Book Review on Imagining India Essay

Monday morning, it is chaos. Despite its pristine new metro and expanding high slipway, the city put forward barely jibe the morning hubbub, the swarm of pack all trying to get fewwhere. By the time I annoy Kaushik Basus homeset a little apart from the highway, on a quiet way that is empty except for a single, lazy cow who stops in front of the car, in no hurry to moveI am very late, a little grimy, but exhilarated. Kaushik and I berate about how the crowds in the city look completely different compa rubor to, say, two cristals ago. Then, you would see people lounging nuzzle tea shops, reading the morning paper late into the afternoon, puffing languorously at their beedis and generally slam the breeze. and as India has changed bursting forth as mavin of the dry lands fastest- suppuration countriesso has the scene on the street.And as Kaushik points out, it is this new restlessness, the hum and thrum of its people, that is the sound of Indias economic engine today. Kaushik is the author of a number of books on India and teaches economics at Cornell, and his take on Indias growthof a region driven by human capitalis now well accepted. Indias position as the worlds go-to destination for talent is hardly surprising we whitethorn nominate been short on different things at various times, but we have always had plenty of people. The crowded tumult of our cities is something I have every day as I navigate my way to our Bangalore office through a laboured crowd that overflows from the footpaths and on to the roadof software engineers waiting at bus stops, groups of women in colourful saris, on their way to their jobs 38 at the garment factories that line the road, men in construction hats heading towards the semi-completed highway. And thence there are the people milling around the cars, hawking magazines and pirated versions of the latest best-sellers.* Looking around, I look at that if people are the engine of Indias growth, our economy has neverthel ess just begun to rev up. But to the demographic experts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Indias universe of discourse made the country quite simply a happening of epic proportions. Paul Ehlrichs visit to Delhi in 1966 forms the opening of his book The Population Bomb, and his shock as he describes Indias crowds is palp qualified People eating, people washing, people sleeping . . . people visiting, arguing and shout . . . people clinging to buses . . . people, people, people. But in the last two decades, this depressing fantasy of Indias race as an overwhelming burden has been turned on its head. With growth, our human capital has emerged as a vibrant source of workers and consumers not just for India, but also for the orbiculate economy.But this change in our attitudes has not come easily. Since independence, India struggled for decades with policies that tried to put the lid on its surging macrocosm. It is only recently that the country has been able to look its b illion in the eye and consider its advantages. MILLIONS ON AN ANTHILL For most of the twentieth century, people both within and outside India viewed us through a lens that was distinctly Malthusian. As a short and extremely crowded part of the world, we seemed to vindicate Thomas Malthuss uniquely despondent visionthat great population growth inevitably led to great famine and despair.The time that Thomas Malthus, writer, dilettante economist and clergyman (the enduring term history gave him would be the gloomy par watchword), lived in may have greatly influenced his theory on population. Nineteenth-century England was seeing very high behave rates, with families having children by the bakers dozen. Malthus who, as the second of eight children, was himself part of the population explosion he bemoanedpredicted in his An search on *Tbe Alchemist, Liars Poker and (Tom Friedman would be delighted) The World Is Flat have been perennial favourites for Indian pirates.the Principle of Population that the unprecedented increases in population would lead to a cycle of famines, of epidemics, and sickly seasons. India in particular seemed to be speedily bearing down the path that Malthus predicted. On our shores, famine was a repair visitor. We endured thirty hunger famines* between 1770 and 1950 plagues during which entire provinces saw a third of their population disappear, and the countryside was covered with the attenuate bones of the millions dead.1 By the mid twentieth century, neo-Malthusian prophets were sounding the alarm on the disastrous population growth in India and China, and predicted that the impact of such growth would be felt around the world. Their apocalyptic scenarios helped rid draconian approaches to birth control. Policies recommending sterilization of the unfit and the disabled, and the killing of defective babies gained the air of respectable theory.2 Indias increasing dependence on food aid from the developed world due to domestic short ages also fuelled the panic around its population growthin 1960 India had consumed one-eighth of the United States total pale yellow production, and by 1966 this had grown to onefourth. Consequently, if you were an adult in the 1950s and 1960s and followed the news, it was entirely plausible to believe that the end game for humanity was just round the corner you may also have believed that this catastrophe was the making of some overly fecund Indians. Nehru, observing the hand-wringing, remarked that the Western world was getting frightened at the prospect of the spate of Asia becoming vaster and vaster, and swarming all over the place.And it is true that Indians of this generation had a cultural affinity for unsound families, until now among the middle classevery long holiday during my childhood was spent at my grandparents foretoken with my cousins, and a family photo from that time has a hundred people crammed into the frame. Indian families were big enough to be your *Amar tya Sen and others have pointed out, however, that plot these famines may have seemed to be the consequence of a country that was both short(p) and overpopulated, they were in fact triggered partly by trade policies and the lack of infrastructure. Lord Lytton exported wheat from India at the raising of the 1876-78 famine, and the lack of connectivity across the country affected transportation of grain to affected areas.Main social batchmost people did not mingle extensively outside family weddings, celebrations and visits to each others homes. The growing global worries around our population growth created immense pressure on India to impose some crystallise of control on our birth rates, and we became the first developing country to initiate a family planning architectural plan. But our early family planning policies had an unusual emphasis on self-control.3 In part this was influenced by leading such as Gandhi, who preached abstinence in an interesting departure from his us ual policy of non-violence, he had said, Wives should contract off their husbands with force, if necessary.This focus on abstinence and self-restraint keep with independent Indias first wellness minister, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, who was in the odd position of being at the helm of a family planning programme while opposing family planning in principle.4 As a result Indian policy during this decade emphasized the rhythm method. Rural India was targeted for raising awareness of the method, and one villager remarked of its success, They talked of the rhythm method to people who didnt know the calendar. Then they gave us rosaries of coloured beads . . . at night, people couldnt tell the red bead for dont from the green for go ahead. 