Field Notes on Democracy

"I had four or five different books in front of me that talk about contemporary India. I chose this one because it’s extremely critical of many developments in India today. The idea of India that has gone around recently, particularly in Europe and America, has been of this great, vibrant democracy with a booming economy, full of English speakers like us, with the same kind of aspirations to a consumer lifestyle. Broadly speaking, there is a lot of truth to this picture. India’s democracy is indeed very vibrant in certain areas. In other areas, it’s not so vibrant. Just in terms of numbers, there is a very large part of the population that aspires to a certain kind of European and American middle-class lifestyle and the same kind of consumption patterns. That fact makes businessmen in the West very excited, because these are potentially big markets. If, out of 1.2 billion people, 200 million were to start living at the same level as the American and European middle classes, that opens up a huge new market. But this focus leaves out the fate of the other India, so to speak – although it’s not really ‘other’ because it is in fact the majority of India. It’s the 800 million people living in villages who are close to destitution, and even those living in urban areas. Most people living in Indian cities are still living in what, by any definition of the term, would be called a slum. What Arundhati Roy’s book does is act as an antidote to all the current fashionable prejudices and notions about India. The book will certainly be shocking and disconcerting and depressing to a lot of people who look at India from the great heights of Davos and Aspen, or know it from the pages of The Economist and The Wall Street Journal . But it’s very salutary in the end. As a visitor, one is immediately struck by these aspects of India – the extreme poverty, and the fear and hate the rich feel toward the poor. These are not immediately apparent in a place like China, where poverty and inequality are not so visible. In India, they are part of the disquieting experience of a foreign visitor. Roy’s book actually helps you understand that experience, it explains why these grotesque inequalities exist, and why India today, in addition to being a vibrant democracy and booming economy, is also an extremely violent place. There are all kinds of conflicts going on in India today: conflicts over resources, conflicts over identity, all kinds of battles. This book covers everything from Kashmir to the Maoist insurgency in central India. It talks about the crackdown on civil liberties in the wake of 9/11 in India. It also brings India into the larger history, this larger moment of a violence-infected globalisation we’ve been living since 9/11. India also has been affected in significant ways by the war on terror and the culture of brutality that you now see manifested all across the world, even as economic globalisation accelerates. Roy’s book shows that India is not at all immune to that whole set of problems shared by countries around the world: rising inequality, crony capitalism, compromised media, the unresponsiveness or dysfunction of democratic institutions, and the recourse to violence by both the state and ordinary individuals."