Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
On the Grand Trunk Road (9 page)
The Nehruvian state’s present crisis, which has produced so much talk of radical economic reform along democratic-capitalist lines in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, flows from several accumulated failures. After decades of egalitarian socialist rhetoric, the South Asian elites have failed to eliminate or even seriously reduce poverty or economic inequality. Per capita income remains pitiful, in the range of $350 to $700 per year across the region. Several hundred million people—a minority, but a large one—live in dire squalor. The South Asian economies have fallen badly behind Third World economies that tilted to capitalism earlier, even unwieldy and oppressive ones such as Communist China, not to mention the East Asian tigers of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, which lately have been racking up annual growth rates nearing 10 percent. As their neighbors to the east raced on, the bloated South Asian governments fell so badly into debt internally and externally that they eventually found they had little choice but to slim down and tighten up. And of course, the socialist ideas that so animated Nehru and other South Asian leaders forty years ago have fallen into disrepute. Theorists such as India’s Prem Shankar Jha, who argues that the socialist elites in South Asia deliberately created shortages in their economies to enhance the profitability of controlling their governments, are helping, directly and indirectly, to write the reform agendas. It is a remarkable turnabout, although the elites are anxious to present it more as a form of continuity so as not to discredit themselves and the history they have made.
In India, and to a lesser degree in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the impetus for capitalist reform is also rising from what has been arguably the state’s most important success: the creation of an expanding middle class. In Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the questions of what the middle class is and whether it has real strength are problematic. In Bangladesh, Nepal, and Afghanistan the middle class barely exists, although there are relatively small urban classes that sometimes wrestle for power with the old elite. But in India nowadays the middle class—one hundred million to two hundred million people who earn incomes large enough to permit savings, families who organize themselves around familiar Western concerns such as planning for college, providing for children, acquiring creature comforts—is broad, deep, simultaneously a bedrock of social conservatism and a vehicle for revolutionary social mobility and progressive change. What successful political economies exist in the world today—in the West, in Asia, and now the tentative embryos in Latin America and elsewhere—were erected atop the middle classes. To see India at the threshold of a similar achievement cannot help but inspire hope in anyone who feels sympathy for South Asia’s centuries of suffering. The Indian neocolonial elite likes to take credit for the middle class that swelled beneath it during the 1980s—15 to 25 percent of the population, depending on how you measure it. But truly, this was in many ways an involuntary and painful birth. And now the Indian middle class is showing the same ingratitude to its feudal parents that middle classes throughout history and around the world have done. The Indian middle class by and large wants opportunity, stability, a level social and economic playing field, and a share of power in a clean, forward-looking government, which these days means an orientation toward the internationally ascendant free market. It wants the corrupt neocolonial elite, Nehru’s wayward children, to step aside. This has not, so far, been a stark confrontation, like that in Tiananmen Square between the Chinese middle class and the Maoist old guard, or in central Bangkok between the Thai middle class and their corrupt generals. Because India has clung stubbornly to its electoral democracy, its politicians, however mendacious or corrupt as a group, have been forced to take into account the middle class’s aspirations in order to win elections and garner campaign funds. Sometimes the middle class’s demands have seemed dangerous products of manipulation or anger or confusion, as in the Hindu revivalist movement or the Punjab insurgency. But its energy has been inescapable. And it is threatening to derail what has been the most precious, profitable creation of the old guardians of the state—the great South Asian socialist gravy train.
As it happens, train stations are not a bad place to sniff the fumes of the decomposing Nehruvian state.
South Asia’s railways are much romanticized by Westerners, and with reason. They certainly do better than the mobile torture chambers collectively referred to as Indian Airlines. Mark Tully, for seventeen years the British Broadcasting Corporation’s correspondent in South Asia, writes that the railways reveal a “talent for developing the modem without destroying the ancient.” The Indian railways do move many people and much freight cheaply, and they manage to earn a profit, which is a lot more than most subsections of the Nehruvian state can claim. Whether they represent an ideal marriage of the ancient and the modern is another matter. As a social enterprise and a microcosm of the state’s public hierarchy, the railways exemplify the ways the state has both failed and succeeded in India since 1947. These days, down in the bowels of the railway ministry lies an anxious culture of 1.6 million sinecured employees who suspect that their best days may be behind them.
Wander through the Old Delhi station and the first thing you notice are all the signs carved in English and Hindi on polished wood, swinging neatly from their hinges, indicating the offices of the station superintendent, deputy station superintendent, ticket collector, deputy ticket collector, personal secretaries, security supervisors, and on down the line to the peons in their oil-stained T-shirts who rate no signs but seem to do much of the actual work. Once, on a thirty-six-hour ride from Delhi to Madras in the south, I brought my notebook along and talked to dozens of employees about their lives and work. It was like wandering through a living Victorian museum, but the anxiety shared by the employees arose distinctly from the pressures buffeting the South Asian state in the late twentieth century.
