The Two Indias

John Edwards may have spent the last few years talking about the "two Americas" but I can't help feeling that the notion of two divergent nations yoked together for all eternity is as true of India as it is anywhere else in the world. There is what is often termed "India Inc" here (that miniscule Westernized and wealthy elite -- the "aam admi" (man on the street, literally) but generally meaning the rest of the nation, where most everyone is a farmer or farm labourer and lives at or below the poverty line.

The nuclear deal that the Indian government and the US was pushing for has come through and India has been granted an exemption (though I don't understand on what grounds) for the purposes of trading in civilian nuclear energy supplies though it will not sign either the non-proliferation treaty or the CTBT. And there is a large part of India that is ecstatic about this news. Again, I don't quite understand how this obscure piece of legislation affects the average Indian but so many of its younger citizens seem to have overdosed on nationalism and patriotism that they signify any kind of national event with such sentiments.

The interest in this is seen as a part of globalization and also, contradictorily, as a rallying point for those from the left (and far right) who would reject mass-produced commercial and corporate globalization but it's just kinda weird to see. And I'm opposed to the deal anyway. What's even weirder is that the Communist led "Left" parties who broke with the ruling Congress party over this issue are also casting their refusal to condone the deal as a macho, nationalist thing. They don't object to this deal on the grounds that India should be focussing on developing safer sources of alternative energy (or if they do, this is at the tail end of their platform). The main point that Prakash Karatand his buddies in the Left have been making is that this deal is a loss of Indian sovereignity, where this is solely determined by India's right (and ability) to keep testing nuclear weapons without suffering any international consequences. Am I just not getting something here or is this simply bad politics, for a so-called "progressive" party?

The contradictions are endless -- the world's largest democracy, which actually regularly elects a number of Communists to federal government is going ga-ga over the legalization of nuclear energy trading. This, in a place wherein the federal government has just mandated that anyone standing for any village or panchayat (rural) election must own a toilet! Yes, you read that right -- you don't need to be educated to any particular level or not have criminal convictions or anything like that in order to qualify to run for these small-time positions but you do need to have a built lav. This in an effort to promote sanitation in the vast swathes of rural India wherein it has not yet caught on or is beyond the reach of the people. What price nuclear energy there?

In other news, that Tata Nano project I wrote about is more or less going to go ahead although there are negotiations and negotiations-about-negotiations going on.

The aftermath of the floods in Bihar (and surrounding areas) are still devastating. As I watch saturation coverage of Hurricane Ike, I can't help thinking of the 2-3 million who have been left homeless (no accurate number of dead can yet be reported though eye-witness accounts say it will be in the tens of thousands) by the Kosi River's catastrophic flooding. There are those who make the news and those who will never merit a mention. Globalization doesn't mean a damn thing here.

The Nano, the Nuclear Deal and the Floods

I've been so obsessed with myself and my family that I haven't said much about what's going on in the rest of India these days, but life for the millions is part of the background to everyday here. The big news stories of the time are about the cataclysmic floods that are affecting Bihar (in East-Central India); the India government's attempt, backed by the US, to secure an exemption that would allow it to trade in nuclear energy; a politically framed agitation in Singur in West Bengal that has halted work on the October rollout of the Nano (aka as the world's cheapest car, one that the Tata Corporation unveiled last year); a deal signed a coupled a days ago on Hindu pilgrims right to use certain government lands in Kashmir that caused another flare-up between Islamic separatists and the national Army and and and..... hmmm.... those are the big ones, I guess. There's a lot about about cricket and local corruption and a court suggesting that women in sarees ought to be banned from riding pillion on motorcycles and scooters and other such fun stories. But.... and in no particular order, here are some editorializations:

The central government in India nearly fell a couple of months ago when the "left" parties in the coalition -- ie, the communists in name and their smaller regional allies -- pulled out when the Congress party insisted on going ahead with a nuclear deal with the US. The details are incomprehensible but essentially, the deal allows for India to buy supplies to produce nuclear energy from the US. In return for such business, the US is attempting to get the world's elite nations who are part of the nuclear cartel -- aka as the Nuclear Suppliers Group -- to allow India an exemption to buy these materials legally. I'm not a fan of either the US and India (playing its regional superpower card) bullying this permission through or of the idea that a handful of nations can decide who trades in cheap sources of power legally. This country needs to find alternative sources of energy and it needs to do so yesterday!!! I do think that there are safer and greener sources of energy out there that India should be aggressively developing.

Singur. Well, this one is interesting. Last year, Ratan Tata unveiled his "car for the masses" -- a 4 door that would be produced for $2500 or so. In theory, it's a great idea. One has only to see common the family-of-four-on-a-motorscooter phenomenon everywhere in India to understand that a cheap car is a social good. The environmentalists have been screaming -- and I get their point. But public transport is nowhere near good enough here and even when it gets better, who are we to say that the mass of Indians shouldn't have the option to access to what we who have the luxury of living in the West take for granted? That said, I was also impressed by the fact that the Nano production unit was set up in Singur in West Bengal, the only state in the world that has consistently and democratically elected communist governments for over 50 years.... and where the union movement is as strong as it gets in India. But there are now major problems -- a year after the plant was established, there are numbers of farmers who haven't accepted and don't want to accept the cheques they've been handed for the expropriation of their land. Enter an opportunist political party -- not the communists who are in power and are actually backing the Singur plant -- but an opposition party who supported the farmers with protests and road blockades and we have chaos. I'm not sure where I stand on this, since I've heard a number of farmers say that they don't want their now unarable land back.... they just want things to go back to how they were 2 years ago. And the plant is providing good union jobs to a lot of people. But it's a story that has gripped the nation. More on it as it develops.

The floods in Bihar are awful. To start with, this is a have-not state in a (mostly and still) have-not nation. The hundreds of thousands of people affected are mostly small farmers and farm labour, living in hundreds of tiny villages that are remote at the best of times. The Indian army is out rescuing them where it can and herding them into makeshift camps. Honestly, this makes the aftermath of Katerina look like a model operation. The scale of tragedy in such parts of the world is unimaginable: I look at TV coverage of the tens of thousands of deaths and think about how to calibrate my grief over losing my grandmother in the face of that kind of loss. And the truth is, I can't.