that Yevgeny Prigozhin was also in St Petersburg, also meeting with African leaders, apparently not in disgrace after his recent mutiny against the Russian defence ministry. Prigozhin’s Wagner group has a significant presence in the Central African Republic, Libya, Mali and Sudan (and now potentially Niger).

The summit came not long after Russia had decided to abandon the deal that had allowed Ukraine to export grain (some 32.8 million tonnes last year) from its Black Sea ports, on the grounds that Western sanctions restricting the export of Russian grain and fertiliser had not been lifted (though these are actually exempt from sanctions). The end of the deal means that shortages will grow and prices rise.

At the summit Ramaphosa and other African leaders pleaded with Putin to restore the initiative, the lack of which was already causing hardship on the continent, but to no avail. When Putin offered to donate some grain free to the neediest countries, the South African leader thanked him politely and then added that he and his fellow leaders “are not coming here to plead for donations for the African continent… our main input here is not so much focused on giving and donating grain to the African continent.”

Nor did the summit see any progress on peace negotiations. Putin had no objections to the African mission continuing, but he offered no hope that he was changing his position or withdrawing his transparently false claim that the West had really started the war.

Adding further to the chill, Putin acknowledged after the summit that he would not be travelling to Johannesburg for the BRICS summit, which started on 22 August, as this was less “important than me staying in Russia.” The real reason was that the South African government could not guarantee Putin would not be arrested and sent to The Hague.

The International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Putin, issued in March, for the war crime of deporting Ukrainian children, is restricting his ability to travel. South Africa, along with 122 other states, has ratified the Rome Statute and is obliged to arrest Putin if he shows up in their jurisdiction.

The South African government did try to find a way out of this predicament, arguing to the ICC that arresting Putin would be tantamount to a declaration of war and would undermine peace efforts. In the end it had to abandon this effort. Without a guarantee of immunity, Putin clearly decided it was too risky to travel. Instead he will join the summit by video while foreign minister Sergey Lavrov will represent Russia in person.

The developing frustration with Russia was reflected in the most important peace initiative thus far — a two-day summit in Jeddah on 6–8 August, hosted by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (normally referred to as “MBS”). Saudi Arabia is another country with which Russia has been trying to improve relations. In particular, the Saudis have cooperated on oil production cuts to raise prices. Although Western nations encourage countries to buy Russian oil only below a US$60 ceiling price, for now it is selling oil at closer to US$65, helping push up revenues.

The Biden administration has also been making moves to improve relations with the Saudis, despite starting in a critical mode because of the kingdom’s human rights records (and especially the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018). It is actively engaged in an effort to get Israel and the Saudis to establish diplomatic relations. MBS’s sympathetic view of Ukraine was evident when Zelenskyy was hosted in May at an Arab summit, also in Jeddah. There the Ukrainian president urged Arab leaders not to turn “a blind eye” to Russian aggression.

Following that summit the Crown Prince called a large international conference and invited Ukraine but not Russia. Even more notable was that the other invitees (some forty states) didn’t appear to find this a turn-off. It was no surprise that the United States and the European Union turned up, but the presence of China, India and South Africa was significant. Had it been the other way round, and Russia had been invited and not Ukraine, this would have been considered an enormous diplomatic defeat for Kyiv and its supporters.

Russia made clear that it was unhappy with its exclusion. Deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov grumbled that without his country the talks had not “the slightest added value.” He described the meeting as “a reflection of the West’s attempt to continue futile, doomed efforts” to mobilise the Global South behind Kyiv. At the same time he insisted that Russia remained open to a diplomatic solution to end the war, and would respond to any sincere proposals.

Around the same time, a New York Times journalist asked Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov whether Russia wants to occupy new Ukrainian territories. “No,” he answered. “We just want to control all the land we have now written into our constitution as ours.” Yet that land includes not only Crimea but also the territories of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, not all of which are currently occupied by Russia. “There are currently no grounds for an agreement,” added Peskov. “We will continue the operation for the foreseeable future.”

By contrast, the Ukrainian delegation was pleased with the event. Zelenskyy’s head of staff, Andriy Yermak, spoke of “very productive consultations on the key principles on which a just and lasting peace should be built.” No consensus position had emerged, but the conversation between the different viewpoints was honest and open.

Zelenskyy has said that he hopes that the Jeddah gathering will be a step on the road towards a global peace summit, possibly to be held later in the year. He has framed the talks as following the ten-point peace plan that he presented to the G20 last November. Saudi Arabia’s media ministry emphasised the importance of continuing consultations to pave the way for peace. Working groups are being established to consider some of the specific problems raised by the war.

China’s representative at the Jeddah meeting, Li Hui, was described by an EU source as having “participated actively” in the sessions. He had not attended another informal meeting in Denmark in June.

Also present was India’s national security adviser, who shared the consensus view: “Dialogue and diplomacy is the way forward for a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine conflict. There is a need to uphold territorial integrity and sovereignty without exception by all states… India has regularly engaged both Russia and Ukraine at the highest levels since the beginning of the conflict and New Delhi supports a global order based on principles enshrined in UN Charter and international law.”

India will be hosting the next G20 meeting in Delhi on 9–10 September. Unlike South Africa, it has not signed up to the ICC, so Putin would not be at risk of arrest should be decide to attend. He cannot, however, expect a warm reception, and should it come to talk of peace he will find little sympathy for his insistence on annexing a large chunk of Ukrainian territory. None of the leaders, other than Xi and perhaps Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, the host, will be keen on bilateral meetings with the Russian president.

Russian aggression was condemned at the last G20 meeting in Bali, which Zelenskyy attended. Putin is already seeking to prevent a similar communiqué emerging out of the Delhi summit. A preliminary meeting of G20 finance ministers in July failed to agree to a communiqué because Russia and China objected to a reference to “immense human suffering” and Western states would not sign one that did not condemn the aggression.

Should Putin decide to attend the G20, the event may serve to underline Russia’s isolation as much as its power. He has annoyed countries that now have significant clout in international affairs — countries that make a point of not following an American lead — by insisting on terms for ending the war that contradict the principles of the UN Charter and pursuing strategies that push up energy and food costs for all countries at a time when most are struggling economically. This behaviour has created an opportunity for Zelenskyy to improve relations with these countries and ensure that future peace initiatives are more likely to fit in with his vision than Putin’s.

For that reason we should not expect any early breakthroughs. Much still depends on what happens militarily. But it would be too cynical to dismiss the current diplomatic initiatives as being irrelevant. They reflect the changing character of international relations as Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia and other countries demonstrate their political muscle, and also the continuing importance of the UN Charter as one of the few fixed normative points.

We are moving from the idea of a mediated peace, in which a country able to talk to both Moscow and Kyiv, such as Turkey or Israel, tries to broker an agreement that leaves both sides with honour satisfied, to a process that involves developing global pressure on Putin to back away from his stubborn insistence on Russia’s right to annex Ukrainian territory. •

This article first appeared in Sam and Lawrence Freedman’s Substack newsletter, Comment Is Freed.

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US president Joe Biden had rushed back to Washington from the G7 summit in Hiroshima to negotiate a debt-ceiling deal with Congress. Otherwise he would have joined Modi, Albanese and Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida in Sydney for a meeting of the Quad, that relatively new grouping seen in American and Australian circles as a way of countering the two Asian countries’ diffidence about lining up against China. (Japan’s diffidence reflects its post-1945 constitution’s bar on non-defensive use of force, India’s its longstanding non-alignment doctrine.)

But what if the Quad instead became a forum for Japan and India to enlist Australia’s help in persuading Washington to give China some space? Just such a proposal is put forward in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads: A Japanese Strategy for Peace and Sustainable Prosperity,” a paper published in Tokyo at the end of July.

The paper comes not from familiar members of Japan’s left but from Japanese scholars and a South Korean co-author who mostly gained their doctorates in the United States. The two lead authors, Mike Mochizuki and Kuniko Ashizawa, are professors at George Washington University in the American capital.

In essence, the paper argues that Japan should lead a “middle power” effort to lower tensions in Asia. “As part of its middle power diplomacy,” the scholars write, “Japan could also build on the Quad… and take the lead in promoting a ‘middle power coalition’ among Japan, Australia, and India, and thus lead the agenda-setting of the Quad.”

The coalition could then be extended to include other middle powers in the region, including South Korea and the ASEAN countries: “In this process, it would be effective to envision a ‘middle power quad’ by inviting South Korea to join the Japan–Australia–India coalition. By building on its partnerships with middle powers in Asia and in Europe, Japan should vigorously engage China to stabilise bilateral relations as well as to cooperate on pressing transnational challenges.”

The paper’s critique and proposals may upset comfortable assumptions in Washington and Canberra. “Rather [than] being solely dependent on the United States,” it says, “Japan needs a more autonomous foreign policy — what might be called a ‘pro-American, autonomous diplomacy.’” Instead of being “self-righteous” about values-oriented foreign policy, Japan should respect political diversity and promote peaceful coexistence, resisting efforts to divide Asia into a struggle between democracies and autocracies.

This vision is offered as a counterpoint to the concept of the “Indo-Pacific” — a formulation developed by Canberra pundits and adopted by the United States — which “diminishes the importance of continental Asia and suggests a regional orientation designed to counter and even contain China.”

The authors see the National Security Strategy announced by Prime Minister Kishida in December as a “180-degree turnaround” from longstanding Japanese defence policy. It included a doubling of defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP and an arsenal of new Tomahawk cruise missiles designed to strike back at China and North Korea. Commenting on the counterstrike capabilities of the missiles, they argue that “what would only be of tactical use during a military conflict is recklessly justified from the logic of strategic deterrence.”

Rather than treating Australia as Japan’s most important partner in middle-power diplomacy, the authors turn to South Korea: an established democracy and developed economy (one of the world’s ten largest) with per capita income equal to or exceeding Japan’s.

“Both countries [Japan and South Korea] are close allies of the United States; and they both see North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs as acute threats and are concerned about China’s military build-up and coercive behaviour,” says the paper. “But at the same time, they share a deep interest in preventing a military conflict in East Asia that would have devastating consequences for both countries; and they want to maintain close and stable economic relations with China, which is their largest trading partner. In short, both Japan and South Korea desire an Asia that is not divided into two conflicting camps and would prefer a region that is open and inclusive.”

The scholars believe the new version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership — the trade, investment and data pact Australia and Japan pressed ahead with after Donald Trump withdrew the United States — should be opened to simultaneous admission to both China, once it meets its qualifications, and Taiwan.

The paper’s authors aren’t arguing for an unarmed Japan. But they fear that conflict over Taiwan would have a devastating impact on Japan, probably as a result of Chinese attacks on US bases there. They agree that the United States must show it could beat off a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “Japan can best contribute to this deterrence by denial by improving the resilience and survivability of US and Japanese defence assets in Japan and by strengthening Japan’s own capabilities to defend its own territory, especially its southwest island chain that is close to Taiwan.”

The key point is that the capacity to strike Chinese military targets on the mainland with missiles would not add greatly to deterrence, since China has too many targets and could rain fire back on a more compact Japan.

While the Biden administration has recently emphasised that America’s “One China” policy hasn’t changed, calls by Congress members and former officials to drop the policy, extend diplomatic recognition to Taiwan and defend Taiwan unconditionally are “especially provocative” and have raised the danger of conflict over Taiwan.

Japan’s aim “should be to maintain the conditions for preserving the status quo until the day comes when China and Taiwan can find a peaceful solution to the issue of unification,” the scholars urge, adding: “Moreover, Japan should not base its policies on forecasts of imminent military conflict or Chinese purported deadlines on unification and should not support the drawing of various ‘redlines.’”

The proposals in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” are likely to be welcomed by those senior figures in Australia’s foreign affairs and strategic circles — mostly out of government positions now — who criticise an increasingly security-oriented approach to Asia, along with our tightening “interoperability” with US forces and an apparent concurrence in US primacy.

They also chime with the kind of ideas the foreign minister, Penny Wong, was putting forward in opposition, which have been submerged by the unequivocal embrace of the AUKUS agreement on nuclear-powered submarines and advanced technologies.

Some of Kishida’s December proposals are similar to contentious Australian moves by Scott Morrison and now Anthony Albanese. Notable among these are a closer commitment to the defence of Taiwan and general alliance war-fighting capability, and the acquisition of 2000-kilometre-range Tomahawks and other missiles to strike back at China. The difference here is that Australia’s missiles would have to be fired from submarines, ships or aircraft some thousands of kilometres away from Australia.

The key question is: how much influence will “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” have in Japan? The answer is not much, at least immediately. The paper was published two days before Japan’s defence ministry, the Self-Defence Agency, came out with a new white paper that, as defence minister Yasukazu Hamada said, “explains how we will drastically reinforce our defence capabilities.”

On Taiwan, the white paper doesn’t go as far as Kishida’s Liberal Democratic Party predecessors — Shinzo Abe said a Taiwan conflict would be an “emergency” for Japan and Taro Aso suggested Japan could join Taiwan’s defence — but it strongly supports the “counterstrike” capability in case Japan comes under fire.

Still, the yearning for peace in Japan, ingrained since the wartime US firebombing and atomic attacks on its cities, will act as a political brake on rearmament and assertive power play. Despite the belligerent drift in Chinese security policy since 2012 under Xi Jinping, the notion of an underlying Asian affinity also remains.

That notion last surfaced in 2009 when a splinter of the Liberal Democratic Party called the Democratic Party of Japan, led by former LDP politician Yukio Hatoyama, swept into power, interrupting near-unbroken LDP rule since the end of the Allied occupation in 1952. The foreign policies of the incoming government so concerned Washington that US secretary of state Hillary Clinton handed Japan policy to the Pentagon. (One of the authors of “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads,” Kiyoshi Sugawa, was an adviser in the Democratic Party government.)

Three years later, with the Democratic Party in disarray, the LDP was back under Shinzo Abe, who set about turning Japan into a militarily “normal” state.

Yet the LDP’s Kishida has gone part of the way in the direction proposed in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” by rescuing Japan’s relations with Seoul from the plunge under Shinzo Abe over South Korean grievances dating from Japan’s 1910–45 annexation of that country. Helped by South Korea’s election last year of a more conservative president, Yoon Suk Yeol, and stepped-up missile testing and nuclear threats by North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Kishida has developed a warmer partnership on several fronts, including defence.

In June, he also announced plans to expand staff in Japan’s foreign ministry to 8000 by 2030, a 20 per cent increase on current levels, in order to step up Japan’s engagement with the world, especially Asia, and counter China’s influence. While most reporting focused on China’s 7 per cent increase in defence spending this year, Beijing also said it was spending 12.2 per cent more on its diplomacy.

In Australia, meanwhile, the military brass section still dominates the foreign policy orchestra. The latest formal talks between Australian and US foreign and defence ministers, in Brisbane on 28–29 July, will have pleased China hawks and made critics of the alliance drift grind their teeth. In the background, some 30,000 American, Australian and allied defence personnel were engaged in the biannual Talisman Sabre war games.

Australia will be hosting more US forces, manufacturing missiles for both countries in two years, somehow getting hold of its US nuclear submarines despite problems in the US Congress, and — mentioned only vaguely — becoming more deeply involved in US space warfare capability. Albanese is out to pre-empt any criticism at the upcoming Australian Labor Party national conference in Brisbane.

The growing closeness to Washington has so far earned Labor no evident traction in getting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange free of US efforts to extradite and charge him under its espionage law.

Some sign of a resurgence in the influence of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade came in April, when the government’s Defence Strategic Review recommended that it “be appropriately resourced to lead a nationally determined and strategically directed whole-of-government statecraft effort in the Indo-Pacific.” And glimmers of Foreign Affairs influence were evident when Albanese stressed the importance of diplomacy as well as deterrence and the need for “guardrails” to avoid conflict, and praised Biden for talking to China, at the annual Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore in early June.

But Foreign Affairs still seems undernourished for a more central role. A departmental spokesperson tells me that “work is under way across agencies to implement the government’s response to the Defence Strategic Review,” but evidence Foreign Affairs is still a supporting act to Defence can be seen in one of its latest budget allocations: $52.7 million over two years from 2023–24 “to provide international policy advice and diplomatic support for the nuclear-powered submarine program.”

The sophisticated debate in Japan and India’s ambivalence about deeper military ties under the Quad (including its late withdrawal from the Talisman Sabre exercise) indicates the department has much work to do in guiding its political masters around this complicated region. And if Donald Trump does return to the White House, the idea of Japan, India and Australia using the Quad to handle America might not be so far-fetched. •

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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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Melbourne University’s Michael Wesley goes through some of this history in his lead essay for Australian Foreign Affairs. He shows Australia clinging to its diminishing status in London as one of the “white dominions” and then falling in with the United States in its suspicion of India’s Soviet ties and sanctions over its nuclear tests — before having to play catch-up when Washington, London and Paris decided a nuclear Indian superpower was needed.

Wesley points out the dilemma for Canberra. “Its foreign policy has tended to be ‘heliocentric’ — the major elements of its statecraft are shaped by its commitment to a single major ally,” he writes. That single ally — first Britain, then the United States — has always been culturally similar. “Heliocentrism has enshrined a presidential element to policy formulation, with the prime minister taking personal charge of relations with the major ally. It has also resulted in Australia looking at the world from the same perspective as a global power, rather than as an isolated country with limited capabilities.”

Hence our expectation to be heard in global councils, our willingness to join military expeditions, and our past contempt for Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-aligned foreign policy. In return, we drew contempt from New Delhi’s external affairs ministry, its suspicion of America only recently fading, as the monkey to the Washington organ-grinder.

This heliocentrism is now deeply challenged, says Wesley. “The US investment in a relationship with India signals an admission that America has neither the capacity nor the stomach to face China alone. Washington has ceded its pre-eminence in the Pacific to an order in which China and the United States become two among a series of great powers — including Indonesia and Japan — seeking to prevent any single state from dominating the region.”

This shift has clearly not yet sunk in among Canberra foreign policymakers. Our diplomats and security analysts are still pushing for India to stop acquiring Russian-supplied armaments and buy American in the name of “interoperability” with the other Quad members. With New Delhi proceeding with the purchase of the powerful S-400 air defence system from Russia in spite of threatened US sanctions — a similar purchase got NATO ally Turkey barred from the F-35 fighter program — Canberra will be put in an awkward spot if neither partner backs down.

India is unlikely to transform into another dutiful US ally like Japan and Australia. But it would help us adjust out of heliocentrism if India displays the kind of kindred liberal democratic and free-market values cited by exponents of a closer embrace.

Will it? Indian journalist Debasish Roy Chowdhury and Sydney University political scientist John Keane offer a dismaying portrait of neglect and institutional decay. The world’s “biggest democracy” is an “endangered” one in its “death stages,” characterised by dark money, manipulated media and muscle power, its people at risk from toxic air, poisoned water, and (as Covid has shown) disease.

The authors of To Kill a Democracy believe the seeds of decay were planted soon after independence when Nehru echoed the 1835 advice of Thomas Babington Macaulay that higher education for the upper classes was more useful than basic education for the masses. In Nehru’s case, he wanted brains to run the institutions of state and his new industrial “temples of modernity.”

That neglect has left India with an employment gap between agriculture and the booming but relatively low-labour services sector. A huge pool of jobless young has been waiting for a demagogue like Narendra Modi to enlist them as stormtroopers in a quest to turn the secular Indian state into a Hindu one.

A first-past-the-post electoral system allowed Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to translate a 37 per cent vote into an absolute majority of seats. With anti-defection laws reducing MPs to ciphers, cabinet cowed and civil servants at risk of transfer to remote posts, Modi and his authoritarian home minister Amit Shah are the government. That makes for decisive but sometimes disastrous decisions, as when Modi suddenly “de-monetised” large-value banknotes in 2016 in an effort to flush out the black economy. Representing 86 per of cash in circulation in an economy overwhelmingly reliant on cash transactions, the move paralysed the economy.

The book’s most dispiriting passage concerns the abject complicity of the widely respected Supreme Court of India, under former chief justice Ranjan Gogoi, in Modi’s manoeuvres against Muslims, notably his overnight abolition of Kashmir’s autonomous statehood and his National Register of Citizens, which was used to remove citizenship from some 1.9 million Muslims in Assam.

All this has been played down by Quad enthusiasts. Modi has had a warm rapport with Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison, Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump. As Wesley writes, “There are elements of his populist political style and can-do approach to governance that appeal to conservative leaders, who are more likely to overlook his government’s chauvinistic approach to communal relations at home.”

Fortunately, Australia’s Indian diaspora seems to be bringing the best of India with them, eager for space, a clean environment and less competition for jobs. Aarti Betigeri, a journalist living in Australia, writes a stand-out essay for India Rising? from inside this diaspora, which is, or soon will be, our biggest new migrant cohort and one that is moving rapidly up the echelons of our institutions and companies — though not yet in politics, as its numbers would suggest, because it associates in divergent language, caste and other interest groups.

Betigeri believes the hunger to migrate has been thoroughly exploited by Australia:

We have set the intake pipeline so that it benefits Australia at every stage. First, students pay huge sums of money to study here (usually it’s their parents’ life savings, or land is sold to finance the fees). Then, while they’re studying, they provide a cheap, readily available and compliant source of unskilled labour. After graduation, they take on unpaid internships of three to six months, living off their savings, or fitting in overnight shifts at the servo to pay the rent. Then they emerge, fully trained, with an Australian education, ready to join the workforce, fuelling our economic growth. At every stage, the benefits are stacked in Australia’s favour. The house always wins.

The ever-higher bar of Home Affairs criteria for converting temporary residence into citizenship is another grievance. The Morrison government’s treatment of foreign students during the pandemic — go home or fend for yourselves — and its ban on flights from India at the height of the Delta variant panic have hardly improved Australia’s external image.

That adverse perceptions are prone to persist is shown in Harsh V. Pant’s essay for India Rising? on the view of Australia from India. He opens by recalling the wave of attacks on Indian students in Sydney and Melbourne in 2009–10, which he accepts as mostly racially motivated and epitomising a “social and political gap” between India and Australia. But street-level enquiries by Indian diplomats revealed that nearly all the attacks were made by disadvantaged teenagers set on stealing mobile phones and bling from relatively well-off students in the outer suburbs to which they had been dispersed by the gentrification of old inner-city student quarters,.

From New Delhi, Amit Dasgupta, the Indian consul-general in Sydney at the time, tells me, “I had said then and maintain even now that, with the exception of a few, the majority of the attacks were not racist and to allege them as such is incorrect.” That even Pant, a professor in international relations at King’s College, London, is still swayed by the hyped-up “news” generated by India’s hectic new electronic channels and websites illustrates the dangers of a debased media that has only flourished and become more chauvinist under Modi.

Such is the degree of intimidation that Oxford University Press has opted out of producing a cheaper edition of the Roy Chowdhury and Keane book for the Indian market. This followed a warning in the journal of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the militant Hindu-nationalist movement from which Modi sprang.

While the strategic partnership between Australia and India won’t follow the US alliance model, economic ties seem likely to grow steadily, and an essay about this would have rounded out this issue of Australian Foreign Affairs. The Morrison government is again talking up the free-trade agreement shelved soon after Abbott and Modi announced talks. This is again raising unrealistic hopes.

As Peter Varghese, author of An India Economic Strategy to 2035 for the Australian government, put it to me earlier this year, India is “deeply protectionist and unlikely to fundamentally change.” He says India is an “investment story” requiring Australian businesses to get in behind India’s protective barriers and develop a domestic business — a big call for Australia’s parochial and short term–minded business community. “I think it would be a mistake to overinvest in getting a free-trade agreement done because it will just distract the relationship for a considerable period of time with a limited prospect of success,” Varghese said. “And there’s a heck of a lot of things you can do without an FTA.”

On the shared values front, the old secular India may be pushing back. As Roy Chowdhury and Keane admit, India may still have the world’s largest pool of illiterates, but adult literacy grew from 12 per cent in 1947 to 74 per cent in the latest census, in 2011. Mobile phones and the internet have empowered and enlightened, as well as being channels for bigotry and porn. Political cultures in the non-Hindi language states and lower-caste mobilisation also stand in Modi’s way: in the important West Bengal state elections this year, the fiery chief minister and leader of a Congress Party splinter, Mamata Banerjee, roundly beat Modi’s BJP.

The Supreme Court may also be regaining its nerve under a new chief justice. This year it accepted public interest litigation from a group of Modi critics who found their mobile phones infected by Israeli spyware available only to governments. The court rejected the government’s attempt to assert national-interest secrecy, and set up its own independent commission to investigate.

And this month, Modi abruptly announced the withdrawal of his new agricultural laws that would have ditched guaranteed prices and government purchases of major crops, and left individual farmers to deal directly with emerging giant retail chains. Until suspended by the Supreme Court in January, the laws drew a blockade of New Delhi by farmers and their tractors. Over 600 died in clashes with police, as Modi’s spokespeople called the protesters “traitors” and “terrorists.”

With state elections approaching in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, from where many of the protesting farmers came, the Indian prime minister is backing off. Perhaps we have seen peak Modi. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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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. •

The post “Everyone has a horror story to tell” appeared first on Inside Story.

Now comes this book by Tim Harper, a Cambridge historian who has also collaborated on books with Bayly. Underground Asia takes us down the burrows of resistance to the Asian empires of Britain, France and the Netherlands, and into the struggles over the carcass of the Chinese empire in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

In this earlier era of globalisation, revolutionaries made use of post, telegraph, steamship and loose border controls to advance their causes. As Harper writes, “Many of them — although not all of them and not all of the time — travelled as seamen, labourers, servants, entertainers, students and, most often, as exiles.” These revolutionaries — people like Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, China’s Zhou Enlai and Indonesia’s Ibrahim Tan Malaka — travelled light, often under false names, “with banned literature, illicit currency or encoded messages hidden in their luggage”:

They experienced a world of connections, but also a world upside down: the underbelly of the great port cities of empire where they found they were able more freely to organise and act.

The sites of their struggles were the waterfront, the lodging house, the coffee shop, the clandestine printing press in the back alley. They made these places centres of global awareness, and their experience of a secret underworld of empire helped shape a spectrum of radical ideas — about class and national identity, the position of women, the function of art and literature, the history of the future.

Some of them hid in plain sight. “If you want to hide revolutionary connections,” as the Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin remarked, “you had better travel first class.”

The strands of revolution and resistance were diverse. Some developed out of the anarchism portrayed in Joseph Conrad’s novels. “As a doctrine, anarchism was malleable to individual needs,” writes Harper. “[It] represented freedom from the state and feudal structures and a new moral purpose.” Less a system of thought than a “utopian horizon… it was not something passively received but elaborated on locally by men and women making sense of their alienation from the old order.”

Meiji Japan was an initial beacon, especially after its victory over Russia in 1904. “The remaking of the Japanese imperial order following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 exerted a fascination on restless minds across Asia,” Harper writes. “For Indian maharajahs, Malay sultans and Thai kings, Japan was a model for monarchical revival in the face of western encroachment. For critics of royal power, Japan was also an example of successful westernisation and liberal constitutional reform.” In 1896 just thirteen Chinese students were studying in Japan; by 1905 the figure was over 8000.

As soon as Kaiser Wilhelm II learnt of Russia’s mobilisation in July 1914, imperial Germany began trying to foment revolution in opposing empires. “Rapidly, German agents took advantage of the territory of neutral powers such as Spain, Siam, the United States and its colony in the Philippines to distribute calls to Muslims to resist the British and support the Ottoman Sultan and his ally ‘Hadji Guillaume.’”

The British countered with their Arab Bureau, run out of the Savoy Hotel in Cairo, whose tentacles reached across to Asia with the help of an expanding Intelligence Bureau in India and police special branches and MI5 posts in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai’s foreign enclave. “All of this drew the British empire deeper into an unprecedented global counter-propaganda exercise as it asserted its claim to be the world’s largest Muslim power and a defender of the faith,” Harper says.

Imperial police struggled to comprehend the enemy. Some were obsessed with “those capable both of ‘visiting addresses at which Europeans rarely call’ and of haunting the exclusive cafes and luxury hotels that only whites could enter.” The conspiracies they unravelled “conjured up an ‘underside India’ of ‘every sort of half understood thing and people,’ dark with the threat of thuggee and steeped in ‘the pathos of underworlds.’ Into this bestiary of empire was now placed the bomb-parast, the ‘worshipper of bombs.’”

The contending conspiracies could baffle even the closest observers. In 1922, Britain’s new Bureau of Political Intelligence reported activity in Malaya “in various guises, whose objects are uncertain but yet give no cause for definite suspicion, and it is difficult to prevent the feeling that more is going on under the surface than we are actually aware of.”

The imperial powers responded with brutal power and increasingly efficient security services. Conspiracy trials in India sent dozens to the gallows or the harsh panopticon prison in the Andaman Islands. Unrest after the first world war saw police and soldiers fire on crowds in Tonkin and Shanghai. In Amritsar, Brigadier Reginald Dyer had his troops open fire on a peaceful gathering of Sikhs, killing at least 379 and wounding 1200. A little-known uprising by Muslims in South Malabar saw 2339 killed by British forces, the largest casualties since 1857.

In the meantime, Japan had lost its aura for the rest of Asia. It had its own bomb-throwing anarchists, dismayed by increasing “Prussianisation” and the power of the zaibatsu industrial oligarchs. And it, too, had succumbed to imperialism. Sun Yat-sen was expelled in 1907, and then used the Penang and Hong Kong underground to overthrow the Qing dynasty in 1911. Japan joined the victorious European powers in 1919 by taking over Germany’s footholds in China.

Now the beacon was Moscow, and rebels like Nguyen Ai Quoc, later known as Ho Chi Minh, began to gather in the Soviet capital. The anarchists turned Marxist. The first Chinese translation of the full Communist Manifesto, from Japanese, came out in August 1920. A few months earlier, the Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI, had been the first to take the communist name in Asia, followed in 1921 by the Chinese Communist Party, the latter initially orchestrated by Comintern agent Henk Sneevliet, a Dutch former trade unionist in Java. Borodin, in Canton, oversaw the creation of the Whampoa military academy, with Japanese-trained Chiang Kai-shek as commandant and Zhou Enlai as a political commissar.

But the communists were overconfident. The Indian communist M.N. Roy failed in his effort to use Tashkent as a launching pad for agents, as had Berlin’s wartime India Committee, even though his British opposition, the “Great Gamer” Colonel Frederick Marshman Bailey, had his cover blown: “the band at the most fashionable café would break off and play ‘Tipperary’ when he and his companions entered.”

When Chiang Kai-shek took his new army north against the warlords, leftists including Zhou Enlai made an ill-judged seizure of territory near Wuhan and were forced to a long retreat to the coast. The communists kept their heads up in Shanghai when Chiang took control of its Chinese areas, allowing his Kuomintang and associated triad gangsters to massacre some 4000 members and some 20,000 others. In Java, the PKI launched an uprising in November 1926, with the Dutch waiting to crush it.

By the late 1920s, the revolutionaries were quelled. Mao Zedong took China’s communists on two long marches to mountains in the northwest. The Kuomintang had expelled the Comintern. The imperial powers worried more about global economic depression and rising Japanese power. In India, the British were facing a more sophisticated challenge than bomb-throwers: from minds trained in London’s Inns of Court, following either Gandhi’s non-violence path or, as “constitutionalists,” taking up London’s promise of “dominion” status as a step forward, even while realising India would not be embraced by London to the extent that Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were.

Australia’s minor mentions in this book show us as willing assistants to imperial power in Asia. Sailors from HMAS Sydney helped Singapore police quell anti-Chinese protests in 1919. When prisoners escaped to Thursday Island from the Boven Digul prison camp in Dutch New Guinea, they were returned.

Eventually, of course, it was the Japanese strike into Southeast Asia that broke the imperial hold, though it imposed new forms of slavery. The British came to agree on Indian independence two years after a Japanese surrender. The French and Dutch tried to return, one power meeting its Dien Bien Phu, the other a growing international ostracism partly stirred up by the PKI prisoners it had transferred to Australia from Boven Digul in 1943.

The main strands of Harper’s story are fairly well known to readers of Asia’s national histories. His achievement is to draw them into a continuous narrative, kept alive by colourful vignettes of characters like the West Sumatran leftist Ibrahim Tan Malaka, summarily executed by an Indonesian army patrol in 1948, the Dutch communist Sneevliet, who perished in a Nazi camp, the women who took active roles in revolution, and the dozens sent to the Gulag or liquidated by Stalin.

It could look like a litany of failure, says Harper, but it helped break the imperial “hypnotism” of Asian populations. By carefully biding their time until opponents were exhausted by war, and by enlisting Soviet support, the revolutionaries did come to power in China, Vietnam and North Korea. Underground Asia is also a reminder of how subversive communities of thought were enabled across borders by the now-primitive communications of a century ago. What are social media and mass migration concealing today?

Later this year, the heirs of Mao Zedong and the small group that held its “first congress” in a Shanghai terrace house on 23 July 1921 will celebrate the Chinese Communist Party’s centenary. In 2018, when some Beijing students tried to apply Marxism and organise factory workers, they were arrested. Long after the revolutionary years, the descendants of Mao and his colleagues now rule a system locked into global capitalism. •

The post Restless minds appeared first on Inside Story.

Born one hundred years ago to parents who were Bengali Brahmin, and given the name Robindra, shortened to Robu or Robi, Shankar was raised by his mother in Benares (Varanasi). He didn’t meet his estranged father until he was eight years old. Because of the estrangement, the family was poor. At around this time the boy began to suffer sustained sexual abuse from “a family member.” Shortly before his ninth birthday, his favourite brother, Bhupendra, died of the plague. Like Ray’s Apu, he lost both parents while still in his mid teens.

Another aspect of Shankar’s early life also has a bearing on his work as a film composer. From childhood he was a storyteller, not through music — that came later — but through dance. Joining his eldest brother Uday’s international dance troupe, the boy became a performer on the world stage, touring Europe and the United States. In his diary of April 1933, the nineteen-year-old Benjamin Britten singled out the thirteen-year-old “Robindra” as a highlight of the performance he had witnessed in London.

Late in life, Ravi Shankar would complain that he had missed out on a childhood, but at the time he enjoyed meeting the celebrities of the day, including Greta Garbo and Myrna Loy. At a party in Hollywood, the actor Marie Dressler asked Uday, in all seriousness, if she could adopt the boy.

“Robi” is the Bengali word for sun. In Sanskrit, the word is “Ravi,” the name he took around the age of twenty. Craske’s book, Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar, is the first biography of the musician, with the exception of Shankar’s own memoirs, the last of which, Raga Mala, was a collaboration with Craske. But in spite of its writer’s closeness to his subject this new book is no exercise in hagiography. Shankar himself encouraged the author to wait until after his death and tell the whole story, and Craske seems to have done just that.

Better yet, Indian Sun is that rare thing, a biography of a famous musician in which the music is kept in the foreground and knowledgeably discussed. The book’s preliminary pages include a detailed diagram of a sitar, an explanation of the steps in an Indian octave, and lists of the ragas Shankar created and the talas (rhythmic patterns) he commonly employed.

Shankar didn’t take up the sitar until his late teens — very late indeed for someone who would become the most celebrated sitar player in history — but he worked hard and learnt fast. His guru was Allauddin Khan, not himself a sitar player but a master of the sarod. In short order, Ravi was allowed to play jugalbandi with Khan’s son, Ali Akbar Khan, another sarod player. The pairing of sitar and sarod on equal footing (which is what the term jugalbandi implies) was rare, even experimental. It was a sign not only of the faith Khan had in Shankar (who also married Khan’s daughter, Annapurna) but also of things to come. From early in Shankar’s musical career, his playing received praise and criticism in equal measure, the criticism nearly always for a want of purity.

Shankar had a Zelig-like tendency to be present at great historical moments. As part of Uday’s dance troupe, for example, he witnessed the rise of Hitler. Until 1933, Germany had been the country in which the Indian dancers felt most appreciated. In New York he heard Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club. He sang for Gandhi and received a blessing from Rabindranath Tagore. All this before he turned eighteen. As Craske underlines, though, the greatest example of Shankar being in the right place at the right time — twenty years before he moved to California, just before the Summer of Love — was his emergence as a charismatic cultural figure in India at the moment of that country’s independence. Before he taught the world about Indian classical music, he demonstrated its value to a nation emerging from the shadow of colonialism.

By the mid 1960s, Ravi Shankar had become not only a famous musician but a global celebrity, his influence felt everywhere — certainly in musical circles. After lessons with Shankar, John Coltrane felt he was “just beginning again,” and went on to name his son Ravi. Yehudi Menuhin regarded himself as Shankar’s disciple and recorded albums of music for violin and sitar. And in 1965, Shankar changed the lives of two young musicians: one was among the most famous musicians on the planet, the other a recent music graduate from Juilliard.

