Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

The people who were complaining about these things presumably knew that working-class rents were rising as quickly as everyone else’s; they certainly knew that the price of food was going up by as much as 12 per cent a year. But these demands from working-class people were still seen as pure opportunism. Being ‘fleeced’ by the poor was a near-obsession with the city’s middle classes, who described the vegetable sellers who came to their doors as ‘thieves’, while rickshaw drivers were all out, so the truism went, to ‘take you for a ride’. India’s boom belonged to the middle classes: it was their moment, and they would fight furiously for it. In a country where the mean income was $1,400 per year, the slightest move to average out incomes would be catastrophic for the few who earned, say, $60,000 per year. So the 90 per cent were excommunicated from the middle-class project of India’s rise, and their claims on better incomes and better lives pronounced illegitimate. As if in reaction to the perennial dictum of the post-Independence period — “Remember the poor!” — it was now, so it seemed, time to forget.

And yet it goes without saying that the poor were instrumental to the new accumulation of middle-class wealth. The disaster of the Indian countryside unleashed not only a handy supply of domestic servants; it also generated a vast supply of labour for construction firms and factory owners. The labour of these millions produced fortunes for factory owners, of course, but it also funded the management consultancy firms and advertising agencies where professionals worked, it produced the gratifying stock market returns from the mining and construction companies in which they had their investments, and it built the roads on which the car-owning classes drove and the houses in which they lived. But once again, the balance was firmly in the hands of elites, because of the sheer quantity of willing labouring hands. Employers never had to worry about where the next workers would come from. They could pay almost nothing, and demand pretty much any level of toil. It was common for factory workers to work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, thirty days a month. Most were not paid the minimum wage of $4 per day, and almost none were granted pensions or insurance. The fact that Indian factories were now producing for consumers all over the world added to the intensity of workers’ lives but made almost no difference to their salaries: if liberalisation brought extra revenues into the system, they were generally taken by contractors, not by the workers themselves.

The decade following liberalisation, in fact, saw an aggressive assault by industrialists on workers’ bargaining power. At the beginning of that decade, some 90 per cent of workers in the factories around Delhi were employed on a permanent basis, which meant not only that they enjoyed higher salaries but also pensions, health insurance and various legal protections. Many workers worked an entire career in one factory. But with the new pressures of globalisation, this situation became increasingly unattractive to factory owners, who sought pretexts to fire permanent workers, often en masse. By 2000, 70 or 80 per cent of workers were temporary, and their legal and economic situation correspondingly more precarious. Workers could not make individual complaints about their situation, since there was a long line of people waiting to take their place, but mass protests were dealt with harshly and often with the assistance of police batons and tear gas — the police seemed always to stand unquestioningly by the side of factory owners even when protests were provoked by worker deaths or by reports of bizarre and sadistic violence on the part of the management.

Unlike in China, where so many workers were housed and fed in dormitories and bussed to the factory, Indian employers made little investment in workers’ lives outside the workplace. Workers had only makeshift shelter to return to, often without running water, and it was therefore difficult to achieve even the bare minimum of self-preservation — staying healthy and getting enough rest to return to work a few hours later. Needless to say, factories produced a great accumulation of human detritus: those who had fallen sick and could no longer work, those who had, aged thirty-five, grown too old, those who had lost fingers and hands in machines and who could do little, henceforth, except beg in the streets.

But this uncontrolled situation was inconvenient for employers too, because their workers had no stake in their enterprise, and came and went without warning. They suddenly went back to Bihar when employment prospects there were rumoured to have improved, they took a week off for a religious festival — or they simply moved to the factory next door when the owner temporarily offered higher wages in order to complete an urgent order. Textile manufacturers supplying major Western chain stores had sixty to ninety days to produce and deliver their clothes on pain of harsh penalties; ensuring, in such labour conditions, that everything happened on time presented enormous problems. But employers seemed to think of their workers as alien, and incurably insubordinate beings, and did not believe in the possibility of coming to any kind of accommodation with them. The only interface they had with the inscrutable worker psyche was money, so this was where they applied their pressure. In some factories, workers who were paid the minimum wage of around Rs 6,000 [$120] per month had one-third of that amount categorised as an ‘attendance bonus’, which was withheld if they missed a single day of work, even for sickness. But even such measures could never entirely preserve the mechanised and predictable space of the factory from the immense turbulence whence it derived its human resource. These workers were living on every kind of edge, and were stalked by emergencies of all sorts — as were their parents, siblings, wives and children in far-off parts of the country (unlike in China, most factory workers were men). Even when the financial consequences were as serious as they were, it was frequently impossible for them to work all their waking hours for thirty days in one month.

The situation of the poor in twenty-first century India certainly owed much to local dynamics: traditional caste hierarchies, for instance, and the failure of human sympathy to pass between the city and the countryside. But in many respects the poor who laboured here were not just ‘India’s’ poor. They belonged to the world. By the early twenty-first century, in fact, it could be said that much of the global economy was running off the desperation of the Asian countryside. If the 1990s had seen so much manufacturing moved to places like India and China it was because of, and not in spite of, the authoritarian system that operated in both those places, albeit in different ways. ‘Normal’ bourgeois life, whether in Delhi or New York, required one to consume immense amounts of embedded labour, which was only possible if that labour was kept very cheap. The force that was pressing down on Indian and Chinese labour, ultimately, was not the class contempt of wealthy Indians so much as the global consumerist logic of new, fast and cheap . This logic was merciless, and insatiable in its thirst for human labour. The death of rural life in Asia, which affected many hundreds of millions of people, provided the hopeless reservoir on which this logic could draw.

As one unusually self-critical textile factory owner observed to me, reflecting on the system in which she played a nodal role, “There used to be a time when you could be a capitalist with personality. You could make your own decisions about what kind of ethos you wanted to create. Now it does not matter if you are a ‘nice’ person. It is completely irrelevant. We live in an age when we all know what we do is disgusting but we still carry on doing it. The system we are part of feeds on desperation. And any system that demands such levels of desperation will produce more and more disorder, and the only way to keep everything in check will be the increasing militarisation of the world.”