Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

It has been said that there are some who need to be loved by one person, some who need the love of many, and others who need to be loved by the entire world. But even when you fall into the last category, it seems, it is in the attentions of a single individual that the love of the multitude becomes manifest. 6

Two sisters who had locked themselves inside their Noida residence for the past seven months and were living in inhuman conditions were rescued by the local police on Tuesday. The sisters, both in their forties, were rushed to hospital, where the condition of one of them was described as critical owing to severe malnutrition and dehydration.

Both sisters have PhDs and were until recently successful professionals. They are said to have fallen into severe depression after their father, an army officer, passed away a few years ago. The sisters also have an estranged brother living separately in Delhi. He and his family reportedly had no contact with the sisters for the past four years. The death of the family’s pet dog a few months ago is said to have aggravated their depression. The sisters had lost their mother much earlier.

A doctor in the hospital said, “The sisters arrived in an extremely emaciated condition. The elder sister was unconscious and suffering from internal and oral bleeding. The other sister is very disoriented in terms of time and space.”

— News item, April 2011 7

In the older centres of the global market, observers felt they knew exactly what all these developments in far-off India meant. The technology companies, the cafés, the mixed-gender groups of professionals drinking after work, the alternative lifestyles: Americans recognised it all immediately as — America. Knowing publications such as the New York Times ‘explained’ to their readers how the landscape of the rising Asian giant was, through the spread of cappuccino drinking, rapidly becoming just like their own. ‘How India Became America’ 8went the title of one such article:

Recently, both Starbucks and Amazon announced that they would be entering the Indian market […] As one Indian newspaper put it, this could be “the final stamp of globalization”. For me, though, the arrival of these two companies, so emblematic of American consumerism, and so emblematic, too, of the West Coast techie culture that has infiltrated India’s own booming technology sector, is a sign of something more distinctive. It signals the latest episode in India’s remarkable process of Americanization.

Cold-War suspicion between India and the United States was laid exuberantly to rest in March 2000, when Bill Clinton made the first state visit to India of any US president since 1978. His tour came at the peak of the Nasdaq’s technology-fuelled boom, and Clinton was quick to acknowledge the contribution Indians had made to this extraordinary period of American capitalism. “Indian — Americans now run more than 750 companies in Silicon Valley alone,” he said, singling out for tribute tech godfathers Vinod Khosla, who had graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi before going to Stanford and co-founding Sun Microsystems, and Vinod Dham, who had studied at the Delhi College of Engineering, migrated to the US and masterminded the development of Intel’s Pentium chip. But the president added, “We’re moving from a brain drain to a brain gain in India because many are coming home.” India, he said, citing the successes of companies such as Infosys, is “fast becoming one of the world’s software superpowers, proving that in a globalised world, developing nations not only can succeed, developing nations can lead.” 9

Clinton’s benedictions resembled those, not of a drily detached superpower, but of an emotional older sibling. America and India shared, after all, so much of their DNA: America, too, had won independence from Britain, albeit 170 years before India; and the fact that the two countries now enjoyed such close business ties stemmed in part from the language they both inherited from this history. Both were democracies; both were extremely diverse and found their unity in a liberal constitution. And both seemed to display the same inborn predisposition towards free enterprise. In a statement that could have been a declaration of the indispensability of brotherly love, Clinton concluded, “A lot of our future depends upon whether we have the right kind of partnership with India.”

It was a theme that Indian ideologues would develop elaborately over the coming decade. As China rose, as wars against Islam brought America into engagement with India’s neighbours Pakistan and Afghanistan, Indian elites made a fervent case for the ‘natural’ partnership of their country with the superpower. “In terms of the scale and ambition of our respective political experiments, we can only be compared to one another,” said Indian historian Ramachandra Guha to Time magazine. 10The argument could of course be profoundly self-serving, as was demonstrated with its most conspicuous outcome, the Indo-US nuclear deal of 2008, which, since India refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, went against existing American law, but which Indians skilfully lobbied for nonetheless on the basis that India’s interests, in these days of Asian instability, were an essential outpost of America’s own. “The nuclear deal [is one] that the Indians regard as basic recognition of their status as a major power,” approved Fareed Zakaria, columnist at Newsweek and conspicuous promoter of the Indo-US partnership, and even if it destabilised the global nuclear equilibrium, it could present no grounds for anxiety since “India’s objectives are exactly aligned with America’s.” 11

As America’s global predominance fell subject to an increasing range of challenges, the US too found it soothing to imagine India as a ‘second America’. If the centre of global power was to shift to Asia, if American hegemony was to decline, perhaps India could provide the guarantee that American values continue to reign. The future managers of the world might look somewhat different, but inside they were exactly the same. The future of the world, in other words, presented no unpleasant surprises. It would be exactly like the present.

But American newspapers’ bucolic descriptions of couples in shopping malls and bourbon-drinking corporate executives listening to jazz seemed, in their emphasis, profoundly foreign to those who were actually living through India’s transformation. ‘Globalisation’ was not homogenisation, nor even Americanisation. The presence of American brand names did nothing to alter the fact that India was a vastly poorer country than the US, whose relationship to Western capitalism was full of historical ambivalence — and what was emerging in India looked like nothing ever seen in America. Even those Indians who sipped coffees in shopping malls felt a very different content to that activity from the one felt on the other side of the world. The shopping mall was only one part of a carved-up landscape, inner and outer — for there was no continuity between the world inside the mall and the one on the other side of its walls, where street traders, shanty towns and traffic jams awaited the departing consumer. The mall itself, moreover, had arrived as part of a rapacious economic torrent that had turned everything upside-down, destroying things human and divine, scattering objects and energies, and setting down alien needs and rituals in the rubble. Global capitalism might have appeared serene and civilised in its ancient heartlands but this was not how it felt when it suddenly burst in somewhere new. This is why the system failed to produce, at its edges, those tranquil, docile citizens that Westerners so often assumed were an inherent part of the package.