George Harrison’s debt to Shankar is well known (Shankar greatly appreciated the Beatle’s seriousness and modesty), Philip Glass’s less so. In Paris, pursuing his studies with Nadia Boulanger, Glass found himself engaged to assist Shankar with scoring Conrad Rooks’s film Chappaqua. Shankar would sing lines to Glass (who was impressed that he had all the music in his head) and Glass would write them down in Western notation. But such notation required bar lines, and when the music was played there were unwanted stresses on the down beats. The barlines were moved and the stresses moved with them. “All the notes are equal,” explained Alla Rakha, Shankar’s tabla player. Finally, the barlines were eradicated and the music worked. Whether or not he realised it at the time, Glass had probably just received the most important composition lesson of his life.

Craske’s book leaves little out. Shankar’s international touring is described in such detail we begin to glaze over, but perhaps that’s the point. How, we wonder, did he fit so much in? And how did he manage his 180 affairs with women? (And who was counting? Did he have his own, personal Leporello?) And there are copious nuggets of trivia. Among my favourites is the fact that Peter Sellers went to Shankar for guidance about how to look like a sitar player in Blake Edwards’s film The Party. In the film, Sellers, in “brownface,” plays a hapless Indian actor mistakenly invited to a Hollywood party at which he proceeds to wreak havoc. Satyajit Ray, for one, found Sellers’s performance repellent. But Shankar and Sellers were quite close for a time, even working up a double act for friends, in which they impersonated each other.

To the end of this mighty book, Craske rightly prioritises the music. The penultimate chapter, “Late Style,” discusses Shankar’s final compositions. By his eighties, although he occasionally performed alongside his daughter, Anoushka, using a modified sitar with a short neck, he was mostly a composer. He wrote an opera, Sukanya, named after a woman in the Mhabharata who marries a much older man. It was a name shared by Shankar’s second wife, and the opera is both an extended love letter to her (there’s a musical motto based on her name) and a hymn to Krishna. But it is also a grand summing up of Shankar’s musical life, reworking ragas that had been important to him — Piloo, for instance, which he had recorded with Menuhin — and other earlier compositions.

The music to Sukanya was written first — is there another opera for which the music was composed ahead of its libretto? — and words fitted only after Shankar’s death in 2012. The premiere was in England in 2017. The same year, at the London Proms, Passages, Shankar’s album-length collaboration with Philip Glass, had its first live performance, with Anoushka Shankar playing sitar. The event was televised live by the BBC. As Craske writes in the title of his final chapter, this sun “won’t set.” •

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Before Australia finally shrugged off the White Australia policy in 1973, South Asians were a small minority — a little over 5000 at their peak in the 1890s, as against 29,000 or so Chinese. In scattered numbers on the margins of settlement, they incurred less of the resentment that sometimes erupted into murderous anti-Chinese riots.

Many of these South Asians were here because they had been invited: recruited by colonial authorities and businessmen from the 1860s to build and operate the networks of camel transport that serviced remote mines and grazing runs. They also had the advantage of being British subjects, if second-class ones.

In asserting this imperial identity, according to historian Kama Maclean, Indian Australians separated themselves from “Asiatics” and “Orientials” with some lasting effect. “It is curious that in Britain, many Indian communities have come to identify and be identified as ‘Asian,’” she writes. “In Australia, Indians have largely been thought of as an entirely separate category, not necessarily Asian at all.”

But they suffered calumnies and bureaucratic obstruction enough, as historian Samia Khatun shows in her case studies. And the official exclusion after Federation, when they were lumped in with “Asiatics” under the Immigration Act, was an immense and long-lasting insult to the educated classes of the entire subcontinent, even those who never thought to come here.

White nationalism in the settler colonies was the fly in the ointment London was using to try to soothe India from the mid nineteenth century on. After suppressing the great Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, Queen Victoria had proclaimed that all subjects of the empire would be treated equally. Colonial secretaries chided premiers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa over racial exclusion, but the admonishments were generally batted off as humbug on the part of an empire that embodied a deep racial hierarchy.

Among Australians, images of the subcontinent derived from the writings of Rudyard Kipling, who visited Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart in 1891, and from romantic writings about fabulously wealthy maharajas and sultans, the mystical yearnings of Theosophists, and the opinions of resident “old India hands.” The term “Hindoo” was used synonymously with Indian, emphasising “otherness” and “heathen rituals.” Even the few senior politicians with a deeper knowledge of India, among them Alfred Deakin, upheld the White Australia policy.

But some softening of the policy did occur quite early. Persuaded by a new governor-general, Lord Northcote, who had come straight from governing Bombay, the Watson government amended the Immigration Restriction Act in 1904 to let Indian merchants, students and tourist travellers enter for up to twelve months.

Not many took advantage, and deportations of Indian traders like Mool Chand (in his case for having entered Australia under false pretences) raised periodic outcries in India. Meanwhile Deakin, as external affairs minister, was trying to get more Australians into the elite Indian Civil Service, arguing that hardy Australians were just the thing India needed to get organised and open up new fields of development. “In this, Deakin seemed to be imagining an India of mutiny novels and Boy’s Own adventures,” observes Maclean. Indian newspapers saw it as a double standard: let us in, but you stay out.

After diggers fought alongside Indian soldiers in Gallipoli, Palestine and France during the Great War, postwar Australian views moderated a little. Norman Lindsay’s South Asian character “Chunder Loo,” who featured in advertisements for Cobra Boot Polish, was transformed into an amiable, subservient comic figure present at great events. Australian prime minister Billy Hughes and his British counterpart David Lloyd George might have cursed each other in Welsh at times, but at the 1921 Imperial Conference Lloyd George pressed Hughes to agree on a compromise — keep your external barriers, but remove discrimination for those inside — acceptable to the Indians.

As much as Hughes had fought at Versailles against a racial equality clause in the League of Nations charter, he also worried about the growing power of the United States, which was drawing Canada closer, and the unrest in Ireland, Egypt and India. It all threatened to break up the empire and threaten Australia’s “lifeline” to Europe.

So imperial duty saw British-Indian residents of Australia — now about 2000 in number — given the vote and the pension. The remnant of the earlier, larger population most widely recalled are the itinerant turban-wearing pedlars who roamed inland settlements in horse-drawn carts, bringing haberdashery and household implements along with a touch of exotic colour to isolated households.

As nationalism deepened in British India, writes Maclean, settler colonies like Australia “inadvertently presented a third front against which the British in India and in London could imagine and claim to be championing Indian causes.” The Balfour Declaration of 1925, which gave equal status to all Britain’s dominions — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland, South Africa and the Irish Free State — let London off the hook: it could say it had no control over their immigration policies.

Continuing discrimination through the 1930s and 1940s also had the unintended effect of encouraging India’s leaders to reject British offers of eventual dominion status. India would always be a second-class member of the empire, said Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who would be India’s first prime minister. The Bank of England had brought Australia to near bankruptcy in the Great Depression; imagine what it might have done to an Indian dominion.

With the fall of Singapore, India became even more of a lifeline for Australia, and the Indian nationalists had Churchill over a barrel. Eventually, two years after Japan’s surrender, London agreed to India’s independence. Prescient Australians had seen this coming. In September 1942, external affairs minister H.V. Evatt had said that Australia “looked forward to the people of India becoming a truly self-governing nation,” with the rider that it should still be loyal to the King. Canberra and New Delhi exchanged high commissioners during 1943–44.

The appointment of R.G. Casey as governor of Bengal in December 1943 put an Australian at the centre of one of the second world war’s most tragic episodes, the famine that gripped this frontline state during 1943–44 and killed some three million people. Maclean shows us how Australians became aware of the famine through church, business and personal correspondence that got around wartime censorship, and pressured Canberra to release its stockpiles of wheat. The government was prepared to do so if the War Cabinet in London would release the necessary ships. Only in February 1944 did large shipments begin belatedly flowing.

Somehow the glamorous couple, Casey and his wife Maie, floated above this misery. After Casey resigned as governor in June 1945 in order to return to Australia and enter politics, he wrote An Australian in India, a book that took a relatively sympathetic view of Indian nationalism, and distanced himself from the British administration. As an Australian, he claimed, he had gone to India “with no imperial past.”

Casey argued that once it was explained that the White Australia policy was based on economic, not racial, grounds it was “generally accepted” in India. But when the departing British asked Australia to take in some “Anglo-Indians” — the mixed-race and generally well-educated and prosperous children of empire — Canberra agreed only to those who were “predominantly of European blood.”

As external affairs minister for most of the 1950s, Casey shared with his prime minister, Robert Menzies, a somewhat distant relationship with Prime Minister Nehru. According to Maclean, Casey was arguably closer to Pakistan, which was drawn to the Western side as the cold war set in. He continued to play down the White Australia policy rather than try to change it, and urged the Australian press to stop using the term.

And so it went on — and so, to some extent, it continues. Our leaders are puzzled why Indians are so “hypersensitive” about race; they tend to assume all experiences of empire are the same. Multiculturalism has comfortably located racism in the past; events like the Cronulla riot of 2005 and the attacks on Indian students in 2010 are seen as aberrations.

“Many note that Australian attempts to engage with India have gone unrequited,” Maclean says. “Few have tried to appreciate why this might be the case.” Still, the Indian population in Australia grew 30 per cent over 2016–18. Whether Australia can overcome its past is still an open question, she says, but “it is clear that a redefinition of ‘Australian’ is under way.”

Samia Khatun isn’t so sure. She sees cant in how we welcome well-off and highly skilled South Asians, patting ourselves on the back for our openness, while treating undocumented arrivals by boat, many from the same region, so shamefully.

Khatun’s book focuses on the South Asians (having been born in Bangladesh, she is careful to use that term) who came to Australia during that early half-century window. This is an important, eye-opening exploration of their world and its connections, bringing into vivid centrality the “Afghan” cameleers who are auxiliary figures on the periphery of events in mainstream history.

Her “Book of Australia,” as the title translates, began as a doctoral thesis in history at the University of Sydney, and still reads like that in places. But between the thickets of Foucauldian and other theoretical analysis of the “epistemic arrogance of modernist paradigms of thought” is a fascinating detective story.

It began when she read of “an old Quran” found by local historians in the corrugated-iron mosque in Broken Hill. She travelled there, and found the book was actually a compendium of eight books of Sufi poetic legend titled Kasasol Ambia (Stories of the Prophets). How did a book of poetry in Bengali published in 1895, written to be read aloud, come to Broken Hill, when most of the cameleers were from the northwest of undivided India and Afghanistan?

Her quest to find out took her to Calcutta and its busy publishing hubs, to encounters with an irascible scholar of old texts, and to the stories of the men and women who might have picked up the book in Calcutta on their way to Australia.

We learn about characters like Khawajah Muhammad Bux, who became a wealthy Perth-based trader before retiring to Lahore in the 1920s, where he built a mosque and a girl’s school in what became known as Australia Chowk (Australia Bazaar); Bux’s son later founded the one hundred–branch Australasia Bank, now part of Pakistan’s big Allied Bank.

And Hasan Musakhan, a brilliant scholar from Karachi who won a scholarship to Bombay University and then joined a big camel operator in Australia. A follower of the Ahmadi branch of Islam (later declared heretic by the mainstream), he married Sophia Blitz from a German-Jewish family in Adelaide and became active in court cases contesting discriminatory application of the law and a writer of letters to newspapers.

Khatun recounts marriages and other encounters between South Asian men and white and Aboriginal women; brides and wives brought out from India, some in purdah, some not; and jealous shootings and elopements. This richly detailed account culminates in her journeys with descendants of the Aborigines who mixed with the Abigana (Afghans) along the camel routes and railway lines that penetrated inland to places like Marree and Oodnadatta. In this sandy country, she coaxes out the background to some of the perplexing incidents in the written record.

Khatun is not very forgiving of settler Australians and “monolingual” historians attracted to facts and progressive narratives rather than the imagined worlds and dreams she taps into. She has a wonderful ability to capture the landscapes of inland Australia and make its “marginal” people central. In showing us what has been under our noses, Australianama is as good as Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, if not better. •

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With nearly 40,000 cases of Covid-19, the vast country currently ranks sixteenth on the global ladder, behind the United States with more than a million reported cases, several European countries with more than 150,000 cases, China with more than 85,000 and Brazil with more than 79,000. Given its enormous population, the figures might suggest that India’s comprehensive national lockdown, imposed in early April, is working. Or, as some critics allege, it might simply be that Indian authorities haven’t tested enough people.

For now, India has completed its second lockdown phase, making it a total of forty days, and has extended the lockdown by another two weeks. In this third phase, it has broken the country into colour-coded zones according to the number of infections, with relaxed rules for the less-affected areas.

Meanwhile, India’s healthcare system has been struggling. Rural health infrastructure in particular has been overwhelmed by workers’ migration back to their home villages. The challenge is aggravated by rapid privatisation of the sector after years of neglect of the public health system. Nearly two-thirds of the 1.3 billion population still live in villages, where primary healthcare is meagre at best. Under-resourced community clinics are often staffed by poorly trained practitioners, making containment, tracing and testing for the virus extremely difficult. In the towns and cities, a large part of India’s population lives in poorly ventilated, crowded conditions, with little access to running water and basic sanitation.

The two groups that appear to be suffering most are India’s Muslim minority and its migrant labourers. Muslims, India’s biggest religious minority, number nearly 200 million in this Hindu-majority country. Tensions between Hindus and Muslims were already strained by the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act, which favoured citizenship applications from certain ethno-religious groups (Hindu, Christian, Parsi, Jain and Sikh) over Muslims. Critics argue that the legislation serves the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s wider program of exclusionary politics. With Muslim communities already feeling increasingly targeted, the pandemic further fuelled resentment towards a group that has been dubbed as India’s “corona superspreaders.”

Anti-Muslim sentiment intensified in mid March after a Muslim missionary organisation, Tablighi Jamaat, held a large convention in Delhi. Many delegates were later found to have been infected with the virus, aiding its spread across the subcontinent. It’s clear that the convention should never have been held, but reports about the convention and its effects soon ignited indiscriminate Islamophobia. On social media, hashtags including #CoronaJihad and #BioJihad fuelled criticism of Muslim communities accused of purposely spreading the virus. Time magazine reported that the hashtag #CoronaJihad appeared nearly 300,000 times in late March, potentially reaching more than 165 million people on Twitter. Social media corporations struggle to regulate hate speech at such scale.

Meanwhile, other political groups and media outlets continue to foment anti-Muslim prejudice. These sentiments have translated brutally into real-time discrimination, with reports of Muslims being refused medical treatment and routine procedures in hospitals for fear of contamination. In the city of Varanasi, a Muslim woman was forced to give birth outside the hospital in the middle of the night. When she finally received medical care the following day, the nurse admonished, “You have no work anyway, but to give birth to children and have come here to spread corona… Now take her from here.” In other parts of India, similar treatment led to the tragic deaths of newborn babies.

Many Hindus view the pandemic as part of a Muslim conspiracy sparked by Tablighi Jamaat, which is a transnational organisation. Yet Muslims living in densely populated neighbourhoods in North India are among those most likely to contract the virus. In Varanasi, several of these neighbourhoods have been declared hotspots and sealed by the police for weeks.

Muslim–Hindu relations in the city, a friend there told me recently, are at an all-time low. Some Hindus are still angry that the Tablighi Jamaat convention went ahead. Others are incensed because some imams have suggested that prayers will shield the community from the virus. But the biggest problem is fear among Muslims. They already have a deep distrust of the government, and many are therefore reluctant to report new cases, or get tested, for fear of official retribution and vigilante attacks.

There is a catch-22 in this for the Muslim community. Those fears will lead to an increased spread of the virus, further fuelling rumours that Muslims are sheltering infected individuals and acting irresponsibly or maliciously. Ramadan may bring additional challenges, with containment and social distancing difficult to maintain.

But Muslims are not the only ones suffering. The pandemic has exacerbated the precarious conditions faced by millions of impoverished migrant labourers working in India’s megacities. The majority of these socioeconomically vulnerable workers had practically no time to prepare for the lockdown and few savings to get them through such an extended period. Most have been left unable to feed themselves, pay their rent or remit their earnings to their families in the villages.

Such abject circumstances led many migrant workers to leave cities and towns in a hurry. Millions have been stranded part-way home in densely packed makeshift shelters, where food, clothing and basic amenities are scant and potential for contamination is high. Ignorance and fear mean they have been faced with closed borders, bizarre quarantine methods and backlashes from locals, many of whom are agitated by the prospect of these human vectors travelling through their towns and villages.

The pandemic has also exposed a fatal flaw in the decades-old Public Distribution System, which provides subsidised food for the poor. Because it is locally based, the scheme is effectively closed to millions of migrant workers. They are not in their home villages, where registration is relatively straightforward, and qualifying where they are working means completing paperwork, dealing with red tape, and lots of time. The many who work in the informal sector or in unauthorised slums find it impossible to prove eligibility. The incentive to try to get back to their villages is great.

State and national leaders face a formidable challenge in guiding India through the pandemic. It is largely up to the states to implement lockdown measures and control the spread, but they entered the pandemic at different starting points in terms of healthcare systems, education levels and other resources. The southern state of Kerala is leading the way in its coordinated response, tapping its unionised healthcare workers and civil society organisations to great effect. Other states are struggling to control a growing list of hotspots in major cities, with frontline workers — police, medical professionals and sanitation workers — facing mounting verbal and physical attacks sparked by fearful rumours.

India’s ethno-religious tensions and socioeconomic divides are all having a significant impact on how the pandemic unfolds, leading many to question whether the country can manage its spread. What is becoming painfully clear is that a coronavirus safety net must contain much more than economic relief if it’s to tackle prejudice and misinformation and promote solidarity. •

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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 world is rapidly moving towards a post-antibiotic epoch in which superbugs will define humanity’s future. The diminishing effectiveness of antimicrobials — the drugs we rely on to combat increasingly resistant microbes — is a global crisis, and India is becoming its ground zero. The lack of toilets and the rise of antimicrobial resistance are fundamentally linked.

Think of it this way. A landless labourer has a bout of diarrhoea but must keep working for fear of losing his job: competition for work is fierce in India’s informal labour markets. He takes the antibiotic from the street-side vendor and feels better, continuing to work.

And yet the gut tells another story. The drugs taken by the labourer did kill some bacteria, but others survived. In fact, the surviving bacteria develop a genetic trait, a “shield” as it were, that makes them oblivious to even the most powerful antibiotics.

These resistant bacteria tend to share their genetic traits with other bacteria, and so the problem spreads. Bacteria that have never been exposed to these antibiotics can now carry such powerful armoury against them, and even trade that armoury with others. The resistant bacteria will find their way out into the open in the faeces of millions of people without access to toilets, and then move through untreated sewage to rivers and other water bodies. There, insects, fish, birds and other wildlife will carry them further, contaminating the environment and compounding the cycle of infection.

Meanwhile, our poor labourer’s compromised immune system means he soon develops another sickness. This time the leftover antibiotics are ineffective, and he goes back to the pharmacist for even more powerful drugs. In his body, antibiotics exemplify the law of diminishing returns.

India is no stranger to the politics of poo. Back in 2012 the rural development minister, Jairam Ramesh of the Congress Party, provoked anger when he called India “the world’s largest open-air toilet.” More indignation followed when data revealed that far more Indians owned a mobile phone than had access to basic sanitation.

In 2014 India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, launched the Clean India Mission (Swachh Bharat Abhiyan), vowing to eliminate India’s shameful practice of “open defecation.” More than 500 million people were still relieving themselves outdoors every day.

To eliminate open defecation, a toilet-building drive began, with the target of achieving an Open Defecation Free India by Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birthday, 2 October 2019. Last month, with much fanfare, Modi proclaimed India ODF. The Economic Times recorded the prime minister’s exaltation: “The world is felicitating India for constructing more than 11 crore toilets [110 million] in sixty months, helping more than sixty crore [600 million] people to use toilets.”

In many ways, the “toilet revolution” embodied India’s new-found confidence that it was finally approaching the long-promised goal of “development for all.” Eliminating random defecation was also portrayed as a major step towards alleviating systemic issues such as poor hygiene, malnutrition, stunted growth in children, and challenges in cognitive development and infection control.

But there was another way of looking at Modi’s push. His medicalised, developmental view of the problem derived from an approach to public health that favoured government control and expert design. This top-down strategy meant that the state and corporations took the lead in protecting and controlling the conduct of citizens. Those who questioned this seemingly apolitical campaign risked being cast as anti-national, and people caught relieving themselves outdoors were targeted, punished or publicly shamed for their wayward behaviour. Technical solutions were more appealing than tackling the dynamics of poverty and disadvantage.

The reality on the ground, so to speak, is that open defecation continues. Researchers found that there was a big difference between building toilets and having them used and maintained. India’s 110 million new toilets are an excellent step forward, but they also need water, and the pit toilets favoured by the campaign must be properly built or they become cesspits leaching faeces into the groundwater.

Despite the scheme, this rapidly urbanising and densely populated country still lacks basic sanitation facilities. The catchphrase “behavioural change” rings hollow when enduring cultural prejudices relating to religion, caste, gender and class are allowed to persist. The dignity and safety afforded by well-built and maintained toilets remain the privilege of the affluent classes, while the poor are trapped by their living and working conditions in a cycle of infection. It is not surprising that the poor also resort to the quick-fix antibiotics commonly available over the counter in India’s street-side pharmacies.

Of course, poor sanitation, open defecation and self-medication only partly explain why India now leads the global drug-resistance index. Illicit practices in the global pharmaceutical industry, along with the excessive use of antibiotics in agriculture, are key contributors. This Ponzi scheme of antimicrobials, with its false promise of quick returns, means that India is a time bomb: perhaps the world’s largest breeding ground for superbugs. But the implications extend far beyond that country.

Resistant bacteria don’t care much for passports, ethnicity or even species. They colonise the bodies of humans and animals, move around the globe and leave a residue of resistance on the most everyday surfaces, not least our mobile phones. The touch of a tainted phone can be a powerful reminder of how we are intimately connected with someone without a toilet in India, and how our collective futures are tied to meeting the basic needs of those most vulnerable.

What is the answer to this pernicious nexus? The more we invest in culturally appropriate, multifaceted development across health, education and welfare, the less antimicrobial blowback humanity as a whole will experience. The life chances of the poor will determine our collective antimicrobial fate, which means that India’s poo problem touches humanity as a whole. •

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Built to enable military forces to move between Tibet and Xinjiang, the road passes through Aksai Chin, a rugged swathe of unpopulated high-altitude desert administered by China but claimed by India as part of the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir state. The arrival of the highway was one of the triggers for the 1962 Sino-Indian war, a short but bloody conflict that has cast a long shadow over China–India relations.

Although the border dispute remains unresolved, Aksai Chin has been generally stable since 1962. But this month’s announcement that the Indian government is splitting restive Jammu and Kashmir into two new Union Territories has reopened Chinese concerns about its “territorial sovereignty,” once again setting the scene for heightened tensions along what’s called the Line of Actual Control.

For the past seventy years, Article 370 of the Indian constitution has given Jammu and Kashmir special status, allowing it greater autonomy, including a separate constitution, control over its own administrative processes, and restrictions on non-residents. On 5 August, the Indian parliament, dominated by prime minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, voted to repeal the article, claiming that the state’s autonomy was a cause of separatist violence.

The two new Union Territories — Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh — will essentially be under direct rule by Delhi. Jammu and Kashmir will have its own unicameral legislature; Ladakh will have no legislature at all.

Not surprisingly, the decision has met with a mixed response. The vast majority of the population of the new territories, around eight million people, will be in the new Jammu and Kashmir Union Territory. Jammu Division is majority Hindu, while the Kashmir Valley is overwhelmingly Muslim. Ladakh, with just 300,000 people — Muslims and Buddhists in roughly equal numbers — has been agitating for separation for some time.

Control of the wider Kashmir region has been the subject of dispute between India and Pakistan since Partition in 1947, with Pakistan controlling the western part (known as Azad Kashmir) along with the northern territories (Gilgit-Baltistan). Much of the focus since Modi’s announcement has been on how the region’s change in status will affect that dispute, which has led to tens of thousands of deaths and casualties, especially since the rise of a separatist insurgency in 1989. The region was placed under an unprecedented lockdown, including a total communications blackout, though India has promised to begin loosening its grip this week.

Less widely recognised is the potential for the administrative changes to inflame tensions between India and China. Beijing immediately described India’s decision as an attack on its territorial sovereignty; India responded by essentially telling China not to interfere in its internal matters.

By the time of a meeting in Beijing on 12 August, China’s message had softened slightly, with foreign minister Wang Yi telling India’s external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, that “China is highly concerned about the current situation in Kashmir and the escalated conflict between India and Pakistan.” Wang had earlier reiterated that China was Pakistan’s “all-weather strategic partner.” It has since referred the change in Jammu and Kashmir’s status to the UN Security Council, which discussed the issue inconclusively on Friday.

This is not the first time China has sought to play peacemaker between India and Pakistan. During the 1999 Kargil war — arguably the closest India and Pakistan have come to nuclear war — China dialled back its historically strong support for Pakistan, urging the two sides to resolve their differences through dialogue. China is couching its current concerns in terms of the India–Pakistan relationship and possible instability in the region, but its initial statement betrays its worries about the broader effect on Aksai Chin and its own relationship with India.

China–India border tensions have two main focal points: Aksai Chin in the west, and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh in the east, which China also claims. Traditionally, the eastern sector has been the major flashpoint, most recently in 2017 when Chinese and Indian forces clashed on the Doklam plateau, in an area disputed between India’s ally, Bhutan, and China, and bordering the Indian state of Sikkim. Unlike Aksai Chin, the disputed territories in the east are well populated and strategically vital to India, leading to periodic clashes.

In the Kashmir region, by contrast, India’s main focus is Pakistan. Although India technically claims Aksai Chin, it has made little attempt to challenge China’s de facto administration of the area.

From China’s perspective, the changes in Kashmir’s status have three possible outcomes. The most likely is that the state’s loss of autonomy will cause a flare-up between India and Pakistan and reinvigorate the separatist movement. This is clearly what Indian authorities fear, given their imposition of a full communications blackout. While any instability in this area is a concern for China, as Pakistan’s ally, especially given the region’s proximity to Xinjiang, the threat of direct conflict with India is low.

The second scenario is that, having exerted greater control over the Kashmir region, India will want to reopen the status of Aksai Chin. This seems unlikely, as it’s not in India’s interests to create a second border conflict in an already unstable region. But it has doubtless occurred to the Chinese government, as evidenced by its early comments regarding territorial integrity.

The third possible outcome — the golden vision offered on 5 August by the Indian government — is that greater centralised control will stabilise Kashmir and open it up to commerce and tourism from the rest of India. It’s true that the region’s economy has suffered significantly from the ongoing conflict, but Kashmiris fear the loss of identity that may come with a large influx of tourists and new residents. For China, a relatively stable, centrally controlled Kashmir region with a growing population is perhaps a greater threat to its territorial claim than ongoing instability. In this scenario, only time will tell.

For countries that are so often at loggerheads, the irony is that India and China may now have more in common than they care to admit. Some observers are likening the Hindu nationalist–led crackdown on Kashmiri Muslims to China’s actions against its Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang. It’s a grim reality on which to be united. •

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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 2019 elections will almost certainly answer that question in the negative. Neither the BJP nor its main opponent, the Indian National Congress, is taking any chances, with both parties frantically searching for allies in May’s election. Their success in this search will determine who forms the next government.

In the BJP’s case, one obvious reason for recruiting political allies is that a degree of disappointment among voters was always inevitable given the extravagant promises Modi made in 2014. Unemployment has risen, the BJP’s schemes for lifting farmers out of their dire circumstances have failed, corruption is still rampant, and Hindu–Muslim tensions have not abated. As a result, the party has recently suffered major electoral setbacks, with Congress taking control of governments in the BJP heartland states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The BJP won 136 of the 222 seats in these states in 2014, a feat most unlikely to be repeated in May.

One crucial factor driving this reversal is the growing disaffection of farmers, who constitute about 70 per cent of India’s population. Drought, falling prices for produce, and escalating prices for fuel, fertiliser and other necessities have left them impoverished and unable to repay loans, and the decision to withdraw large-denomination banknotes (an anti-corruption measure) and introduce a GST only made things worse. Last March in Maharashtra tens of thousands of farmers walked 150 kilometres to Mumbai to demand government-guaranteed price rises for their produce and respite from loan repayments. In October a demonstration in Delhi was met with water cannons and tear gas; two months later another 100,000 farmers took to the streets. Such demonstrations have become frequent and widespread.

Increasingly, the emphasis has been on the highly emotive issue of farmer suicides. In January the Economist estimated that numbers had reached 12,000 per annum. The deaths were given particularly grisly emphasis in 2017 when farmers from Tamil Nadu protested in Delhi carrying skulls purported to be those of suicided farmers. On that occasion the BBC quoted this anguished poem that epitomised the desperation of many of the protesters:

It’s dead/ It’s dead/ Farming is dead
It’s agony/ It’s agony/ The death of farming
It’s burning/ It’s burning
The farmers’ heart and belly
Stop this/ Stop this
These farmers’ deaths.

Although many of the Modi reforms have brought improved roads, better sanitation, and gas, electricity and water services for urban dwellers, the farming community has much less to be grateful for. New loans to farmers went overwhelmingly to those with farms of more than four hectares, while the 50 per cent or more whose farms are less than one hectare or who don’t have a bank account failed to receive this assistance. Corruption was also rampant: in Rajasthan, for example, 17,000 of the listed beneficiaries of the scheme had never, in fact, received a loan.

A promise to guarantee farmers “production cost plus 50 per cent” for their goods was never honoured and many prices have plummeted to disastrous levels. The price of garlic fell from between 30 and 50 rupees per kilogram in January last year to between 5 and 20 rupees by November.

On top of that, Modi’s chaotically managed “demonetisation” policy of 2016 and his introduction of a GST in 2017 are seen as further burdens for farmers and small businesses. Inevitably, the withdrawal of all 500 rupee and 1000 rupee notes from circulation, and the accompanying limits on cash withdrawals caused a rush on the banks and an extended cash shortage for a huge number of people. Many businesses closed down and an estimated 1.5 million jobs were lost.

The introduction of the GST in the following year was less dramatic, but it too placed new stresses on small businesses and on the poor. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was quick to present it as “a way of removing money from the pockets of the poor,” and it became another opportunity to attack the Modi government.

In these circumstances, even many of the farmers who did receive loans are unable to make their repayments, and some are having their land confiscated. It is little wonder that farmer discontent is at such a level.

One fundamental characteristic of India is its diversity. As John Strachey wrote back in 1888, “India is a name that we give to a great region including a multitude of different countries.” Much has changed since then, but regional differences remain a distinguishing feature of today’s India. Of its twenty-nine states, ten have populations of over fifty million; of those ten, eight have their own official language. Overall, the nation has thirty-three official languages.

The population is further divided into thousands of castes and sub-castes, which often form the basis of local voting blocs. All of this means that local identity and interests often prevail over national ones, making the formation of a genuinely national party impossible. Seven national parties, twenty-four regional parties and 2293 other parties litter the Indian electoral scene, and even the “national” parties are far from national.

The successes of the smaller parties have generally been restricted to one state. For their part, the BJP and Congress have had basically no electoral success in the main southern and southwestern states — Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Odisha and West Bengal — that contain 164 of the nation’s 543 seats. At the last election Congress won just fourteen of those seats and the BJP only seven. To win this year’s election, one of them will need substantial support from local parties in those states.

A vital characteristic of the Indian electoral system is that it uses the first-past-the-post voting system, which means that the candidate with the largest number of votes wins regardless of whether he or she achieves an absolute majority. In the crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, for example, the BJP won seventy-one of the eighty seats in 2014 after obtaining only 43 per cent of the vote. It won sixty-one of these seats with a vote of less than 50 per cent, and nineteen of them with less than 40 per cent.

If the two left-of-centre parties, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party, had agreed to nominate and support only one candidate in each of Uttar Pradesh’s electorates, their combined vote would have defeated thirty-four of the successful BJP candidates. The two parties learnt their lesson, and have formed an alliance for this election that poses a very serious threat to the BJP. Of course, not all of their voters will follow the alliance’s advice, but it is highly probable that many will. If such an alliance had existed in 2014 and had also incorporated Congress, it may well have snatched victory from a further ten BJP candidates. The animosity of the two parties to Congress has, however, ruled out such a triple alliance this year.

On 19 March the two left-wing parties announced a similar alliance in Maharashtra, the second-largest state, and declared that they hoped to win at least fifteen of the forty-eight seats. They have also formed an alliance in Madhya Pradesh and Uttarkand and hope to do so in Rajasthan. This could prove disastrous for the BJP but could also limit possible Congress gains.

The election campaign is now in full swing and all parties are setting out to woo 800-plus million voters, 130 million of whom will be new voters. As usual, the major parties will be making grand and unachievable promises — promises to stabilise prices, create millions of new jobs, eradicate corruption and raise millions from poverty. Modi’s many undertakings in 2014 prompted Nitin Gadkari, one of his most prominent ministers, to make a veiled reference to a “merchant of dreams,” but the title could well be applied to other party leaders.

Modi goes into the election with considerable achievements in such areas as economic growth, reduced inflation, and investments in infrastructure and sanitation to balance against his government’s shortcomings in relation to farmers’ livelihoods, irrigation, employment, corruption, minority groups and trade unions. He is presenting himself as the chowkidar or watchman, of the nation, the one person who can maintain the stability and economic development of the country, and his handling of the recent border clashes with Pakistan has enhanced his status as national leader. The person has assumed more prominence than his policies.

His main opponent, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, has followed a different path. He is capitalising as much as he can on his family connections, as the current flag-bearer of the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty, and is being very publicly supported by his mother, Sonia Gandhi, and his sister, Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra. But he has very little political or governmental experience and can easily be presented as a political novice in comparison with Modi. The main thrust of his campaign so far has been to highlight Modi’s failures and to try to enlist the support of the various anti-Modi/BJP forces in the country, the latter a task for which he has shown very little aptitude.

He has promised a minimum income guarantee for the poorest 10 per cent of India’s families, reserved places for women amounting to 33 per cent of national and state parliaments, and pledged an increase in education expenditure to 6 per cent of GDP by 2023–24 and health expenditure to 3 per cent of GDP. These unrealistic pledges are familiar from previous Indian elections and are unlikely to be taken at face value.

Gandhi’s campaign has also turned up one particularly disturbing factor, especially for a party traditionally espousing secular values. Over the past two decades the major Hindi states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh have become the heartland of the BJP, which espouses Hindutva, a militant form of Hindu nationalism. It is a political ideology that demands a Hindu hegemony, imposes Hindu values and way of life on all its subjects, and often results in violence against minority groups such as Muslims. In order to try to regain support for Congress in the two states, Rahul has pandered to these attitudes, regularly preceding political rallies there with much-publicised visits to Hindu temples. He has been silent on the issues of Hindutva violence against Muslims and dalits and has pursued a policy of endorsing dominant caste candidates in the area.

Gandhi has also installed Kamal Nath as the new chief minister of Madhya Pradesh despite his high-profile involvement in the 1984 massacre of the Sikhs in Delhi and his pre-election emphasis on such policies as setting up a thousand cow shelters (gaushalas) throughout the state.

Yet these policies are unlikely to win votes from Modi. In fact, the swing that Congress gained in this area in last year’s state elections came not from the traditional high-caste BJP base but from the lower castes, traditionally the Congress base, which he should be nurturing rather than surrendering to other left-of-centre parties. Congress is fast becoming a party with no ideological base or political program of its own and no driving aim other than the desire for political power.

Given the disenchantment of farmers with the Modi government, the enormous diversity of the national electorate, the nature of the voting system, the emerging alliance of those erstwhile enemies, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party, and the failure of Congress to develop effective strategies or policies to substantially increase its support base, neither Modi’s BJP nor Gandhi’s Congress is likely to win this election and the new government will be yet another unstable and probably short-lived coalition.

Powerful regional leaders — such as Mayawati, Mamata Banerjee, Akhilesh Yadav and Sharad Pawar — may be prepared to ally themselves with Gandhi to form a coalition government, but they won’t necessarily accept him as prime minister. Or the BJP and its allied parties might succeed in reaching the magic figure of 274 seats if Modi can find the skills of cooperation and compromise that have been glaringly absent from his own political career, in which case his party may need to opt for a new leader such as Nitin Gadkari, who has a long history of workable relations with his political opponents. Either way, coalition government will return to its previous status as India’s political norm. •

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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.

Yet India has done something that its massive neighbour wouldn’t countenance. Last month, Narendra Modi’s government requested the resignation of the minister of state (or junior minister) for external affairs, M.J. Akbar, after mounting evidence suggested that he had misused his position as a newspaper editor to proposition and harass women. The #MeToo movement had claimed its first significant scalp in India.

Despite being an internet-based phenomenon in a country where a significant digital gender gap persists, the movement took India’s social media by storm. It all started when Bollywood actor Tanushree Dutta called out the veteran star Nana Patekar for harassing her on film sets a decade earlier. Then one journalist after another used social media and websites to narrate their horror stories about Akbar.

