Adventures in Correspondentland (28 page)

Eavesdropping as ever on misery, we filmed as Bharati hurriedly fastened a bag containing some pots and pans, the bare essentials, and listened as she spoke in a voice of rising panic: ‘If they demolish now, where do we go? They are going to smash down our shelter, and we will have nowhere to live.' Minutes away from being made homeless, they had no idea where they would sleep that evening, since the government had not offered them any alternative accommodation.

On the scrubland outside, as the planes continued to land over her shoulder, one of Bharati's more feisty neighbours tried to raise a mob. ‘We'll stop the bulldozers,' she cried, with her sinewy arm thrust into the sky and her head contorting from side to side,
‘even if we have to die.' Given her fervour, it was tempting to describe her as a sari-clad revolutionary. But all she was trying to do was preserve the status quo.

When the bulldozers rolled around the corner, she stood in the way of the demolition crew for a few futile moments, while men from the shanties hurled bricks and rocks at the advancing machines. Yet a squad of policemen wielding lathis, the thin antiquated bamboo batons that for generations had kept agitators in their place, quickly brushed them aside. Within minutes of arriving, the bulldozers' mechanical arms reached into the corrugated iron huts and wrenched them savagely apart.

Now, without even tilting or readjusting the frame, the camera captured the new destroying the old: the shot showed a bulldozer entering from the side of the screen, while Bharati watched helpless and mute as its iron claws ransacked her long-time home. Here was the flipside of India's grand new boast that nothing could stand in the way of progress.

Successive Indian governments had an appalling record of managing change in a way that balanced the needs of corporations and foreign investors with the interests of the poor. There was no greater monument to their failure than the skeletal remains of the Union Carbide chemical factory in Bhopal, where a poisonous gas leak in 1984 killed at least 3000 people at the time, claimed 8000 more lives in the years afterwards and left over 500,000 people nursing injuries. Returning there to mark the 20th anniversary of the world's worst ever industrial disaster, we saw for ourselves the broken sacks of pesticide still littering the site and the piles of toxic waste that had not yet been cleared away.

In the shanty opposite the factory were the victims themselves, many of whom still awaited proper compensation. Cows continued
to amble around the site, from which the nearby slum-dwellers drew their milk. The wells that locals relied upon for their water remained poisoned. A helpful security guard, who patrolled the site with a double-barrelled shotgun slung over his shoulder, told us of his failed attempts to prevent local children from playing among the ruins. Then, as the fumes seeped into his nostrils, his knees buckled beneath him, and he started to faint. No wonder Bhopal had become a byword for corporate and official negligence.

In covering the anniversary, we listened to the testimony of survivors, highlighted the ongoing litigation aimed at bringing justice for the victims of the disaster and visited the local hospital to film the room where foetuses cut from the bellies of pregnant women killed by the gas cloud were stored in over-sized glass jars – a real chamber of horrors.

To our lasting regret, however, the BBC unwittingly added to Bhopal's misery. We did so by falling prey to the most terrible hoax, which for a time that day made us the focus of the story. It started the week before when a producer in London was duped by a fake website purporting to be the corporate home of The Dow Chemical Company, which now owned the plant. She rang the telephone number that appeared on the phoney website and arranged for a company spokesman to come to our Paris bureau on the morning of the anniversary. Live on air, in an interview with a presenter in London, the spokesman made the most startling announcement: that Dow would not only clean up the factory site but also hand out vast sums in compensation. It would be financed, he said, out of the liquidation of Union Carbide. As if to prove how fast a lie can travel, the news reached Bhopal in an instant, where it was met with near riotous joy from the hardened activists who had fought Dow Chemical for years. The markets
also delivered their verdict, wiping over four per cent of the value of Dow Chemical's share price in the space of 23 minutes.

