Growing up as a child, I was too anglicised for my own good. India was the last place on earth that I wanted to go to on a family holiday. I always thought it was a “difficult” country. My parents retaliated by taking me on endless “traditional” summer holidays to Bournemouth and Torquay where my brother and I were subjected to crazy golf, model villages and strange glances from the locals.
Once I grew up a little and got over myself, India became much more than a space where I could project my cultural anxiety. Most of all, it helped me understand a broader spectrum of humanity and my family heritage.
Now a regular visitor, I still find it problematic, but in other ways. Its twin pillars of tragedy and democracy continue, though, to leave me simultaneously troubled and energised.
This week has once again located India in a state of paradox based around its extreme financial imbalances. It is difficult to separate this from the anecdotal ground level realities for the British Asian diaspora.
The commonly held view on India today — including among many British-Asians I know — that more are richer and fewer are poor is far from the truth. Many commonly cite Delhi’s Metro, its growing number of fast-food chains and less visible poverty on the streets as signs of progress.
But each of these has emerged alongside, and sometimes because of, the corporeal losses experienced by the poor and the powerless. The “losers” are increasingly being hidden from the tourists’ gaze.
The “our gain, their loss” mentality is nowhere as apt as when one thinks about India’s new economic hierarchy and its global effects. India today is, more than ever, a society dichotomised by, on the one hand, an urban middle class fully engaged with western-led global culture and on the other, those such as the landless 25,000 who marched this week and who face the challenge of real poverty.
The underprivileged majority demographic are further disenfranchised through the rapid growth of information technology and the fallout of globalised cultural politics. On a recent visit, everyone I knew in Delhi was talking about Liz and Arun, Aishwarya and Abhishek and busily reviewing Shah-Rukh Khan’s performance as the new host of Kaun Banega Crorepati, the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
And so, for me, the dehydrated dogs at the turn of every corner, and the stench of the slums backing on to the railway station seemed even more pronounced. For most villagers the “cultural knowledge” offered by this new economy and “urban lifestyle” are more and more beyond their reach.
And just as we have Laxmi Nivas Mittal as a role model for British-Asian success, we now have Mukesh Ambani, an Indian, who was this week rumoured (and then quickly denied) to be the world’s richest person.
Ambani’s riches are estimated, depending on what you read, to be a networth of $63.2bn meaning that he could be richer or certainly in the same league as other super-billionaires such as Bill Gates and Carlos Slim Helu. Making these into success stories only serves to obscure the real and widening inequities that exist.
It is estimated that 70 per cent of Indians are poorer now than they were before India’s economy began to boom. But the “our gain, their loss” effect is now not just reserved for Briton’s bargain-hunting trips to India; it confronts us at every corner.
Gap’s use of Indian child labour “in conditions close to slavery”, is the dark side of this story and one that connects us to the choices and circumstances of the landless poor. Last week my internet package from another leading high street retailer contained a far-from-cheap dress that smelt of “India” (a chemical aroma akin to petrol that is commonly found in Indian fabrics). The label did indeed say “Made in India”. It has gone straight back to the shop “just in case”.
When my cousin arrives in the UK from Delhi his first stop is the high-street stores at the cheaper end of the market. There would be heavy demand for a shuttle bus service from Heathrow T3 to Ealing Broadway, allowing middle-class Indian holiday makers to fulfil their urge of spending their newly-converted UK pounds on recently-imported cut-price T-shirts and jogging bottoms.
The supposed kudos of “buying British” to take to the relatives back home is a long-standing tradition that many of us British-based Asians are familiar with. But surely the value of its claim is now in some doubt.
Such financial imbalances can only become more pronounced as India’s rich get richer, the poor remain landless, and we continue to spend in the way we do. The challenge of producing genuinely inclusive growth can only be met if it involves wider personal and corporate social responsibility.
In every economic market there are winners and losers — in India the losers are too great. You may (or may not) be able to find the richest man in the world in India, but you could probably find the poorest one too.
Guardian