Initially, the government decided to weather the storm. But it soon turned into a whirlwind that threatened to bring it down. When journalists raised questions with the senior external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj, she evaded them. But silence was no longer golden. Ministers were repeatedly asked the same question: could Akbar continue in a government that famously adopted the slogan “Beti Bachao Beti Padhao” (“Save daughters, educate daughters”), and especially one that has shown its support for female participation by giving two key portfolios, defence and external affairs, to women?

Akbar’s resignation was #MeToo’s first victory within the Indian government, but the journey is far from over. The movement has yet to reach rural and undeveloped India, where women’s voices are still not generally heard, and many women still face patriarchal questioning and misogynist comments the moment they step out of their homes.

Perhaps the hope for change rests with those who wish to join the movement by talking about a pattern of harassment, rather than by naming and shaming their perpetrators. Khabar Lahariya, a rural news website, has chronicled struggles in smaller towns of the hinterland, publishing heart-wrenching testimony about how women are assumed to be open to advances from men. Male editors — often products of deep caste fissures — have reinforced a similar culture in the newsrooms of the vernacular-language press and regional news channels.

Besides Akbar, several top editors have been forced to quit after their names surfaced on public platforms. Harassers have been shamed even within the Board of Control for Cricket in India. Other institutions have also come under fire. A process of far-reaching change is gathering momentum.

In China, meanwhile, the nervous and repressive atmosphere under Xi Jinping means that any kind of activism not mandated by the government is regarded dimly. Mao Zedong’s regime famously declared that “women hold up half the sky,” but there are no women on the party’s central standing committee and just two in a Politburo of twenty-four; and only a quarter of the ninety-million-strong membership of the party is made up of women. In the business world, women have been successful and treated as equals, but even there the price of success is often to work in a world dominated by men.

#MeToo did gain some limited traction in the People’s Republic, though it is hard to think of a Chinese equivalent of Akbar. Senior political figures have been accused of supporting multiple mistresses, with their largesse often the cause of their downfall for reasons of corruption rather than sexual exploitation or abuse. But the idea that the testimony of one person could bring down a key member of the central government is largely regarded as a Western-style indulgence.

#MeToo’s early impact is in Chinese universities, businesses and other sectors outside politics. It could easily accelerate: with fifty million fewer Chinese women than men, women’s demands of potential husbands are increasing, and their status is rising as a result. This demographic shift may yet prompt the same kind of upheaval that is happening in India.

The two cases show that, despite China’s economic success, there are things that India — with its more flexible and less centralised social and political model, and greater degree of pluralism — seems better able to handle. For all the challenges it has faced recently, it is doing better than China in this respect.

Of course, Chinese leaders could argue that India has had to face up to horrendous cases of abuse, rape and murder of women in recent years. But at least that violence has prompted widespread soul-searching and attempts to turn things around. In China, such candour is difficult or even impossible, especially when it is seen to be critical of the government. If India does create a culture in which women are genuinely equal, it will have a massive advantage over a China in which significant barriers — visible and invisible — continue to prevent women from fully participating in the political and social direction of their country. •

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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 first thought to spring to mind might echo The Castle’s Darryl Kerrigan: Clean India? They’re dreaming! But the second thought ought to be that we might learn from India’s experience of three years of costly, multi-pronged attempts to make the country cleaner.

Perhaps the most germane lesson for Australia right now relates to incineration of waste to generate electricity, known as Waste to Energy, or W2E. Japan, Singapore and countries in northern Europe have burned waste for years using high-combustion incinerators. Waste is reduced to about one-tenth of its original bulk, the ash can be used for industrial purposes, and electricity can be generated in the process.

In Singapore, a totally urban, densely populated island, high-combustion incinerators at the city’s extremities burn up to 8000 tonnes of waste a day. The ash gets taken by barge to a foreshore where it’s used to reclaim land from the sea and expand Semakau Island. The main purpose of the incinerators is to keep Singapore clean and tidy.

But complete-combustion incinerators are expensive. The largest, at Tuas South on the west of the island, cost S$890 million in 2000 (about A$700 million in those days). Incinerating up to 3000 tonnes of suitable waste a day, it is capable of producing eighty megawatts of power, 20 per cent of which runs the plant; the rest — enough to serve as many as 65,000 households — is sold into the grid.

These big, expensive plants also need a regular supply of dry, high-calorie fuel. A plant like Tuas South is the magnet for up to 300 ten-tonne truck journeys each day. That’s a lot of noise, fuel, and wear and tear on roads.

Perth looks like having Australia’s first W2E plant, estimated to cost $400 million and start operating in mid 2021. It will handle about 1000 tonnes of waste a day to produce forty megawatts of electricity. At the end of May, Australian Paper proposed to build a $600 million W2E incinerator next to its paper mill in the Latrobe Valley. The target would be a whopping 225 megawatts of electricity.

In certain conditions, complete-combustion incinerators have a place. But they are not the magic wand that pressured politicians, whether in India or Australia, would like to believe they are.

Here, the lessons from India’s clean-up campaign are relevant and cautionary. When large sums of money began to be directed into public sanitation, various operators with bright ideas came forward. In the most unhappy circumstances, local governments were sold quick fixes that did not work. One council contracted for a “moving incinerator,” hitched to the back of a truck, that burned more fuel than it did garbage and was abandoned within months.

Incineration works well in Singapore (and Japan and northern Europe), and it looked a tempting option for India. But as well as being expensive, high-combustion incinerators are fussy, and not just about their diet. If their temperature falls below 850°C, it has to be built up with external fuel, usually diesel. Combustion below 850°C releases toxic dioxin molecules into the air. But if material is burned above 850°C, the molecules break down into their constituent atoms (carbon, chlorine, oxygen and hydrogen), which can be captured and neutralised. The downside is that high-combustion incinerators need relentless maintenance.

A lot of waste gets burned in India, largely through unregulated street-level and farmyard burning, and it pollutes the air. The idea of high-combustion burning appealed to Indian policy-makers, as it does to Australians, because it looks like a way of fixing waste problems and making electricity in the process.

But India’s most recent experiment, the plant at Okhla in the jam-packed National Capital Territory of Delhi, has revealed how dicey high-combustion incineration can be. Its owners blame its failures on the poor quality waste — unsorted, wet, low-calorie and unreliably supplied. Critics say the technology was not up to world standards, the location is too close to densely packed dwellings and the maintenance is inadequate to prevent health-impairing air pollution.

But Delhi is desperate. It has a population of eighteen million in an area of 1500 square kilometres, one-seventh the size of greater Melbourne. A second W2E plant, costing around A$66 million, has been on the drawing board for some time.

Perhaps the clearest legacy of the Clean India campaign is a growing awareness that decentralised waste management works best. That’s not easy. It requires local involvement, motivated people and governments prepared to risk slow, relentless culture-building.

It’s possible, for example, to make both energy and good compost at the same time. Biomethanation stations require a small plot of land to collect wet waste from a neighbourhood. The technique has been around for more than a hundred years — it was invented at the Matunga Leper Asylum in Mumbai in the 1890s — but modern materials make it more flexible. Wet waste is allowed to ferment to release gas that drives a turbine and feeds electricity into the grid; the benign, leftover sediment makes excellent compost.

Stations like these need regular management. In India, labour costs are not the problem. In Australia, they might be.

But the general lesson is that decentralised waste management works. It limits transport costs, road congestion and pollution. New processes hold promise to be able to remake plastics and metals in clean mini-factories that don’t need much more space than a double garage. Such technologies are being trialled by a team under Professor Veena Sahajwalla at the University of New South Wales.

Decentralisation is possible and effective, but it’s hard to begin. And it doesn’t provide the quick fix that worried authorities are desperate for. But quick fixes, as we’ve seen time and again, can turn into prolonged fiascos. •

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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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In many ways, Xi Jinping seems the more secure of the two. He was reappointed secretary of the Chinese Communist Party at the nineteenth congress last October. Following last month’s constitutional changes removing time limits on the presidency, he looks increasingly likely to stick around beyond 2023, when his current term ends. Domestically, he seems the master of all he surveys.

But that seemingly secure position relies on all the party’s resources of control. Xi’s core achievement over the past five years has been to shift from an all-out focus on economic growth (which continued at a healthy annual rate of 6.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2018) to a more political emphasis. Using a ruthless anti-corruption drive, he has restored discipline to the eighty-nine-million-strong Communist Party, rooting out those who have been working against the interests of the party state. The People’s Liberation Army, state-owned enterprises and the security services have all felt the heat of the fire that has even engulfed figures at the summit of power, including Ling Jihua, a former senior adviser to Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao, and Sun Zhengcai, former party secretary of Chongqing.

Alongside this purge has been a massive ideological campaign designed to enforce loyalty in the media and close down any potential opposition within civil society and the legal system. China has never looked more unified and cohesive — at least on the surface.

This shift away from economic growth as the source of legitimacy towards what the party calls “the great historic mission of rejuvenating China” has inevitably had an external impact. The process of making China great again has sent expectations and nationalist feeling soaring. The China Dream, the Belt and Road Initiative and other campaigns and slogans all allude to what has been called the Centenary Objective — that group of goals to be met by 2021, when the party celebrates its hundredth anniversary and the country will once more be a modern, powerful, internationally respected force.

Modi operates in a democracy, where things work differently. He came to power a little later than Xi and doesn’t face elections until the middle of next year. But several Indian states that have been ruled for more than a decade by his Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP — Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in central India, for instance — go to the polls later this year, presenting Modi with a real test. Defending bastions like these has already proved tough, as was evident in December’s fiercely contested election in Modi’s home state of Gujarat, where he ruled as chief minister for thirteen years. The BJP may have scraped back for the sixth time, but the narrowness of the victory inspired an (until then) moribund Congress Party to vigorously defend Karnataka state in next month’s election. Whether the BJP manages to unseat Congress there will shape the opposition’s manoeuvrings in the run-up to 2019.

Despite the challenges, Modi and his party continue to perform strongly in the states. In January, the BJP won government in Tripura, in the northeast, dislodging the left-wing government of Manik Sarkar, one of the longest-serving chief ministers of any Indian state. The left now controls only Kerala, in the south, while the BJP is in government — either alone or in coalitions — in twenty-one of twenty-nine states, home to over 70 per cent of Indians.

This is no mean achievement. When Modi arrived in Delhi in 2014, his party held power in a mere seven states. His charisma, ably backed by the organisational skills of his one-time lieutenant, BJP president Amit Shah, has swept much before it.

The World Bank forecasts 7.3 per cent growth for the country this year and 7.5 per cent for 2019. Just about every international monitoring and rating agency has given a big thumbs up to Modi initiatives, which include a new (if initially troubled) goods and services tax and the withdrawal of all ₹500 and ₹1000 banknotes, as an anti-crime measure, in November 2016. With the investment climate looking good, India is regarded as being on track economically.

However formidable Modi’s BJP looks, though, there’s evidence to suggest the government is losing some of its charm. In early April, India witnessed an outpouring of public anger similar to the reaction to the brutal rape of a young Delhi woman on a bus in December 2012, a crime that led to the introduction of tougher punishments. Modi famously declared in 2014, in his first Independence Day speech as prime minister, that parents should take responsibility for the behaviour of their sons rather than throwing the onus onto their daughters, and he reiterated the point in London recently. This at least was speaking the plain truth about the patriarchal cast of many Indian minds.

But Modi’s rhetoric is now being put to the test. His initial silence after the brutal rape of an eight-year-old girl in Jammu was deeply concerning, even for his most committed admirers. When he did finally speak, though, his words were strong. “Indian daughters will get justice and these kinds of incidents shame us as a nation,” he said. Soon after, two government ministers who had come out in support of the accused men resigned. Since then, yet another shocking case — this time in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, where a BJP hardliner, Yogi Adityanath, is the new chief minister — has further shaken the nation. Modi’s responses will need to reflect the urgency and scale of the problem.

Another deep-seated and longstanding problem has captured increased attention recently, following protests against the alleged diluting of legal protections for the traditionally marginalised and underprivileged Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. With the legal system regarded as one of India’s great assets, questions about its fairness forced the government to request a review. Although the court refused to reconsider, these traditional, deep-seated divisions in society could easily lead to more unrest.

Xi and Modi may operate in very different contexts, one in charge of the world’s largest Communist Party–controlled state, the other running the world’s largest democracy. But both can be called nationalists whose primary appeal to their people is their commitment to making their country modern and powerful. In each case, the extent to which they achieve that goal will also have an impact on how they relate to their neighbour.

Can Xi-ism and Modi-ism happily coexist, or are the two headed for increasing tension, and perhaps even conflict, in the years ahead? In fact, the more pertinent question is about how stable and predictable their respective domestic politics are. For all its surface diversity and tensions, India is a stable democracy in which public opinion is relatively clearly known and there is a healthy dialogue between leaders and those they lead. In China, though, the apparent uniformity of viewpoints and the tight discipline might turn out to be illusory. If Xi’s government fails to deliver on its objectives, a backlash isn’t out of the question; Chinese history down to modern times has been full of such turbulent events. If that were to happen, then India, despite its current challenges, would be waiting on the sidelines to pick up the regional baton.

This will be one of the great competitive relationships of the coming decades. Its unfolding will be worked out in the local politics of each of these great nations, and will depend on whether, in the end, democracy or one-party uniformity emerges as the best way to sustain prosperity and stability. ●

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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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Although they’re often referred to as a single “dispute,” the border tensions centre on two distinct areas that tend to flare up independently of each other. The current skirmishes are in the eastern sector, in the Sikkim region, sandwiched between Bhutan and Nepal. This area, along with the eastern border that runs to the north of India’s Arunachal Pradesh state – known as the Line of Actual Control or the McMahon Line – was a major point of conflict in the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

The other disputed area, in the western sector, runs from Nepal’s western border up to the Aksai Chin territory, bordering Tibet, the Chinese province of Xinjiang, and the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The Aksai Chin is claimed by India but administered by China.

Uneasy borders: the two main areas of dispute between India and China (shown in yellow). The boundaries on this map are not endorsed by the governments of India, Pakistan or China.

Because it is a populated and strategically vulnerable part of India, the eastern sector tends to be the more controversial of the two. Known as the “chicken’s neck” because of its shape, Sikkim is a narrow corridor of Indian territory, wedged between Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, that joins India’s northeastern states to the main part of the country. If India were to lose control of the Sikkim region, it would effectively be cut off from defending these areas, including disputed Arunachal Pradesh.

This worst-case scenario has dominated Indian strategic calculus since 1962, when China launched a full-scale assault on the entire length of the border and Indian forces suffered a humiliating defeat. The war was short but bloody: Indian government statistics released on 29 October 1962 – ten days after the conflict started – had between 2000 and 2500 Indian soldiers killed during the first week of fighting, 1102 held prisoner, 291 wounded and 5174 missing and presumed dead. China announced a unilateral ceasefire on 21 November and withdrew its forces back behind the McMahon Line, although it maintained control of the Aksai Chin.

The shadow of 1962 still looms over the border issue, particularly in India, and especially among Indian nationalists. But that war was itself the culmination of half a century of territorial disputes. These are often ignored in the analysis of the modern-day flare-ups, but they continue to shape attitudes in the two countries and are at the forefront of the current tensions. To properly understand the border issue, it’s necessary to go back to a series of conventions signed at the turn of the twentieth century, when India was still a British colony and China’s Qing dynasty was in its death throes.

The 1890 Convention Between Great Britain and China Relating to Sikkim and Tibet – known as the first Anglo-Chinese convention – officially demarcated the eastern part of the border, drawing the “Outer Line” along the Himalayan foothills (now the southern border of Arunachal Pradesh). China claimed suzerainty over Tibet, and Britain, increasingly worried about a Russian push into India, was keen to keep Tibet as a buffer zone. The convention also demarcated the Sikkim border, and noted in Article 3 that “The Government of Great Britain and Ireland and the Government of China engage reciprocally to respect the boundary as defined in Article 1, and to prevent acts of Aggression from their respective sides of the frontier.”

Further agreements, along with an unsuccessful Chinese military push into Tibet and a Tibetan declaration of independence, led to Britain’s convening a tripartite conference in Simla in 1914 with the aim of settling Tibet’s status. This eventually resulted in a document that is arguably at the root of the China–India border problems – the 1914 Simla Convention, which delineated a new eastern border along the Himalayan peaks. This was the McMahon Line, named after the British conference chairman Henry McMahon. China refused to sign, seeing it as another “unequal treaty” akin to those forced on it after the Opium Wars. Britain issued a joint declaration with the Tibetan representative instead.

China’s position – which it still holds today – is that Tibet had no authority to sign because it was under Chinese suzerainty at the time. And because China didn’t sign, its argument goes, the border is invalid. Furthermore, Beijing now argues that, since India has been independent since 1947, any agreement made by British India no longer stands. Instead, it recognises the old Outer Line, on the southern border of Arunachal Pradesh. The northern state border – the McMahon Line – is the international border recognised by India.

The agreement between Tibet and Britain at Simla was initially kept secret, and the McMahon Line was all but forgotten until 1935, when a civil servant in New Delhi stumbled across it and started pushing for its acceptance as the official border. In 1937, the McMahon Line began appearing on Survey of India maps as the official border, with the text “undemarcated” being the only indicator of its disputed status.

Things remained relatively quiet until 1950, after India’s independence from Britain and the creation of the People’s Republic of China. When Chinese forces entered Tibet in 1950, India objected but did not have the military capability to intervene. In 1954 the two countries signed the Sino-India Agreement, in which India recognised Chinese sovereignty over Tibet and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (or Panchsheel) were agreed on.

Up to this point, the eastern sector had been the main point of tension, but in 1956 China began constructing a road through the western sector. Later known as China National Highway 219, it stretched from Xinjiang province to Tibet through the Aksai Chin – a strategically important corridor that would allow troops to move rapidly between the two restive areas. Matters were further complicated in 1959 when Chinese forces entered Tibet and the Dalai Lama fled to India.

In 1960, led by Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, the two countries attempted to negotiate a “territory swap,” under which India would gain official control of Arunachal Pradesh in return for recognising Chinese sovereignty over the Aksai Chin. Diplomatic documents from the time show how intractable the issue was, with the two sides unable to agree on even basic aspects. The talks broke down and relations steadily deteriorated until they dissolved into all-out conflict in 1962.

After two decades of rocky relations, complicated by the cold war and China’s military support for Pakistan, the relationship began to thaw. Eight rounds of border talks were held during the 1980s, and Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi made a landmark visit to China, where the two sides agreed to maintain peace and stability along the Line of Actual Control and set up a joint working group to help defuse the border issue.

Since the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China came into being in the mid-twentieth century, there have been three major periods of rapprochement in Sino-Indian relations. The first was the 1960–61 border negotiations, which ended with the 1962 war. The second was the period following the normalisation of diplomatic relations in 1976, of which Rajiv Gandhi’s visit was the high point, before relations again became fraught after the 1998 Indian nuclear tests. The third followed the 2003 visit of Indian prime minister A.B. Vajpayee to Beijing, which, in spite of some hiccups in recent years, including a military stand-off in Ladakh in September 2014, still continues.

Now, though, China is alleging that India violated the 1890 Anglo-Chinese convention by sending guards over the border into the Doklam/Donglang region – currently under Chinese control but claimed by Bhutan – and disrupting work on a road. Infrastructure construction has been used tactically by both sides to assert their control over contentious areas, most notably by China in the Aksai Chin in 1956, but also by India.

In retaliation, China denied access to a group of Indian pilgrims heading to a sacred site. India, meanwhile, is arguing that it intervened on behalf of Bhutan, with whom it has a “special relationship.” India exerts significant influence over Bhutan’s foreign and defence policies, and Bhutan is also the largest recipient of Indian foreign aid, receiving US$985 million in 2015–16.

As well as the military stand-off, public debate is raging in the two countries’ media – fuelled by official spokespeople and journalists alike – over whether successive Indian governments (and especially India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru) really did recognise the demarcated Sikkim–Tibet border in the 1890 convention. Both the Indian and Chinese media have particularly strong nationalist elements, and the “hearts and minds” battle of the borders is often fought just as strongly as the military one. Maps are a similarly contentious issue in the relationship; in 2012, Beijing sparked ire in India by issuing passports with maps that showed Arunachal Pradesh and the Aksai Chin as part of China. New Delhi retaliated by stamping its own version on visas issued to Chinese citizens.

China has called the current skirmish “the worst in thirty years.” That’s certainly true in terms of sheer numbers – around 3000 troops on each side, compared to 1000 each during the 2014 Ladakh stand-off – but fails to take account of how relatively peaceful the border has been since the 1980s, especially compared to the early cold war decades. The tendency to see the China–India relationship through a prism of rivalry is strong (especially in recent years with the growth in both countries’ relative power), but the cost of a border war would still be prohibitively high for both parties. The two sides also tacitly agree to keep the wider relationship, especially in trade, insulated from border tensions.

Serious diplomatic and military skirmishes in 1998, 2006, 2009 and 2014 were all defused without a shot being fired, and the current stand-off shows no sign of being any different. The real wildcards, however, are the two countries’ leaders, Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping, both of whom base their rule on strong nationalist platforms. With neither leader inclined to accede to his adversary’s demands, this is where the real trouble could lie. •

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Elections in Uttar Pradesh have generally been won by the parties that successfully engineer caste and religious alliances to gain a numerical advantage. (The state’s first-past-the-post electoral system means that as few as 35 per cent of voters can decide the result in individual constituencies.) But since this month’s result, many commentators are highlighting the BJP’s pledge to bring economic development to one of India’s poorest states. Did this allow the BJP to remould voter behaviour in favour of development and broadly nationalist sentiment?

Politics based on caste and religion became increasingly important in Uttar Pradesh in the 1990s, when the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party emerged as political forces. The Samajwadi Party, led by Mulayam Singh Yadav, was the largest party in state elections in 2002 and 2004, having mobilised the support of the Yadav community, Muslims and groups that the government refers to as “other backward classes.” Then, in 2007, the Bahujan Samaj Party, led by Mayawati, won an outright majority by winning a majority of votes from Dalits, other backward classes, and Brahmins. The Samajwadi Party returned to power in 2012, again with the support of the Yadav and Muslim communities.

Enter Narendra Modi, who has travelled the world drumming up business for India since he became prime minister in 2014, and has promoted the BJP’s Make in India campaign at home with great fanfare. In Gujarat, where Modi was chief minister, electricity and other basic services are relatively reliable, but the state is in the middle rank of Indian states on human development indicators. Incidents of communal violence and tension are still frequent throughout India, and Modi and the BJP have been slow to express condemnation. The BJP’s role in the caste-related suicide of a Dalit scholar in Hyderabad in January last year brought the party’s communal image in sharp focus.

Some commentators explain the BJP’s victory last week by arguing that the electoral prowess of the Bahujan Samaj Party and Samajwadi Party–Congress had been exaggerated. Others point to the BJP’s carefully crafted communal rhetoric, which used nationalism and a refusal to “appease minorities” (code for Muslims) to appeal to non-Yadav, non-Jatav backward classes and Dalits. But many have argued that it was the promise of economic development, promoted intensively by the ever-present Modi, that was crucial. The prime minister strongly pressed the case that the BJP was uniquely able to deliver development to Uttar Pradesh, and that it was not a casteist party. He frequently chided Akhilesh Yadav, leader of the incumbent Samajwadi Party government, for his failure to deliver reliable electricity to the state.

But Modi notoriously took a more communal tone as well, arguing, for example, that for every kabristan (Muslim graveyard) in a village, there needed to be a shamshanghat (Hindu cremation ground), and making the loaded assertion, “If there is electricity during Ramadan then it should be available during Diwali too.” This was part of an unequivocally pro-Hindu, anti-Muslim strategy. Yogi Adityanath, who became chief minister after the election, warned in one speech that the situation in Western Uttar Pradesh was like that of Kashmir in the 1990s, suggesting that if the BJP didn’t win, that Hindus would be pushed out of their homes by Muslims.

While economic development may eventually determine the BJP’s continued sway over Uttar Pradesh, the party’s communal, non-secular credentials might also herald a reconfiguration of identity politics and social justice in the state. Events following the victory of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance at the national election in 2014 certainly suggest this possibility. Since then, numerous instances of “cow vigilantism” throughout India have led to violence against Dalits and Muslims. In 2016, in Uttar Pradesh itself, news emerged from a village called Dadri that a Muslim resident had been lynched after being falsely accused of storing beef in his refrigerator; in Una, Gujarat, lower-caste Dalit men were flogged by cow vigilantes for doing their job of skinning dead cows, work that no other caste groups will do. Modi and the BJP were slow to condemn these events.

Nor does the election of Yogi Adityanath as chief minister augur well for Uttar Pradesh’s caste and communal minorities. A priest-politician from the town of Gorakhpur in the state’s east, Adityanath is a staunch proponent of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, and a proponent of the construction of the Ram Temple on the disputed site of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. His role in inciting communal violence in Uttar Pradesh in 2007, as well as a 2005 drive to convert Christians to Hinduism as a form of ghar wapsi (home return to the Hindu nation), testifies to his communal credentials.

The leather industry in Uttar Pradesh will be an important test of development versus communalism. The state is home to a large number of tanneries and leather businesses. Recent media reporting has traced the decline of leather trade in one of Uttar Pradesh’s larger cities, Kanpur. The trade in leather, one of the products on Modi’s “Make in India” list, has suffered not only because of government regulations on industrial pollution but also because of cow vigilantism under the BJP’s rule. Cow protection groups don’t distinguish between cow slaughter and the skinning of a dead cow, and they attack the transporters of hides as well as the Dalits and Muslims who skin dead cows. This cultural movement has haphazardly directed its fury at those in the lowest socioeconomic stratum.

With the threat that vigilantism in Uttar Pradesh will put already marginalised workers at risk, the intersection of cultural nationalism and economic security will prove to be critical to the fortunes of the new government. Amit Shah, the BJP’s national president, has already vowed to shut down slaughterhouses in western Uttar Pradesh and ban the slaughter of cows, oxen and bulls. The livelihoods of people who depend on cow slaughter are likely to become even more precarious if cow vigilantism and slaughterhouse closures become the law of the land. Kanpur may lose its flourishing leather trade and Lucknow, an Islamic cultural centre famous for its tundey kebabs (made with beef or mutton), may also come under the scrutiny of the vigilantes.

Once the euphoria surrounding the BJP’s unprecedented win dies down, Uttar Pradesh will find out how secular the delivery of economic growth and development will be. A recognition that cultural politics can have profound economic ramifications for Muslim and Dalit workers needs to inform the new government’s plans. Otherwise, the BJP will feed the potentially explosive identity politics in India’s most populous state. •

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At the centre of the book is the prime minister. Kumar summarises Modi’s early life, examines how he operated as chief minister of the high-growth state of Gujarat, shows how he carried his centralised model of governance to Delhi, and concludes with an exposition and critique of key policy initiatives. Especially helpful for non-Indian readers is the book’s examination of the prime minister’s work style and the policy and management challenges he faces.

Don’t be put off by an extensive table of Gujarat programs, or by the long appendix to a chapter about current national programs partway through the book. While some readers will object to this unconventional organisation, others will find the extra material useful (as I did) for chasing down details.

Kumar proposes that Modi’s approach to government combines elements of Hindutva (Hindu-ness), vigorous nationalism and a drive for development. In this “development state,” all important initiatives are driven by a prime minister who wants to see a more efficient (rather than necessarily smaller) public sector, who supports a project-by-project approach rather than an overall vision, and who expects that successive increments will add up to transformations.

Although Kumar is broadly sympathetic, he urges less reliance on centralised leadership and considerable restraint in pursuit of Hindutva. He is sceptical that the project-by-project approach will bring the promised economic benefits and insists on the need for sector-based, labour-intensive strategies to provide jobs and to facilitate growth of the kind that is beneficial across the population. But he also acknowledges that a more complete assessment of the government’s prospects is difficult without more information about impacts to date.

The book begins by relating Modi’s neo-middle-class, lower-caste background (his father was a tea stall operator at the local railway station) and his emergence as the high-achieving member of an otherwise ordinary family. After leaving an early arranged marriage, and following a period of wandering in search of spiritual learning, he made his early career as an organiser in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (the RSS, or National Volunteer Organisation), which then assigned him to the Bharatiya Janata Party where, despite being a relative outsider, he came to prominence.

Kumar admits to being puzzled by Modi’s personality. Each of his encounters with Modi has left him with a different impression, though several characteristics have become clear: Modi is open to new ideas; he has an eye for detail; and, as his adept use of social media and accomplished photography shows, he is at home with technology. He also follows his own path in a disciplined way. Despite his years in the RSS, he kept the organisation at arm’s length when he was chief minister of Gujarat. In government, he tends to act not through institutions but through trusted civil servants.

In Gujarat, as Kumar sees it, Modi operated a paternalistic, centralised administration that focused on development by “getting on with it.” He took problems as they came and worked to solve them. Energised bureaucrats, continuous publicity and close relations between government and business provided a sense of achievement. He was helped by the state’s relatively strong economic base and by a “globally benign environment.” Manufacturing development was relatively labour-intensive and farming as a business was encouraged. Improvements were made to urban and rural infrastructure. The use of IT in government was championed.

But while Kumar is impressed with these achievements and recommends their emulation in other states, he acknowledges that Modi’s record in Gujarat remains contested. Health and education received insufficient attention. Not all sections of the community benefited. No overall vision for development emerged. Further, the murderous communal conflicts of 2002, shortly after Modi took office, shouldn’t be forgotten. While Kumar believes that an objective analysis of these events is impossible, he hints that they continue to cast a noticeable shadow on national affairs.

The relevance of the prime minister’s time in Gujarat is that he seems to be using the same methods in Delhi. Kumar poses questions that are still to be answered. Modi’s approach in Gujarat depended on constant learning; will he continue to learn in Delhi? Will he adapt his personalised, centralised, partisan leadership to become an effective rajrishi (a combination of monarch and saint)? For Kumar, the risks Modi faces are a lack of supportive networks like those in Gujarat, an over-dependence on a burgeoning Prime Minister’s Office, limited consultation with outsiders, and the expectations of hard-line Hindutva supporters.

As in Gujarat, Modi has demanded improved performance from the national civil service, while continuing to rely heavily on individual officers. His only structural change has been to replace the Planning Commission with the NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India). Kumar favours augmenting the civil service with external skills, including from business. He is sceptical about the NITI Aayog’s contribution – especially in managing relations with the states, which now control many of the most important decisions that affect business growth. On top of all this, the prime minister’s ambitious initiatives in foreign relations take him out of the country when important decisions have to be made at home. Centralisation in Delhi may entail far greater costs than in Gujarat.

In a section that repays careful reading, Kumar surveys the extensive range of projects initiated by the government, including the “Make in India” scheme to promote manufacturing and exports; Swachh Bharat (Clean India), aimed at cleaning up cities and towns, and building lavatories to discourage still-prevalent open defecation; the Aadhar identity-card system, which also facilitates digital transfer of money and benefits; “Smart Cities” and “Digital India,” to extend the use of IT in government and society; and many more.

Kumar highlights not only the problems in implementation, but also the magnitude of the economic development task. To catch up with China and Korea, with which India once compared in its per capita income, India needs to grow for years at double-digit rates and create one million new jobs each month. Unfortunately, Kumar argues, recent annual growth rates of approximately 7.5 per cent are not translating into employment growth and, in any case, growth won’t fix all problems that India faces.

To conclude, Kumar surveys four sectors – agriculture, manufacturing and exports, infrastructure, and education – in which much more needs to be done. In particular, he argues that a project-driven strategy needs to be replaced by strategic approaches that cover each sector. He maintains that transformation by small steps will not take place without an expanded vision and a management philosophy that looks beyond inputs to outcomes. He places his prescriptions for economic policy in social and political context. He also sees no place for extreme social and religious organisations and urges firm steps in public and private to put them out of business.

Kumar’s conclusion is that “India cannot afford Modi to make many mistakes.” Whether the prime minister is of a mind – or has the freedom – to take advice of this kind remains to be seen. But for readers wanting to look beyond immediate politics and the controversies surrounding the Modi government, and to understand some of the forces behind events since publication (including the currently controversial “big bang” demonetisation of large banknotes, which the author supports, in an attempt to curb “black money”), Kumar is an accessible and considered guide. In particular, he raises questions about the effectiveness, in a country as diverse and complex as India, of a model of governing that depends more on personal leadership than on the building and deployment of institutional capability. •

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The clarity of Modi’s successful election campaign, with its focus on economic growth, opportunities and jobs, has given way to government by mixed messages. In foreign policy, the prime minister has enchanted new friends and old antagonists alike; at home, the combination of his direct leadership of key civil servants and his cautious and adaptive policy and infrastructure initiatives have been overshadowed by the upsurge in Hindutva, or Hindu nationalist, agitation within his party.

These two books approach India’s divides from different directions. The distinguished historian Romila Thapar and her colleagues, mostly established scholars, debate the role of public intellectuals in reasserting connections between liberalism, secularism and democracy. Barkha Dutt, a controversial television journalist (self-described in an open letter to the prime minister – using insults levelled against her – as an “Anti-National, Sickular, Presstitute”), reflects on the conflicts behind the news stories, and in doing so explores similar themes to Thapar’s. Scholarly exposition and gritty reflection converge around the puzzle of how the Indian people can find a way forward that doesn’t involve marginalising the significant elements of a segmented and diverse society that are perceived as anti-Hindu.

Thapar poses the problem as one of intellect and inclusion. “How,” she asks, “can we create the independent space that will encourage us to think, and to think together?” She pursues the question in three contributions to The Public Intellectual in India, which evolved from a memorial lecture in honour of the late founding editor of the current affairs weekly Mainstream. She advocates a role for public intellectuals in reversing the shrinking of the space for public debate.

According to Thapar, the shrinkage has its origins in the way the British fostered notions of identity in India around religion. The impatient voices demanding a Hindu rashtra arise not from mainstream Hindu practice but from reactions to colonial rule among upper-caste movements that use religion as a vehicle for political mobilisation. She sees current demands, including multifarious attempts to ban things considered offensive to Hindu sentiment, as an attempt to use religion as an instrument of social and political control. She regrets that the wider society does not stand up to such demands and very publicly champions her own vision of a secular India.

Thapar wants an India free from colonial perspectives and structures. She advocates drawing on indigenous traditions of critical thinking and melding them where appropriate with other critical traditions, including – controversially for those who do not share her preference for reason over myth – the European Enlightenment. Throughout, she argues against the “mythologising” associated with Hindutva agendas. Her co-contributors generally complement her approach, though one of them, the historian Neeladri Bhattacharya, suggests that Thapar is nostalgic for earlier times when the approach to secularism she favours appeared strong only because a “deep structure” of alternative perspectives was repressed.

Despite the cogency of Thapar’s advocacy, Bhattacharya’s proposition deserves more exploration than the book provides. It leads to questions about the very nature of secularism in India, how it has been reflected since 1947 in Congress-led administrations, and which people and interests have felt left out. It probes the gap, acknowledged even by Nehru, between declarations that India was a secular state and how many people lived and thought.

As the Australian National University’s Peter Friedlander has pointed out, the language in which Indian secularism is discussed is significant. In Hindi, the multiple meanings of “secularism” focus not on independence from religion, as in English, but on how religions are regarded. Friedlander identifies three different meanings in Hindi: all religions treated as separate and equal; all religions as essentially one; and equal respect for all religions. He also points out that in the Hindi version of the constitution there has been a shift in the word used for secularism from “all religions treated as separate” to “all religions as essentially one.” From there it is a short step to claims (depending on one’s perspective, perfectly normal or disturbingly ambitious) that Hinduism provides a home for other religions in India.

In these circumstances it would have been useful for Thapar and her co-contributors to have looked more closely at what secularism means for different streams of thought in India. It would also have been useful to look more closely at Congress and at the charge made by its opponents on the right that it has used secularism as cover for tailoring benefits to minority communities, especially Muslims. And it would have been useful to devote more attention to those who supported Modi mainly because of discontent with Congress’s statist economic policies up to 1991 and its disappointing economic record more recently. The potential of conservative and liberal-right intellectuals to become allies in the creation of the desired “independent space” for thinking might have been too easily dismissed.

Barkha Dutt examines changes in India over the past twenty-five years and the rumblings that foreshadow further change. She looks especially at the place of women, at sectarianism, Kashmir and the games politicians play, and at rapidly changing class and caste equations – all topics she has covered extensively as a reporter. She reflects, too, on how television news, in which she began in the mid 1990s, has come to frame so many issues in the public arena. She does this from the perspective of someone who was raised in South Delhi in a professional salaried family originally from Sialkot (now in Pakistan). Her mother was a pioneering woman journalist; at home, religion and caste were not prominent concerns. Dutt received a tertiary education in English and won a scholarship in journalism at Columbia. As the book proceeds, she is frank about how her work has prompted her to press beyond her original values.