It is still shocking, and enraging, to recall how easily London was duped. Alarm bells should have started ringing even before the ‘Dow Chemical Company spokesman' was allowed on air, for he turned up at our Paris bureau in an ill-fitting suit, accompanied by his own camera crew, which was not the normal corporate look. His unusual name, Jude Finisterra, might have raised suspicions. Subsequent Google searches revealed that Finisterra means the end of the world, while Jude, of course, is the patron saint of lost causes. Then there was his startling announcement: the liquidation of a multi-billion-dollar company, Union Carbide.

By now, the alarm bells should have been deafening. Here was an American corporate titan announcing the liquidation of a giant subsidiary live on BBC World News from a remote studio in Paris, with a boggle-eyed spokesman with a weird name wearing a ragged suit that looked like it had been borrowed from a mime artist on the Champs Élysées. Please.

Soon, a real Dow Chemical Company spokesperson, desperate to halt the slide in its share price, was interviewed from London and given the easiest of rides by a presenter who now had to apologise for our mistake rather than tackling her on theirs. Then, the hoaxer himself was allowed back onto our airwaves to revel in his mischief. Later, a group calling itself the Yes Men made a film claiming that the people of Bhopal were deeply appreciative of their brilliant trickery, because it had highlighted the Dow Chemical Company's hard-heartedness. But I witnessed the elation of these people when they learnt of their windfall and saw their despair when it was cruelly snatched away. Other than
to marvel at their own cleverness, the main thing the Yes Men did that day was to further victimise the victims.

Back in Delhi – a city where argumentative debate was often the highest form of entertainment – much of the dinner-party discussion at the time centred on whether India's rapid advance was a wholly good thing. Perhaps the memory of Bhopal, an early American encroachment into the Indian market, offered something of a cautionary tale, given the new-found reliance on foreign investment. Not only was the gap widening between rich and poor, bringing about even more ghastly disparities, but also there was a danger that India was losing itself in the rush for globalisation.

Old South Asian hands bemoaned the intrusion into their favourite local markets of fast-food chains such as McDonald's, Subway and Pizza Hut. (Are not pizza-delivery boys always the storm troopers of globalisation?) High-end jewellers and opticians selling titanium frames and sunglasses by Chanel and Dior were crowding out booksellers. Edge-of-town supermarkets – a new innovation in India – threatened to kill off the trusted corner shop, while air-conditioned malls endangered bustling, traditional markets.

Preferring denim and tight-fitting T-shirts, women now wore saris less commonly. Young men sported the latest Nike, Adidas or Reebok leisurewear. Much of India's rapid new-millennial growth had been propelled by Western paranoia over the Y2K bug and the skill of Indian outsourcing firms to deliver cheap fixes. Now, it was India itself that was at risk of contamination from the twenty-first century.

Whenever the debate was limited to the narrower question of whether economic growth was benefiting Indian society as a
whole, I found it hard to side with the naysayers. The statistics, even without being tortured, spoke for themselves. In the early 1980s, before the evisceration of the Licence Raj and the opening up of the economy to outside investment, 60 per cent of Indians lived below the international poverty line. In 2005, the figure had dropped to 41 per cent, with the sharpest falls in poverty coinciding with the fastest spurts of growth.

For all that, I was glad to have experienced so much of the old India before it was totally eclipsed by the new. One morning in Delhi, I found myself discussing this question with a high-ranking public servant who moonlighted as a public intellectual, who had written a series of quite brilliant books on the rise and character of the Indian middle class. Clearly, he was a strong believer in a more egalitarian society, and confidently predicted that a rising tide would eventually lift all the boats, to use the voguish economic analogy of the times.

He spoke with eloquent conviction, and it was moving to hear him talk so hopefully of a less iniquitous country. Yet the moment we finished the interview, he nonchalantly pushed a buzzer concealed in the arm of his chair, at which point a waiter came scurrying in from the pantry next door to serve us tea. It was hilariously incongruous, but he performed this ritual with a complete lack of embarrassment or self-consciousness. Like many Indians, I suspect, he was a well-intentioned macro-economist, but more self-serving as a micro-economist. Much as he believed that the poor should get a far better deal, he rather enjoyed the luxuries that the inequality of Indian society brought to his daily life. I recognised this train of thought, not least because, like most foreign correspondents stationed in Delhi, I had fallen prey to it myself.

