Read this book titled "In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India" by Edward Luce and enjoyed it thoroughly. He is a British journalist, who has served as the New Delhi bureau chief of Financial Times from 2001 to 2006. He is living in Washington D.C. now. His years in India, his position combined with his background (he is married to an Indian who is a World Bank economist) seems to have given him a good grip on a wide range of topics discussed in the book. Though I am not following Indian politics/headlines/hot topics closely on a daily basis, I found his assertions and assessments quite in line with my image of what is India today. In some parts of the world the subtitle seems to be modified slightly as "The Strange Rise of Modern India"..!
He starts off with a visit to Auroville, a spiritual town full of Westerners seeking India's spiritual elixir, which is home to the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. Starting from there he tours around various parts of India to get a good view of India's schizophrenic mix of ultra modern and medieval economies lingering side by side. Second chapter discusses the extent to which the state permeates people's daily lives, how well entrenched the civilian cadre of officers are, and despite knowing well how corrupt government officials are, and poor villagers still seeing landing a government job (from which no one gets fired) as their path to economic salvation. Moving on, the next section discussing north and south India paints a clear picture of how different the quality of governance is. He provides pointers like the literacy rate in Tamilnadu (about 90%) Vs. Bihar (less than 50%), well paved roads and seemless WiFi service in Hyderabad full of MNC software giants Vs. Patna (capital of Bihar) where making a phone call from your room to the hotel front desk is tough and all the roads are broken, while (even economically poor rural) women in Tamilnadu's coastal region discuss and complain about how they have been paid only 90% of the tsunami relief monies, women in rural north Indian villages won't even come out of their huts to talk to a foreigner. He himself explicitly states that he is not trying to portray Tamilnadu as heaven but compared to several northern states, southern states have much better quality of governance, only 10 to 20% of funds being siphoned off compared to 70 to 80% in the north.
Subsequent chapters talk in depth about castes, Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and the sycophants that surrounds the leaders, the Kashmir issue with Pakistan (he had interviewed General Musharraf), the triangular dance going on between India, China and US each with its own intentions and end goals, nuclear deterrent, Bollywood movies and so forth. Everywhere he manages to retain readers' attention.
He visits Dar-ul-Uloom -the House of Knowledge- a large Islamic school in a town called Deoband. The Maulana (an honorific title given to the Muslim leader) asks him if he wants any refershment to which Luce responds with a request for a Nescafe coffee, which is probably the only kind of coffee you will get in those parts. The Maulana says that he had earlier issued a fatwa preventing all faithfuls from consuming any of the American or British products to protest against their attacks on the muslim brethren. Luce trying to argue that he is not a faithful (since he is not aMuslim) and Nestle is actually a company in Switzerland, etc. doesn't help. Still the Maulana after thinking through it a bit comes up with a solution saying the fatwa he issued applies only to products bought after 9/11 and so by locating an instant coffee sachet bought before 9/11, they manage to serve him a cup of coffee..! With such a convenient & thoughtful loophole found in the fatwa for his sake, Luce says it was one of the most satisfying cup of coffee he ever had. :-)
There are no charts or graphs in the book (though there are a bunch of photographs collected in few pages in the middle) and the tone is not too academic but still the work is serious enough to dive into serious topics earnestly. It is his perception of people, places, events, organizations he had come across in India, which is a functioning anarchy. The list of big names in India that he had interviewed sound quite impressive as it ranges from political leaders (Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, Vajpayee, Lalu Prasad Yadav), industrialists (Hinduja), tech titans (Nilekani, Premji) to Bollywood stars (Amitabh Bachchan), sport stars, IAS officers, spiritual leaders (Sri Sri Ravishankar) and so on. His wit is entertaining. Describing one of the modern gurus (Ravishankar) very popular in India, he says the guru is sitting in a large prayer hall with hundreds of devotees in front, with flowing long hair and beard, with a nice air conditioner on, looking like Jesus Christ is shooting a shampoo commercial. :-) There are mild jokes thrown in once in a while pointing out things like in India "You don't cast your vote but vote your caste", India never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity, etc. While he is on the whole respectful of people & culture, he relentlessly points out all the flaws in the system as in the cases of free or subsidized products and services provided by the government purportedly to help the poor ending up filling up the coffers of the rich and resulting in the exact opposite effect of depriving the poor even more. A good case in point is free electricity state governments provide to help the poor farmers. In reality only the well connected rich farmers who don't need the freebie enjoy the delivery, run the pump sets 24x7 to irrigate their large lands endlessly as there is no incentive to turn the pumps off that results in water table getting lower and lower preventing poor farmers who can't afford electric pumps from accessing any water through their manual means.
In the last section he lists the following four problems that require urgent attention, if India had to reach its envisioned super power status in the future.
- The challenge of lifting 300 million people out of abject poverty
- Overcoming the dangers of rapid environmental degradation
- Heading off the specter of an HIV-AIDS epidemic
- Protecting and strengthening India's system of liberal democracy
His prescriptions are a bit vague and skimpy. I am also sure that we can add couple more bullets to the list or debate whether these four are the valid ones that should be on top. Similarly, Indian readers may not see a lot of new information in the book, while foreigners may not know the cast of characters well enough to enjoy the book as much as I did. But on the whole he does a nice job of presenting the background history and current status of this land of contrast well to conclude that India is not on autopilot to greatness but it would take an incompetent pilot to crash the plane.
Planning to read a similar work on China for which China Goes Global:The Partial Power by David Shambaugh looked like a good candidate. Haven't bought it yet. Do you know of anything better?
-sundar.
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