She is relentless in probing the deep-seated inequities in social relationships in India. She starts with the sexism that confronts Indian women, from rape – a phenomenon that authorities routinely turn back on the victim – to the “chick charts” in elite colleges and her own experiences of abuse. (The latter include molestation by a distant relative when she was a child and social media allegations that she has had two Kashmiri Muslim husbands.) She records the struggles of Dalits and the sharpness with which attempts to escape through conversion are scorned by some upper-caste Hindus.

More broadly, she writes extensively about the sufferings of the peoples of Kashmir, Muslim as well as Hindu, and the inability of the authorities to arrive at any kind of enduring settlement. Official lack of preparedness for emergencies and the ease with which officials on the spot resort to violence are recurring themes. She records the devastation wrought by mob violence – in one especially notorious case, “simultaneously senseless and perfectly controlled.” Yet she is also alert to acts of generosity and selflessness. She is particularly eloquent about the valour of the troops who fought the alpine war at Kargil.

Dutt’s career began shortly after the liberalisation in economic policy in 1991. While Thapar is deeply discomforted by the changes it brought, Dutt looks at who benefited and who did not. She suggests that liberalisation expanded the circles of the rich and powerful, but many others missed out. She argues that those left behind included the old upper castes (which Thapar sees as reacting already to colonial policy) and many in the new middle class. This exclusion set off multiple revolts that also drew on dissatisfaction about the decision to extend the scheme that reserves a proportion of government jobs for lower castes. Those who felt disadvantaged provided targets for Modi’s election campaign (and less successfully for that of the Aam Aadmi Party).

Dutt goes on to examine how religious enthusiasm combines with economic aspiration. Indeed, the extent of religious devotion leads her to question the secularism with which she grew up. She refers often to Hindu majoritarianism and quotes one spokesperson who even finds support for his claims in Australia: “Why can’t we say like John Howard said in Australia about Christians, that in this country Hindus are the majority and so this country will be run on the principles of Hinduism?”

Her questioning of the style of secularism practised by Congress governments is particularly sharp. She suggests that Congress tended to give in to religious extremists among both Muslims and Hindus. Secularism thus came to be seen as two-faced. “In a country where religion is threaded into the fabric of society and culture,” she concludes, “the only thing we can hope for is a way of living that respects all faiths and does not deny faith altogether.” While she is no less dismayed than Thapar at recent attacks on alleged enemies of Hinduism, her hope is in the rejection of religious phobias, not in the separation of religion from public life.

Both these books make a case for understanding not only the workings of the Modi government, but also the noisily competing forces in social and religious life that accompany it. •

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

But Xi and Modi already had more in common than might have met the eye. In important ways they capture the ambitions of their two countries: they are both populist leaders, and they are both appealing to public sentiments of national rejuvenation and a desire for a central place in the global order. At issue is not the scope of their mutual ambitions, but whether Asia, or for that matter the world, is large enough for both of them.

Take Xi, for instance. Since being appointed general secretary of the Communist Party in November 2012 he has launched an extensive anti-corruption struggle that has threatened to turn into an all-out purge of any party, military or state-owned-business elites who might cramp his style. So far, it is not entirely clear whether he is an autocrat or the faithful servant of the party. But one thing is certain: his use of direct language, his speeches about a “China Dream” and his globetrotting (thirty-nine countries in two years) show plenty of ambition, whatever might be behind his actions. Modi has almost equalled this energetic record, with thirty-seven foreign trips across five continents during the same period.

Xi has proved adept at portraying himself, domestically, as being on the side of ordinary Chinese. This Chinese New Year he was shown, Maoist-style, working in the Chinese countryside among farmers. In 2014 he made a widely publicised visit to a simple dumpling shop in Beijing. He also, reportedly, took a taxi with some advisers soon after taking power. This attempt to reduce the vast distance between the public and the party leadership was initially refreshing, and so too was his willingness to speak more directly to ordinary citizens and the outside world. The problem is that a cult of personality is starting to emerge.

Modi is similarly bold and expansive. He too needs to ensure that the reforms he has promoted in the last year don’t get lost in domestic conflict and legislative standstill. The crucial goods and services tax legislation, touted as the biggest tax reform since India’s independence, has been blocked by opposition in parliament. The land acquisition and rehabilitation bill, important for achieving his “Make in India” dream, is also caught in domestic political conflicts.

In very different ways, Modi and Xi insist on remaining in control of one key area: the media. Through the early part of this year Xi has been demanding that state television, radio and news outlets stay loyal. For Modi, the tactic is different, even if the end – political control – is the same. As well as broadcasting a monthly radio program, Mann Ki Baat (Talk from the Heart), Modi is the master of social media: the platform, the medium and the message are his, not the opposition’s. With 18.1 million followers, he is the second-most-followed Twitter politician in the world after US president Barack Obama. This is a formidable weapon to turn against the opposition. His opponent, Congress Party leader Rahul Gandhi, took to Twitter much later; and by then Modi and his tweeting army had managed to dominate the discourse completely.

Modi’s aggressive use of social media bypasses the traditional media. India, the world, his ministerial colleagues and the government’s bureaucrats came to learn through Twitter rather than any official announcement that Obama was to be chief guest at the Republic Day celebrations in 2015. He has opened his government to public participation through contests for slogans, logos, taglines and other creative inputs. But in a country where the literacy rate is still a dismal 70 per cent, political communication like this only generates an illusion of democratic participation, and can easily appear self-serving.

Xi heads the party, military and, as president, the country. He has been appointed chair of a number of small but all-important committees whose policy input runs across almost every area of government. His cluster of close advisers creates the impression that the country is being run not by the Standing Committee of the Politburo but by Xi’s own cabal. Modi’s control over the Bharatiya Janata Party and the government is similarly complete. Most decisions are made directly by his office, on several notable occasions without keeping the relevant ministers in the loop. Like Xi, he is a compulsive workaholic. He is already being called an autocrat in India – someone who doesn’t trust the calibre of his ministers.

Are we seeing two parallel cases of political self-aggrandisement and nationalism rising before us? And, despite the reassuring sight of them making friends during 2014 and in 2015, can we be confident they will be able to coexist happily? For Xi, after all, the objective is clear and simple: regional economic dominance (China is already well on the way to that) followed quickly by political dominance. China wants to be the centre of Asia, restored to what its current leaders believe is its historically rightful place. Would Modi sign up for that vision? It’s hardly likely. For him, national regeneration and restoration of India to its rightful economical and political place is at the top of the agenda.

The world really needs to take more notice of the relationship between India and China. By the next decade, they will together be home to 2.7 billion people, almost two-fifths of humanity. And the emergence of a middle class in both countries will be central to global growth, as will their governments’ contribution to solving environmental problems.

Between them, Modi and Xi constitute an informal G2. If they get their relationship right, it will be an extraordinarily powerful combination. But history is not on their side. Will their hunger for success encourage them to break this mould and conduct the relationship in new ways, or will it make them even sharper rivals?

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Koala diplomacy is now a set piece in Australia’s welcoming of international dignitaries. But Meg Gurry’s multifaceted and impressively researched history of Australia’s bilateral relationship with what is now the world’s second-most populous country, Australia and India: Mapping the Journey, brings fresh context to the well-known “Indira with koala” press shot. For one thing, Gurry’s plumbing of the archives tells us that a week or so before the photo was taken, Mrs Gandhi’s request to take a koala back to India was summarily refused. For another, the book’s narration of the 1968 visit reveals it to be curiously devoid of substance, with nothing in particular tabled for bilateral discussion. The irony of the koala snap is that the one flicker of interest India had in Australia at the time – no matter how whimsical – was not fostered (although a koala was happily spared the need to travel).

Gurry offers an account of Australia and India’s flailing relationship that goes well beyond the clichéd tale of decades of neglect (with some cricket thrown in). In order to piece together a truly diplomatic history of the bilateral relationship, she has broken new ground in the National Archives, interviewed former high commissioners on both sides, and combed unpublished memoirs and papers. Gurry’s aim is to probe the “official mind” in order to access an otherwise hidden political realm, and that effort has proven a notable success.

Her method helps explain why a second photo of the koala episode, privately owned but housed in the National Library of Australia (and featured in the book’s own picture section, and above), reveals even more about the longstanding complexities of Australia’s relationship with India. The second smiling face in this other image is that of Sir Arthur Tange, high commissioner to India from 1965 to 1970. Tange professed to having spent “the best five years” of his life in India, and Gurry catalogues his impressive efforts to diagnose (and try to resolve) the roots of the diplomatic distance between the two countries.

Yet Tange is just one figure in Gurry’s stellar cast of Australian diplomats with a passion for India. Another is Walter Crocker, who served as high commissioner in New Delhi from 1958 to 1962 and felt confident enough to write a biography of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Crocker’s skill as an India-reader is evident in Ramachandra Guha’s celebration of that biography in the Monthly. But Crocker and Tange are not alone: Peter Heydon, Graham Feakes and John McCarthy are other standouts in Gurry’s “long line of dedicated high commissioners and diplomats who have worked hard to understand India.” Together, they deliver the freshest narratives and the keenest insights in her retelling of the Australia–India story.

In the process, Australia and India dispels the long-held official myth of Australia’s neglect of India. “Every leader since Whitlam,” Gurry notes, “has at some stage in their term of office ‘discovered’ India, spoken of the unfulfilled promise between the two states, and set out to forge and institutionalise a stronger bilateral connection.” And each leader’s quest, she concludes, has ended in “disappointment and frustration.” These efforts, along with the intelligence, insight and effort of many of Australia’s diplomats and high commissioners, show that neglect is not an accurate description of what is at fault with the relationship.

What, then, can Gurry tell us about what has gone so wrong, so often?

In line with the title, her book is structured as a journey, taking us on a chronological passage. As she makes clear, this is first and foremost a tale told through Australian voices, documents and worldviews, and the book’s major themes take Australia as their departure point. Australia is the primary agent, for example, in most of the political processes – including aligning, titling, searching and engaging – described in the titles of the seven chapters.

More unusually, Gurry also uses maps to pin down her narrative. In the book’s opening pages she argues persuasively that any understanding of the bilateral relationship is intimately entwined with its regional context. Maps count because “regions do not have fixed and predetermined boundaries – they are created, and their borders established and crafted in response to geopolitical events, to shifting alliances and to new trading and economic opportunities.”

Gurry’s pictorial maps speak the language any student of international relations and history would recognise: they offer clear visualisations of decolonisation, collective defence, multilateral groupings, economic cooperation, and the spread and containment of communism. The shifting boundaries of these maps (to include or exclude India) offer one kind of insight into the nature of change in the relationship. The conclusions to be drawn from them are the stuff of policy briefs, and Gurry lists them clearly in the conclusion. Shared strategic interests, economic links and people-to-people contact matter most in the relationship, and the recent upturn in Australia–India relations is tied to progress on each of these fronts.

But the book’s undrawn maps are by far the most compelling. These are the mental – and emotive – maps of race, civilisational hierarchy, moral conviction (largely regarding either the sanctity or malevolence of alliance diplomacy) and global status. Such maps show who matters most, and least, in global affairs, in Australian and Indian hearts and minds. By cultivating in the reader an understanding of these maps, Australia and India presents us with new lenses through which to interpret the relationship.

Seen through these lenses, some of the major obstacles to the India–Australia relationship come into keener relief. One is Indian disgust at the White Australia policy, which echoes in the ever-reigniting issue of race (most clearly seen in India’s angry response to the allegedly racist attacks on Indian students in 2009 and 2010). Another is Australia’s commitment to alliance diplomacy, manifesting as a routine adherence to US foreign policy priorities that Indian leaders often saw as weak and unimaginative. A third is Australia’s repeated relegation of India to a lower order of significance. This stemmed partly from a tendency of some Australian prime ministers to peer across Asia towards Europe and the West. Worse than that, in India’s eyes, it has also been clear in Australia’s tendency to ignore India and gaze instead at China. Or even worse than that, to turn away from India and towards Pakistan.

All of this is not to suggest that clashes in material interests have been irrelevant. In a replay of the koala snub, India’s keenness to buy Australia’s uranium and the Rudd government’s decision to block its sale in 2007 was a major sticking point. But clear, substantive issues of disagreement have been few. This is why Gurry’s more subtle mapping of the long-ranging value clashes within the relationship is so enlightening.

As well as the obstacles, the mental maps help us to understand the successes, too. There was a brief period in the early 1970s, for example, when Australia’s flash of independent foreign policy on the issue of Bangladesh met with Indian gratitude. Around the same time, the Whitlam government’s dismantling of White Australia earned that leader an invitation to visit India. More recently, the Howard government did well to recognise that India was finding a place at the heart of the world economy, while Tony Abbott has had the foresight to label India “the emerging democratic superpower of the world.” Perhaps more than any other diplomatic step, Australia’s greater recognition of India’s global importance has appealed to India and its sensitivities about status.

The book’s concluding section could do more to pull out revelations from the undrawn maps, and to sing more proudly about the fine contribution it makes to our understanding of Australian diplomatic history. At the broadest level, Gurry’s account is of an Australia seeking to find a place in Asia and the world. At the institutional level, it is one of the competing visions and values pursued at different moments by the political and bureaucratic arms of Australia’s diplomatic machine. And at the level of individual men (and occasional women) it is about an Australian capacity to deeply admire India and Indians and to use that (often unreciprocated) admiration as a mirror in which to assess Australia’s failures and omissions in policies of many kinds.

But much of the Indian story still remains tantalisingly out of reach. For Australia, Gurry observes, “it has always been an uphill battle to get India’s attention.” Why this is so is a story still waiting to be told. Australia and India is not quite the “definitive account of bilateral relations,” as Amitabh Mattoo of the Australia India Institute (and the book’s key backer), suggested earlier this year. But it is a credit to Gurry’s compelling and comprehensive treatment of the Australian side of the story that the reader is left thirsty for a parallel delving into Indian geo-strategic hang-ups, institutional complexities and individual flashes of diplomatic creativity.

At some levels, the Indian tale is likely to look remarkably similar. As a product of European empire – though of a very different kind – caught between Asia and the West, India too suffered a crisis of international identity in the early decades of independence as it implicitly sought recognition from major Western powers, even while championing Asian solidarity. While internationally, India spoke up against racism of all kinds, particularly on the issue of South African apartheid, the kinds of racial and civilisational hierarchies implicit in the White Australia policy were not entirely absent domestically, as Itty Abraham has shown in relation to early official discourse on India’s “backward and indigenous” peoples. But there will be major differences, too. Unlike Australia, India has stubbornly pursued a largely autonomous foreign policy for much of its independent history. Also unlike Australia, India’s global ambitions have almost always exceeded those of a middle power. With Indian sights set so high, Australia is likely to remain, as Gareth Evans described it to Gurry, of “second-order importance."

For the policy-maker looking for a way to patch over this mismatch in global ambition, one final insight from Australia and India should be pencilled down: Australian soft power can work temporary wonders, especially where that softness celebrates Indian achievements or takes Indian sentiments seriously. Julia Gillard’s bestowal of an Order of Australia on India’s best-loved cricketer, Sachin Tendulkar, was well-received, as was Tony Abbott’s symbolic return of two stolen Indian idols that came into the possession of Australian galleries. But, as Gurry shows, these gestures come rather late in the piece. Looking back to the iconic image of Indira Gandhi’s visit in 1968, Australia could have tried harder, earlier. Perhaps one of Sir Arthur Tange’s contemporaries should have packed that koala a suitcase. •

The post Rediscovering India appeared first on Inside Story.

We eat toasted chicken sandwiches and custard, odd leftovers from the Raj, and I watch the four men, their gestures immediately familiar. Like us they have crossed the road, past the auto-rickshaws, the sleeping dogs, the many small pharmacies, and the constant cars and taxis, to come to the Sassanian Boulangerie.

Also like us, they are here, near the Churchgate Railway Station, to attend the sixth Kashish Mumbai International Queer Film Festival. The festival is centred on the Liberty Cinema, a well-preserved dowager from 1947, whose owner had helped welcome us on opening night. The Liberty has remained a cinema since Indian independence; this week it is flying a rainbow flag just down the road from Mumbai’s main hospital.

I had come to Mumbai to speak at Kashish, which takes its name from an Urdu term meaning attraction or allurement. This is one of a number of such festivals, which play an important role in the development of Asia’s queer communities, offering both community and privacy. Unlike a protest rally, you can retreat into the dark of a cinema knowing you’re there with others who share an aspect of your life you don’t necessarily want revealed in broad daylight. Nor is the audience exclusively queer; a number of attendees, particularly middle-aged women, had come along to expand their understanding of the communities depicted.

Not that the people who thronged the Liberty, and a couple of other smaller venues, seemed concerned about visibility. While homosexual activity remains illegal in India, a large and visible group of people are openly homosexual or transgendered, and many more may not have adopted Western identity terms but live out various forms of divergence from the presumed norms of sexual and gender orthodoxy. Best known outside India are hijra, a term that describes a range of male-to-female transgenders and transvestites. Hijra are often identified as “third gender,” the term used by India’s Supreme Court when it ruled last year for legal recognition of gender diversity.

Kashish unapologetically sees itself globally, showing 180 films from forty countries over four days, less than a fifth of them Indian. This year the emphasis was on Australia, and Saturday night’s major attraction was the first Indian cinema screening of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The three drag queens on stage during the opening ceremony could have walked straight off the set of Priscilla; watching them was like going back thirty years to the drag bars of Oxford Street. (And when I took Gore Vidal to one of these bars long before Priscilla was made, he said we could have been in New York twenty years earlier.) But social change is never linear; while there were echoes of the past, the opening of Kashish was taking place in a very different time and place. The references might seem familiar, even hackneyed; their meaning for the audience was very different than it was for me.

The queer world I saw in Mumbai was both familiar and alien, but because the language of the festival was predominantly English, and the various formal discussions were led by cosmopolitan Indians at home in several languages, the rhetoric and the reality were strangely disconnected. Several locals complained to me that Westerners come to Mumbai looking for bars, saunas and pink businesses, and complain at their absence. But these same locals use a global language to describe themselves; they are very aware of the latest international developments, and I heard constant references to the Irish vote for same-sex marriage. The impact of the internet means that men seeking sex with other men now use their smart phones much as their counterparts would in Sydney or San Francisco.

As in Australia, the term LGBTI – sometimes in India without either B or I – has become a noun without any reflection on what the initials stand for. “I am a proud LGBTI,” declared a friend on Facebook, even though he clearly fits only one of those categories. The bigger problem is that conflating gender expression and sexual identity muddies already clouded waters: to wish to transition one’s gender is not an expression of either homo- or heterosexual desire, indeed in some ways it makes nonsense of the very division. Those of us who remain influenced by Freud might well note that if all humans are potentially bisexual then the idea of a bisexual identity becomes problematic, if not all-inclusive.

The complexities of sexuality and gender in India underlie the work of the Humsafar Trust, which is not only the major HIV outreach organisation in Maharashtra State but also the largest organisation working for sexual and gender diversity. Touching all bases, the trust identifies itself as a community organisation of “self-identified Gay men, MSM, Transgenders, Hijras and LBT persons.” It has become a major service-delivery organisation, reaching out to thousands of people across greater Mumbai and receiving considerable international funding.

Humsafar is part of a dense array of community queer organisations in India, which exists alongside a flourishing publishing world – as is clear from a recent anthology: Out!, published by the energetic Shobhna Kumar, who runs Queer Ink, a publishing and bookstore enterprise. Shobhna was one of the few lesbians visible at Kashish; despite careful programming, very few women were present, and the almost entirely male discussions at the festival reflected the persistent realities of India more than the rhetoric of LGBTI inclusiveness.

Five years ago the Delhi High Court seemed to mark a new step in India’s acceptance of homosexuality when it repealed the colonial era’s Section 377, which outlawed sexual acts “against the order of nature,” a phrase generally understood to refer to male-to-male sex. But this ruling was overturned in 2013 by the nation’s Supreme Court, and the current government seems unwilling to make legislative changes. The court’s decision was a short-term blow; in the longer run it has opened up discussion about (homo)sexuality that will bring about unforeseen changes.

As in other former British colonies, imperialism is often blamed for the law and all it symbolises, which I find increasingly unconvincing: after sixty years of independence, should not self-styled anti-colonial Indian governments have despatched this legacy of colonialism? In fact, it is now the former colonial rulers who uphold “LGBTI rights” against many African, Asian and Caribbean countries that claim a colonial legacy as part of their essential tradition and culture.

The Western concept of gay liberation, now morphed into the far more respectable call for “LGBTI rights,” is based on a strong assumption of individualism, of the right of an individual to assert whatever sexual or gender identity s/he wishes. This assertion is possible in societies where family ties are declining, and the state is expected to provide some guarantee of care as we become sick, feeble and isolated. In India, however, the extended family is still central, and negotiating one’s sexuality with one’s biological family is a central preoccupation for most people. As Parmesh Shahani wrote in his book Gay Bombay, “Insofar as one’s primary community is concerned, the blood family still rules the roost.” One of the organisers of Kashish told me that whenever his parents come to visit his partner goes to stay with his biological family.

Arranged marriages are the norm for most Indians, even if the opportunity for children to have a say has increased. They reinforce class and caste lines: in the Sunday Times of India the two pages of ads for “matrimonials” begin with “caste,” although other sections refer to language and religion. Could an Indian way for gay liberation lie in arranged same-sex marriages? The idea might seem playful, but one such advertisement was posted in May, seeking a “well-placed, animal-loving, vegetarian GROOM for my son…” The woman who placed this post is the mother of a gay rights activist, and the advertisement caused some consternation.

Queer India exemplifies all the contradictions and delights of hybridity and pastiche common to contemporary cultural theory. (It’s no accident that postcolonial theory is largely the product of expatriate Indian intellectuals.) Thus, a cartoon in the publication Bombay Dost can simultaneously reflect family pressures and invoke Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Oscar Wilde as gay heroes.

The people behind Kashish are very aware of the gaps between the cool, middle-class and predominantly English-speaking audiences at the festival and the majority of people in India. But on the closing night, with its transgender dance troupe and the (largely male) Rainbow Choir singing a mixture of Indian and civil rights songs, it was clear that the festival was reaching out beyond the cosmopolitan, educated elite.

On the plane back from Mumbai I watched four hours of Best Marigold Hotel films, and as is my wont at 30,000 feet in the air sniffled through most of it. Clichéd as these films are, they highlight the fact that what is happening in India today is a glorious entanglement of local and global. As the mythologist and author Devdutt Pattanaik remarked at Kashish: “There are events in life that we qualify as climax or start, end or beginning, tragedy or comedy. But life just keeps moving ahead. We are just one act in a never ending play on an eternal stage giving moments meaning.” •

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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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Myanmar has taken charge of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, for the first time. To host the hundreds of meetings that come with the year-long job, a vast new neighbourhood has been built in Naypyitaw, the country’s sprawling decade-old capital. Two huge convention centres and more than two dozen brand new hotels have sprung up, all helping fulfil the government’s long-held desire for respectability and renewed national pride.

Leading ASEAN is a significant turning point in Myanmar’s relations with its nine Southeast Asian neighbours. During the dark decades of military dictatorship, the country’s pariah status would have precluded a regional endorsement of this kind. But now Myanmar is taking centrestage and enjoying the applause as it performs what could be the world’s most astonishing political pivot: former military dictators building a system that is slowly starting to look like democracy.

These changes matter for lots of reasons, especially because they mean that a nascent economic boom is helping lift millions of the country’s people out of poverty. But the most important reason to be watching Myanmar closely is the old real estate mantra: location, location, location.

Many Australians have started to focus on the implications of the resurgence of China and India, but we’re still far from the frontlines. Myanmar – almost 700,000 square kilometres, home to sixty million people – is wedged between those twin Asian-century behemoths, its long, winding borders snaking across remote mountains and valleys. It is only a matter of time before Myanmar’s wedge of territory feels the force of the renegotiation of global power that the coming decades will bring.

For millennia, the diverse peoples of Myanmar have accepted influence from both directions. Today, the country recognises 135 “national races,” or ethnic groups, within its borders. Anyone walking the streets of Myanmar towns can see clearly the jumble of linguistic, culinary, genetic and cultural influences that have flowed from India and China. And not just from those two giants. Myanmar’s interactions with its other neighbours – Thailand, Bangladesh and Laos – are important too.

In the borderlands, long-running civil conflicts have preoccupied Myanmar’s central government and destroyed the lives of far too many people, with perhaps 750,000 dead since independence in 1948. Millions of people, especially those from the ethnic minorities who make up roughly 40 per cent of the national population, have sought safety and livelihoods abroad.

More than two million Myanmar citizens and former citizens are in Thailand alone, most of them doing the low-paying jobs that the Thais have left behind during their recent decades of economic success. Others have sought employment, healthcare, education and romance in other neighbouring lands. And the people of Myanmar’s borderlands are better connected to their neighbours than they are to Yangon or Naypyitaw. Short hops to places like Chiang Mai in Thailand or Ruili in China have offered exposure to economic and cultural resources unavailable at home. At many points, the national borders are low bamboo fences or shallow creeks; in other places there are no barriers at all.

Increasingly, people from Myanmar have also found new lives further afield, in places like Malaysia and Singapore. Daily flights from Yangon are often filled with migrant workers, and it’s common enough to find Myanmar names on cashiers’ receipts and waiters’ nametags in posh shopping precincts in Kuala Lumpur.

Even though Myanmar is gradually becoming wealthier and more peaceful, many locals are taking the main chance while they can. Getting a fair wage and seeking opportunities for education, training and the accumulation of capital: life outside Myanmar can be an attractive bet.

Myanmar’s neighbourhood is also arguably the best indication of the country’s own future direction. Perhaps more than any other country in Asia, Myanmar will have a front-row seat for the changes and challenges of the decades ahead. And its politics are likely to echo aspects of the recent experiences of its neighbours. How Myanmar goes about processing its diverse inheritances and unique features will be what counts.

Until now, the country has been best-known for the prolonged stalemate between democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi and the military leadership. It has been easy to ignore the broader geopolitical story.

First of all, Myanmar’s political changes bring opportunities for increased transport, cultural and communication links. Astoundingly, there are still no highways crossing Myanmar’s borders that offer quick and easy transport to deep inside the country. Roads in border areas still tend to be bumpy and packed with erratic traffic. Motorised travel is slow and dangerous.

International rail links have yet to be built, and only two of the country’s airports are of any real size. Infrastructure that better ties Myanmar to its region is clearly high on the government’s agenda. For now, the initial surge of investment into the country has focused on gas pipelines designed to support the energy appetites of Thailand and China. In time, Myanmar will be fully enmeshed in Asian and global transport networks.

Anyone visiting Yangon’s airport will see that fundamental shifts are occurring quickly. New flights, initially from across the immediate region and now from much further afield, are giving a genuinely dimension to the processes of change. This daily traffic will create new opportunities for Myanmar’s people while also challenging them to accept new influences.

Those influences are becoming increasingly difficult to control. While Myanmar has been exposed to culture, pop and otherwise, from across the world, it is now being drawn into debates about politics and society. Every week these issues are discussed in workshops, debates and seminars in Yangon, Naypyitaw and other major centres.

These events, while perhaps inconsequential on their own, are adding to a shifting landscape of ideas. Myanmar’s people, and especially the country’s intellectuals, are being bombarded with opportunities to test their notions and marshal new evidence. The isation of Myanmar’s political culture is well and truly under way.

This is part of the reason why Myanmar is divided by squabbles over the most satisfactory form of politics to follow its five decades of dictatorial rule. For many well-intentioned advocates in Western democracies, the next natural step for Myanmar is to embrace a liberal society founded on principles of equality and freedom, with popular electoral franchises extending the length and breadth of the country.

Others, though, will see some moderation of the democratic ideal as preferable. Myanmar’s leadership is balancing political challenges that would test most Western democracies – especially in its ethnic minority areas, where war has been the decades-long standard. Is it realistic to expect a rapid about-turn?

This question has special importance because Myanmar is surrounded by countries where democracy has very shallow roots, and some of them will exert influence on its political development. China, for example, will be hoping that Myanmar remains amenable to its demands, and its preferred model is likely to be a very heavily constricted form of semi-democracy. Many of Myanmar’s powerbrokers, including some of those with the most outspoken democratic credentials, are also inclined towards a “managed” democratic experience.

Should we split the difference, then, between Thai and Bangladeshi politics? That might not do full justice to Myanmar’s inheritance, but it isn’t entirely unfair either. It would imply that political violence will continue in Myanmar, that there will be no handbrake on inequality, and that entrenched elites will continue to bolster their positions. New challengers for power will arise, as they have in both Thailand and Bangladesh, but they will be drawn into brawling, or worse. The military, if we take the neighbourhood’s track record as a guide, will continue to be a powerful player. It may, from time to time, reassert its dominance, even through military coups.

Myanmar’s location needs to be considered with these complications in mind. Its chairmanship of ASEAN has once again given regional leaders a chance to claim some of the credit for the country’s newfound status. They are all proud that their doctrine of non-interference in internal political affairs contributed to Myanmar’s incremental changes.

Such changes are acceptable precisely because some of ASEAN’s members – most notably Vietnam, Laos and Brunei – have yet to begin even token experiments with popular rule. And even those countries that hold regular elections, including Singapore, Malaysia and Cambodia, are still dominated by single parties. Thailand, yet again ruled by military dictatorship, signals how difficult a transition might prove to be. How Myanmar negotiates the pushes and pulls of its location will provide an example for the rest of us. Myanmar may never enjoy warm ties with all of its neighbours, but it can’t avoid their shared geographical destiny.

Meanwhile, the people making the near-term decisions about what happens in Myanmar have opted for a geographical reorientation of their own. Naypyitaw, the new capital built five hours north of Yangon, is supposed to recentre the nation. It provides ready access to all areas of the country, and turns its back on the colonial legacies of cluttered Yangon, the former capital.

As the city taking centrestage in Myanmar’s ASEAN year, it is a symbol of the ambitions of Myanmar’s new political system and the audacious effort to rebuild national confidence and present a proud image to the region and the world. And there is perhaps nowhere in Asia more intriguing, or more misunderstood. With its grand boulevards and architectural pomp, the new capital only looks crazy if you forget, for a moment, that every city, every political system and every idea had to start somewhere. From the beginning, Naypyitaw was designed, ostentatiously, for geopolitical effect.

Those who rule from Naypyitaw will face many hard choices. In particular, the novelty of Myanmar’s transformation from dictatorship to democracy is beginning to diminish as many questions are asked about the management of ethnic and communal fault lines. These, too, are a product of the country’s geography and the mixture of peoples who call it home.

But what happens in Myanmar will matter precisely because it will be first to confront some of the most challenging trends of the years ahead. From India–China strategic competition to ethnic strife, economic inequality, environmental degradation, sectarianism and climate change: Myanmar has all of the Asian century’s big issues.

Australia, by comparison, will be sitting on the sidelines, with the chance to observe, and prepare for, the key trends before they reach us. Our habit of writing stories to suit our own impressions of the present and the future will need to change.

Far-sighted diplomatic management and generous development support mean that for now Australia enjoys an enviably warm relationship with Myanmar’s government and people. Myanmar’s special location and current goodwill mean that working as long-term partners in the Asian century will be in all of our best interests. •

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By a curious coincidence, both the youngest and the oldest ministers in Narendra Modi’s newly appointed cabinet – Smriti Irani, aged thirty-eight, and Najma Heptullah, seventy-four – happen to be women. Irani, a former model and television star who became national president of the women’s wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, now holds the position of party vice-president in the party; Heptullah, the lone Muslim voice in the cabinet, has had a long career in both the Congress Party and the BJP.

The Indian commentators Sruthijith KK and Shruti Chakraborty have highlighted the fact that women are now much better represented in cabinet, numbering six ministers out of a team of twenty-four. This contrasts sharply with the outgoing Singh cabinet, which included just two women among twenty-eight ministers. Sushma Swaraj, a seasoned politician with many firsts to her credit (as BJP’s first female chief minister, a national cabinet minister, a party general secretary and spokesperson, and opposition leader) now holds the external affairs portfolio, which is part of the powerful Cabinet Committee on Security, the nation’s top decision-making body on national security. She is the first woman since Indira Gandhi in 1984 to be part of this group. As leader of the opposition before the elections, she was also one of the most vocal advocates for the maximum possible punishment for perpetrators of violence against women.

The other women members of Modi’s cabinet include Uma Bharti, Maneka Gandhi and Harsimrat Kaur Badal. BJP spokesperson Nirmala Sitharaman has been sworn-in as a minister of state with full ministerial powers. They represent a mix of ages, languages and religions. Christians appear to be the only major group missing.

Sruthijith KK and Shruti Chakraborty also identify several other interesting differences. The new cabinet is younger (average age sixty, versus the sixty-eight average of the outgoing cabinet), less wealthy, almost entirely educated in India (except for Najma Heptullah, who studied at the University of Denver) and has fewer family ties to politics.

The last point is worth noting, given concerns in India and elsewhere about the entrenchment of the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty in Indian politics. (The Kennedys in the United States and the various second-generation politicians in Australia and elsewhere in the Western world suggest that dynasties are not entirely peculiar to India.) While Maneka Gandhi (women and child development minister in the Modi government) was married to Sanjay, Indira Gandhi’s younger son, she was always the less favoured daughter-in-law, particularly after the untimely death of Sanjay, while Sonia Gandhi was the clear favourite. Maneka featured frequently in the Indian media both for her firebrand animal rights and environment activities as well as political competition with Sanjay’s family. The less controversial Harsimrat Kaur Badal, wife of the deputy chief minister of Punjab, Sukhbir Singh Badal, successfully defeated a four-party combine led by her husband’s cousin Manpreet Badal.

Women have made these gains despite the fact that just 12 per cent of the total 1325 candidates fielded for the lower house by the three biggest of them (Congress, the BJP and the Aam Aadmi Party) were women. Significantly, the brightest performances came from two parties headed by women: both the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, led by Mamata Banerjee, and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu, led by Jayalalithaa, registered landslide victories in their respective states.

Meanwhile, the youngest and the oldest members of Modi’s cabinet are already making waves. Irani’s opponents have queried her suitability for appointment as human resource development minister, citing her lack of tertiary qualifications. Smriti Irani’s supporters say this counts in her favour because she comes without any baggage and, besides, it is more important that she display the ability to seek and use good advice.

On her first day as minority affairs minister, Najma Heptullah said Muslims were not minorities but that Parsis, with their dwindling population, qualified for the tag. (The Parsis are Zoroastrians who sought refuge in India following persecution by Muslim rulers in the Middle East.) Heptullah was referring to the sub-quota system proposed by the Congress, which was intended to provide representation for all minority groups but came to be known as the “Muslim quota” because Congress allegedly planned to attract the largest minority community through the policy. There was speculation at one point that the quota system would be abandoned and the minorities’ ministry disbanded or merged with the bigger social justice ministry, but there has been no move to do this so far.

More waves could follow with the possible nomination of highly decorated former policewoman Kiran Bedi as BJP candidate for the position of chief minister of Delhi (ignominiously vacated by anti-corruption campaigner Arvind Kejariwal, who raised and dashed many hopes for a corruption-free new world). Bedi is no stranger to controversy, dating back to her days of removing cars that were illegally parked (including one used by Indira Gandhi, which earned her the sobriquet “Crane Gandhi”) and including widely admired prison reforms, is expected to be a keen contestant in India’s real life Game of Thrones.

The BJP’s manifesto focuses on many important issues for women, including equal opportunities for women in the political, social and economic condition of women. Like women everywhere, Indian women will be watching to see how the people they have helped vote into power keep their promises. •

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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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THE first public mobile phone call was made just over forty years ago, on 3 April 1973. The caller was a Motorola engineer in New York City. The phone was a cream-coloured brick, a prototype of the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, which weighed a kilogram and took ten hours to charge.

Over the past few weeks the international media has been throwing a birthday party for what is now a middle-aged technology (if you missed the festivities, try tiny.cc/40phone). The nostalgic photos of flip-phones and classic Nokias remind us how far the technology has come.

As it enters its fifth decade, the mobile is the centrepiece of a US$800 billion industry. Ubiquitous in virtually every nation, it has displaced the personal computer as the focus of investment and innovation in consumer technologies.

In recent years a growing body of research has been documenting the cultural history of mobile technology, exploring the diverse ways in which it shapes public and private life. Three recent books on the topic capture a representative sample of the fascinating debates under way.

WHILE early studies of mobiles focused on communications practices, researchers are increasingly interested in the mobile’s new status as a digital content platform. Moving Data explores this theme through a collection of short, scholarly essays. It approaches Apple’s iPhone from the perspective of media theory, seeing it as a paradigmatic object that crystallises a larger shift in the way culture is produced and distributed.

As the book’s editors argue, the iPhone brings with it a “convergence of technologies, cultures, and marketing practices that were previously thought incommensurable.” The contributors to Moving Data investigate, from different angles, this common theme — the coming together of tech companies, with experience producing hardware or online search, and the classic content industries of cinema and broadcasting, under the sign of the mobile.