Certainly, prosperity was no guarantor of progress. Consider what unfolded in Gujarat, one of India's richest states, where communal rioting erupted in 2002 that led to the slaughter of almost 800 Muslims and over 250 Hindus. With homicidal fury, Hindu mobs, wearing saffron bandanas and brandishing swords, iron bars and trishuls, tore through the streets of Ahmedabad, the state capital, and a string of towns destroying mosques and setting alight Muslim-owned businesses.

Then they murdered their owners and gang-raped the women and children, 20 men at a time. One Muslim man who tried to protect his sister-in-law and young child had his skull cracked open with a sword and his eyes doused with diesel oil. Then he was set alight. His sister-in-law was stripped and raped, then drenched in kerosene and burnt alive. Then, the three-month-old baby that she had cradled in her lap was dumped into the flames. Afterwards, the local gravedigger told of finding the bodies of three pregnant women by the side of the road, with their stomachs slashed open and the foetuses hanging out. From survivors also came testimony of how young Muslim girls cast themselves onto the fire rather than being held down and raped.

To their shame, the police and state authorities did nothing to prevent the violence. Indeed, the accusation has always been that they were accomplices to the slaughter and allowed the mass murders in revenge for an arson attack on a train returning Hindu pilgrims from the holy town of Ayodhya in which at least 58 people were killed. The chief minister of Gujarat, the Hindu extremist Narendra Modi, was also accused of taking no action to prevent the riots.

In India, the burning of a train was always likely to provoke an especially grotesque response, for it recalled the horrors of
partition. Some of the worst violence took place within metres of police stations, where unmanned switchboards echoed to the noise of the violence outside and the sound of ringing phones. The first pogrom of the new India age, what was especially alarming was how technology had been co-opted by the murderers. They used computer printouts of voter-registration lists to identify the homes and businesses owned by Muslims, along with mobile phones and texts to better coordinate their attacks.

If wealth and prosperity had failed to eradicate the savagery of communalism, it had actually aggravated another Indian problem that had been handed down through the ages: female foeticide, the abortion each year of 500,000 female foetuses. Not wanting to be saddled with expensive dowries or run the risk of losing their landholdings when their daughters got married, parents who discovered they were expecting a baby daughter regularly opted to pay 500 rupees ($10) for a quick abortion.

Here, increased prosperity brought increased access to prenatal ultrasounds and sonograms, which, in turn, brought increased rates of female foeticide. Already, there was a welter of statistics to show that sex selection was worst in the most affluent parts of the country: Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat and South Delhi, the middle-class haven that was the home to most foreign correspondents. While the Indian Government had enacted laws to prevent expectant parents finding out the sex of their child, doctors were rarely prosecuted for revealing the results of ultrasound tests. Instead, the same spirit of consumerism that was driving the Indian economy was also depressing the female birth rate. Moderately well-off Indians could choose the sex of their babies just as easily as they could select the colour of their new Marutis.

In a Punjabi village just a couple of hours' drive from Chandigarh, the state capital, it was easy to find evidence of female foeticide. The village birth register from the past 12 months showed that 34 boys had been born compared with just 19 girls. Since January, just one female name had been added to the ledger, and now it was almost November. Cars equipped with mobile ultrasound machines drove from village to village, so women did not even have to leave home to find out the sex of their foetus.

Local women spoke openly about having abortions, with little sense of shame and no fear of prosecution. At the local maternity hospital, we were allowed to film a mother giving birth, and we arrived in the operating theatre just as the young mother, Neelam, was being administered a trickle of anaesthetic to numb the pain from her Caesarean section. Neelam had already given birth to a daughter and desperately wanted to give her husband a son. So there was a heightened sense of tension in the operating theatre as the surgeon slid his scalpel across her stomach and pulled from her womb the tiny infant. With the Caesarean section a complete success, the safe arrival of such a beautiful ball of life should have been greeted with delight. Sadly, it was a joyless birth. Neelam had produced a second baby girl.