Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

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When asked about how he would solve the problems of the countryside, a Congress finance minister said, essentially, that he would liquidate it: 85 per cent of Indians, he said, now needed to live in cities. He said these words at a time when 70 per cent, or more than 700 million people, lived in the countryside: his breezy percentages conjured up upheavals of mythic proportions. They reflected the fact that urban elites had lost the ability to imagine the countryside, and therefore the vast majority of their own compatriots, and they wished it would simply disappear. Pastoral billboards advertising real estate developments called ‘Provence’ and the like presented India’s countryside as just so much empty ‘Lebensraum’ waiting for the middle classes to move in. But what city people had ceased to understand was that agriculture could support far more people than industry and that, with its destruction, India would be faced with a violent crisis. The cheapness of labour in early twenty-first-century India derived from the fact that there was a huge excess , which meant not only that it was easily available but also, by definition, that it could not all be used. A great number of India’s poor were not sucked up by the capitalist machine. They were just left over. Like the residents of Bhalswa, they maintained only the most tenuous connection to the frenzy of the mainstream economy, and were squirrelled away in an improbable parallel universe of lassitude and decline.

“We are storing up immense problems for ourselves,” observes the owner of a large private equity fund. “People talk about India’s ‘population dividend’, referring to the advantages that recent high birth rates might deliver in terms of a youthful, energetic population. But I am unable to see it like that. We have 15 to 20 million people entering the labour market every year and there is nothing for them to do. The only thing that can absorb such numbers is electronics and textile manufacturing on a scale out of all proportion to what we have.

“We make a lot of our IT industries, but India’s IT and BPO sectors together only employ 2 million people. Retail and restaurants have created new jobs, but those account only for another 4 to 5 million people. Compare that to China’s electronics and textiles manufacturing, which employs 100 million people. India has failed entirely to get hold of this kind of business, and there is no indication that we can offer jobs to our young people. It is a colossal failure.”

This failure raised profound questions about the future of societies such as India’s. More historically minded observers thought back to the destruction of rural life during the industrial revolution in Europe, which also produced enormous waves of newly destitute people to the cities — far more, again, than could be employed in new factories and mines, far more even than could be accommodated in prisons, workhouses or workforces on infrastructure projects. The carving up of traditional agrarian lifestyles was for the majority a catastrophe that would only be healed many generations after their own, and during their lifetime they could expect no better fate than membership of the thronging, surplus ‘underclass’. But nineteenth-century Europe allowed itself an astonishing possibility which twenty-first-century Asia could not, and that was the ‘New World’. North America in particular, but also Brazil, Argentina and Australia, were essential to European industrialisation, acting as a safety valve for the great number of people that it rendered homeless and unemployed. Some 70 million people left Europe for the ‘New World’ between the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War, which is to say one-third of the European population at the start of that period — and this is in addition to the fact that some 130 million Europeans also died in the two world wars. (In the same period, of course, many tens of millions of the ‘New World’s’ native inhabitants were wiped out by a combination of war and disease.)

The situation was different in the twenty-first century. A third of India’s population was close to 400 million people, and there was quite obviously no place on the planet where such a surplus could be stowed. How they would be integrated into a fast-changing society in a way that did not involve genocide or more world wars was still an open question.

It should not be imagined that immense intelligence and resources were not devoted to the resolution of this question, nor that there were no debates, conflicts or breakthroughs. On the contrary. Early twenty-first century India was, in addition to everything else, a giant laboratory of social and economic experiments, in which every sector of society participated. Farmers displayed great ingenuity in developing — sometimes with the help of the government or of the countless NGOs at work in the Indian countryside — new economic and agricultural strategies to reduce the precariousness of their situation so they might not join the mass exodus from the land. Factory workers became conspicuously more creative and organised in the way they contested the progressive erosion of their rights: by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Gurgaon car manufacturers could no longer depend on workers fighting, ineffectually, all against all, and found themselves having to sit down to serious negotiations. The government too, despite its reputation for incompetence and corruption, was capable of visionary innovation. These years saw the introduction of the first-ever financial safety net for rural communities, which offered adults 100 days of guaranteed employment every year at a salary of Rs 100 per day — a vital measure for communities so assailed by financial unpredictability. This was the time also of the groundbreaking Right to Information Act, a transparency law which dramatically empowered poor communities, whose fate was so heavily decided, as we have seen, by the machinations of government: armed with this act they could now find out when they were being lied to, or by how much the money that reached them was less than what had been paid out.

And even the wealthy were furiously divided over what should be the style and human cost of India’s economic transformation. Television scenes of farmers protesting against the seizure of fertile agricultural land and its conversion into factories, and of bloody showdowns between them and armed representatives of the state, caused people of all kinds to meditate on their relationship to this ‘new India’ — and some of those members of the urban, affluent classes who were most dismayed by these meditations worked to mitigate the harsh fall-out of change. NGOs, some of them with brilliantly creative visions of what modern life could be and how its benefits could be better distributed, sent educated people into the remotest corners of the country. Some of these were funded by foreign governments and foundations, which also pumped in billions of dollars of developmental aid over this period. The press remained, for the most part, free, and the media could be powerfully illuminating and acerbic with respect to contemporary society’s inequities.

The first decade of the century also saw gathering waves of urban protest against its corruption and cruelty. It was increasingly common to see the city taken over by gatherings of a hundred thousand or more united in outrage towards society’s ills or the machinations of its rulers. Though some of this discontent could be accommodated within the prevailing rubric of self-interest — middle-class resentment towards the fortunes made by corrupt politicians could be seen in this way, for instance — it was clear from the grief and euphoria on display at such gatherings that there was more than this at stake. There were other, humbler ambitions at play: the desire to live in a more tender society; the desire for a loftier idea of human relations, for something other, indeed, than self-interest; the desire for a respite from the world’s conspicuous cruelty. Cruel societies are often the most dynamic and productive — nineteenth-century Europe was one of the most creative societies ever to exist — but even if you are one of those borne up on this dynamism, cruelty is less easy to live with than one imagines. Only the most hardened warriors are able to assume total ownership of their cruelty, and indeed of the mercilessness of capitalism. Middle-class Indians did not actually want to be responsible for cruelty any more than middle-class Canadians or Swedes did. It is part of the ideology of our ‘neoliberal’ moment that only self-aggrandising drives are ‘natural’ to human beings, but in fact sympathy for others is more difficult to defeat than we imagine.