This is a striking feature of today’s media landscape, but we are still grappling with its implications. Moving Data is very useful in this respect, offering absorbing case studies and critical analyses that help to put the changes in context. I particularly enjoyed Pelle Snickars’s chapter, which explores the debate about Apple’s App Store, the “walled garden” that provokes passionate criticism yet has fostered innovation; Göran Bolin’s philosophical ruminations on the history of mobile media technologies; and the chapters on regulation and corporate strategy by Jennifer Holt, Alisa Perren and Karen Petruska.

The book has a European skew, reflecting the backgrounds of many of its contributors, which makes for a welcome addition to the literature on the iPhone, a publishing genre dominated by American tech journalists.

Like Moving Data, Studying Mobile Media is concerned with convergence as a logic of today’s mobile industries. Despite what the title suggests, this is not a textbook but a collection of essays on different aspects of mobile industries and culture. The publisher’s hardback pricing might make this book one for libraries only (though many of the chapters can be found in draft online).

Together, the essays cover a representative spread of current debates, and are complemented by three case studies that focus on South Korea, China and Finland — nations with contrasting traditions of mobile take-up and use.

The book opens with a series of conceptual chapters, including a marvellous analysis by Brisbane-based media scholar Jean Burgess that frames “the iPhone moment” in relation to debates about innovation, creativity and gender. It then moves into some new and exciting areas, such as mobile gaming, mapping and photography. The mobile’s impact on each of these areas is hard to overstate.

Take photography: as the chapter by Daniel Palmer notes, the phone manufacturer Nokia has likely put “more cameras into people’s hands than in the whole previous history of photography.” Yet this boom in image-making has coincided with new social anxieties. Palmer’s essay explores the increasingly complex moral terrain of mobile photography in public places, like beaches and malls, where concerns about “upskirting” and other mobile-enabled nastiness make it difficult for professional photographers to shoot in the way they used to. But he also notes that today’s situation recalls an earlier age of photographic democratisation, at the end of the nineteenth century, when newly portable cameras created similar panics about “hand-camera fiends.”

Labour is another area of concern of this book. The question of who makes our devices, who does the coding for the apps, and who creates the value-added content necessary for social platforms is emerging as a renewed focus of debate. This theme appears throughout the essays, especially in chapters by Jack Linchuan Qiu — who examines the scandal around Foxconn, an Apple supplier whose Guangdong factory has been the site of strikes and suicides — and John Banks, who considers the shifting modes of production that underlie the development of mobile games.

THIS brings us to our third book, The Great Indian Phone Book, which has a more specific story to tell. India — a nation of 1.2 billion people and fifteen official languages, where the growth of telecom industries has been explosive — makes for a unique vantage point. In 1998, there were fewer than a million mobiles in India. Fourteen years later, the number of mobiles had leapt to almost 900 million. This is all the more remarkable given that most people had little engagement with fixed-line telephony, a technology reserved for elites and public servants.

In The Great Indian Phone Book, Robin Jeffrey (a political scientist) and Assa Doron (an anthropologist) have produced a riveting study that traces the effects of mobile technology on the lives of everyday people, from the fishermen who can now more effectively set the price of their catch to the electronic technicians who make a living from repairing banged-up handsets.

India’s mobile revolution has been premised not on high-end smartphones, which are the focus of the other two books, but on cheap, durable handsets. Many phones have multiple-SIM capabilities, allowing budget-conscious users to switch between carriers to take advantage of special rates. Nokia, not Apple or Samsung, is the market leader. There is a lively trade in secondhand handsets, and informal repair businesses can be found in the smallest villages.

II enjoyed how The Great Indian Phone Book approaches mobile culture from many different angles, including telecommunications policy (the skulduggery of spectrum auctions), cultural-economic history (the ad campaigns that market the mobile lifestyle), and infrastructure (the art of mobile tower construction). This is a 360- degree vision of mobile culture, grounded in everyday life but with a historical consciousness and a deep understanding of India’s cultural politics.

The book’s most absorbing parts are the ethnographic portraits that introduce us to a cross-section of Indian society, all touched in some way by the mobile. Readers will encounter peasants, parents, professionals, entrepreneurs, lovers, criminals and everyone in between.

With The Great Indian Phone Book, Jeffrey and Doron offer a timely reminder that mobile cultures are moving in many directions simultaneously. With convergence, the technological gap between the mobile and other devices is closing — but the uses to which the mobile is put around the world remain impossibly diverse. •

• Read an edited extract from The Great Indian Phone Book

The post The middle-aged mobile appeared first on Inside Story.

“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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ON 19 APRIL this year, the day India launched its first intercontinental ballistic missile, US State Department spokesman Mark Toner faced a barrage of questions from journalists. The successful test flight of Agni V had exploded into the headlines that day, and Toner’s interrogators demanded to know what it meant for the world. His response was curious. He didn’t dwell on the fact that Agni V was capable of carrying a nuclear warhead for distances of up to 5000 kilometres. He omitted to mention that the missile put major Chinese cities within striking distance of Indian nuclear weapons. He didn’t speculate about India’s military aims and intentions. Instead, he did something quite baffling: he launched into praise. India, he said, had been “very much engaged in the community and nonproliferation issues,” had attended nuclear security summits, and could demonstrate a “solid nonproliferation record.”

The contrast with the alarm and condemnation triggered by North Korea’s failed rocket launch less than a week earlier was striking. India’s testing of a nuclear-capable long-range missile had given its jubilant leadership two causes for celebration. Agni V not only delivered a world-class ranking among the handful of states with ICBM technology, it also provided clear evidence of a critical diplomatic triumph – evidence that emerged more slowly and subtly than the deafening roar of the launch.

India had won tacit US support for its nuclear missile program.

THE launch of India’s first ICBM, and the subdued and oblique response of the United States, is only the latest chapter in India’s perplexing nuclear history. In 1998, when India tested nuclear weapons and became an overtly nuclear-armed state, the widespread condemnation and sanctions placed it firmly in the category of nuclear pariah. Yet Indian fortunes shifted not long after. Relations with Washington warmed, and seemingly overnight New Delhi received unprecedented rights to civil nuclear trade with the United States. By 2008 a civil nuclear agreement was in force between the two countries, and India had been granted significant trading allowances by key non-proliferation institutions. India had turned into a nuclear friend. As the journalist Ravi Nessman commented on the day of the Agni V test, “The world has grown to accept India as a responsible and stable nuclear power.”

A historical perspective can often shed light on puzzles like this one. But the further you look back in time the more paradoxical India’s promotion to privileged nuclear partner of the United States appears. In 1968, India refused to become a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT. Its key complaint was that the treaty was discriminatory, since it permitted countries that had tested nuclear weapons before 1 January 1967 – the so-called Nuclear Weapons States – to retain them, even as it foreclosed the nuclear option to everyone else. But India was equally keen to defend its legal right to develop and test nuclear weapons. In 1974 it exercised this right in defiance of the community, and conducted a “peaceful nuclear explosion,” which New Delhi claimed was not a weapon. The reading of the test was different, and the United States led the way in consolidating global non-proliferation laws and barring India from multilateral trade in a range of sensitive technologies, including nuclear ones.

The campaign against “nuclear India” continued. Well into the 1990s, any kind of nuclear trade or collaboration between India and the global nuclear community was unthinkable. And when New Delhi startled the world with its tests in 1998, the United States emerged as one of its most vociferous critics. Washington’s angry response reverberated far and wide: in the G8, which blocked assistance to India from financial institutions, and in the UN Security Council, which made it clear that India, tests or no tests, would be denied formal NPT recognition as a Nuclear Weapons State, even if it signed.

For decades, it seemed, India had existed firmly outside the written and unwritten rules of the global nuclear game, a game largely devised, played and refereed by the United States. The civil nuclear agreement concluded between Washington and New Delhi a decade after India’s tests was exceptional not simply because it symbolised a turning point in a relationship that had long been hostile. In giving India the right to civil nuclear trade, the United States now explicitly recognised India as a “responsible nuclear state” in the global nuclear game, which was tantamount to both picking it for the team, and letting it onto the pitch.

Washington aimed to ensure that New Delhi would acquire “the same benefits and advantages” as other states with “advanced nuclear technology,” effectively granting it a similar status to the Nuclear Weapons States. But perhaps the most striking part of the deal was that India had still not signed the NPT, ratified a test ban treaty or agreed to any other significant constraints on its nuclear weapons program. It was being offered civil nuclear trade and technology with no real guarantee that its weapons program wouldn’t indirectly benefit. The kinds of legal exceptions granted to India outside the NPT were unprecedented. Not only was India being invited to play, but a very special set of rules was being created to accommodate it.

EXPLAINING the acceptance of a nuclear India requires a much closer look at India’s complex nuclear past, or more precisely, the two curiously contradictory histories that the Indian state has interwoven since independence. While the usual questions asked about India’s pathway to the bomb are concerned with why India went nuclear and tested its weapons when it did, the equally compelling story of why India did not test for so many years is seldom explored.

The story begins soon after independence in 1947, when the country’s early leaders were ardent advocates of nuclear disarmament. Both the first UN document to suggest halting nuclear tests and the first study of the consequences of nuclear weapon use were initiatives of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, in the mid-1950s. Indian diplomats played a significant role in drawing up the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which prohibited countries from testing in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water, but not underground. India was the fourth signatory after the top nuclear powers of the time, the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain.

From India’s vantage point, success at global disarmament activism could deliver a number of rewards. Disarmament promised a reduction in global tensions and the removal of the danger of nuclear war. Developing countries such as India would be able to devote resources to economic development rather than to a costly arms race. But disarmament would only be feasible if the major powers with nuclear weapons could be coaxed into letting them go. In the context of the Cold War, a successful role for India in persuading the world’s most powerful enemies to disarm would bring an enormous boost to India’s prestige. Championing disarmament was not only about security, it was about status.

India’s campaigns continued for decades. In global forums, Indian diplomats pushed again and again for the world to renounce nuclear weapons. At the same time, Indian scientists were developing ever more sophisticated atomic energy technology, and with it, a nuclear weapons capability. While the twin efforts at disarmament and nuclear development appeared contradictory, they made perfect sense. For an emerging post-colonial state that saw sophisticated technology as an important proving ground, mastering the atom was a way of demonstrating modern scientific and technological credentials, both at home and to the world. The official line was that the development of nuclear capabilities needn’t be at odds with India’s disarmament aims. India could develop nuclear material and expertise but was restrained enough not to turn it into usable weapons. Indeed, in their pro-disarmament speeches, Indian diplomats foregrounded this uniquely principled approach to the atom as something the rest of the world could observe and learn from.

Once a moral stance on the nuclear issue had been adopted, it was difficult to back away from. India’s adherence to principle in part explains why it didn’t test nuclear weapons for nearly a quarter of a century, despite being well able to do so. Moreover, the repeating refrain of nuclear restraint meant that New Delhi’s nuclear policy implicitly followed many of the rules of the global nuclear game, even though India had not signed the NPT. Though in possession of nuclear know-how, India did not test between 1974 and 1998, and it did not export that know-how to others. Up until 1998, India was building a record of restrained nuclear behaviour and a pro-peace image that would one day prove crucial in facilitating a positive reading of its nuclear past.

A number of motives help explain why India suddenly decided to break the pattern in 1998. Certainly, the existence of nuclear threats, overt and covert, from China and Pakistan and pressure to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the mid-1990s were factors. Domestic politics, in the form of a strategically minded Hindu nationalist leadership hoping to harden India’s “soft” image, was another. But it was also clear from the jubilant response of the Indian urban public to the first nuclear tests in May 1998 that the bomb had enormous domestic value as a symbol of global prestige. Overnight it placed India on the same level as a select club of nuclear-armed states, at the top of the global hierarchy.

Perhaps more interesting than the “why?” of India’s tests however, is the question of how India managed to make its new position mesh with its longstanding claims to nuclear responsibility and restraint. In the wake of the tests New Delhi was at pains to reassure: India had peaceful intentions, would voluntarily abstain from further nuclear testing, would limit itself to the minimum number of weapons needed for a credible nuclear deterrent, and would never be the first to use those weapons. Above all, it was claimed, India had an excellent track record of non-proliferation, never having sold or traded its nuclear secrets or technologies with others.

Although India’s curious mix of demonstrations of strength and declarations of restraint in 1998 puzzled and frustrated onlookers, the swiftly painted portrait of a principled, responsible nuclear power was ultimately persuasive beyond India’s borders. In 2007, as Washington worked together with New Delhi to formulate the terms of the civil nuclear deal, a key interlocutor for the United States, R. Nicholas Burns, described India as “a largely responsible steward of its nuclear material” that “had played by the rules of a system to which it did not belong.” India’s nuclear self-narrative had suddenly emerged in the unlikeliest of places: official US policy discourse.

CERTAINLY, there are several drivers behind the blossoming friendship between the United States and India. Since India’s economy began to gain momentum from the early 1990s, the benefits of closer economic engagement have weighed heavily in US calculations. US leaders have also begun to appreciate the potential of India’s growing influence in Asia, possibly as a balance to that of China. Moreover, the US-India relationship has been helped by India’s neat fit into the category of a “friendly” democracy and its role as a valuable global partner in key areas such as counter-terrorism. As former Indian foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal argued just days after the launch of Agni V, the absence of American disapproval over the test suggests that India’s missile program is broadly in line with US interests. Yet interests cannot explain everything. They cannot explain why India merits a different kind of thinking when it comes to the highly sensitive area of nuclear cooperation, especially given New Delhi’s continued refusal to sign the NPT. Above all, they cannot explain how the United States has come to trust India with the bomb.

The key difference between India and North Korea, or India and Iran, is that New Delhi has persistently and successfully cultivated an image as a responsible nuclear power. The credibility of this image would have been unthinkable without the great Indian diplomatic resource of decades of “restrained” behaviour and principled policy discourse. Put differently, by drawing on its complex nuclear history, India has worked at persuading the United States that its nuclear intentions are benign.

Current research as part of a larger UK-based project on The Challenges to Trust-Building in Nuclear Worlds is exploring exactly how this trusting relationship with the United States came about. It shows how trust was built both interpersonally within high-level negotiations between senior US and Indian officials, and between powerful political, business and civil-society communities in both countries. Intensified trade linkages, Track II (or informal) diplomacy and the efforts of US-based Indian diaspora groups all contributed to knitting the two leaderships closer together. Teaching and learning about India’s nuclear past was a central part of this broad-based engagement. Less than a decade after the 1998 tests, the exceptional nuclear deal between India and the United States signalled that India had drawn resourcefully on its history to complete the journey from nuclear rogue to nuclear partner.

Much of the wider community, too, has accepted the line that India is a responsible nuclear power. The original civil nuclear agreement with the United States had the support of Russia, France and Britain. In September 2008, the forty-five members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group reached a consensus and backed their assessment of India’s nuclear trustworthiness by granting exceptional trading privileges. These privileges meant that India became the first nuclear-armed state outside the NPT permitted to engage in nuclear commerce with the rest of the world. Even the Australian government softened its line when it agreed to the sale of uranium to India in December 2011.

China and Pakistan, naturally, remain a resistant barrier to the spread of nuclear goodwill towards India. As India’s historic rivals in Asia, this is hardly surprising. Both are potential targets of India’s nuclear weapons and missiles. An early official justification for India’s 1998 nuclear tests was that India perceived a nuclear threat from both countries, although subsequent statements aimed to reassure the world that India would never play the role of aggressor in a nuclear exchange. India’s official line on the Agni V test was that the missile was “not any country-specific.” Yet reading between the lines, many have inferred that strategic Chinese cities are potential targets within its extended range. The striking distance of previous versions of the Agni missile covered the territory of Pakistan.

China, in particular, has voiced disapproval over the concessions granted to India outside the NPT. The September 2008 meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which granted India privileged trading rights, faced strong opposition from China, but US pressure finally tipped the balance of the group towards consensus. Increasingly, Beijing appears to be treading carefully when it comes to official commentary on India’s nuclear-related activities. It is as eager as India to project and maintain an image as responsible emerging power. This helps to explain the official response to the Agni V test, in which the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin stated that India and China were “not competitors but partners.” Different sentiments appear to simmer within, however. China’s influential tabloid, Global Times, ominously warned that “India should not overestimate its strength” and would not profit “from being arrogant during disputes with China.”

Pakistan, for its part, appeared to answer to Agni V with a missile test of its own. The shorter range but newly upgraded Hatf IV Shaheen 1A ballistic missile was launched on 25 April amidst Pakistani claims that it was “not a direct response to Agni V.” Whether or not Pakistan’s missile was an exercise in military posturing, it was undertaken with an appropriate measure of responsibility. Before Shaheen 1A took to the skies, Pakistan had taken care to inform India of its plan to test.

India’s successful launch of Agni V has underscored the increasingly free hand it has won since 1998 over its own nuclear destiny. The test signalled India’s entry into an elite club of only six other states with ICBM capabilities. But more significantly, it reaffirmed the success of a recent Indian diplomatic project. India has earned a different kind of global prestige through the broad-based acceptance of its status as a responsible nuclear power. When it comes to testing nuclear missiles, it pays first to make friends in high places. •

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A few months earlier, the Australian’s Higher Education Supplement had published an article by Wesley about “Australian Education in the Asian Century.” At the conference, he took a lateral approach to the theme of that essay by asking his audience to imagine a “Generation Z” in 2030, a generation of “knowledge empowered and networked” students, all asking why they should pay for an Australian university education if it would not help them compete with “ten million graduates of Chinese universities.” Charging the university system in Australia with elitism, he threw down a gauntlet before the assembled vice-chancellors: “Justify your privileged position, your public funding, your cloistered existence by making sure that we are at the forefront of the knowledge economy.” The Australian carried a lengthy report of the lecture and ensuing questions, and placed the full text of the address on its website.

It would be interesting to know what all those vice-chancellors were thinking as they listened to this lecture. Could any of what Wesley said have been new to people who spend their days pondering the challenges of changing technologies, university rankings, and Asia? That he should find it “curious” for Australian universities to be “so Western in character” was perhaps novel. On this point, they might have wondered whether Chinese universities, too, were not rather Western in some of the respects that especially attracted Wesley’s ire: mortarboards at graduation, faux gothic architectural features where possible, and valorisation of the classics.

And here’s the rub. Towards the end of the session, Wesley put the rhetorical question of whether we in Australia have “made any progress in internationalising – really Asianising – how we think about knowledge.” What does “Asianising” mean? One of the challenges for Ken Henry in producing the white paper on Australia in the Asian Century will be to define such terms. Historically, Asia has served as a catch-all phrase for societies that were literate but not Christian: hence its application to places from Turkey in the west to the Philippines in the east. It may be approaching its use-by date. Societies in this enormous region are in flux. They differ greatly from one to the next in approaches to knowledge, among other things, and often have points – sometimes vast areas – of similarity to Western societies.

Does Wesley think we should Asianise in an Indian way, or in a Chinese way – to mention two rather different possibilities? India, with its strong British intellectual traditions and English-language culture of learning, a place where one can still read statements such as “Western culture is humanity’s culture”: will that provide sufficiently “Asian” ways of thinking? Perhaps not. And probably Wesley was not thinking of India at all, but of China, which is actually what Australians now often mean by Asia, even if they throw in India for good measure.

Consideration of the China option, however, suggests that “Asianising” ways of thinking about knowledge is not a concept to be bandied about with impunity. In China, with its 2263 universities, knowledge is not so much acquired as selectively dispensed. This is a very particular sort of knowledge economy. Students take seven to ten subjects a semester, sitting in classrooms to be lectured at for three hours at a stretch. In assignments, they repeat back to the teacher what the teacher has said to them, and are praised for it. The most common question asked of a lecturer by a Chinese undergraduate writing an essay in an English-language institution must surely be: “Do I have to give my own opinion?” But teachers also watch what they say. Students can get upset by statements that sound unpatriotic, and report them to the university leaders, or even to the police.

The surprising thing about this system is its failure to eliminate every last spark of intellectual life in China, but the effect overall is not good. Employers complain about graduates’ lack of initiative and the government frets about the failure of its top universities to produce creativity on demand. The pressures on academics and students alike are enormous. Academics write with care and restraint to avoid political problems, then have their writings censored, or else rejected as incompatible with the “national situation.” Plagiarism is rife throughout the system.

Are these just growing pains? On 21 March, the Australian’s Higher Education Supplement carried a report on research by Oxford academic Janette Ryan on comparative attitudes of educators in Confucian-heritage and Anglo-heritage cultures. According to the report, these educators share a vocabulary of “catchwords” for education, including “originality, imagination, independence and challenges to authority.” Such a finding gives ballast to the views of Michael Spence, vice-chancellor of Sydney University, who last year dismissed problems of academic freedom in China on grounds that things are changing. The Chinese government is “asking all the right questions,” he said, and “is committed to having an innovative university system.” The picture emerging from these references to the carefully cultivated signs of normalcy in China is of a hardworking society earnestly pursuing the goal of a higher education system featuring universal values of learning.

THERE is something missing from this picture, and it is the Chinese Communist Party, sometimes hard to see because of its ubiquity. Universities in Australia (or my university at least) make “breadth” subjects compulsory. Universities in China make classes in Marxism-Leninism compulsory. Universities in Australia have benign chancellors, who preside over graduations. Universities in China have party secretaries, whose task it is to make sure “challenges to authority” are not challenges to the government – that is, to the party. Hence the plight of a former associate professor at Nanjing Normal University, Guo Quan: original, imaginative, independent, and imprisoned for ten years in 2009.

Having taught in China, Michael Wesley must be fully aware of all of this, and it is not to be supposed that he means we need a system like China’s when he talks about Asianising. But what exactly does he mean? His overall point, to judge by the shock-and-awe numbers that he produced for his audience (nicely illustrating a point he has made about Australians’ tendency to talk about Asia in numbers), is that Australian universities need to remain competitive in the region. The thousands of universities in China and India, crammed with hard-working, high-achieving students, are threatening to render our own redundant. A return to rote learning is among the preventative treatments he suggests. It is not clear how rote learning would serve to nurture “the critical thought, innovation and the courage needed to push back against and shape society’s trends and pressures” he envisages as desirable for the future university. It plainly does not nurture those things in China.

If we are seriously to engage or compete with universities in Asia to a greater extent than is now the case, we need to be clear about what we want our own education system to be. Is it possible to compete with Chinese universities on their terms? Probably not. The students in China are engaged in a Darwinian struggle: too many students, not enough places. Students in primary school stay up to 10 pm doing homework, and are awake again at 6 am to get to school. High school students probably average six hours of sleep a night Monday to Thursday. They go to school on weekends to learn what they weren’t taught in school during the week. Their mothers sit up beside them, feeding and coaching them as they slog their way through sums and multiple choice and fill-in-the-word.

There may be something to be said for such a mode of life, but it is not going to take off in Australia any time soon. These habits of hard work are by no means maintained throughout the years of university, but they underpin the skill levels achieved in maths, the sciences and languages, especially English.

Under these circumstances, Australian universities should be looking not to compete, but to co-exist with universities in China, and elsewhere, in a meaningful way. One of the things that we now offer students, local and international, is a liberal education that fosters critical thinking and creativity. If “innovative” comes to be defined by what the Chinese government envisages then we may not have it for too much longer, but while it is still with us, it may be worth exploiting for what it has to offer in terms of niche markets for learning in our regions. Like many Australian academics, I have taught Chinese students in both China and Australia. I agree with Michael Wesley about their “hunger and ambition,” but where the hunger is for knowledge, it is not one they can easily satisfy at home.

There are high levels of cynicism in China about the value of the education to which children are subjected. A typical response to Shanghai’s strong showing in the secondary school numeracy and literacy rankings released last year was a rueful comment on life-long outcomes: “Our students can top the exams, but then no one ever hears of them again.” For Chinese students who drift by chance into an Australian classroom where history, politics, philosophy and literature are actually being debated rather than simply taught, the effects are, in my experience and those of many of my colleagues, electric. The impact is not one-sided. I would be surprised if closer examination bore out Wesley’s charge that “Australian educators have continued to teach using the same knowledge frameworks and teaching techniques they always did.” He may not have been inside a classroom for a while.

To go with our strengths means developing them. The “knowledge-empowered, and networked” students that Wesley imagines populating our campuses in 2030 are already with us. It is their education that should now be preoccupying us: in 2030, they will be teaching the next generation. Many of our current students are themselves from “Asia,” or only one generation removed. For all the others, Asia is important. With proper support, thousands of them could be spending one of the three or four years of their undergraduate degrees studying in places like China, Indonesia, India or Vietnam. They would love it, and benefit from it. This would not necessarily result in Australia’s universities looking any more “Asian,” but it would do a lot for the quality of their Australianness. Such a project would depend, of course, on funds, which are no longer as public or as plentiful as Wesley has implied. •

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Thant’s new book, Where China Meets India, is the product of purposeful wandering. He covers great distances in central and northeast Burma, in southwest China and in northeast India – he calls it “Asia through the back door,” and it is hardly a standard tourist itinerary. This is a region beset by long-running civil wars and defined, in many imaginations, by the notoriety of the “golden triangle” drug trade and the disgrace of Burma’s decades-long dictatorship. I know from hard experience that getting to many of the towns that Thant visits – obscure places like Guwahati (India), Mong La (Burma) and Ruili (China) – requires determination and stamina. But, as he also explains, there is no alternative if we are to understand the people of these borderlands.

Thant is intensely focused on contextualising the characters he meets along the way. He is preoccupied with the blending and blurring of the faces, languages and politics that define the China, India and Burma borderlands. This has sometimes amusing results. Describing his difficulty trying to “detect” some of the Burmese in a Chinese border town, he notes that “it was as if they were in disguise, making themselves indistinguishable from the locals, wearing trousers and shoes and polo shirts.” With characteristic self-awareness he states that he too, in his own way, was probably hard to pick out of the crowd.

Indeed, Thant dwells on identity and appearance in almost every chapter. In Mandalay we meet “new Chinese” who are “easy to spot, never dressed in a Burmese longyi (as many of the Burma-born Chinese were), but instead wearing the somewhat baggy, Western-style clothes of modern China.” He describes “women with Himalayan faces” and “Burmese ruffians… sunburnt… looking wild and uncertain,” and even notes that “a European strain” was “sometimes visible,” the product of colonial-era genes.

While he makes judgements about anything out-of-place that catches his eye, Thant is himself an exceptionally smooth operator, one of those rare figures who can fit in almost anywhere. He is the grandson of U Thant, the former United Nations secretary-general; the author of two well-regarded histories of Burma; a former diplomat with a CV weighed down by heavy peace-making and public relations credentials; and now a freelancing international trouble-shooter and humanitarian. In this book he also demonstrates audacious documentary ambitions.

Part of the art of his account is its almost continuous use of the past tense. It is as though a wise but distant figure, immersed in deep historical reading and empathy for his subjects, has provided descriptions that will make sense to historians next century, or perhaps the one after. He has sought to clarify the timelessness of borderland geography and also its constantly changing economic and political present. With his deft use of language he forces us to look back, with a critical appreciation, on the here-and-now.

As he explains, “the geography of Burma is important in understanding its history, its current ethnic make-up, and its possible futures.” Burma sits wedged between the high Himalayas to the north and the rows of cascading mountains that serve to divide it from the civilisations of the Indian subcontinent and East Asia. This region is mountainous, no doubt, but it is also a land of wild rivers, huge gorges, fertile valleys and pleasant plateaus. This inheritance has not, however, guaranteed splendid isolation.

For millennia, Burma has experienced irregular flows of people, ideas, language, culture, politics and goods: all dictated by its position between Asia’s giants. In one poetic flourish Thant insists that, “like the Caucasus at the other end of Asia, this is a mountain Babel which has long proved inimical to any centralising authority.” Southwest China’s Yunnan province was “a land of outlaws and miscreants and exotic religious sects, a place where musket-slinging Han settlers battled bow and arrow-wielding tribesmen and aliens from beyond the pale.” He cites political scientist James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) as a recent contribution to understanding this history of rebelliousness.

For the moment, Thant thinks it unlikely that Yunnan will face the fate of Tibet and Xinjiang, with their recent ethnic uprisings and crackdowns. Yunnan’s dozens of ethnic minorities are “much more jumbled together” and thus less likely to offer strong and united opposition. And recent history in southwest China suggests that rebellion ends badly: Thant describes what is believed to have been the only major uprising during the Cultural Revolution when, in 1975, the Muslim townsfolk of Shadian, in Yunnan, rebelled. It took several regiments of People’s Liberation Army troops, plus artillery and airpower, to stamp out their insurrection. Thousands may have died.

Since then China has, we know, generally tilted in more peaceful directions, and its steady rise to global prominence is a major theme of this book. Thant Myint-U describes China’s efforts with careful attention to all of the important details. While he gives us no reason to doubt China’s widely reported political and economic ambitions in Burma, he also tells us that, “whereas English was widely spoken by the educated class, no Burmese I knew spoke Chinese.”

This could, however, begin to change quickly. The Chinese government has recently established a Confucius Institute in Mandalay to provide training about China, including language tuition. According to Thant’s analysis, and employing his treasured past tense, “in the same way that Western observers saw Burma’s poverty and misgovernment and assumed Western models provided the answer, the Chinese did the same.”

The situation in northeast India is even more contested. This region, “home to around forty million people, has long been a policy headache for New Delhi.” Disrupted by civil war, and with countless different ethnic groups jockeying for position, it is arguably the wildest corner of the country. It is there, in the town of Imphal, that Thant visits India’s only Burma Studies Centre. Later there is a lively episode in which an Indian colonel, actively involved in counter-insurgency against the region’s ethnic rebels, tracks Thant down between operations to declare his scholarly commitments. The colonel, it turns out, is an amateur historian and the head of the local Burma history association.

In India, Thant again uses descriptions of faces and appearance to underline his points. He describes how most of the Indian soldiers and police based in the northeast stick out in a crowd. Drawn from “the Punjab and other faraway places in India, with their different complexions and aquiline faces, [they] looked alien, swirling around in their armoured personnel carriers, automatic weapons on display.” Elsewhere, naturally enough, he is drawn to personable entrepreneurs looking to get a slice of the rapidly expanding commercial action. Many are making explicit accommodations with China’s dreams for regional influence. One ethnic Shan-Kachin chap can operate fluently in Burmese, Shan and Chinese societies. While that is hardly a unique situation in these polyglot borderlands he makes one especially pertinent observation: “the Chinese think of me as purely Chinese.”

Many others develop cross-border connections. Arguably the most exceptional site for these connections is Mong La, which in its heyday, fuelled by gamblers and prostitutes, became “an Alice in Wonderland world, where the back of beyond was suddenly transformed though its connection with China into a mini-metropolis.” But that experiment with freewheeling cross-border capitalism was brought to an abrupt end by Chinese officials concerned with the money being lost across the border. Without the waves of cashed-up Chinese gamblers, Mong La is now only a skeleton of its former glory.

That experience of recent lawlessness points to other persistent problems. Thant concludes his book by explaining that while the Chinese, Indian and Burmese governments all talk of increasing connectivity, especially in terms of trade and cultural links, they must appreciate that “there is already a connectivity of a different sort, of violence and criminality, which in the future may only grow.” This critical appreciation is one of Thant’s key lessons. Increasing harmony and connectivity will almost inevitability create a parallel realm of shadows and discontent that will require careful attention and management.

More optimistically, with the right leadership Burma could undoubtedly use its position between China and India to its advantage. Thant argues that this geography “more than anything could provide tremendous opportunities going forward, for the entire country.” But since this book was published many of the areas under discussion have lurched, again, into ferocious civil war. Perhaps the most important new conflict is in northernmost Burma, between the Kachin Independence Army and the Burmese government. Many hundreds have been killed, with the majority of the losses absorbed by some of the Burmese army’s most battle-hardened infantry battalions. In ambushes they have been slaughtered: pulverised by an enemy that has declared enough is, simply, enough.

In the borderlands between India and China many others are similarly motivated to take up arms against government. In this troubled region history shows that long, simmering ethnic wars are the prevailing pattern.

And if Thant Myint-U’s less optimistic observations are any guide, then major conflict could loom just over the horizon. This means that the soldiers and spies – not to mention journalists and academics – who trade in information about this region will continue with their work. As part of this effort, Thant has, once again, helped to improve our understanding of the societies of Burma, and its wider neighbourhood. He states, quite rightly, that “a peaceful, prosperous and democratic Burma would be a game-changer for all Asia.” In the meantime, he has set out a unique and instructive story about the borderlands where Burma meets its giant neighbours. •

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THE biggest threat facing humanity is the uncontrolled spread of nuclear weapons. Because it is the custodian of the world’s largest reserves of uranium, Australia has a special responsibility to help protect the global rules containing this danger. But you wouldn’t know this from reading Julia Gillard’s announcement backing the sale of uranium to India, or from listening to the subsequent comments from the opposition’s foreign affairs spokeswoman Julie Bishop. Both were remarkably inward-looking.

Before we look at the shrinking horizons of our politicians, some background is necessary. The system designed to stop the spread of the bomb is anchored in the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which says that those countries that already had the bomb – the United States, the then Soviet Union, Britain, France and China – could keep it, at least for the time being. All other signatories agreed not to acquire nuclear weapons – on the condition that they could develop civil nuclear energy programs.

The NPT-based system is arguably the most successful arms control regime in history. It has an enormous membership (over 180 states), nearly all of whom are acting in good faith. The treaty is one reason why most countries that could build the bomb have opted not to do so.

But some states refused to sign up, most notably Israel, Pakistan and India. For decades it was understood that these states should be kept on the outer as far as nuclear trade was concerned. This arrangement was institutionalised by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which was established after India’s cynically labelled “peaceful nuclear explosion” of 1974. In the Group’s words, the 1974 explosion “demonstrated that nuclear technology transferred for peaceful purposes could be misused.” Under the guise of a civil nuclear program, India had gate-crashed its way into the nuclear weapons club.

In response, the Group laid down strict conditions for the sale of nuclear material and technology. Customers had to accept comprehensive safeguards as required by the NPT. Apart from containing proliferation, this system was intended to underline the advantages of treaty membership and highlight the disadvantages of staying outside. Making access to nuclear trade conditional on NPT rules was part of the glue holding the system together.

Over the past decade or so this system has been weakened by key players who are keen to get closer to India. The story starts when President George W. Bush, sensing the growing commercial opportunities, redrew US policy and signed a nuclear trade deal with Delhi. Some advocates of the change in policy also claimed to be concerned about global warming. Washington also wanted to draw India nearer as a de-facto ally while reinforcing it as a counter to growing Chinese power. Then there was a legal point: because India had never signed the NPT, it could not be considered in breach of it – this, and the fact that Delhi was not implicated in selling nuclear weapons capabilities, put India in a different light from, for instance, NPT renegades like North Korea.

Nevertheless, arms control experts were apprehensive about Bush’s stance for three overlapping reasons. First, they saw the development as part of a broader story of Bush’s generally contemptuous attitude towards multilateralism. The context here was alarming. It included Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq on the basis of a disturbingly elastic definition of self-defence, and his scuttling of a verification protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention. Anxious critics fretted that the Bush administration was sending out signals that Washington was ready to break with the post–second world war rules-based approach to world order.

Second, Washington was damaging the consensus that underpinned the NPT. Bush’s neoconservative supporters sometimes talked as though the treaty was obsolete debris from a bygone age (a view partly fed by worries that the treaty could not manage rogue states). As part of its lurch toward unilateralism Washington said it wouldn’t be bound by previous agreements it made at NPT meetings. This was brought home when, almost alone, it voted against a UN call for a ban on nuclear testing and was the only country to vote against tighter restrictions on the first-use of nuclear weapons.

Third, although the US–Indian nuclear deal was limited to civilian products, critics argued this would free up other Indian sources of supply for military uses and facilitate an expansion of India’s nuclear arsenal. This could then fuel an arms race between India and Pakistan, and between India and China.

Bush brushed aside these concerns. As part of the understanding with Delhi, the United States went further still, agreeing to urge its allies to back the idea of nuclear trade with India. This urging (reports suggest “pressure” is a more accurate description) worked. Soon, John Howard’s Coalition government made an in-principle decision to sell uranium to India. Then, in 2008, the recently elected Rudd Labor government sided with the Americans and voted to rewrite the Nuclear Suppliers Group rule book on India’s behalf.

But this left Labor in an awkward, and apparently contradictory, place. On the one hand, it agreed India should be granted open access to global nuclear trade despite not being a member of the NPT. On the other hand, Labor ministers remained adamant that, because it had not signed this treaty, India could not buy Australian uranium. Presumably it hoped that this formula would simultaneously satisfy Washington, appease India, and preserve what was left of Labor’s purity.

In reality, however, the drift of events had opened up a hole into core Labor policy. Predictably, the Indian government and the Australian opposition inserted a painful political lever into the gap. Labor was tied up in knots. Without firm and clear advocacy, Labor’s position would be become an increasingly unsustainable muddle.

