The Gospel according to Goregaon

Thanks to this wise choice India is today seen as a possible economic superpower instead of an economic basket case. On my first morning in Davos I opened the Financial Times to find a glossy special report on India titled ‘India Awakes’. It talked of the booming stock market, the attempts to energise the banking system, the possibility of India becoming the global centre for outsourced jobs and the downside: the need for more reforms in agriculture, aviation and infrastructure. In the nearly ten years that I have come regularly to this snow-covered Swiss ski resort I have never met more people who speak with optimism about India. And whatever the Left may say, one of the reasons for this is globalisation. Companies like Infosys and Wipro would simply not have been possible without it. Outsourced jobs, call centres, the new middle class would not exit.

But, my problem with leftist rhetoric goes deeper because it is exactly the same rubbish I heard in my years of growing up in socialist India and have we forgotten what a shabby, non-functional place that country was? We hear much these days about how India is progressing only for the middle classes and the more I hear this theory the more I am convinced that the people who propound it have never stepped out of their middle class environs. If they did, if they traveled only even at election time, they might discover that technology, modernity and prosperity have trickles down to even the poorest states. The cry for bijli, paani, sadak that became the leitmotif of the last round of assembly elections is based — guess what — not just for basic but for middle class needs.

In a Rajasthani village, not long ago, I was struck by the demand that electricity be made available not only at dawn for irrigation purposes but at dusk ‘‘so that children can do their homework’’. In the village, which is not far from Jaipur, they also explained that city girls were not prepared to marry their boys because the absence of reliable electricity meant no television. How tediously middle class can the poor get?

Change in aspirations, change in standards of living are evident even in the slums of our towns and cities but when you are blinded by a failed ideology, as many of our leading Leftist intellectuals are, how can you possibly see?

Of course there is still poverty in India. Of course it is terrible that nearly thirty percent of Indians continue to live on less than a dollar a day but please let us acknowledge that this is not poverty that was created by less than fifteen years of globalisation and economic reform. It is an old, old curse and forty years of socialism did little more, in the name of ‘poverty alleviation’, than turn the poor into a constituency. We should thank the gods that politicians of every hue these days are forced to pay attention to the rising aspirations of ordinary, poor people.

Just like the middle classes, the poorest Indians want decent homes with running water and electricity, they want roads that allow them to escape the misery of their forgotten villages and they want a better life for their children. The only people who seem not to have noticed this are those who gathered to celebrate the possibilities for ‘another world’ in Goregaon. Where were they when socialist India was that other world?

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com