The first man I met was Chandra Mohan Soli, a deputy station superintendent in Delhi who sat in a dim office with a concrete floor, clacking manual typewriters, and piles of carbon papers attached to forms printed on the coarse, soft paper common to the Indian bureaucracy. I asked him about his railway career. He explained the rigorous exams he had taken thirty years before and then described the benefits: subsidized housing for himself and his family in the “railway colonies” scattered across India, free medical care from the dispensary in the colony, hospitalization at the railway clinic, a pension, sick days, personal leave, holidays. If he dies in an accident on the job, the railway is required to give his son a career position as compensation. Seniority determines who gets the promotions, the larger houses, the air coolers and air conditioners in the offices. Since he was a senior employee, the system seemed fair enough to him—he had an air conditioner, at least. I asked what he thought about all this recent talk of privatization and capitalism. His answer was direct. “This is safer,” he said. “If it is privatized, then the big guy of the company can fire you any time, according to his whims and fancies. Here, nobody is going to get fired.”
As he spoke, a radio set beside him crackled and he began barking into it urgently, ordering subordinates around his desk this way and that. He paused, exasperated. “VIPs on the trains are a daily affair,” he sighed. “We give them the front seats and we meet them on the platforms.” He shuffled through piles of forms on his desk. In South Asia, VIPs throw their weight around in ways unfathomable to anyone raised amid the nominal egalitarianism of the West. The VIP definition covers anyone with enough power within the state to command patronage. VIPs go immediately to the front of the line, harass lowly government servants with impunity, and demand special treatment for the most ordinary services. A common way for a VIP to assert his status is to be late for an Indian Airlines flight and demand that the plane wait for him on the tarmac. The station manager holds the flight or faces the risk of transfer to a godforsaken hinterlands outpost as retaliation. Soli seemed animated by a similar concern. “The VIPs arriving today are a railway officer, an adviser for planning on the railway board, an Uttar Pradesh state railway minister, an Uttar Pradesh party minister, the executive director of the railway board, the union minister of petroleum, and a former union finance minister and minister of defense,” he said, shuffling hurriedly through his pile of forms. “Actually, this last one might be a special VIP, a WIP. If it’s a WIP, then the senior superintendent of the station attends to it. That would be the prime minister or the chairman of the railway board.... Half of my job is watching after the VIPs.”
A deputy stepped into the office and told Soli that a state minister was pulling into the station. Soli jumped up and buttoned his wool coat to the top. He grabbed a telephone and cranked the old-fashioned handle. “Which train is he in?” Soli demanded. “There’s no air-conditioning in that train? How can he travel in that train?” And then he was off, marching briskly through the swarms of passengers, tobacco sellers, porters, dogs, and hangers-on congregated on the platforms.
Aboard the train I introduced myself to the superintendent, P. Kadiresan, a thin, dark-skinned southerner with oiled hair who sat in a small compartment filled with passengers making elaborate complaints about lost baggage. Kadiresan diverted them with forms and carbon paper and then sat back to narrate the story of his career. His was a tale of how the Nehruvian state built the Indian middle class and how it was running out of ways to sustain its achievement into the next generation.
Kadiresan was born as a shunned untouchable in an impoverished Tamil Nadu village prior to independence. His father was a coolie, illiterate and overworked, paid day wages when he could find a job. He pushed his son to stay in school, and when Kadiresan graduated, he won a position as a government clerk through a postindependence affirmative action program for untouchables. In 1954 he sat for the railway exam and passed. Kadiresan said he never considered looking for a job anywhere but with the government—as an untouchable, he had only one other realistic option, to replicate his father’s life as a landless laborer. So for twenty-nine years he worked his way slowly up the railway ladder, eventually earning a middle-class salary and—just as important—respect. He put his sons through college or engineering school and they did well, but not one of them had been able to find a job. The railway, like nearly all of the bloated federal ministries, had stopped hiring. Untouchables find it difficult to enter the management ranks at private companies. Kadiresan sounded genuinely puzzled and frustrated by his sons’ predicament. But he was sure of one thing: Capitalism was not the answer.
Private employers “will extract more work,” he said in lilting English. “Under this system, there is some leniency. I mean, they don’t extract so much work from us. According to the rules and regulations, they don’t extract so much. They give job security. If anything goes wrong, the family gets a compassionate job. After joining in railways, I never fear anything. After coming to my duty, I am arriving, working very loyally without any fear. I never care about my family. I only care about my passengers and my train. This is the mentality of Indian people. Railways is the way. The rules and regulations are very much known. Without knowing the rules and regulations, nobody can come and work here.”
In the second-class carriages I found S. M. Mahule, a thirty-three-year veteran of the railway service. He was a ticket collector and wore a yellow-and-red cloth armband. He talked about the extraordinary benefits of government service—forty-five days of paid vacation each year, a dozen government holidays, and up to one hundred twenty sick days each year, paid and unpaid. Mahule said he took two months off the previous year for what he described as irregular blood pressure and said he planned another extended leave soon. “Most of our employees, they are sick,” he said wryly. He, too, lamented that the socialist gravy train was running out of steam. He had six children, all college graduates, all unemployed. He was more sanguine than some of his colleagues about a future dominated by the private sector, but he was worried. “In my time government service was more important,” he said. “Not anymore. Direct recruitment from the service commission has been stopped. If they privatize, that would be better. They pay more attention in the private sector than in the government because they are getting the benefits to their own pockets. They are choosing candidates according to their caliber and ability. In government, seniority is all.” He mentioned a son who had twice taken the railway exam but had not yet found a place. I asked why his son wanted a government job. “He’s not so much brilliant or extraordinary. He is an ordinary boy. That is why he wants a government job.”
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