Where was this leadership? Well, at about the same time as he acquiesced in the administrative erosion of a key pillar of Canberra’s NPT policy, Prime Minister Rudd was publicly big-noting his firm commitment to the treaty. For example, with much fanfare he set up the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, led by former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans. This was billed as a body to advise the world’s governments on why and how they should strengthen the NPT and then move towards getting rid of all their nuclear arms.

In the context of recent developments, though, Evans’s well-intentioned mission may go into the history books as part of Rudd’s grandiose window dressing. The real action was being played out behind the scenes in the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Rudd’s aim may have been to deftly balance principle and pragmatism, but Labor ended up looking like it was stranded in a mushy no man’s land in which both principle and pragmatism appeared elusive.

THE stage was set for Gillard’s part in the drama. Her role was to finish the script begun by Bush; she was to do this by advocating Australian uranium sales to India. Conservatives can be excused their smirking at the irony. From where they stood here was a left-wing Australian politician delivering on a policy devised by American neo-conservatives whom the Left had previously portrayed as simple-minded rednecks intent on wrecking global rules.

As Gillard worked on her lines, she appeared uninterested in the wider narrative. (Her brazen and domestically oriented refusal to inform her own foreign minister – who seems to know vastly more about the subject than her – about her decision deepened a perception she wasn’t interested in the broader picture.) Her call for uranium exports to India was dominated by economic considerations. There was one sentence to the effect that Australian uranium wouldn’t end up in Indian bombs, but that was the end of the matter as far as arms control was concerned. No mention of the NPT; no engagement with the underlying logic of the global non-proliferation regime.

Within hours Gillard’s announcement was followed by a statement from Julie Bishop. She reaffirmed Coalition support for the exports and then, with tiresome predictability, engaged in political point-scoring. On a day potentially marking a new direction in Australia’s place on the world stage, the messages from our leaders had a distinctly parochial character.

When Bishop did touch on arms control her analysis was underwhelming. She recycled Delhi’s slogan that India’s record on non-proliferation has been “exemplary.” Along with other advocates of uranium sales, Bishop apparently believes that if this slogan is chanted enough times it will be accepted as true. In the background, armchair strategists mutter that given the rise of the so-called Asian century, we mustn’t cause any offence to India; if anything, we ought to help puff up Delhi’s rather high opinion of itself.

But Bishop’s mantra about India’s exemplary behaviour is historically illiterate. Apart from refusing to sign the NPT in the 1970s, India duped its overseas suppliers of “civil” nuclear technology, lying its way to nuclear weapons capability. Indian policy also encouraged counter-proliferation from Pakistan. The tale continued into the 1990s when India not only obstructed agreement on a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) but also engaged in a series of inflammatory test explosions. This was despite the fact that successive Australian governments declared the test ban vital to our national interests and global security.

Bishop should brush off some old speeches on the topic from former Liberal foreign minister Alexander Downer (or at least those he made before Washington’s switch in policy on India). Perhaps she could then try to explain why Downer’s criticisms of Delhi’s nuclear behaviour in the late 1990s no longer carry weight; after all, India has still not signed up to the CTBT, although over 190 other states have.

The NPT is not perfect. But the world is a better place with it than without it. The treaty needs to be kept in sound repair, which requires hard work and good faith. Some people sincerely argue that the best way to keep it in shape is to modernise it by formally recognising that India now has a legitimate place as a responsible nuclear weapons state: best to have India inside the tent.

Perhaps there’s something to be said for this. But the idea of integrating a nuclear armed India into the non-proliferation regime needs serious reflection and a significant rejigging of the system, not a dash to sign contracts. The purpose and integrity of this regime are under enough strain without adding to the problem. One way to develop the modernisation and integration themes would be to make Indian entry into the tent conditional on its ratifying the CTBT. After all, a prudent revamp of global non-proliferation rules should raise, not lower, the bar on nuclear-related sales.

Unfortunately, however, the argument about updating the non-proliferation regime by including India is often simply cover for more narrowly motivated policy. Key players in the saga seem not to care much about either the NPT or the CTBT. They are content to look the other way while both treaties die the death of a thousand cuts. Their interests and vision lie elsewhere. For them the stuff of politics has a more immediate form, one readily summed up in soundbites and more easily grasped by the punters than imagining what the non-proliferation regime might look like to future generations.

For the moment, the leaders of both main Australian political parties seem content to shrug their shoulders and help Delhi push the NPT and CTBT out of the way. Not much room here for what used to be called good international citizenship, especially if it gets in the way of jobs, investment, profits and taxes.

A focus on the economy is certainly required of politicians. But good leadership sets this into a bigger picture and provides a sense of the sort of world we would like to help build in the coming decades. This has been lacking. Let’s not kid ourselves that the latest effort to cash in on uranium is shaped by lofty ideals about what Australia’s main political parties stand for.

The post How Labor finished Bush’s uranium script appeared first on Inside Story.

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. •

The post Delhi drift appeared first on Inside Story.

PERHAPS more has been written about Mahatma Gandhi than any other twentieth-century figure. But most of the English-language biographies and major studies published each year fade fairly quickly into obscurity. Why, then, was India recently engulfed by a paroxysm of outrage when Pulitzer Prize–winning author Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul was published in America?

During a long career as a journalist, Lelyveld has covered both South Africa, where Gandhi lived early in his career, and India for the New York Times. His new book, subtitled Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, demonstrates his knowledge of both countries and is guided by a good reporter’s scepticism. He tells the story of a man who made mistakes, who occasionally did things that seemed to conflict with his own teachings, who wanted to be a saint but could be too much of a politician – but also someone who had a vision, perhaps doomed from the outset, of how life should be lived and how, in Lelyveld’s words, his “recalcitrant country” could provide a model for the world.

Great Soul is not a full biography and it certainly doesn’t serve as an introduction to Gandhi’s life and times. Lelyveld dispenses with Gandhi’s youth, focusing instead on how the years in South Africa remade a callow lawyer into a political activist who was capable of inspiring mass mobilisation among the disaffected. He is clearly aiming to provide a deeper analysis for an audience that already knows something about his subject. And he obviously respects Gandhi; while his assessments are not all positive, it is clear that he is not merely setting up the Mahatma for a hatchet job.

A threatened India-wide ban on the book was fuelled by a cascade of events: the bans announced in some individual states, outraged speeches by politicians, hostile newspaper headlines and an agitated Indian blogosphere. Why this happened probably says more about the political situation in India than it does about Lelyveld’s book.

The cries to ban Great Soul originated in Gandhi’s home state, Gujarat, which is governed by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Outrage was also orchestrated in the state of Maharashtra, dominated by the Hindu right, following a lead story about the book in the Mumbai Mirror. While Maharashtra eventually abandoned moves to outlaw Great Soul, it’s likely that many Mumbai bookshops will have declined to stock it given the history of violence against people or institutions associated with books judged critical of some local hero.

That the traditionally secular Congress Party, governing at the national level, toyed with the idea of a ban is even more surprising. India’s law minister, Veerappa Moily, was in favour, and even foreshadowed an amendment to the 1971 National Honour Act that would make insulting the “Father of the Nation” – as Gandhi is called in India – an act of blasphemy similar in gravity to offences against the national flag or Indian constitution (with penalties of up to three years’ imprisonment). Given India’s general criticism of the blasphemy laws of its neighbouring foe, Pakistan, this is the height of irony. Moily denounced the book as “baseless, sensational and hearsay… denigrating a national leader.” Then, after a few days of vacillating, he backed down, explaining that it was a review of the book that had led to the outcry and therefore “there is no question of banning the book as the author has clarified that he has not written what has been attributed to the book.” The allegation of blasphemy evaporated and, in the end, sense prevailed at the centre.

In Gujarat the issue was not dropped so easily. Chief minister Narendra Modi denounced the book as a perversion, accusing Lelyveld of a most reprehensible act, “hurting the sentiments of those with capacity for sane and logical thinking.” He requested that the book be banned across the country and demanded a public apology from the author. The state assembly voted unanimously to ban the volume, with the state Congress Party leader urging the national government to take similar action.

HOW could a book that added very little to what we know of this well-documented life have ignited such passions? And how could it have happened in a democratic country where, moreover, the book was not yet available?

The controversy was sparked by Andrew Roberts’s review, “Among the Hagiographers,” in the Wall Street Journal on 26 March, which was more a character assassination of Gandhi than a serious reflection on the book. Two days later, in an article titled “Gandhi ‘left his wife to live with a male lover’ new book claims,” the London tabloid Daily Mail reproduced the parts of the Roberts review that deal with Gandhi’s attitudes to sex. Interestingly, two days before the Roberts piece appeared, the New York Times had published a very favourable review (“How Gandhi Became Gandhi”) by biographer Geoffrey Ward, who grew up in India. Had it not been made explicit, it would be hard to guess that this and the two other articles were about the same book. Ward’s piece did not raise overly controversial issues and was not picked up by the Indian press.

Roberts, who professes to be “extremely right wing” and is a hagiographer of Gandhi’s opponent, Winston Churchill, commences his review of Great Soul by stating that Lelyveld’s “generally admiring” book allows us to conclude that Gandhi “was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist – one who was often downright cruel to those around him… professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals.” The review is full of selective quotations, unwarranted linking of disparate facts and statements, and misinterpretations. It is a catalogue of everything negative, or anything that could possibly be construed as negative, in Lelyveld’s biography, without any of the sympathetic analysis that he also includes. Roberts merely notes at one point that “Mr Lelyveld is not immune” from hagiography, “making laboured excuses for [Gandhi] at every turn of this nonetheless well-researched and well-written book.” In short, under the guise of a review Roberts’s piece pushes another agenda. Gandhi is someone he doesn’t like.

The earliest writings about Gandhi by Western authors were admiring of their subject. Among them, the French pacifist Romain Rolland’s 1924 book, Mahatma Gandhi: The Man Who Became One With the Universal Being, did the most to popularise Gandhi in the West. But there were also critical books. American Anglophile Katherine Mayo visited India in 1926, interviewed Gandhi, and in the following year published Mother India, which was to become the most popular book on India in the first half of the twentieth century. It was an apologia for the British subjugation of India, focusing on the topics of filth, disease, sex, disadvantage, illiteracy, the oppression of women, heartless caste practices, the mistreatment of cows, untouchability and Hindu–Muslim enmity, often using Gandhi as an authority to back her argument or to show that he was part of the problem. Gandhi labelled the book a “Drain Inspector’s Report” but, while he pointed out its distortions, he added that “every Indian can read [it] with some degree of profit” to see themselves as others saw them in order to correct their defects.

Revisionist literature on Gandhi and his role in the development of India has continued apace. Authors such as Arthur Koestler (The Lotus and the Robot), Ved Mehta (Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles) and V.S. Naipaul (India: A Wounded Civilisation) have tried to demonstrate that Gandhi was a reactionary. More recently, Jad Adams (Gandhi: Naked Ambition) produced a debunking volume focusing on Gandhi’s sexuality. Whatever the first sensationalist reviews of his book suggest, Lelyveld’s Great Soul cannot comfortably be placed in this company.

The issues highlighted by the would-be book banners – that Lelyveld claims Gandhi was both homosexual and a racist – are not borne out by a careful reading of his book. Gandhi is shown as a person of his time: someone whose primary concern in South Africa was obtaining justice for his own community rather than promoting the well-being of blacks. Later, when his ideas about race developed as his insights grew, he could acknowledge the narrowness of his vision and seek justice for all.

The reference to Gandhi’s relationship with his soul mate at the time, Hermann Kallenbach, is not a salacious new discovery by Lelyveld. The author is trying to understand the young Gandhi and actually warns that in an age “when the concept of Platonic love gains little credence” details of a relationship and quotation from letters “can easily be arranged” to reach a conclusion that is not necessarily warranted. James Hunt, the most scholarly yet sympathetic biographer of Gandhi’s time in South Africa, and Lelyveld’s source, noted that the relationship may have been “homoerotic” but was certainly not homosexual. Lelyveld notes that this described “a strong mutual attraction, nothing more.”

If anything, this brief discussion comes across as a divergence from the main story Lelyveld is telling. Yet on the strength of these few paragraphs, Roberts and the Daily Mail paint Gandhi as a homosexual. And in a country where there is sensitivity about the Father of the Nation’s honour, and where homosexual activity was a criminal offence until 2009, this was bound to go rapidly viral on the internet. On 29 March Mumbai’s largest-circulation paper, the Mumbai Mirror, ran a front-page story about the outrage under the heading “Book claims German man was Gandhi’s secret love.” Soon all hell had broken loose and Great Soul had become a focal point for opportunist politicians.

The book wasn’t yet available in India, so the calls for a ban were made by people who had not read it. This raises the question of whether the reaction was really about protecting the image of the Father of the Nation (which needs little outside protection) or for some form of political gain. As the social scientist and Gandhi scholar, Tridip Suhrud, observes, any decision to ban any book, even if it is flawed, “suggests a growing intolerance with the culture of discussion and debate.” It is a pity that Indian politicians, while proudly proclaiming their country the world’s largest democracy, seem to be spearheading this growing intolerance.

The farce at least stimulated public debate about the limits of free expression in a country that upholds the importance of this right but feels the need to balance it against the sensitive issue of national harmony. India banned Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988 and in 2003 banned an autobiographical novel by Bangladeshi feminist writer and critic of Islam, Taslima Nasreen. As Time magazine’s correspondent, Jyoti Thottam, commented:

The Indian public is getting a little tired of this particular brand of controversy and the high-minded debate that follows. It seems to repeat itself so often and spares no one, from senior Hindu nationalist politicians like Jaswant Singh [who wrote a sympathetic biography of Jinnah, the father of Pakistan] to progressive activists like Arundhati Roy. And inevitably, the ending is the same – a few political points scored, democratic values compromised slightly and the offending authors suffering little more than a touch of notoriety and the inconvenience of a media mob.

Another commentator pointed out that these bans offer a “no cost opportunity, the small minority of readers in English is not considered a useful votebank, and banning a book offers immediate access to national television.” Perhaps not coincidentally, it has been rumoured that Narendra Modi has been casting his eye on a political role at the national level.

Lelyveld’s response to the outcry was to point out that it was shameful for a country that calls itself a democracy to ban a book “that no one has read, including the people who are doing the banning.” With tongue firmly in cheek, he added, “The book was banned in Gujarat by the great Gandhian Narendra Modi.” One Indian newspaper, the Hindu, quite rightly pointed out that “the Mahatma would have been the first to protest against any suggestion of an obscurantist ban.”

BIOGRAPHIES are often produced by those who love and consequently want to laud their subjects or by those who dislike and so want to denigrate them. Lelyveld has probably come as close as possible to producing an impartial biography of Gandhi. Those who revere the Mahatma may not be overly fond of a book that paints a portrait of someone who was all too human, with the failings that that entails. Those who want to portray Gandhi as a humbug or worse may find some ammunition – but not vindication. The author tries to understand Gandhi in his own terms, and does a reasonable job. There is nothing negative here that is new to those who are versed in the Gandhi story. But still, there is enough for those with strong pro- or anti-Gandhi feelings to gather ammunition for their beliefs.

Indeed, Lelyveld demonstrates the dilemma Gandhi faced in trying to be both a politician interested in national independence and a social reformer who was interested in a certain sort of independence: “neither cause – that of Hindu–Muslim unity nor justice for untouchables – had much appeal to caste Hindus, especially rural caste Hindus, who where the backbone of the movement Gandhi and his lieutenants were building.” In fact, he insightfully notes, “To say that Gandhi wasn’t absolutely consistent isn’t to convict him of hypocrisy; it’s to acknowledge that he was a political leader preoccupied with the task of building a nation, or sometimes just holding it together.”

Lelyveld denies the claims made in the early inflammatory reviews. The book, he writes,

does not say that Gandhi was bisexual. It does not say that he was homosexual. It does not say that he was a racist. The word bisexual never appears in the book and the word racist only appears once in a very limited context, relating to a single phrase and not to Gandhi’s whole set of attitudes or history in South Africa.

In short, Great Soul provides real analysis, not hagiography. Gandhi is a person of his time, with all the baggage that entails. Like all of us, he does not come into the world fully formed. He moves from realisation to realisation. He is allowed to grow, to change.

It has been argued that some Indian politicians might not have welcomed the book because it shows how they have let the Mahatma down. But their politically disingenuous criticisms backfired badly: they ensured that a great many more Indians will read this book than would otherwise have been the case.

Interestingly, almost at the very end of Great Soul, after describing the 2002 massacre of 2000 Muslims and the displacement of 200,000 others in Gujarat, Lelyveld makes the point that those killings “were tacitly sanctioned, even encouraged, by a right-wing Hindu party lineally descended from extremist movements that were banned for a time following Gandhi’s assassination on suspicion that they had been complicit in the murder. That party [the BJP, led by Modi] has held power ever since in the Gujarat state capital named Gandhinagar, after the favourite son who deplored its brand of chauvinism, expressed in a doctrine of national identity called Hindutva,” which is “diametrically opposed to the doctrine of Gandhi.” A cynic might think that this, rather than any reference to Gandhi as a homosexual or racist, was the real reason for the knee-jerk reaction promising a banning of the book.

In the end, for all the bluster, the book was not even banned in Gujarat. While Modi made announcements in the Gujarat Assembly that the book was being banned there, no order prohibiting the book was ever gazetted. Without any fanfare, even he had effectively backed down. One commentator noted that Modi “hoped to win kudos for being the first to ban and now finds himself alone and ridiculed.”

Lelyveld was obviously blindsided not so much by the furore, but by its focus. “I thought the book might be controversial for other reasons,” he writes, “because in my reading of what I am doing I am being somewhat critical of the Indian political establishment for basically jettisoning Gandhi’s goal in this area of social reform and uplift and I identify with his sense that the movement basically payed lip service to his goals. So, I thought that might be controversial – a foreigner making those statements. But in fact no one has paid much attention to that which I consider to be the major theme of the book.”

Now that the book is available in India, some of those in the Indian political establishment may want to read the book – and perhaps ban it. •

The post How outrage gripped Gandhi’s recalcitrant nation appeared first on Inside Story.

ALTHOUGH I first visited India in 1981, it wasn’t until fifteen years later that I travelled to the acclaimed Kashmir Valley. Tourists had been journeying there for thousands of years – among the more famous, according to Kashmiris, were Moses, Jesus, the Chinese Buddhist, Hiuen Tsang, and the fourth Mughal emperor, Jehangir, who regarded the place as “paradise.” By 1941, according to the official census of what was then the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, 29,000 holiday-makers, including 8000 Europeans, visited the valley each year, and the number increased annually until the anti-Indian insurgency killed off tourism in 1988.

Over the years since then, militants fighting to “liberate” Kashmir from Indian control have exploited, intimidated and terrorised the local people, and Indian military and paramilitary counter-insurgents have responded by injuring, browbeating and traumatising frustrated Kashmiris. Yet by 2009 tourists were again visiting in large numbers as the security situation improved. That year brought 450,000 Indian and 24,000 foreign visitors, about half the annual number recorded before the anti-Indian uprising commenced.

In 1996, during a dark decade of insurgency and despair for Kashmiris, I flew into Srinagar as an aberrant tourist. I’d had a frustrating journey from Muzaffarabad, the regional capital in Pakistan-administered Azad Kashmir, made worse by the fact that I’d spotted a sign indicating that Srinagar was just 170 kilometres down the road – a road that wasn’t open. Instead, like other visitors, I had to endure a long and dangerous car trip – my driver drove like a maniac – via the hill station of Murree to Islamabad, catch a flight to Lahore, catch a second flight to Delhi (which, in my case, the petulant Pakistanis delightfully delayed), stay overnight in a dodgy hotel near Delhi airport, then fly to Srinagar – snow, bad weather and stroppy Indian authorities permitting. A trip of four hours could take anywhere up to forty-eight hours.

Despite the general belief among non-Indians that the Kashmir Valley was off-limits to all but native Kashmiris and Indian soldiers, all I needed to do at Srinagar airport was complete a form letting the local authorities know where I would be staying. On this first visit, faced with limited options, I stayed on a houseboat on the famous Dal Lake – an experience I’ve avoided repeating. I became a captive of the owner and his various mates who desperately sought to sell me shawls, tourist goods, jewellery, fruit, groceries, cigarettes – anything – from their showroom shikaras (canoes).

I had been struck by the palpable and overbearing security as soon as I came out of the airport. Heavily armed and surly – or was it scared? – groups of around a dozen Indian soldiers were on foot patrols throughout the city. Out of the bunkers pockmarking the major street corners, gun barrels poked and Indian soldiers peered. Armoured Suzuki jeeps (called “gypsies” locally), in the turret of which sat a stern soldier armed with an intimidating machine gun, regularly cruised the streets. To be in the wrong place at the wrong time was clearly dangerous.

For the first time in my life, I had entered an active and agitated war zone that made Germany’s Checkpoint Charlie, which I had crossed a dozen seemingly dangerous times in the late 1970s, appear insignificant. Srinagar by day was a city under heavy military control, often subjected to locally induced hartals (strikes that closed all businesses, usually to protest against Indian actions), and without cheer, charm or charity. Once the sun set, curfews and a lack of electricity made the city a dark, desolate and dangerous place in which the militants now opposed the military on equal terms. Indeed, on a return trip in 1998 during which I stayed with friends, they were frantic with worry when I strolled into their house ten minutes after sundown. They assumed that militants or the military – it didn’t matter which – had kidnapped me.

After a week on the houseboat, during which I read, rested and made “raids” ashore to explore the militarised and traumatised city of Srinagar, I woke one morning to the sound of heavy gunfire. In my naivety, I thought this was an India–Pakistan military exchange over the Line of Control that divides J&K into Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir (comprising Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan) and Indian Jammu and Kashmir (comprising Jammu, the Kashmir Valley and Ladakh). In fact, Indian security forces were fighting Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front militants holed up near Srinagar’s famous Hazratbal Shrine, which houses a relic of the prophet Mohammed purchased by a Kashmiri businessman in the 1600s. The Indians killed all twenty-two militants.

While I didn’t personally experience the nervous security forces’ hostility or brutality, I saw plenty of evidence of repression. More than once, I witnessed Indian soldiers severely chastising young Kashmiris who, with their darker complexions, stood out from the locals. Often, soldiers who were clearly about to strike Kashmiris would see me, an obvious angrez (Westerner) or firengi (foreigner), and lower their lathis (sticks) or fists and… smile. Life was neither pleasant nor easy for the “occupiers.”

Finally, when I left Srinagar in 1996, I had to endure three security checks of me and my bags – and that was before I even got into the airport terminal. There were another three security checks inside, after which I also had to identify my suitcase so that it could be loaded onto the plane. Then, with relief soaring as I walked out to board the plane through an unofficial guard of honour comprising heavily armed paramilitary officers on airport duty, local airline officials frisked me again before I boarded the plane – just to be sure. Only inside the plane did I regain some sense of normality. For the residents of Srinagar, meanwhile, the daily dangers and impositions continued.

In recent years, the security situation in the Kashmir Valley has improved. Many Kashmiris are war-weary and have reluctantly realised that their future will most probably be with India. Nevertheless, many Kashmiris are still very dissatisfied, as a serious stone-throwing campaign by younger Kashmiris last year showed. They are frustrated with a paternalistic India – and an opportunistic Pakistan. Both “sides” have a long way to go to win the Kashmiris’ hearts and minds.

THESE two new books help non-Kashmiris to understand some of the Kashmiris’ frustrations. As Basharat Peer writes in his memoir, Curfewed Night, India has more than half a million soldiers and paramilitary forces in Kashmir. “Srinagar is a city of bunkers, and the armoured cars and soldiers patrolling roads or manning check posts ha[ve] become a part of the Kashmiri landscape, like the willows, poplars, and pines… The heady, rebellious Kashmir I left as a teenager [is] now a land of brutalised, exhausted and uncertain people.”

The casualties of the anti-Indian insurgency are staggering. “More than 70,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989; around 8000 people have disappeared; at least 25,000 children have been orphaned; and over 4000 people are in Indian prisons,” writes Mirza Waheed in an afterword to his novel, The Collaborator. “Thousands of women have been widowed in the conflict, including 2000 ‘half widows’ whose husbands remain missing.” This toll of death and disappeared approaches the 75,000 people killed by a devastating earthquake in neighbouring Azad (Free) Kashmir in 2005. (This region, which Pakistan administers, is only “free” in the sense of being “free” from Indian control.)

It was after, and partly because of, rigged elections in 1987 that disenchanted young Kashmiris instigated the anti-Indian uprising. They remained at the forefront of this movement until around 1993, when better-armed, trained and financed pro-Pakistan militants intimidated, suppressed or simply killed off Kashmiris wanting independence. Since then, people in the Kashmir Valley have lost control of “their” uprising; now, the major armed elements opposing Indian control are foreign militants – men housed, trained, armed, sent and/or supported by the Pakistan military in Azad Kashmir. Local Kashmiri militants still operate in the valley, but they play a subordinate role to the more brutal Punjabis and others from Pakistan.

Perhaps – and this is a big perhaps – the greatest sufferers in the Kashmiris’ anti-Indian uprising have been Kashmiri men. Suspicious Indian soldiers seeking to restore normality, but nervous because they know that Kashmiris regard them as oppressors, have often considered young Kashmiris to be either militants, militant sympathisers or potential militants, subjecting them to brutish harassment, surly intimidation, random and oppressive searches, incessant security procedures, overbearing curfews, and arbitrary arrest. For a young Kashmiri man apprehended for any reason the prospects are bleak. I was told on various visits to Kashmir that the best that he could expect was a beating; middling treatment would be torture; at worst, he could disappear or die a brutal, usually anonymous, death. Meanwhile, invariably powerless families would be further traumatised. As a result, other young Kashmiri men have decided, or been persuaded by their families, to leave for other parts of India or abroad.

The books by Peer and Waheed – two younger Kashmiri men – provide the outsider with a flavour of major aspects of the anti-Indian insurgency. Peer deftly describes his life story – from his idyllic childhood, shattered by the insurgency, through to his adult experiences as a journalist who returns to Kashmir to investigate and record the situation there and rediscover old friends and acquaintances. Along the way, he provides us with a readable and informative report about what Kashmiris have typically experienced. His two interesting sketch maps of the Kashmir Valley and Srinagar allow the reader to locate these experiences.

At times, Peer’s account is chilling. For instance, he provides a “grim list” of just thirty-seven words a reporter needs to know in order to report on Kashmir: “Fear, arrest, prison, torture, death, Indian security forces, separatists, guerillas/militants/terrorists, grenades, assault rifles, sandbag bunkers, army installations, hideouts, crackdowns, search-and-destroy operations, frustration, tension, anxiety, trauma, democracy, betrayal, self-determination, freedom, peace talks, international community, mediation, breakdown, despair, and rage.” He also provides some history although, like many Indians, Pakistanis and Kashmiris, he does not mention the Poonch uprising – this major opposition movement against the maharaja was a precursor to both the invasion of the Kashmir Valley by tribesmen from Pakistan on 22 October 1947 and to the maharaja’s accession to India on 26 October 1947. Somewhat surprisingly, while discussing the terrorist attack on India’s parliament in 2001, Peer also does not mention that the first terrorist incident post 9/11 actually took place in Srinagar when terrorists attacked the J&K Legislative Assembly.

Waheed’s book provides an interesting complement to Peer’s memoir. It is a fictional account of the dark and disturbing part that an ethnic Gujjar youth plays “collaborating” with a captain in the Indian military as his force attempts to control, then defeat, the insurgency. Waheed describes in depth this collaboration and the youth’s attempts to rationalise, or remove himself from, this “hideous heap.” Until recently, Gujjars were typically nomadic cow herders who roamed with their cattle throughout Jammu and Kashmir. In this book – and in reality – the Gujjars have been encouraged to settle down by the heavily armed and restrictive Line of Control and by better economic times. The youth’s family lives in Nowgam, the closest Kashmiri village to the Line of Control; his father is village headman. Partly because of his father’s influence, he secures a job with the Indian army which involves searching for and removing valuable articles from dead Kashmiri youth who have attempted to cross from Azad Kashmir, via the Line of Control, into Kashmir. Chillingly, he hears how Indian forces calculatingly and ruthlessly kill many youths attempting to do so. Waheed’s narrative provides the reader with a feel for many untold and unsavoury aspects of the Kashmiri insurgency, particularly in relation to the role that Indians and Pakistanis play in it.

One weakness of Waheed’s book is that he assumes that the reader has a certain understanding of the Kashmir dispute and of local languages, which he uses freely in his text. But the story of how the Gujjar’s village depopulates as his friends become militants and people are killed or feel compelled “to escape the wrath of the Indian Security Forces… by running away to India itself” is compelling. And when he discusses the Gujjar’s deeper feelings and his desires to take revenge on the Indians, it is harrowing.

TRAVELLING from Jammu City to Srinagar for a weekend one winter, I realised how isolated and susceptible to interdiction the Kashmir Valley was, and still is. On a cold and snowy Friday afternoon I went expectantly to Jammu airport. A delayed Indian Airlines flight to Srinagar came into Jammu, then left. Shortly afterwards, my Jet Airways plane landed, but airline officials, apparently on a whim, decided that the weather – which hadn’t changed since the Indian Airlines’ departure – now made the flight to Srinagar impossible. The passengers, who were mostly stranded Kashmiris, protested vehemently; some left the airport, saying they would return for tomorrow’s flight, while others of us, perplexed and flabbergasted by such off-handed treatment, stayed put. Mysteriously, after thirty minutes, the flight was rescheduled and we duly flew to Srinagar.

When I was due to return to Jammu on the Monday morning, the weather was again inclement. I had planned to return to Jammu by road in order to see the terrain, a journey that would have taken eight hours by car. Unfortunately, rain and landslides at the Jammu end had closed the road – which was, and is, the only way south from the isolated Kashmir Valley – so I chased madly around Srinagar trying to secure a seat on an airline, any airline. This proved impossible. Then, after a chance encounter with a friendly and helpful Kashmiri bureaucrat and three hours in a travel agency waiting and urging, we both appeared to have secured seats on the only Srinagar–Jammu flight that day. My newfound Kashmiri friend kindly drove me to my hotel, where I grabbed my luggage, after which we sped to the airport. He then helped me negotiate the security processes which, because I was accompanied by an official, were happily reduced from six to a mere three stages. Once inside the airport, we had the satisfaction of finding that we were on… a waitlist. Thankfully, my Kashmiri again used his influence to get us on board the only Jammu flight that day, and for quite a few days.

Because of the region’s isolation, few people outside Kashmir – including most Pakistanis and Indians who either can’t go (Pakistanis) or won’t go (Indians) to Kashmir – experience problems like these, let alone the more deadly impact of the decades-old conflict. These two books bring the situation a little close for readers in the West. •

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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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CHINA’s push to expand its naval strength and presence in the Indian Ocean is prompting an apprehensive India to increase the size of its 171-ship navy by some ninety-four ships, including two aircraft carriers and at least three nuclear powered-submarines.

While China’s Indian Ocean naval strategy is attracting only limited mainstream media attention, it is exciting global interest among academics and in think-tanks. Beijing is seen to be playing a long game to assert its interests in the critical waterway linking the Middle East to East Asia and to mark its rise as a global power.

Last December, in a paper for the Centre for Independent Studies, John Lees argued that the resurgence of China and India was a recipe for rivalry “which could come to define the strategic landscape of Asia in the next few decades.” His view is widely shared and seems supported by rising Chinese–Indian naval competition.

At the Lowy Institute for International Policy, Ashley Townshend argued similarly: “Given the long-standing tensions over their disputed land border, mutual anxieties about being contained, and both states’ rapid expansion of blue-water naval capabilities, conditions appear ripe for Sino-Indian competition at sea.”

Although the issue is not mentioned in the Australian defence white paper, the size of Australia’s planned naval expansion – including twelve submarines, three air war destroyers, two heavy amphibious ships and twenty-four naval helicopters, as well as other acquisitions – suggests that Indian Ocean concerns were among influences that shaped that document.

Despite India’s worries of an overbearing Chinese competitor in what New Delhi likes to think of as an Indian lake, the Indian Ocean is not the focus of Beijing’s short-term naval strategy as it expands its already formidable 225,000-crew navy, which includes fifty-eight submarines, including eight to ten nuclear submarines, twenty-six destroyers and fifty-six frigates.

China’s immediate primary objective is to build a modern naval force capable of dominating what it calls “the first island chain” stretching from Japan to Taiwan and the Philippines. The aim of its ship and weapons acquisition programs is to restrict the activities of powerful US carrier battle groups and to be able, if necessary, to mount an invasion of Taiwan. Its second aim is to have a global blue-water naval force capable of operating into the “second island chain” which includes Guam, Indonesia and Australia. Hence its contentious declaration that the disputed South China Sea is a “core interest.”

The Indian Ocean strategy is China’s longer game, motivated partly by its desire to protect its sea lines of communications and partly by its desire to assert its rise as a global power. The strategy has been unfolding slowly, if inexorably, for many years.

More than fifteen years ago China declared, “We can no longer accept the Indian Ocean as only an ocean of the Indians.” Recently Shen Dingli, a professor at Fudan University, Shanghai, wrote that it was wrong for China to believe that it had no right to set up bases abroad. To stop other states from blocking China’s trade routes, he argued, China needed a blue-water navy and overseas military bases.

Last year ,Harsh V. Plant of King’s College, London, wrote that China’s new declared naval strategy of “far sea defence” was aimed at giving Beijing the ability to project power in key oceanic areas, “including and most significantly the Indian Ocean.” Hence, what has become known as China’s “string of pearls” strategy in the Indian Ocean – through which Beijing aims to gain naval access rights in Pakistan, Burma, Bangladesh, the Maldives and Sri Lanka by participating in the development of commercial port facilities and possibly intelligence-collection capabilities in those countries.

The significance of that strategy is disputed. Plant argues it has “significantly expanded China’s strategic depth in India’s backyard” but David Brewster of the Australian National University argues that it “will be a long time before any such capabilities come to fruition.”

Yet India is clearly spooked by the strategy – hardly surprising given its history of conflict with China and the massive superiority of the Chinese navy. Currently some thirty-six of India’s planned ninety-four new naval ships are under construction. But despite its plans to increase the number of principal combatant ships by some 25 per cent by 2015, India will still have a navy only a quarter the size of China’s, according to Ashley Townshend.

This is one reason why India has been moving to strengthen its ties with the United States, which still possesses by far the world’s mightiest navy. With 330,000 personnel (plus 101,000 reservists) and 253 battleships including eleven aircraft carriers, fourteen ballistic missile submarines, fifty-three nuclear attack submarines, four guided missile submarines and 100 surface combatants, the US navy is and will remain a massive deterrent force.

It is not a force China is any position, or hurry, to challenge. Moreover, as Townshend notes, India’s partnership with the United States “will for the foreseeable future ensure that the overall maritime balance of power remains tilted in India’s favor.” Nevertheless, the United States has reacted uneasily to the Chinese expansion, although it is widely agreed that Beijing’s naval capabilities are still limited. The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said recently: “I have moved from being curious to being genuinely concerned.”

India has also moved to develop security relationships in the region, especially with Mauritius in the south-west Indian Ocean. As David Brewster has noted, “Mauritian political leaders have publicly indicated on several occasions that India would be permitted to establish naval facilities on Mauritius if it so wished and there are claims that India already operates a signals intelligence station.”

Despite his concerns about the Chinese strategy, Plant concludes that it “remains a bit far-fetched” that China aspires to naval domination of the Indian Ocean. But he says China does wish to play a greater role in the region, protect and advance its interests and to counter India. “[T]he steps that China is taking… are generating apprehensions in Indian strategic circles, thereby engendering a classic security dilemma between the two Asian giants,” Plant writes. Clearly a great game is being joined. •

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But does it really matter whether Mumbai is or becomes the second, third, first or whatever sized city? It’s already a very big city and, whatever the scenario, it is going to get bigger. It’s already a place where too many people cram into a tight north–south axis of space, the heritage of a colonial past that melded a clutch of marshy islands into a jutting peninsula between a large harbour and the Arabian Sea. What compounds the urgency of the sheer mass of numbers is the density of their togetherness. Again the Mumbai Report is informative – and distressing. Greater Mumbai has around 27,366 people per square kilometre and Mumbai City (the space of the conjoined Bombay Island) a massive 48,581 people per square kilometre, with one municipal ward reaching what might be the highest concentration anywhere: 114,001 people living in an area of just 1.8 square kilometres.

Such figures highlight a paradox of contemporary city life. People still come to Mumbai or to its feeder dormitories despite its numbers, its clogging densities and such extreme lack of housing that poorer migrants have little choice but to squat on pavements or move into shanties and slums. (There were over 1,331,984 slum households in 2001 and an estimated slum population of just under seven million.) Yet they keep coming. The city has something attractive above and beyond the push factor of rural impoverishment or the pull of urban jobs – all implied in the title Gillian Tindall used for her 1982 biography of Bombay, The City of Gold. Re-named in the mid 1990s in response to right-wing fundamentalist populism, Bombay/Mumbai contained the idea of a utopia, the place of wealth and success – or at least where a living could be secured and perhaps even greater rewards attained. But Mumbai had, and has, something else, a presence, and a quality that permeates the imagination and turns it into not merely a big but a great city.