5 Not surprisingly, Indias population continued to grow through the 1950s and 1960s, as fertility remained stubbornly high even while infant mortality and death rates fell rapidly.This was despite the massive awareness-building efforts around family planning that the administration undertook. I still remember the small family songs on the radio and the walls of our cities, the sides of buses and trucks were papered with posters that featured happy (and small) cartoon families, and slogans homogeneous Us Two, Ours Two. And yet, each census release made it clear that our population numbers continued to relentlessly soar, and we despaired over a graph that was climbing too high, too fast. SNIP, SNIP As the global panic around population growth surged, the Indian and Chinese governments began executing white-knuckle measures of family planning in the 1960s. Our sign is on fire, Dr S. Chandrasekhar, minister of health and family planning, said in 1968. If we focused much on sterilization, he added, We can get the blaze under control.By the 1970s, programmes and targets for sterilization of citizens were set up for Indian states. There was even a vasectomy clinic set up at the Victoria Terminus rail station in Bombay, to bring home the b acon to the passenger traffic flowing through. 7 But no matter how Indian governments tried to call forth sterilization with incentives and sops, the number of people willing to undergo the occasion did not go up. Indias poor wanted childrenand especially sonsas economic security. State efforts to persuade citizens into sterilization backfired in unexpected waysas when many people across rural India refused to have the anti-tuberculosis BCG, Bacillus Calmette-Guerin, injections because of a rumour that BCG stood for birth control government.8 In 1975, however, Indira Gandhi announced the Emergency, which suspended democratic rights and elections and endowed her with new powers of persuasion, so to speak.The Indian government morphed into a frighteningly sycophantic group, there to do the bidding of the prime minister and her son Sanjaythe same hotheaded young man who had described the Cabinet ministers as ignorant buffoons, thought his baffle a ditherer and regarded the Philippin es dictator Ferdinand Marcos his role model.9 In the winter of 1976, I, along with some of my fellow IIT Bombay students, had arrived on the festival circuit in Delhi to participate in the student debates and quizzes (yes, I was an inveterate nerd). It meant going from college to college for competitions, from Hindu to St Stephens to Miranda House to IIT Delhi. Most of us from the sylvan, secluded campus of IIT Bombay were not as politically aware as the Delhi studentsthe only elections we followed were those for the ITT hostels and student body. But in the Delhi of the Emergency years, sitting around campfires, one heard the whispered tales of Emergency-era atrocities, and of one particular outragenasbandi.Sanjay, who had discovered a taste and talent for authoritarianism with the Emergency, had made sterilizationspecifically male sterilization or nasbandi his pet project. The sterilization measures that were introduced came to be known as the Sanjay Effecta combination, as the de mographer Ashish Bose put it to me, of coercion, cruelty, corruption and cooked figures. Ashish notes that incentives to undergo the sterilization cognitive operation included laws that required a sterilization certificate before government permits and rural credit could be granted. Children of parents with more than three children free-base that schools refused them admission, and prisoners did not get parole until they went under the knife. And some government departments persuaded their more reluctant employees to undergo the procedure by threatening them with charges of embezzlement.* The steep sterilization targets for state governments meant that people were oftentimes rounded up deal sheep and taken to family planning clinics. For instance, one journalist witnessed municipal police in the small town of Barsi, Maharashtra, force several hundred peasants visiting Barsi on market day off the streets.They drove these men in two garbage trucks to the local family planning cli nic, where beefy orderlies held them down while they were given vasectomies.10 This scene ingeminate itself time and again, across the country. It was difficult to trust the sterlization figures the government released since there was so much pressure on the states for results. Nevertheless, the Emergency-era sterilization programme, Ashish notes, may have achieved nearly two-thirds of its targeteight million sterilizations. But democracy shortly hit back with a stunning blow. When Indira Gandhi called for elections in 1977ignoring Sanjays protests, much to his ire11the relative was immediately tossed out of power. The nasbandi programme was the last gasp of coercive family planning in India on a large scale, and it became political suicide to implement similar policies.The Janata Party government that followed Indira even changed the label of the programme to avoid the stigma it carried, and family planning became family welfare. While sterilization programmes have occasionally reappeared across states, they have been mostly voluntary, with the focus on incentives to undergo the procedure, f *Asoka Bandarage describes the target fever in Indias sterilization programmes, which gave rise to speed doctors who competed against each other to perform the most number of operations every day, often under ghastly, unhygienic conditions.One celebrated figure was the Indian gynaecologist P.V. Mehta, who entered the Guinness Book of World Records for sterilizing more than 350,000 people in a decadehe claimed that he could perform forty sterilizations in an hour. tThese sweeteners for the procedure have at times been very strange and a little suspect, such as Uttar Pradeshs guns for sterilisation policy in 2004, under which scheme Indians purchasing firearms or seeking gun licences were told they would be fast-tracked if they could round up volunteers for sterilization. A district in Madhya Pradesh also made a similar guns for vasectomies exsert to its residents in 20 08.