India With Speedbreakers

This book is the effort of a couple who have lived and breathed India heartily and with empathy. If you had their sensitivity, their ability to converse with ordinary people, their eye for detail, and wanted to write a book about 8220;Hindoostan8221;, not just India, in the closing years of the 20th century, what themes would you pick? Religion, identity, politics and communalism; social change at the grassroots in a liberalising economy; Kashmir; drought; corruption. Yes, that is what this book is about.

Ayodhya and Babri Masjid, Tehelka and Bofors, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity in India, the IT revolution and life in the fast lane in Hyderabad and Bangalore. Amidst all this, drought and the desperation in rural India. Kashmir. Patronage and patriarchy in politics. Most of this is Tullyland, especially the discussion of religion and politics in north India. Tully has a deep and sympathetic understanding of this aspect of India and agonises like all liberals do about how bigotry is winning over the essential liberalism of a syncretic Hindustani culture.

Knowing Tully8217;s familiarity with Indian politics I would have expected to also read about the rise of 8220;regional politicians8221;. There is a section on Chandrababu Naidu, but you can see southern India is not Tully8217;s turf. I am sure he has delightful things to say about Mayawati, Mulayam and Laloo, apart from Sant Bux Singh and brother Vishwanath Pratap, to whom a chapter is devoted.

What8217;s Tully8217;s message? To point to that silver lining of hope in a troubled land, in distressed and stressed people. To hold a mirror to all of us. To show a rapidly changing nation in slow motion. Make no mistake, Tully8217;s India is not in slow motion. That is not the implication of the title. After all his first book was called No Full Stops in India. Indeed, there are none. But to find out what is really happening in a fast-changing nation, Tully tells his tale in slow motion. Drawing out the paradoxes, pointing to the hopes and the hopeless, listing the threats and the opportunities.

There may be no full stops in India, but there are plenty of speedbreakers. Bumps, as the Americans prefer to call them. Corruption is the biggest 8220;corruption has become a low risk and high reward activity8221; and then come inequity and inequality. But so are religious intolerance and bad governance. It8217;s a bumpy ride for progress. The underlying message of Tully and Wright8217;s sympathetic account of a changing India is that this change is all too slow, inequitous and conflict-ridden because of bad governance. It is an epitaph written in pain, not a report written in anger or with disdain.

If their complaint, as that of most Indians, is that as a nation we are constrained by misgovernance, bad governance, ineffective governance and yet too much of government, their message of hope is that civil society is alive and kicking. India, they declare, 8220;has become the NGO capital of the world.8221;

As one would expect from a good journalist, we get a story with some news value as well. When the Babri Masjid was being felled, eyewitness Tully tells us a decade later, 8220;Lal Krishan Advani8230; was strangely silent and disapproving.8221; The writers are right to conclude that 8220;Hindu fundamentalism was not sweeping the country8221;, and they are even more right to warn us how they have come to realise 8220;how insidious creating a sense of grievance could be.8221;

Tully and Wright have a wry sense of humour and are not overawed by those who strut around the country, glaring at us from TV screens and newspapers. Writing about Naidu8217;s Cyberabad and his modernist mission, Tully remembers to remind us that Naidu was late to an appointment and did not even say sorry! A lack of punctuality in cyber-age? Very Indian.

Who should read this book? All those who have not had time to step back and see the nature of change underway in our country. All of us who are the instruments of that change and may often be unaware of the legacy we leave behind.