It is this character that intrigues Gyan Prakash. In Mumbai Fables he presents us with a personal narrative of how he has perceived the city, and his encounters are both emotional and intellectual, distant and up close. They begin with his youthful fancies of the city from the perspective of the distant and very different “backward state” of Bihar to the north, and continue with his later experiences in the city. They end with the magisterial viewpoint of the author as Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University.

Prakash presents the city as the place of fable, of many and different fables for people throughout India. Hence the title of the book, and the frequent use of the word myth to describe the city. He uses the word both as noun and adjective – as in the mythic city or the city of myth – but also in the contradictory meanings of a chimera, or a false and exaggerated belief, on the one hand, and of the legendary and renowned on the other. The tension between the two meanings enables him to hang on his theme discussions about film, writing, songs, building styles, painting and how the city has developed its own imagined corpus of what it is.

His examples range from Bollywood films and songs through to the exceptional short story writer, Manto, and other progressive left-wing authors – with, of course, a reference to Rushdie, some of whose novels are sited in the city’s elite suburbs. (Does this make Rushdie a suburban writer?) There is an account, too, of the Progressive Artists Group of the 1940s and 1950s who, in their contemporary world art praxis, reshaped modes of seeing and painting in the recently independent nation. More recent artists with their searing critiques of urban living, and local Hindi comic books featuring superhero Doga fighting the evils of contemporary life in Batmanesque gloaming become integral to Prakash’s discussion about the destruction of urban values. By bringing such creative responses together to suit his critiques of what city life in Mumbai has become, Prakash nevertheless reinforces the larger-than-life character of the city. It is larger imagined than it is in reality – larger because it is mediated through sites of creativity and culture, which generate images that become super-real.

Much of this matches the author’s journey into a Bombay that changes with the stages in his life and his own experiences. In his youthful days in Patna, the capital of Bihar, and later in Delhi, Mumbai satisfied his student desire for modernity; but later, when he is confronted by the overpowering reality of urban inequality and disintegration, Prakash can only see the city as “a wasteland of broken modernist dreams,” though much of his material, in fact, presents a contrary interpretation. His accounts of Mumbai’s recent history of communal riots, crime gang warfare, police killings, terrorist attacks, fundamentalist street politics, corrupt urban developments, natural disasters, oppression and exploitation lead to further revision of his stance and a critique of all gigantic cities. The idea of cities as the space for rational discourse and civil society, the image of the cosmopolitan city and the notion of an internally coherent urban entity segue into incoherence and fragmentation. “To some extent all modern cities are patched-up societies composed of strangers,” he tells us, and he agrees with the Dalit (untouchable) contemporary poet, Namdeo Dhasal, when he calls Mumbai “my dear slut.” For Dhasal, though, Mumbai is still his, whatever dehumanising experiences it provides – and, perhaps more than just a patched-up aggregation of bodies crammed into minimal space, it is a place of freedom.

Prakash provides a fine overview account of the city from its period as a colonial port city – “the muck of colonial despotism,” as he reflexively and not quite plausibly puts it – through the paternalism of the early years of Nehruvian independence after 1947, and on to the troubles of recent years. He brings together much interesting material in what is a dual narrative, that of the city and that of his personal journey of changing readings of the city. He presents the varieties of city life, the multiplicities and inequalities, but overall he sees the city in terms of fragmentation and dissolution – not a view most Mumbai people would necessarily agree with. The massive waves of popular support and concern for the city as a wounded organism following the multiple train bombings of 2006 suggest, despite some limited and minimal vigilante responsive action, that the notion of city unity is not chimera but is a real, if not always evident, fact of city living. City people necessarily live and function in a co-existent mode and the mass of numbers brings them together just as much as it might set up the conditions for anomie.

MUCH the same concerns– about population and density, economic underpinnings, slums, equity, gender issues, health, education, quality of life and human development – inform the Mumbai Development Report. But its main concern is to formulate policies with practical effect and beneficial outcomes rather than engage in self-analysis. Its insights are based on hard detail presented in tables of statistics that are remarkably clear and accessible – and the conclusions are measured, humane and eminently sensible. As a report from and for the municipality, it may well have inbuilt biases but they are not evident. It shows a deep understanding of conditions and problems and the concluding chapters point to possible solutions – none of which seem impractical.

There is common sense in the report’s view that as a mega-city the municipality is constantly managing crises, the biggest being the very size of the issues it is confronted with. This raises the question of the role of local government: are the issues still local enough for local government to deal with? As an administration it is faced by a population increasing “to the extent of being unmanageable” and at the cost of imposing dysfunctionalities on the city. There is only so much any municipality can do, the report contends.

Perhaps the solution is to put disincentives in place, such that “the lure of Mumbai should diminish and provide counter-magnets which provide increased pulls.” In the meantime, the report recommends more infrastructure, more satellite cities and more concern to use migrants – not only slum dwellers but other more skilled people who also flock to the city – as a resource base. Should these and other more detailed conclusions be implemented, and if they work, then in the future there may well be no role or any need for future Mumbai Fables. Or if there is need, it will be surrounding another place, in another space with other priorities and compulsions. •

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IN AUGUST last year the Chennai Centre for China Studies, a hawkish Indian foreign-policy think tank, published a copy of an article it clearly hoped would create a furore. Translated from a Chinese website, it detailed how China could split India into ten or twenty ethnically based states by funding insurgents and supporting restive neighbours like Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan. As expected, controversy ignited across India.

With their usual tendency to manufacture outrage, India’s voracious tabloids and twenty-four-hour television stations began baying for Chinese blood. And in a typical display of the Indian media’s tendency to eat their own, they also turned on the Hindu newspaper’s Beijing correspondent, Ananth Krishnan – one of only four Indian correspondents in China – when he dared to suggest that not everything on China’s internet can be associated with the Chinese government.

Coming on top of a series of low-level skirmishes on the India–China border, the controversy illustrated just how deep anti-China feeling still runs in large sections of Indian society. The roots of the hostility lie in the still-disputed border and a three-month conflict – nearly fifty years ago – that many people outside India have never heard of. As the furore showed, the relationship between the two countries might have evolved in many ways over the last six decades, but some things haven’t changed.

There is a running joke among India–China scholars that relations between the two countries over the past sixty years can essentially be described in three phases: “Hindi–Chini bhai-bhai,” “Hindi–Chini bye-bye” and “Hindi–Chini buy-buy.” Although the story is more complex than that, the three labels are a useful way to begin to understand what has changed and what hasn’t.

“Hindi–Chini bhai-bhai” – “Indians and Chinese are brothers” – was coined during a visit by the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to China in October 1954, reciprocating the visit by the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, to India four months earlier. Nineteen fifty-four was a high point in the relationship, a period of rapprochement after decades of strife over the disputed India–Tibet border, which dated back to the end of the nineteenth century, and the more recent tension after the 1950 Chinese “liberation” of Tibet. The year also marked India’s formal recognition of China’s sovereignty over Tibet. India relinquished all its territorial rights over the province, abandoning the long-held position of maintaining Tibet as an autonomous buffer zone.

This new friendship created the potential for renewed discussions about the disputed border, though this was tested only two years later. Two areas were (and still are) in dispute. The first, the north-eastern stretch, was known until 1972 as the North-East Frontier Agency and is now the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh; China claims it as Southern Tibet. The second is the western region of Aksai Chin, claimed by the Indians and currently administered by the Chinese, which borders the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Until the mid 1950s most of the border tension had centred on the eastern stretch – and specifically the disputed border known as the McMahon Line. But the western region became the focus in 1956 when the Chinese decided to build a highway through Aksai Chin, linking the restive provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet and allowing for the rapid movement of troops. Despite the fact that it disputed the occupation of the territory, India hadn’t administered the region in any way, and after the building of the road the region effectively passed into Chinese hands. Aksai Chin continued to be a volatile area – not helped by the fact that the rest of Jammu and Kashmir was the subject of an ongoing and often violent dispute between India and Pakistan – and it would provide one of the flashpoints for the 1962 Sino-Indian conflict.

Matters were further complicated with the Lhasa Revolt of March 1959, an uprising of Tibetans that culminated when the fourteenth Dalai Lama (and subsequently thousands of Tibetan refugees) fled to India and Chinese forces crushed the resistance. In the northern autumn Chinese and Indian troops clashed along the McMahon Line border.

It’s possible that a deal to settle the border dispute could have been made in 1959 – most likely through an exchange that would have given China Aksai Chin and India Arunachal Pradesh. But talks broke down. A bilateral committee, established – according to the Indian Ministry of External Affairs – to “examine the factual material in the possession of the two governments in support of their stands,” met three times during 1960 but failed to agree even on the most basic question: had the border ever been officially delimited? (No, according to China; yes, according to India.) This was the last, failed opportunity to effect an agreement before relations broke down completely.

The Sino-Indian War began on 8 September 1962 when the Chinese crossed into the North-East Frontier Agency and attacked an Indian border post, alleging that the Indians had already violated the McMahon Line. This was the first time the conflict flared along the McMahon Line, though there had already been some fighting in Ladakh around the Aksai Chin region, after India alleged that China and Pakistan were colluding to undermine its position in Kashmir. Skirmishes continued throughout September and into October. This was the era of “Hindi–Chini bye-bye.”

After six weeks the Chinese launched a full-scale offensive along the frontier, from Ladakh to the North-East Frontier Agency, arguing that it was a pre-emptive strike against Indian aggression. This moved the conflict beyond the disputed areas and into Indian territory, essentially making it an invasion of India. The Indian force was heavily under-prepared and crumbled before the Chinese onslaught. The fighting lasted for just over a month, with the Chinese declaring a unilateral ceasefire on 21 November. Statistics released by the Indian government on 29 October 1962 declared between 2000 and 2500 Indian soldiers killed during the first week of fighting, with 1102 held prisoner, 291 wounded and 5174 missing and presumed dead.

On 8 November the Chinese proposed a ceasefire agreement whereby both parties would withdraw twenty kilometres behind the positions held on 7 November 1959. The Chinese would withdraw back behind the McMahon Line, but they would maintain control of Indian-claimed territory in Ladakh, including the strategically important Aksai Chin road linking Xinjiang and Tibet. The Indians rejected this proposal; after another fortnight of fierce fighting, however, the Chinese surprised everyone by announcing a unilateral ceasefire and the withdrawal of troops to the 7 November 1959 positions. The Chinese added that, provided the Indian government took corresponding measures, the two parties could meet to discuss troop withdrawal and an end to hostilities. Militarily weakened, and with the rest of the world supporting all measures to solve the conflict, India was in no position to argue.

In December 1962 six non-aligned nations (Ceylon, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, the United Arab Republic and Ghana) met in Colombo to try to broker a formal peace deal, but their lack of condemnation of the Chinese invasion incensed India. India nevertheless accepted the Colombo proposals, but China rejected them, sticking to the terms of its 21 November 1962 statement. The talks broke down and nothing was resolved, even in subsequent bilateral meetings.

In the decades following the Sino-Indian War relations gradually began to normalise. Formal diplomatic ties were re-established in 1976, and after China instigated economic reform under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s the rapprochement continued, though it wasn’t until 1988 that the turning point came with Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to Beijing. This made him the first Indian prime minister to visit China since Nehru in 1954 and marked the end of the impasse on the border issue, which had lasted for most of the 1980s. The two sides agreed to maintain peace and stability along the “Line of Actual Control” in Arunachal Pradesh (roughly equivalent to the McMahon Line) and they also agreed to set up a joint working group to help defuse the border issue. In addition, India agreed to curtail the anti-China actions of Tibetans in India, a stance that was still evident twenty years later during the anti-China protests surrounding the 2008 Olympic torch relay in Delhi. The era of “Hindi–Chini bye-bye” was drawing to a close, and “Hindi–Chini buy-buy” had begun.

TODAY, Sino-Indian trade is over US$50 billion and growing, though this figure hides a huge trade imbalance in favour of China. The political relationship, however, remains complicated. Much of India’s current attitude to China – which in many ways informs its view of its own place in the world – still has its roots in the border dispute. To most outsiders, the importance of this issue in India, and the significance of the 1962 war in particular, is perplexing – it was, after all, a three-month war that took place half a century ago. But the defeat still rankles in certain sectors of the Indian foreign-policy establishment.

Though the institutional memory of the 1962 war is beginning to recede as a younger guard takes over in the political and foreign-service spheres, the border dispute has become part of a broader nationalist narrative that doesn’t have much to do with precise lines on maps. In the Indian case at least, this stoking of nationalism has contributed to a sense of entitlement which is becoming more pervasive now that Indians are beginning to absorb the Western rhetoric that India and China are “emerging powers.” The fact that the two countries are increasingly linked together – often erroneously – in the West means that the more hawkish elements in the Indian defence establishment feel that the country now has the capacity to “stand up” to China.

This narrative is fuelled by media on both sides of the border, as was evident during the skirmishes last year. Both countries have troops stationed along the border who occasionally provoke each other up by crossing over (to dump their rubbish, for example). When China tried to block a $2.9 billion loan from the Asian Development Bank to India because part of the money was to be used for a water project in Arunachal Pradesh, the Indians increased their troop numbers along the border and the Chinese subsequently did the same, with predictable results.

Another ongoing problem is China’s relationship with Pakistan, which solidified in the 1970s after India signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union, and culminated in transfer of military nuclear technology in the 1980s. Although in the 1990s China renounced its support for Pakistan in Kashmir, saying that it was an issue for India and Pakistan to sort out, it continues to provide extensive aid, including a major transfer of civilian nuclear technology in June this year, which causes considerable consternation in India.

For China’s part, the 1962 war is insignificant; instead, the major issue in the relationship is Tibet, and specifically the Dalai Lama’s residence in India. This came to a head in November last year when the Dalai Lama visited the town of Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh. Tawang – a strategically important border town – is one of the most sacred places in Tibetan Buddhism and is home to the 300-year-old monastery that was the Dalai Lama’s first place of refuge when he fled Tibet in 1959. The Chinese government vigorously protested about the visit, which marked a particularly tense point in the relationship after the series of skirmishes along the McMahon Line.

Although the media on both sides have a limited impact on policy, the extent to which they shape and inflame public opinion must not be underestimated. Among the Indian and Chinese publics there is very little understanding of the other, which tends to lead to knee-jerk reactions during low points in the relationship, such as the 2009 border clashes. In China, India is still generally seen as relatively insignificant – a major player in South Asia, perhaps, but with little clout outside its immediate region. In India, some see China as a threat and others as an enormous trade opportunity worthy of significant engagement. From a Chinese perspective, the Indian media, with their loud, tabloid journalism and devotion to the twenty-four-hour news cycle, are seen as unruly and sometimes hostile, with a penchant for scapegoating China for political ends. To Indians the Chinese media look like a monolithic mouthpiece of the government. (In reality, although the Chinese media are mostly forced to adhere to the government line, opinion there, particularly online, is by no means homogenous.) Such generalisations conveniently ignore the subtleties of the debates taking place on both sides, as well as the informal diplomatic efforts and people-to-people exchanges which, although still in their infancy, are gradually assuming greater importance.

These exchanges, however, remain hampered by bureaucracy and misunderstandings. In particular, the attempts by both countries to foster “cultural exchanges” are often developed with no thought for their intended audience or cultural accessibility. The Indian government sends traditional dancers to China, for example, when the Chinese people would far prefer representatives of Bollywood. China has a phenomenal “soft power” machine in the Confucius Institutes and related programs, but continued suspicion about their motives and links with government mean that it can be difficult for them to gain a serious foothold in countries like India. The Indian equivalent, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, is notoriously ineffective and has nowhere near the global reach of the Office of Chinese Language Council International (Hanban), which administers the Confucius Institutes.

In spite of the obstacles, however, the governments of both sides are taking a far more measured approach than their respective media, particularly on the border issue. Both governments realise that it is in the best interests of their own domestic development to maintain peace along the border, to increase trade and to promote engagement. For this reason, although relations continue to be wary and the potential for confrontation remains, a fresh outbreak of border conflict is unlikely in the immediate future. •

The post Uneasy neighbours appeared first on Inside Story.

WE ALL KNOW that the United States is balancing on a very high wire concerning its South Asia policy, caught between its long-term strategic interests with India and its shorter-term need for Pakistan to support the war in Afghanistan.

The situation is complicated by Pakistan’s double game. Pakistan needs to garner influence with Pushtuns both in Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to give it “strategic depth” vis à vis India. Its dealings with militant groups such as the Haqqani Network extend back into the Soviet occupation period, when Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI, was point-man between the United States and the resistance. And, of course, it was midwife to the birth of the Taliban. Even though Pakistan is itself threatened by a militant revival, such is its fear of India that Islamabad will not easily abandon its links with the extremists. From Islamabad’s point of view, the matter is not helped by what it sees as India’s close relationship with the Karzai government and its involvement in south-eastern Afghanistan, where it has several consulates and a number of aid programs.

Given these circumstances, some of the outspoken comments made by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during and immediately after her recent Pakistan visit are interesting. They are especially interesting coming just before this month’s release of the “Afghan War Logs” by WikiLeaks, which exposed what everyone already knew, that Pakistan was dealing indirectly, and possibly directly, with the Taliban. (Mind you, even the Guardian, one of three newspapers to vet the leaks prior to their release, is of the view that the material on the direct involvement of the ISI with the Taliban falls short of a “smoking gun,” especially since most of it comes from Afghan informers who have an interest in presenting the ISI in this way.)

Clinton’s remarks are also interesting in light of the growing row between India and Pakistan, which escalated around the edges of the recent India–Pakistan Foreign Ministers’ summit, about alleged direct ISI support for terrorist attacks on Indian soil, including the devastating attack on Mumbai of 26–29 November 2008 (known in India as 26/11). Prior to that reportedly fractious summit, India’s home secretary, G.K. Pillai, alleged that terrorist planner David Headley – who was associated with the Lashkar-e-Toiba, which perpetrated the 26/11 attacks – had provided US and Indian authorities with details of ISI involvement in planning the 26/11 attacks. “Leaks” in India, meanwhile, also alleged that Headley had confirmed that the Pakistan navy was involved in training the attackers – a claim initially made by the condemned terrorist Ajmal Kasab in his interrogation.

Although the Indian foreign minister subsequently described Pillai’s remarks on the eve of the summit as unhelpful, they have since been reaffirmed and even strengthened by India’s national security adviser, Shivshankar Menon, who reportedly said that interrogation of Headley revealed a nexus between militants and “the official establishment” (the ISI), which was “getting stronger.”

What is interesting about Clinton’s visit is that she appeared implicitly to endorse the Indian position put by Pillai and Menon. According to a report in Dawn, “Secretary Clinton… for the second day running, handed out a stern warning to Pakistan that any future terrorist attack traced back to its soil would have devastating consequences.” Some reports assume these comments relate to an attack on US soil. But they can equally be read as relating to an attack on India. Such language (if accurately reported), coming as it did on top of the accusation of a leading Indian official, can hardly have been accidental. To this reader at least it says: we know what you did and we are warning you not to do it again.

Indeed, Washington has a choice on this. If it believes that New Delhi’s account of the Indian interrogation of Headley is inaccurate and therefore mischievous it could say so, since the FBI also interrogated Headley extensively and since the basic US interest in view of any misrepresentation by India would be to set the matter straight on behalf of Washington’s client, Pakistan.

The idea that Clinton’s remarks might also apply to India is strengthened by a recent report in the Times of India suggesting that the US State Department is warming to the Indian view that progress in relations between India and Pakistan should be dependent on progress in stemming terrorists operating from Pakistan’s soil. But the question remains: is this new sympathy for India an outcome of what was learned from Headley (and to an extent the WikiLeaks) or is it, rather, part of the general attempt to balance relations between India and Pakistan by giving a sop to India?

Other remarks by Clinton during and after her visit lent credibility to the view that Washington’s anger is strong and genuine. Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported that she strongly opposed Pakistan’s attempts to enter the civil nuclear trade through a deal with China similar to the US–India deal. According to the same report, Clinton did not mince her words: “The problem with A.Q. Khan [the Pakistani nuclear scientist whom Washington still regards as a “serious proliferation risk”] raises red flags for people around the world, not just in the US, because we can trace the export of nuclear information and material from Pakistan through all kinds of channels to many different countries. That cannot be overlooked or put under the carpet. Pakistan, right now, is the only country standing in the way of the Conference on Disarmament pursuing something called the Fissile Material Cut Off Treaty.”

A third – and perhaps the most extraordinary – comment by Clinton concerns the location of Osama bin Laden. In a statement made to Fox News after her Islamabad visit, she said that “elements” of the Pakistani government know where bin Laden is hiding but will not divulge the information. This is a strong statement indeed. One can assume that the United States has information based either on intercepted phone messages or other intelligence. If the US government really believes that some officials in Pakistan know of bin Laden’s location but will not divulge the information, it would be cause for considerable anger given the nature of the 9/11 attacks.

There is another indication of the depth of US concern, this time coming from the White House in the context of the WikiLeaks. One obvious response to the leaks would be to say that they don’t really tell us anything new and that they don’t present a “smoking gun” indicating ISI involvement with the Taliban – which is true. But instead the White House reportedly described the situation that the leaks revealed as “unacceptable” and called militant safe-havens in Pakistan “intolerable.” While it would be going too far to share Hamid Gul’s distorted view that the US government arranged for the leaks in order to discredit him and Pakistan (the egos of retired generals!), it would not be going too far to argue that the White House is making the best of a bad deal in relation to the leaks and using them to garner what leverage it can.

But the crucial question is: what does it all mean? Has anything changed as a result of the events chronicled above? In answering this question we need to ask: could the United States “dump” Pakistan and go it alone in Afghanistan? The answer is that it probably could not. While it has a poor deal with Pakistan, it is better than no deal at all.

A second question is whether tough talk of the kind cited above is likely to change the basics of Pakistan’s longstanding policy of “running with the hare and hunting with the hounds”? Past experience, when President Bush issued stern warnings to President Musharraf, suggests that while such warnings can achieve temporary results, they cannot change the basics of Pakistan’s policy, which seems to be part of its DNA. Moreover, if the Pakistani government assumes, probably correctly, that the United States and its allies will leave Afghanistan before the job is done – the same assumption under which the Taliban is operating – then why wouldn’t they keep their options open, knowing that India will be there long after the Americans have gone? •

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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.

IT’S A TUESDAY afternoon in early October and Prakash is taking me to his afternoon preparatory class at Vajiram & Ravi, one of the dozens of institutes in Delhi that train candidates for India’s civil services exams. Still buoyant despite two failed exam attempts, Prakash is heading for a class that prepares students for the optional paper in psychology he hopes to tackle next year. The classes last two and a half hours and run seven days a week for twenty weeks or more.

The classroom is already half full, with around 200 chairs crammed into a room that can’t be much more than fifty square metres. Once the students have manoeuvred their way into a seat, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to get out again until after the class. And it’s unlikely they’d want to. The scarcity of places and the high cost of the course spell a dropout rate of less than 1 per cent. Though October marks the tail end of the course, and several students are immersed elsewhere in preparation for the fast-approaching Mains exams, the room fills quickly. Prakash points out three young women – a doctor, an engineer and a journalist – sitting pressed up behind us.

Mukhul Pathak, a well-known psychology lecturer whose coaching successes have made his subject a popular choice for the optional paper, marches up to a narrow podium and begins his class. Within seconds he has the entire room in uproarious laughter. Dressed in a striped cream and peach short-sleeved shirt and moss-green corduroy trousers, energetic and humorous, he shows no trace of having taught this same course perhaps twice a year for the past fifteen years. On his wrist hangs a thick gold watch of such proportions that from the fifth row I can see that it runs ten minutes fast. He radiates commitment, efficiency and affluence.

The subject of today’s lecture is effective communication, which Pathak demonstrates as much as he teaches. In a style his students say is unusual among Indian teachers, he layers anecdote upon anecdote to elicit frequent, generous laughter, then dictates his key points from a stack of papers on the lectern at his elbow. As the afternoon sunlight pushes through the dusty windows and mingles with harsh fluorescent light, two hundred heads are bent, almost touching, over thick notepads, taking down his every word. In the distance, ignored by the students, is the rumbling of swollen buses, the honking of horns and the shrill ringing of cycle rickshaw bells. This is like no lecture I have been to before. No one is looking out of the window, doodling or languidly compiling an SMS. The taut, focused energy is of the kind that raises the hairs on the back of your neck.

IF THE THOUGHT of memorising the bathing habits of the one-horned rhinoceros or the virtues of the Wild Ass Sanctuary of Gujarat leaves you with a feeling of mild vertigo, the Indian civil services examinations might not be for you. In fact, if you happen to be sitting the exams over the next three weeks, as some 12,000 eligible Indians across the country will be, you’d better hold on to your table tightly. Questions on topics as diverse as folk dances, constitutional developments, religious and social reforms and the usefulness of camels, or even the type of winter northern India would experience in the absence of the Himalayas, could crop up in one of your exam papers.

Forget “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” – this is India’s toughest contest. And the potential prize is greater than anything money can buy. While a reference to the civil service in some countries will elicit a yawn, for many young Indians a career as a civil services officer sparkles with the allure of status, job satisfaction, government accommodation and top-notch marriage proposals. But much more than this, the civil services are an institution of critical relevance to society and social change in India. As a newly qualified Indian Administrative Officer, for example, your early postings will include the position of Collector in your assigned district. Far from fermenting in an office, you will be out in the field, perhaps surveying the land, picking up after a train crash or putting into practice a program of social uplift whose results will unfold before your eyes. Imbued with the authority of government and the omnipotence and benevolence that accompanies it, you might, almost literally, find yourself king of the district.

Ascending to such giddy heights isn’t easy, however. With a breathtakingly broad range of topics spanning a medley of exam papers, most civil services candidates will sit down to write what are colloquially known as “the Mains” after months, or often years, of punishing preparation. Whittled down from an original applicant pool of about 400,000 by a round of preliminary tests earlier in the year, most will have pursued a relentless campaign of fifteen-hour study sessions and daily attendance at costly coaching courses. As they pit their wits against up to six hours of papers each day, most of them won’t even be able to console themselves with the thought that this trying time will soon be over. The likelihood of passing through both sets of exams and excelling at a further, gruelling interview stands at about one in 10,000. And with a syllabus the size of the one they need to cover, it pays to repeat. And repeat. Of those who succeeded in the 2006 examinations, 73 per cent had made three or more attempts at the tough selection process.

The combined opportunity cost of incredibly low odds and extremely high investments – of time, money and emotional energy – are, quite frankly, as dizzying as the question papers. The fact that a majority of young Indians in their twenties opt to sit the exams more than once means that many of them will devote years to preparing and will miss out on other lucrative career opportunities in the process. Astonishingly, of the 7488 candidates who sat the Mains in 2006, over 300 were qualified doctors, dentists or vets, at least 1400 had a background in engineering, technology or IT, and nearly half held higher degrees in addition to the required bachelors degree. Yet the most popular of the services and posts covered by the civil services exams – the Indian Administrative Service, the Indian Foreign Service and the Indian Police Service – promise a chance to serve the nation, acquire job security in uncertain economic times, and attain instant levels of prestige that would require years of hard work and experience in other sectors. This kind of bounty makes the huge investment of precious years and energy in the career-critical twenties a worthwhile gamble.

Given the rapid expansion of India’s corporate sector since liberalisation took hold in the early 1990s, and the handsome remuneration packages private sector jobs now deliver, it seems hard to believe that the promise of a substantially less well-paid civil service career can still capture the imagination of young Indians. Yet at least one study suggests that, overwhelmingly, it does. In a July 2007 survey conducted by the Associated Chambers of Commerce & Industry of India, 80 per cent of the 300 young corporate sector executives questioned the idea that India’s most talented youths were being drawn towards the private sector. In their view, the top three branches of the civil services continue to harvest the best talent.

One senior officer I spoke to joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1991, around the time India’s corporate sector began to blossom. Despite the changes he has seen in the job market since his service began, he believes that the status and social position bestowed on those in the higher civil services are a distant dream for those working in the corporate world. That the rich dividends private sector employment offers are not enough to lure serving officers away from their posts is evidenced by an extremely low rate of attrition in the higher civil services. Of around 100 Indian Administrative Service officers in his batch, not a single one has left the service for the corporate sector.

Indeed, the enduring popularity of the civil services as a career of choice is reinforced by the continuously high numbers of exam applicants, the proliferation of preparatory coaching institutes in India’s major cities, and the broad media coverage enjoyed by the high scorers in the exam. Inspiring reports of likely and unlikely victors abound. Nearly every civil services aspirant knows the story of Govind Jaiswal, the son of an uneducated rickshaw vendor, who ranked forty-eighth among 474 successful candidates in his first attempt at the exam in 2006. And most will be familiar with the bizarre tale of Ashok Rai, a convicted rapist who was freed after achieving the seemingly impossible: preparing and qualifying for the civil services from behind bars at Delhi’s Tihar Jail.

LOOKING AROUND Pathak’s class at Vajiram & Ravi I begin trying to guess who might be successful in the coming exams. As students dressed in both western and Indian attire earnestly compile information in coloured spider diagrams or neat lists of bullet points, I try to imagine them settling a dispute in a remote village or attending a cocktail party in a distant diplomatic mission. While imagining these students’ successes is a source of pleasant contemplation, the obverse – failure and the huge disappointment it brings, often for entire families – is too heartrending to contemplate. I think back to a June article in The Hindu, India’s second-largest circulated daily English newspaper, which revealed “the other side” of the civil services dream. “The losers,” the author claimed, “virtually become nothings... With no alternative career in hand, they come out of the preparation phase at thirty or thirty-five, totally confused about the future.”

Such a prognosis seems a little dramatic, at least for the students I stay behind to chat with after the class. Vineet, aged twenty-one, is in his fourth year of an engineering degree, which he sees as a sensible back-up option should his attempts at the exam prove fruitless. Priya, twenty-five, the journalist who was sitting behind me in the class, may well have been driven to try out for the civil services by a frustration with the media sector and the limited chances it offers to bring about social change, but she nonetheless has a few years of work experience under her belt that will surely stand her in good stead if all else fails. Of course, I have been unable to speak to the most vulnerable candidates. They are the ones who either could not afford a place in a coaching institute such as this, or who rushed off after the class to a job that will only barely keep them afloat. It’s these aspirants, perhaps more than any others, who would benefit immeasurably from a system of recruitment that is sensitive to the risks inherent in dedicating precious young years to a cause with no guaranteed result.

That’s not to say that the patterns of recruitment and the types of aspirants to the civil services have remained static. In a system of selection that once strongly privileged the urban middle classes, the social base of the civil services is steadily expanding as a result of the growth of educational facilities outside urban centres and the introduction of a reservation system for the disadvantaged sections of Indian society. Members of India’s officially recognised “backward classes” can now draw on a host of measures aimed at ensuring no aspirant should be discouraged from taking the tests. The low admission fee of 50 rupees (a little over one Australian dollar) is waived for India’s former untouchables, now referred to as the scheduled castes, for example. Other disadvantaged groups, known collectively as the “other backward classes,” or OBCs, also benefit from certain concessions in the examination process. While the age bracket for admission is twenty-one to thirty for general candidates, and the permitted number of attempts at the exam stands at four, an eligible candidate from the OBCs can sit the exam up to seven times and compete up until the age of thirty-three. A member of a scheduled caste has until the age of thirty-five and an unlimited number of attempts.

Such measures have increased the attractiveness of the civil services exams for socially and economically disadvantaged young Indians: over 66 per cent of nearly 400,000 initial applicants to the exams in 2006 hailed from India’s scheduled tribes, scheduled castes and OBCs. While the proportion of candidates from these groups who were actually successful was lower, at 55 per cent, the high numbers of applicants, given the costs involved, is encouraging. Women, too, are entering the services in ever higher numbers, and with a greater chance of success. While 9 per cent of those appearing in the Mains examinations were women, they accounted for 21 per cent of successful candidates. Interestingly, the highest success rate of any group in the 2006 Mains comprised women among India’s scheduled tribes, 19.3 per cent of whom performed well enough in the exams to make selection, compared to an average success rate of 6.3 per cent.

Many aspirants believe that relocating to a major city to take coaching classes affords the best chance of examination success. India’s capital, Delhi, is unquestionably the country’s major centre for civil services exam preparation. Coaching institutes in the capital benefit from constant feedback from candidates as they return from exams and interviews, report on their experiences and thus assist in the updating of preparatory materials.

Moving to the capital to imbibe the atmosphere of a common struggle and join study groups is a key move for many civil services hopefuls, though it demands a financial outlay that might well be beyond their family’s means. A preparatory course for just one of the Mains optional papers costs somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 rupees (approximately A$700 to $930). In recognition of this, the government sponsors a certain percentage of places in coaching institutes and even runs entire courses aimed at underprivileged youth. For Indians from less well-off families, study in Delhi must be financed by selling property, borrowing money or working a job alongside an already gruelling preparation schedule that leaves only a few hours for sleep.

Polishing the dreams of aspirants is a lucrative business. Newspapers, national and local, are brimming with adverts for intensive courses, and around a dozen exam preparation monthlies packed with past questions, new material and exam tips grace the majority of book stands in the capital. A glance at the Delhi edition of The Hindu reveals up to forty full-colour advertisements each weekday for institutes that train candidates for the civil services exams. Vajiram & Ravi is one of the best known – so well known that it needs no advertising at all. In business since 1976, its courses fill within twenty-four hours, with eager students queuing from midnight on the night before admissions open. Its fame and popularity is linked to the many success stories featured on its website, which records that the institute has produced the highest scoring qualifying exam candidate – known as the civil services “topper” – every year since 2000.

AMONG THE STUDENTS I talk to at Vajiram & Ravi is Shipra Sharan, a fourth generation descendant of Lal Bahadur Shastri, India’s third prime minister. A graduate in hospitality administration and management with an MBA from the University of Hyderabad, she has sampled many faces of India’s corporate sector, spanning hospitality, finance and the media. Two years ago a personal tragedy made her rethink her priorities and consider the development and welfare issues that affect the Indian nation. “I have tasted money,” she explains, “but even if I have 1 Lakh [100,000 rupees] in my pocket, when I go out onto the street, I won’t be able to get rid of the noise pollution.” Now pursuing a master of public administration in Delhi, she sees the civil services exams as one of the toughest competitions, and realises that, at twenty-eight, she has one or perhaps two chances to crack the exam.

Crucially, older candidates like Shipra bring with them the promise of a wealth of experience gained from other sectors, though the selection process is yet to recognise formally the advantages prior work experience can offer. If successful, Shipra, along with other “probationer” civil services officers, will head to the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, named in memory of her ancestor, to commence a period of intensive training that will last for two years. When I ask her whether she draws inspiration from her political lineage and her connection to the training academy’s namesake, she answers with a resounding yes. Expressing a sense of pride at being a direct descendant of a man who fought for India’s independence from the British and then for the country’s development during his subsequent political career, she also acknowledges how times have changed. “Today we are blessed by opportunities to do good for the country,” she says. “Back then we didn’t even have our freedom.”

Not all young Indians see a career as a civil services officer as the best or only way to serve the nation. A few days earlier I had spoken to Divya, twenty-seven, who has been working for Nokia in Bangalore for the past two and a half years in a role that spans the fields of design, research and technology. With a focus on developing markets, she is part of a research team that seeks to develop technologies to improve people’s livelihoods. Manu, twenty-six, is currently working for a non-government organisation in Delhi. Though he is excited by the potential for social change offered by a career in the civil services, he doesn’t place ultimate emphasis on its capacity to offer avenues for change. As he sees it, other career paths, such as government service outside the civil services, teaching, healthcare or a stint as an electoral representative, all offer potential for improving social conditions.

As Prakash and I head out into the falling dusk and rising cacophony of the Delhi evening rush hour, we encounter two young women, sisters from the state of Jammu and Kashmir, at a tea stall near the coaching institute. Recognising me from the class, they enquire curiously whether I will be appearing at the exams. I wish I could, I tell them, and for a moment, I mean it. But, truth be told, I know I wouldn’t stand a chance. I may now be up to scratch with the Wild Ass Sanctuary in Gujarat, which is, as it happens, famous for its large wild ass herds. But the bathing habits of one-horned rhinos…?

Finishing her tea, the elder of the two sisters bids me to wish her luck in the forthcoming Mains exams. “Good luck!” I exclaim, and then ask when she will hear news of the results. Not until early March, she says. “So you’ll enjoy a long, well-earned break in a few weeks, then?” I ask. “No,” she replies, “I’ll be getting ready to sit the prelims again next May, just in case.” And suddenly I realise that it isn’t the amount of cramming that frightens me away from these exams. It’s the hope and perseverance required to repeat. And repeat. •

The post India’s toughest contest 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.

