Facts from figures

For the past few months, we have had all manner of people and expert bodies tell us that India’s suddenly begun to prosper. Our foreign exchange reserves have crossed $100 billion; our rate of growth has come close to 8 per cent; the stock markets are registering new highs; industries and agriculture are both doing very well; this and a whole lot of other very heart- warming news about our collective welfare are being announced in the press and on television.

Now, very conveniently, the general elections are being advanced, and we can hope to hear much, much more about how well we’ve done, and are doing, and how much better off we will be in the future. The truly real Asian tiger, certainly the biggest of them all. China? Well, there we can quickly play the democracy card; we’re a free democracy, they aren’t, so are we really sure they’re doing as well as they say they are, and so on. Yes their cities are very fashionable and modern but what about their rural areas, we can ask. Very clever move, that.

Except that they may well ask us about our rural areas. That we would regard not as clever but as subversive. Nonetheless, subversion apart, we will have to admit that whatever our nice cheerful figures, poverty stalks our villages, as does malnutrition, underemployment, illiteracy and disease. One doesn’t need reams of figures. One just has to go out there and look around. For that matter, one has to avoid our instinctive reaction to the slums — jhuggis in Delhi, chawls in Mumbai — that constitute the largest portion of our cities, and stop looking away from them. The nice things that are being said about our economic revival have little meaning in these areas.

This is of course what the Congress and its allies — whoever they are — will repeatedly present as the true face of India, just as the National Democratic Alliance will parade the nice, cheerful figures to emphasize that awful phrase, the “feel-good factor”. Not that either side will have much of a manifesto; in power both will do much the same things, have no doubts about that. But the election has nothing to do with manifestos any more; it has to do with climbing into the driver’s seat. Do you climb into the right-hand seat, as Atalji plans to do once again, and drive on the left — or in the centre like most Indian drivers — or climb into the left-hand seat as Soniaji dreams of doing, and drive on the right — again, really in the centre, like Atalji?

Meanwhile, what of the befuddled people who will be inundated with all these figures of newfound prosperity and continuing misery? Well, the best that they can do is carry on with whatever one is doing, doggedly, steadfastly, knowing that we are living in a world that’s not perfect, in which there is injustice, lawlessness, and all that it breeds, but also some attempts at providing justice and the rule of law.

That really is the key. Listen to them all, and keep looking around you at what the actual picture is. In the recently concluded NRI jamboree which has achieved nothing tangible except provide a platform to extol the virtues of governmental successes in various fields, one American NRI appears to have spoken bitterly about having marshalled some $680 million for a construction project in Maharashtra which came to nothing because of red tape. At the same time, in the Tamil Nadu pavilion, visitors were told that the chief minister had signed an agreement with a consortium from Singapore to set up an industrial park, improve Chennai’s port and over time, change the face of that city and its suburbs. So there’s a negative experience and a positive one that have happened in all likelihood at around the same time.

The story isn’t very different with what is happening in the rural areas with health facilities, schools and other facilities like safe drinking water sources. There are villages where these are adequate, and where they function satisfactorily; and there are also many more where they do not. It is true that in the majority they do not, yet the very fact that they are working in some means it is possible to get them to work in the others. But as of now they do not exist, like the roads in Madhya Pradesh that undid Digvijay Singh in the last elections.

And what of corruption, that cancer that has been, over decades, eating into the vitals of all public services? This is an area where the feel-good factor must take wing and disappear. Nothing very substantial has been done by anyone, and there’s no use blaming this or that party. All parties that have been in power have either turned a blind eye to it or made reassuring noises and done nothing. Arresting one Subhash Sharma, lately vice-chairman of the Delhi Development Authority, or the other Sharma who was commissioner of police, Mumbai (what’s with all these Sharmas?) or a Telgi, for that matter, doesn’t mean corruption has ceased to exist. It is now a way of life with most police officials down to constables in our cities and towns, and with virtually all officials in the municipalities and corporations in this country. They pursue their garnering of illegal wealth, in some instances, quite openly; but whatever the manner, the fact is most of them never get caught.

They retire and live off their considerable wealth, appear in the garb of respectable senior citizens who go out for their morning walks and meet other senior citizens at various respectable functions — they marry off their children like conscientious fathers and mothers, are doting grandparents, and yet have lived evil, grasping lives, amassing wealth in manners tainted by the slime of graft and bribery. They may smile at you with great warmth, but their breath is foul with dishonesty. And it is so because the systems that could have brought them to book, and sent them not into contented retirement but to prisons where they rightfully belong, failed or were never actuated.

It finally is a question of priority. Just how much importance do you give to honesty in public life? And how much to making sure the annual growth rate touches 8 per cent? But, equally, it isn’t an either-or situation. Both can be tackled by a government that is determined to eradicate dishonesty as much as it is to developing the country. And that must be our hope — that in the election to come, this will be given the importance that it deserves. Because all of us want to see a prosperous India, but we also want to see an India that becomes prosperous with honour and dignity.