Thanks, But No Thanks

"Why do you always show bullock carts in your reports," a jnu student asks Daniel Lak. "It’s not right. That’s not what we are like. You should be telling the world about our computer skills and how we have alleviated so much of the poverty that you British left us." The shock of this question sets off Lak, who spent 12 years in South Asia reporting for the BBC, on the ambitious task of capturing the big picture of the new, changing face of Indian society. The result is this book of essays, Mantras of Change, which brings together a potpourri of images: of IT-wallas on a high in the pubs of Bangalore, supplicants and sycophants waiting to garland Chandrababu Naidu in his darbar, Hindu priests trying to save the environment, taxi drivers from Uttar Pradesh in the world of ecstatic Bombay dreams, policemen on death squads, rat catchers, and more.

At the end of the book there is a gentle, apologetic postscript about Chandrababu Naidu to justify the author’s earlier enthusiasm for the much reviled leader, now out of power. "He was turfed out on his record," he says, but concludes correctly that Naidu leaves a lasting legacy of having changed the political discourse away from caste, religion and dynasty to development.

It is a problematic legacy. Naidu was our best and most innovative politician, our great hope for modernity. Sincere about his commitments, he transformed, at the very least, ramshackle Hyderabad into clean, efficient Cyberabad. He might have been corrupt, but as Lak says, everyone in Indian politics is supposed to be corrupt. At least, he did something. Yes, he forgot he was not merely Cyberabad’s CM. So, he fought and lost against a venal, lying Congress opposition that promised everything free, despite a bankrupt treasury.

Before criticising Naidu’s passion for IT, let us remember that the West’s industrial revolution happened on the back of what economists call one lead sector. In England’s case, it was textiles; in America, it was the railways; in Sweden, it was timber; and it was dairy exports in Denmark that transformed a whole country’s economy. History teaches us that a nation goes from poverty to prosperity driven by one glory. After floundering for 50 years, we may have finally found in information technology the engine that could drive India’s take-off and transform our whole society.

We also undervalue Naidu’s legacy of e-governance. Seven out of ten Indians live in a village. Most have a parcel of land, and once in their lifetime they must transfer its title—when their father dies. Surveys show that it takes 100 days of running around to effect this transfer. It is also a 100 days of humiliation, and by the end one has lost all dignity and self-esteem. The insolent revenue official has not changed his attitude since the British Raj and continues to lord it over the helpless peasant. Now by putting land records on the Net, Chandrababu Naidu (and S.M. Krishna in Karnataka) has empowered the villager and forever diminished his humiliation. I know this is true for I have a friend who has just bought some land in an AP village without bribing anyone.

So why did the people throw him out? When is our democracy going to value the Chandrababu Naidus? Do we wait until our middle class becomes 50 per cent of the total population? Or, as Lak says, when the Indian economy is "liberated from the dead hand of government that is all that remains of the confident, forward looking statism of Jawaharlal Nehru".

Lak turns the shock of the JNU student’s challenge to conclude that the problem also lies with Indians who consume the images and the Indian middle class, which is strapped into believing that their country is more modern than it is and able to solve its problems better than it does. But where is Lak’s own big picture of India? "Too much of the thinking about India is done along predictable cliched lines," he says in the beginning, and this is why I opened his book with high hopes for the bright, unsullied, unforgettable image. Alas, it does not come. Lak does not get under our skin, and the image eludes him. This is not really a surprise for India is bigger than the people who try to make sense of it. And as the saying goes, whatever you might say about India, the opposite is also true. So, pity the journalist who wants to capture the essence of India. I, for one, suspect that it will be a great writer of fiction, our Tolstoy of Hinglish perhaps, who will stumble one day on to that elusive image.