THERE PROBABLY aren’t too many eighty-one year olds who have an iPhone and their own blog. Lal Krishna Advani does. He can also put his name to a number of websites, a Facebook group and over 250 YouTube clips. But Advani’s subscription to cyberspace shouldn’t come as a surprise. As prime ministerial candidate for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, in India’s upcoming national elections, he is one of scores of political candidates who are using blogs, text messaging, video platforms and social networking sites to reach out to Indian voters. Welcome to e-campaigning in these, the largest and most plugged-in elections in democratic history. And meet the target constituency: India’s colossal youth electorate.

In a nation where a quarter of eligible voters are now between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, the 2009 elections will see a potential 100 million young Indians heading to the polls for the first time between 16 April and 13 May. This isn’t any old India, as PepsiCo’s recent series of TV commercials suggests, this is “Youngistaan,” the Land of the Young. And just as the demographic reality of India’s youth bulge hasn’t passed soft drinks corporations by, neither has it escaped the attention of India’s political hopefuls. In the run-up to the elections, national and regional parties alike have been anxiously reworking their campaign strategies to appeal to youth – or what the media now chummily refers to as Young India.

At the heart of this drive is Obama-inspired online campaigning. Stirred by the Democrats’ success in the United States, India’s major parties have been eagerly integrating the internet into their election drives. The BJP, leading party of the National Democratic Alliance, one of two coalitions competing for power, commands the biggest political web presence in the country. It has also seen fit to advertise on more than 3000 websites and target some half million subscribers with a daily email dispatch.

Equally keen to make waves on the web has been the BJP’s major rival, the Congress Party, which heads the ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance. Its party website offers a downloadable ringtone of Jai Ho, the signature tune to the award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. The unmistakable anthem – whose title roughly means “victory” in Hindi – won homegrown composer A. R. Rahman an Academy Award and widespread reverence from the Indian public in February. Quick to cash in on the film’s popularity with young voters, Congress acquired rights to the song and rejigged the lyrics to harmonise with its campaign.

In a more modest fashion, regional parties such as the Telegu Desam Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party – whose leader, Mayawati, the Dalit chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, could rustle up a “third front” of left-wing and regional parties to challenge the United Progressive Alliance and the National Democratic Alliance – have also launched websites to cater to the young and tech-savvy among their constituencies.

One of the biggest challenges facing Indian parties is the very real task of getting these new voters out to the polls. While turnout in the eighteen to twenty-four age group was higher than 50 per cent at the last four national elections, it was persistently lower than that of older voters. There were also stark differences in turnout patterns across the rural–urban divide. According to Sangeeta Talwar, only 10 per cent of urban youth voted in the last elections. Her company, Tata Tea, has backed a young team from the Bangalore-based NGO, Janaagraha, in their Jaago Re! (“Hey, wake up!”) campaign, a non-partisan “enabling platform” aimed at demystifying the political process and encouraging voter registration. The Jaago Re! web interface is chatty and user-friendly, urging visitors to get themselves onto the electoral roll. Yet for all its inclusiveness, the website’s entire content – except its Hindi slogan – is in English, a language which remains the preserve of a minority in India, and has limited hope of reaching out to a broad group of young people. As the Delhi-based online research company JuxtConsult revealed recently, only 13 per cent of internet users in India prefer to read online content in English.

From the online offerings of the so-called “national” parties it would be hard to deduce that India is home to an estimated 415 languages, twenty-two of which are classified “official.” While Lal Krishna Advani’s website tracks a campaign trail that criss-crosses linguistic boundaries, the details are only available in English and Hindi. Although a widely spoken language, Hindi is the primary tongue of only 41 per cent of the population. The Congress website is only marginally more inclusive, offering web content in Urdu, too. As a language associated with India’s 13.4 per cent Muslim population, its inclusion underscores the party’s secular identity.

Language issues aside, it’s difficult to get a sense of just how many Indians use the internet. The BJP’s IT cell puts the number at a staggering 250 million, which may explain the party’s enthusiasm for web-based campaigning. But more conservative estimates, like the one from JuxtConsult of forty-seven million in January 2009, paint a less optimistic picture of the effectiveness of cyber-shortcuts. Estimates see the influence of the internet on election results as limited to about fifty seats out of an available 543. The reality is that most of India’s voters live in rural areas where internet access is limited or non-existent.

Reaching out to the electorate with Advani’s iPhone might be a better bet. In the state of Gujarat, the BJP has created a database of 25,000 mobile numbers which it targets with bulk messaging. Mobile phone technology is more widely used in rural India than the internet: at the start of 2009, the total number of wireless telephones connections stood at over 360 million, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. While well over two thirds of India’s population live in the countryside, only 9 percent of rural Indians own a phone, compared to 66 percent of city dwellers. Tagged the “next accelerator” for mobile growth, the rural market is the new target of telecoms companies, who are working together to bring infrastructure to remote areas quickly and cheaply.

The pervasiveness of the mobile phone – at least in the Indian imagination, if not yet in the shirt pocket or sari fold – makes the concept of political participation via telecommunication devices more this-worldly than one might think. The latest TV commercial from Idea Cellular, a mobile service operator with a pan-Indian customer base of 36 million, gives a plausible rendition of participative decision-making via the humble text-message. Confronted with the dilemma of signing off on building permission for a shopping mall, a minister’s personal assistant proffers his phone and suggests she “ask the people.” As handsets beep and vibrate across her constituency, a vibrant cast of farmers and shopkeepers – together with a wrestler and a woman reclining on a yacht – deliver their reply: the shopping mall gets a unanimous “Na!.” Instantaneous information dissemination by mobile phone is already a reality in some Indian states, where SMS early warning systems are in place in the event of natural disasters.

WOOING the plugged-in generation might seem like a very contemporary way of tapping into Young India, but strategies for appealing to youth are not entirely new, and nor are they limited to websites, YouTube or the blogosphere. Making brands out of politicians has been a common and enduring theme of the Indian election scene. Cricket icons and film stars are revered by young Indians; either as political sidekicks, or as candidates themselves, many of them have stolen the show on election rallies. The iconic Chiranjeevi, from Andhra Pradesh, with 148 Telugu and Hindi films under his belt, launched the Prajarajam Party last August in a rally that reportedly attracted 1.5 million people.

Film celebrities are also proving useful in getting young Indians interested in the political process. At the end of March, the Association for Democratic Reforms and National Election Watch launched a nationwide voter awareness campaign with Bollywood star Amir Khan as its face. The campaign encompasses film and print advertisements in a host of Indian regional languages, as well as internet and mobile communications. Khan seems a logical choice for provoking India’s youth into thinking politically. In 2006 he won a Filmfare Critics Award for his role in the box office hit Rang De Basanti, which follows a college group’s journey from political disenchantment to ardent patriotism and political awakening. The film, drawing on well-known narratives of some of India’s best-loved revolutionary icons, triggered widespread discussion and even political activism among sections of India’s youth. So conspicuous was the reaction to the film that the shorthand “RDB” was adopted by the media for references to instances of political mobilisation.

Other methods of attracting India’s youth vote centre on a more personal touch. Rahul Gandhi, the young face of the Congress Party, and fourth generation member of the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty that has monopolised Congress leadership since Indian independence, has engaged in campus rallies and visits to villages and slums. In the midst of a frenzied campaign he still finds time, and an internet connection, to maintain contact with supporters through Facebook and email. His tactics exemplify the mix of old and new which characterises the Congress approach to politics. The traditional bent of the century-old party is reflected in its recognition that the majority of voters live rural areas and can still only be reached through conventional means. Its loyalty to election rallies in the countryside might pay dividends at the ballot box.

Despite Congress’ reluctance to buy completely into e-democracy, what this year’s campaigning shows is a paradigm shift, with the words “young” and “politics” linking hands in the media and skipping through a number of election manifestos. Yet the Young India obsession is not entirely new.

The celebration of the nation’s youth has bubbled up, in part, from among India’s elite. In 2002, former Indian President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam published his slim book Ignited Minds, which called for the awakening of young Indians to “unleash the power within India.” Kalam’s book ends with a “Song of Youth” in which a young citizen pledges to “work and sweat for a great vision… Developed India.” Another national luminary, the co-founder of Infosys, Nandan Nilekani, also made conspicuous reference to the latent potential of India’s youth in his recent book Imagining India. He presents India as “a young, fresh-faced nation in a graying world” and its vast young human capital as a “demographic dividend” that is the key to future productivity and growth.

Nilekani and Kalam both share the belief that their country’s burgeoning youth is the key to India’s rise as a global force in knowledge production and innovation. Their conclusions echo the Task Force Report produced by the Indian government’s Planning Commission in 2001, which sketched out a roadmap to “India as a Knowledge Superpower” and highlighted the role of India’s youth in creating a knowledge society.

Politicians have been quick to seize on this rhetoric of progress and join in the heralding of India’s dazzling, young future. Yet while the growing recognition of India’s youth as major stakeholders in the country’s progress has led to their political acknowledgement, it has not resulted in a greater role for young Indians in the nation’s political life. In fact, the average age of parliamentarians has actually increased in recent years. The number of MPs under the age of forty declined significantly during the 1990s, dropping from 102 in 1996 to sixty-one in the last national election in 2004. Young MPs accounted for only 11 per cent of seats at the mid-point of the most recent parliamentary term.

This might not be a top-down conspiracy, however. In a nationwide study conducted in 2008, the New Delhi-based company Marketing and Development Research Associates found that two-thirds of voters prefer experienced political candidates to their younger counterparts. This helps explain why the thirty-eight year old Rahul Gandhi projects the fresher side of the Congress party, yet seventy-six year old Manmohan Singh remains its prime ministerial candidate.

While the hype surrounding Young India may be paying homage to the country’s greatest resource, the image of youth as a commodity rather than an active political force persists. Patterns of consumption in other parts of the world point to young people as a distinct “market segment.” But does the logic of the generation divide translate so easily into India? Tellingly, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, a professor of English at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, points out that youth “is perhaps less foregrounded as a conceptual category in the Indian subcontinent than in many other societies.” According to Nair, “traditionally, the transitional years between childhood and full-fledged adulthood appear to be marked by a representational absence in literature and art.” This social invisibility of youth in the Indian context sits uncomfortably with the political rhetoric proclaiming its significance.

Yogendra Yadav, senior fellow at the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, believes that young people in India do not “constitute a distinct political constituency nor are they a section of population with distinct political preferences, attitudes and voting patterns.” According to the results of the National Election Study 2004, age impacts far less on voting choice than class, caste, locality or gender. This contrasts with the European experience, where younger voters are seen as drivers of recent political trends such the emergence of Green parties. Yadav concludes that “in their political opinions, the youth are not very different from the rest of the population.”

The main issue facing India’s youth in the 2009 elections is the same one that confronts the population as a whole: there are no clear ideological poles to cluster around, and no all-India issues to contest. In the highly fragmented party political context of India, the result of the election will, once again, be the sum of several fractured parts. Just as there is no average Indian, there is no average young Indian. In this sense, India and Youngistaan have something in common: they mean something different to each and every citizen.

While the Indian youth is numerically important, even if it could be accessed via the internet it is not a monolithic entity. New campaign methods certainly highlight India’s new tech-savvy edge, but they speak the idiom of the middle classes, and of a more affluent and educated urban India, rather than that of youth. Some of the most avid users of the internet, India’s journalists, have helped feed the media myth of Pepsi-swigging IT-literate, English-speaking youngsters who care about politics and are ripe for the picking.

So why the attachment to the iPhone, Advani? India’s ageing political elites may be out of touch with the reality of India’s young electorate but this hasn’t stopped them envisioning a bright, young and shining India of the future. Embracing the value of forward-looking technology is one way of living on the cutting-edge of that dream.

A glance at Advani’s BJP manifesto reveals twin pledges to serve Young India’s aspirations and bring broadband to its villages. It seems these elections and their victors will decide just how “connected” the country’s young demographic will feel to the political process of the future. For the moment, though, India’s largest political website has little hope of reaching out to India’s largest “constituency.” •

The post Looking for Youngistaan appeared first on Inside Story.

IN THE LATE 1960s a small girl set out with her family from a Delhi shantytown to visit her grandparents in one of the many thousands of villages dotted across India. It was a long journey and her parents began to chat with their fellow passengers on the bus. All was well until someone asked where they would be staying in the village. When her parents revealed that their destination was the Chamar Mohalla – the area usually found on the outskirts of a village populated by people on the lowest rung of the caste hierarchy – the other passengers stopped speaking and the girl recalls them physically shrinking away from her family. Her mother explained to her that the caste to which her family belonged was considered by other Indians to be low and unclean. Her response, she said later, was to “hate the caste system with all my might.”

More than forty years later this little girl, known simply as Mayawati, has become the unchallenged hero of lower castes across much of north India. Increasingly, she is also gathering support among other oppressed (and not so oppressed) groups across India. Forbes magazine last year named her as one of the world’s one hundred most powerful women – more powerful than the head of the World Health Organization and the vice chancellor of Harvard University and only marginally less powerful than the chief executive of Yahoo.

In May 2007 Mayawati became chief minister of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, for the fourth time. With Uttar Pradesh’s population numbering around 170 million people, this makes Mayawati responsible for more people’s lives than the leaders of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia or Japan. On taking the oath of office she declared that “nobody can stop me from becoming prime minister.”

If you haven’t heard of the fifty-three year old, it’s no surprise. State politics in India rarely makes news and so far Mayawati’s direct influence has been limited to Uttar Pradesh. But after her outstanding win in 2007 and with her party steadily gaining seats in other states, her ultimate goal is no impossibility. If she does become prime minister, she will be unlike any other Indian leader we have seen.

Few doubt her resolve and political ability. During April and May of this year, when millions of Indians get the chance to vote in the next general election, we’ll find out if a majority of Indians agree. If she fulfils her dream, some are even suggesting that she should be seen as India’s counterpart to Barack Obama, a representative of a historically oppressed segment of society reaching the pinnacle of political power. That’s not because she’s a woman – South Asia’s female leaders include the steely Indira Gandhi, who first became prime minister of India in the 1960s, and the recently elected prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina – but because she is a Dalit, the caste historically known as “untouchables” and referred to under the Indian Constitution as Scheduled Castes. How she became so politically powerful in a society which, despite what many urban middle class Indians may like to think, is still riddled with caste discrimination, is a compelling story.

The Dalits in Uttar Pradesh love her, coming in their thousands from far flung villages to hear their Behenji speak at political rallies. She tells them that she is proud to have been born into a Dalit family. “I am the daughter of a Chamar [a Dalit]. I am a Chamar. I am yours.” Caste continues to be the primary reason for their experience of discrimination, oppression, violence, poverty and general exclusion from wider society. Hearing Mayawati take pride in her caste and refuse to accept its traditionally negative value is an empowering experience for those who attend these rallies. In Uttar Pradesh in particular, Dalits claim that her leadership and political success has provided them with dignity and the courage to speak up against their oppressors.

In the big cities of Delhi and Mumbai, meanwhile, the urban middle classes feel alienated from her culture and idiom and fear her influence. Mayawati as a chief minister is one thing but an India with her as prime minister points to a disturbing new world in which they may not find a place. As a Hindi speaking Dalit, she shares neither their culture not their language. One blogger notes the reaction of a young middle class Indian: “If Mayawati becomes PM, won’t that lower India's prestige? She is corrupt, crude and unprincipled. Doesn’t India need a prime minister who is more presentable to the world?” The sense of disconnection between Mayawati’s politics and the lives and concerns of India’s well-off middle classes is palpable.

MAYAWATI WAS BORN on 15 January 1956, the second of nine children from a family who originally hailed from the village of Badalpur in Uttar Pradesh. Unlike most of India’s Dalits, she grew up in the city, in the lower middle class Delhi suburb, Inderpuri, after her father was transferred there by the posts and telegraphs department. Her father, a low level clerk, had access to a regular, if modest, salary, but with nine children the family’s living space was cramped and life was difficult financially.

But Mayawati’s family was able to send her to a government school and understood the importance of education as a means to a better life. Her father encouraged her to study to become a district collector, a government post which would give her both financial security and a significant amount of power. The family wasn’t overly political but – like a lot of Dalit families – each year they would attend festivals celebrating the life of Ambedkar, a Dalit who had become a government minister and who wrote extensively about the condition of the lower castes and how the oppression could be overcome. This early access to a radically different way of thinking about society coupled with her own life experience had an enormous influence on the young Mayawati.

Although she doesn’t appear to have been a brilliant student, Mayawati was a hard worker. She went on to university and gained a bachelor of arts and a teaching qualification. While working in Delhi as a teacher and studying for a law degree she became interested in Dalit politics; she was first noticed by the founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party, Kanshi Ram, when she spoke out passionately at a public meeting against an upper caste politician who referred to Dalits as “Harijan,” a term coined by Mahatma Gandhi that is considered patronising by Dalits. She condemned Gandhi, got people to chant slogans and brought Dalits in the hall to their feet. Ram, who had been involved in mobilising Dalits since the late 1970s, quickly recognised that Mayawati displayed the raw passion and oratory skills required to stir the masses. From that time until his death a few years ago, they were a team with a focused vision for the future of Dalit politics.

The driving force behind Mayawati’s passionate brand of politics is her desire to end caste discrimination and usher in a society that pays more than lip service to the ideals of equality and fairness. Officially, the practice of untouchability and caste discrimination was outlawed in the Indian Constitution in 1950. Unofficially, this did nothing to change the daily lives of millions of Dalits across the country, even after the Prevention of Atrocities Act was introduced to enforce the constitution and bring perpetrators of caste violence to justice.

Discovering the role caste plays in contemporary India is not straightforward. Some urban educated Indians argue that caste hasn’t existed as a social institution since independence and so it no longer has any bearing on people’s lives. But a closer look at the lives of Dalits, and in particular those who live in the rural areas (along with about 75 per cent of the population), reveals a disturbingly different story. Caste does matter. Sometimes it merely operates in ways that cause annoyance – a social slight from someone in a higher caste family, or an upper caste parent discouraging their children from playing with Dalit children. At other times caste has a profound impact on physical, emotional and economic wellbeing.

A recent Action Aid study of more than 500 villages across eleven states illustrates the ongoing problems faced by Dalits and underlines the vast gulf that exists between their lives and those of the urban-based elite. Surveying the prevalence of behaviour that amounts to the practice of untouchability, the study found significant discrimination in the provision of public services including the denial of barber services (in almost half of surveyed villages), separate seating in restaurants (a third of villages), and separate utensils in restaurants (a third of villages). In terms of restrictions on public behaviour faced by Dalits, many villages ban them from having marriage processions on roads (nearly half), from waring new or bright clothes (almost one-in-five). In a quarter of the villages, Dalits were forced to stand rather than sit when in the presence of higher caste men. It takes only a little imagination to consider the psychological impact of being part of a group forced to use separate cups and forks in your local restaurant so that you don’t “pollute” other customers.

Of even greater concern is the fact that physical violence against Dalits is not a thing of the past. The National Crime Records Bureau reports that each day two Dalits are killed and three Dalit women are raped; a Dalit is assaulted every eighteen minutes. Newspaper reports and activist web sites are awash with examples of violence and discrimination occurring across the country – primarily in rural areas.

In October 2007 in a Madhya Pradesh village, a Dalit woman refused to work alone to harvest a crop for a local farmer. The upper caste farm owners tied her to a tree and beat her up, fracturing her limbs. In a final gesture to ensure the maximum possible humiliation, when she regained consciousness and asked for water, the perpetrators instead gave her urine to drink.

Violence is not limited to adult Dalits. There have been numerous documented accounts of children and babies being killed – sometimes in isolated incidents and other times as the result of organised, violent attacks on entire communities and families. Just last week a three month old baby girl was killed because her twenty-five year old mother refused to wash her feet and hands before drawing water from the local well – a centuries-old custom imposed on Dalits only. She was told that Dalits were dirty and not permitted to draw water without first washing. When she refused and attempted to seek help from the local police, she was attacked by seven men who snatched the baby from her mother’s arms, throwing her to the ground and killing her.

Under existing Indian law everything from segregated seating in a restaurant to assaults and murder is illegal. The problem lies not with the law but with the state’s ability and will to implement the law. The BSP points out that Dalits, with neither political nor economic clout, find it hard to get local police to register complaints against influential landowners or those with money and power. Sometimes the police will be bribed into non-action. At other times, they fail to protect the victims from further harassment by the accused who roam free pending trial. Until the BSP came to power, very few police officers were Dalits. The BSP’s ability to gain democratic control over the state’s institutions of power (such as the police force and judiciary) has been a vital part of ensuring the safety of Dalits in Uttar Pradesh and their increased liberation from the threat of violence and intimidation.

Above: Mayawati addresses a press conference in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh on 11 May 2007 after her party’s victory in the Uttar Pradesh elections
Photo: EPA/STR

THE BAHUJAN SAMAJ PARTY, or BSP, entered the Uttar Pradesh political arena in 1984 with the goal of fighting for the rights of oppressed segments of Indian society. While mainly focusing on Dalits, the party’s rhetoric always included non-Dalit groups such as Muslims and other oppressed castes. At the time, the party was keenly aware that winning electoral power required Dalits to adopt a more confident approach. Mayawati knew that she needed to raise their self-esteem and undo generations of submissive behaviour. The party launched into Uttar Pradesh politics with radical slogans that the upper castes found shocking. Using symbols, language and idioms which were familiar to her audience, Mayawati spoke at length at rallies; with her fire and passion she motivated people to cast votes for the party rather than supporting whoever the local landlord told them to vote for. She built statues of Dalit heroes (including herself and Kanshi Ram) in towns and villages around the state, asserting the right of Dalit identity to be celebrated in the public sphere. A well trained and committed BSP cadre travelled extensively by foot, bicycle and train to spread the message and enlist support.

The strategy represented a major change from the way that Dalits had been wooed in the past. There is little doubt that much of post independence electoral politics saw Dalit votes providing an important element in the electoral fortunes of the Congress Party. But the appeals to Dalits rarely used language or cultural symbols that bore any relationship their cultural identity and experiences. Instead, Congress offered Dalits protection from violence as well as access to poverty alleviation programs which depoliticised their cultural experiences.

Upper caste/class journalists have mocked Mayawati’s approach, calling her a crude “casteist” politician and even accusing her of murdering language (the ultimate insult from the cultural elite but not one that she particularly cared about). They accuse her of corruption and point to the wealth she has accumulated while in politics. The BSP has never worried about what journalists have to say in the elite newspapers and magazines that their followers are unlikely to read. Mayawati’s approach worked and the growth and success of the party in the state has slowly changed feelings of inferiority and inspired Dalits to stand up for themselves.

In the 1989 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections the party won a modest thirteen seats. Since then, it has gone from strength to strength, culminating in its majority win in 2007. Mayawati had been chief minister three times between 1995 and 2004, but always in unstable coalitions for short periods. Knowing her time in power was likely to be short lived, she aggressively pursued the transfer and promotion of Dalits and loyal party workers into key government positions so that policies favourable to her followers would be implemented and justice for Dalits in rural areas was more likely. Government workers found to be obstructing her programs or police officers who refused to investigate atrocities or acts of criminality against Dalits were transferred or dismissed. The efficacy of this approach supports Mayawati’s long held belief that the emancipation of oppressed groups requires a one-point plan – win power.

Mayawati’s early success was largely due to her ability to forge a political identity from the cultural and social identities of Dalits and their common experience of oppression. But the numerical strength of Dalits in India (a little more than 15 per cent) was never going to be sufficient to win power outright. No political party in India will ever win by appealing only to a particular caste, or arguably to caste issues alone.

The 2007 state election demonstrated Mayawati’s ability to build cross caste alliances and appeal to a wider section of the electorate on the basis of economic and social issues facing people across the state. As far back at 2002, she shrewdly began to build support for the BSP among Brahmins, who are traditionally at the top of the caste structure. Just as Dalits fear the landholding castes in the middle of the caste system, Brahmins in Uttar Pradesh felt intimidated by this group and disempowered by the ruling Samajwadi Party, which had run a nepotistic and relatively lawless government. Her appeal to Brahmin fears of middle caste assertion was supported by a series of Brahmin rallies where she showed herself to be just as capable of tapping into upper caste symbols. In villages across Uttar Pradesh the BSP also set up Dalit–Brahmin Brotherhood Committees to work together on social issues and election strategy. Her approach paid off, with the party increasing its share of Brahmin votes in the state election from 6 per cent in 2003 to 17 per cent in 2007.

Mayawati campaigned on a platform of law and order, and on a promise of development for all people in need, irrespective of their caste. Coupled with some careful handing out of party tickets to ensure castes from across the board were well represented, this was enough to win her power.

In a country plagued with such a significant disparity in wealth between the top and the bottom –135 million out of the 188 million households are considered deprived – and with 59 per cent of Dalits in Uttar Pradesh living below the poverty line, it is significant that the BSP fights for the rights of the oppressed via the ballot box. The party does not engage in violence or aim for a violent overthrow of government. It is looking for social transformation and equality through electoral politics. At times this focus has attracted criticism from Dalit activists, but the leadership obviously believes that a violent quest for social change is usually paid for disproportionately by the poor. The supporting evidence comes from across the state border, in Bihar, where the Naxalite insurgency has led to the formation of armed upper caste citizen armies with devastating results for the poor and the vulnerable.

SINCE THE DECLINE of Congress Party dominance, it’s a brave person who tries to predict the outcome of an Indian election. This doesn’t stop Indian psephologists – but they frequently get it wrong, and never more spectacularly than in the last general election when the vast majority of them assumed that the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, with its India Shining campaign and emphasis on the trappings of a middle class existence, was a certainty to win. Few thought to consider the relevance of a successful call-centre industry to a drought-stricken farmer or what a bullish stockmarket might mean to a rag picker.

Neither of the two major parties, Congress and the BJP, is likely to win sufficient votes to form government on their own. Recent state elections have brought success for both parties with the surprise being the significant number of votes going to the BSP.

The most likely result of this year’s national election is a hung parliament, not an unusual outcome for India. Out of a total of 543 seats at the last election, no single party won more than 145, far short of the 272 needed to form government. If Mayawati manages to win around fifty seats she may find herself the leader of the third largest party in the Lok Sabha and both major parties will have to negotiate with her if they hope to form government. Even then they will still need the support of regional parties and the communist parties (who are opposed to the BJP’s communal bent and still angry with Congress over the nuclear deal with the United States).

Although the BSP only won nineteen Lok Sabha seats in the last general election – all from Uttar Pradesh – things have changed significantly since then. In 2004, Mayawati held only 98 seats in the Uttar Pradesh state legislative assembly. She now holds 206. In other state assembly elections last year the BSP won six seats in Rajasthan (compared to only two in 2003), two in Chattisgarh (same as in 2003) and seven in Madhya Pradesh (compared to only two in 2003). Based on these recent results, it’s safe to assume that the BSP will improve significantly on its 2004 Lok Sabha results.

Mayawati is an astute politician and the BSP has shown itself to be extraordinarily well organised. The party had chosen more than 70 per cent of its candidates for the upcoming election by early last year, allowing each candidate a significant amount of time to get to know their constituency and make the right connections. Fifty seats is certainly not out of the question.

MAYAWATI’S TEMPERAMENT is the unpredictable element in this scenario. She cares nought for what other politicians and the elite think of her and doesn’t hesitate to let them know. It isn’t clear whether she will give her support to one of the major parties in order for them to form government. If she does she is likely to extract weighty concessions. One possibility is that she will offer support to either Congress or the BJP in return for the position of deputy prime minister. Working in coalition again with a party she actively dislikes may not unduly worry her. She is the master of compromise politics, having formed alliances with every other major political party in Uttar Pradesh over the past fourteen years and could easily see this as an acceptable step on her climb to the top. She is nothing if not pragmatic.

Of course there is another possibility – a long shot but a possibility nonetheless. In this scenario, the BSP, the left, and various regional parties would come together to form a non-Congress, non-BJP coalition government, with Mayawati as prime minister. This possibility was nearly put to the test in the middle of 2008 when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government was forced to contest a trust vote in the Lok Sabha after the left withdrew its support following the signing of the nuclear deal with the United States.

If a third front alliance did come to power, this Dalit ki beti (daughter of a Dalit) will have come a long way from that bus ride to her grandparent’s village, and the hopes and aspirations of millions of Indians will shift irrevocably. •

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Like many other people who live in Mumbai I’ve had afternoon tea at the Taj Mahal Hotel recently, enjoyed a few gin and tonics at the Leopold Cafe and caught trains from Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, which is one of India’s busiest railway stations. And like many people here I awoke to the terror attacks in Mumbai on Thursday 27 November and soon became glued to the TV coverage and the breaking news on the websites of English language daily newspapers. Having lived in Mumbai for the past four months, I responded to the threat of violence like many other Mumbaikers and stayed at home rather than going to work. It takes me about twenty minutes, depending on the traffic conditions, to reach the area in South Mumbai in which the terrorist attacks took place. The places attacked are frequented not only by many Mumbaikers for business and social activities, but also by domestic and visitors.

The overall death toll at the moment remains at 172, including twenty-six foreigners, and 248 injured. Nine terrorists were killed and one captured. What is different about this terror attack on India’s most cosmopolitan and modern city is the magnitude, scale and planning of the attacks and the ensuing three-day siege and carnage. During this time the streets in South Mumbai were deserted, malls and restaurants empty, and most wedding ceremonies, pre-wedding functions and other social gatherings were cancelled. Many residents felt like hostages in their own neighbourhood as commandoes patrolled the streets.

While I was not personally affected by the violence, I have friends and colleagues who were. They all tell stories of anxiety and anger, and the hope that something positive can come of such experiences. Terror attacks, though, are not new in Mumbai. On 11 July 2006, seven bomb blasts on suburban trains killed 181 and injured 898 people. On 12 March 1993, a series of thirteen bomb explosions took place, killing more than 257 people and injuring 713.

The first target last week was the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, where 56 people were killed when two of terrorists fired randomly at commuters. Then the Cama Hospital and the Leopold Cafe were targeted. The sieges took place at the Oberai Trident hotel, the Taj Mahal hotel, and at Nariman House. The siege at the historic and iconic Taj Mahal Hotel lasted for sixty hours. These attacks have triggered outrage from ordinary people against a widely perceived apathy and ineptitude by politicians in addressing the security and intelligence problems that allowed this to happen. Politicians are now viewed by many as spending more time and public money on their own security rather than that of citizens.

Three incidents highlight these lapses in security and intelligence. First, the Navy and the Coast Guard allowed the terrorists to land on the shores of Mumbai. The Navy chief of staff, Admiral Sureesh Mehta, has admitted there had been a “systemic failure” on the part of the security and intelligence establishment and that the Navy was not given any prior “actionable” intelligence inputs. Second, the National Security Guard, whose base is at Manesar in Haryana, had to spend an hour travelling to Delhi Airport and then wait another one and half hours before taking off for Mumbai because this paramilitary force does not have its own air wing, despite repeated requests. Third, the Mumbai Fire Brigade, which carried out rescue operations at the Taj Mahal and Oberai Trident hotels, did so without bulletproof vests and other personal safety protection equipment. While the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation approved a proposal thirteen months ago to allow the brigade to import such equipment, it is awaiting cost clearance.

The political anger has so far claimed three scalps. The first to go was the home minister, Shivraj Patil. An editorial in the Times of India said that “his ineptitude was evident not just in the rise in terror attacks during his tenure in the home ministry but also in his inability to communicate the government’s will to crack down effectively on terrorism.” He has been replaced by the finance minister, P. Chidambaram.

Public opinion has also forced the Maharashtra state’s chief minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, and his deputy, the state home minister, Raosaheb Rao Patil, to resign for being perceived as inept administrators and insensitive to the problems facing people in the state. Patil’s insensitivity was highlighted when he uttered (in Hindi) during the sieges that “small incidents like this always happen in big cities.” He will also be remembered for his moral policing, which had closed down bars in Mumbai and put hundreds of dancers out of their jobs, forcing many into prostitution and some, it’s alleged, to commit suicide.

The Congress Party took two days to accept Deshmukh’s resignation as it grappled with the issue of leadership change in the state. It was Desmukh’s visit to the Taj Mahal hotel, with his actor son and a noted Bollywood director – which made the inspection tour of the devastated site almost look like a location scout for a film shoot – that was the final straw for many people.

Along with their anger, city residents have also been battling paranoia, panic and rumours. Sounds like gunfire caused panic last Friday at CST station, resulting in train services being halted or half-an-hour. On day three the Mumbai Police sought the blackout of some cable news channels in South Mumbai in a bid to quell fear and rumours flying across the city. Even several days after the Taj siege ended there were multiple text messages warning of possible attacks on schools and hotels being sent. This prompted the Mumbai police to issue an advisory to the citizens that these were “false” messages and assure them of safety.

There has also been widespread criticism of the electronic media’s coverage of the unfolding events. The competition among the TV channels resulted in breaches of journalist ethics, including an interview by India TV with a terrorist who was reportedly in Nariman House. The detailed and live coverage of the battle between the commandoes and the terrorists over the three days has raised the question of the safety of the hostages and the success of the operation was put at risk. Sources close to the National Security Guard have said that the live footage of commandoes being dropped onto the rooftop of Nariman House on 28 November, not only compromised their safety but also the safety the five hostages inside the building. Later, journalists charged into the newly secured Taj Mahal hotel despite requests from the National Security Guard to stay off the site.

The News Broadcasters Association of India has responded by announcing a meeting this week to consider the development of a self-regulatory code of conduct to be followed in any similar situations in the future. The Information and Broadcasting Ministry in New Delhi has asked TV channels to refrain from repeated broadcasts of the terror attacks.

THE TERROR ATTACKS have raised three questions for me. First, what are the implications for India–Pakistan relations, which have recently shown some signs of improvement? A growing body of evidence suggests that the attack was planned by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani-based Islamic terrorist organisation which seeks to drive out Indian security forces from the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir and is allegedly supported by the Pakistan intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence. Laskar-e-Taiba was also implicated in the July 2006 bomb blasts. The political response to date has been restrained.

India’s foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, says only that “time will show” what action India will take, and that “every sovereign nation has the right to protect its territorial integrity and take action as it saw fit.” But he cautioned journalists against misinterpreting this to mean taking military action. The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has asserted that “no coward, no terrorist, no enemy of our secular and democratic republic will ever succeed in destroying the unity of our country.”

Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari has renewed his pledge of no first use of nuclear weapons and has blamed the attack on non-state actors, while implicating his own intelligence agency in past acts of terrorism. Pakistan has offered India a “joint investigating mechanism” to probe the Mumbai attacks, and suggested that the National Security Advisers of both countries jointly head it.

Secondly, can the city maintain its record of not having witnessed a Hindu-Muslim riot for the last fifteen years? Several responses from the Muslim community might help to maintain this record. The Muslim Jama Masjid Trust, which runs the Marine Lines Bada Qabrastan (cemetery), has refused to bury the bodies of the nine terrorists. Normally, unclaimed bodies thought to be Muslims are given to the nearest Muslim graveyard for burial after three days. Several Muslim organisations are planning a silent rally from CST to the Oberai Trident hotel on 8 December on the theme of “killers of innocents are enemies of Islam” and “our motherland’s enemies are our enemies.”

The Hindu right has so far remained silent. But as 6 December is the eighteenth anniversary of the demolition by Hindu fundamentalists of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, the police are reviewing all security arrangements in the city.

My third question concerns whether the public anger against politicians can be translated into effective and long term electoral reform in India. While some of my Indian colleagues say that such outpourings have occurred before after terror attacks, I am optimistic that change may be possible, especially viewed against the economic instability that has been introduced into the lives of the young, in particular, and the significance of the election of Barak Obama.

There have been impromptu vigils and peace marches in Mumbai and other major cities, bringing together not only people from across India’s diverse religious and ethnic spectrum but also people from across the often deeper economic and social divide. The mood of anger against politicians has been evident on the posters and banners which have been carried by participants: “Enough of terrorism,” “Politicians get out” and “We want actions not words.” The presence of large numbers of affluent middle-class people at these rallies – people who have long been disaffected by the Indian political process – was significant. As one participant at the 20,000-strong rally in front of the Gateway to India observed, “If the informed and educated don’t lend a voice of unity and strength now who will?” The other significant presence was the many younger people who were largely brought together by email, city-wide text messages and postings on Facebook.

If these outpourings of anger and grief coalesce into a greater involvement in the political process, electoral reform may be possible. Reforms are necessary to address the perceived widespread corruption and lack of accountability of politicians at all levels of government. There is also a need to make all candidates declare any criminal record, to give consideration to holding state and general elections at separate times, and only allowing a candidate to only stand in one constituency rather than multiple ones at present. As there are state assembly elections in Maharashtra and national elections scheduled for April–May 2009, people will soon have the opportunity to express such sentiments. •

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