The Long Marcher

For the poet, it was a metaphor: the child was father of the man. For India’s prime minister, it was reality. There is evidence that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, born into deprivation at a time when British colonialism had ravaged the Indian economy and impoverished the people, when memories of millions dead from starvation in the Bengal Famine were part of lived experience, when the poor had been driven to a primitive existence, was motivated by the deep anguish of the poor he witnessed as a child to make their economic emancipation a central motif of his government. The evidence lies, quite explicitly for those who can listen without bias, in his first speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi.

Speeches are integral to democracy but marginal to public memory. Truth be told, even the most important public speech of the year, delivered by prime ministers on our Independence Day, begins to fade more quickly than we might imagine. But one recent speech can lay claim to that overused adjective ‘great’. 

On August 15, 2014, Prime Minister Modi lifted the narrative from the banal
recitation of bureaucratese into oratory by infusing his vision of governance with a personal dimension. In a remarkable departure from convention, he dwelt on the pain of harsh and relentless poverty. He described the anguish of women, of aunts and relatives who suffered the fever of hidden toxins coursing through their bodies because they did not have a toilet at home and therefore had to wait till sunset.

He described the torture that was embedded in normalcy. That speech should be easily accessible from the inexhaustible archives of the internet.  

The prime minister then initiated, immediately, a dramatic shift in the priorities of government which transformed the lives of the destitute, and particularly of women. Improving the life of the poor became a national mission. The absence of toilets was not a secret. But no one had made it a compulsive and compulsory priority because governance had been in the control of those who have toilets. Sanitation, electricity, health insurance, bank accounts, easy bank loans without collateral: they were not just another set of promises chained to a government file. They became the signature tune of an inclusive India. Opposition voices laughed when Modi announced that millions of poor Indians who had never stepped across the doors of a bank before would get accounts through the Jan Dhan Yojana on August 15, 2014. Fifteen million accounts were opened on the first day of the scheme. The number went far beyond 300 million by the end of his first term.

The most exceptional advance was through the digital empowerment of the poor. Technology was implicitly viewed as a middle-class asset. That changed. In a collateral benefit, the size of the Indian market has kept the price of personal technology affordable.

Numbers are an economist’s crutch but they tell some part of the story. When British imperialism dug its fangs into India with control of Bengal in the 1750s and 1760s, India had about 30 per cent of world trade; China’s share was a little higher; Britain had an estimated two per cent. By 1947 the figures had been reversed. The consequence: in 1947, 70 per cent of the population, or about 250 million Indians, lived below the poverty line. The Rangarajan Committee estimated that in 2014, 38.2 per cent of the population, or over 454 million people, were still living below the poverty line. If you look at these figures with the eyes of a humanist rather than the perspective of an economist, 200 million more Indians were suffering from harsh poverty in 2014, when Narendra Modi became prime minister, than in 1947.

A few weeks ago the World Bank provided the latest statistics. The number of Indians living below the poverty line by 2023 had dipped to 2.8 per cent, despite the change in PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) from $2.15 to $3. Commentators were barely able to hide their astonishment noting that this had happened despite the shock of Covid.

Democracy asks simple questions: Does any child sleep hungry, does any mother wrestle with anxiety, does any father living on a daily wage wonder about the family meal tomorrow in the India of the 2020s? The answer is no. Narendra Modi’s Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana has ensured the highest level of security: food security. Some 800 million Indians get, every month, five kilograms of wheat or rice and one kilogram of preferred pulses. It is the largest social welfare scheme in human history. For Modi this was a fundamental right. 

Every prime minister has wanted to reduce poverty, but each largely left the responsibility to a massive government machine which sought answers from the algorithm of overall economic development. The net effect was accurately described, not least by some of its votaries who loved above all the attention of a press conference, as the “trickle-down theory”. They never wondered about the meaning of trickle.

The theory was premised on a disproportionate value system. The rich got rivers; the middle class got a rivulet; the poor got a trickle. No one ever put it in these terms, but the hidden rationalisation was that each got what it merited. The poor deserved their poverty because ignorance and stupidity had kept them poor. Their existence was not defined by a rational compulsory standard in the quality of life but by an incremental rise; if they were a little better off than before then all was good. Till 2014 women in hundreds of millions did not have basic sanitation, and no one in the classist traditional ruling spectrum lost any sleep over it. They were half a loaf of bread better off than before, weren’t they? Their children were a semi-educated school better off than illiteracy, and that was good enough for the masses. 

A paradox must be addressed. A government in a democracy may not be run by the people, but it must be of and for the people. Otherwise, you do not get re-elected. The greatest demand for good governance comes from the poor: Why did they rebel so rarely? It is easy to attribute this to fatalism, as Western ‘Orientalists’ have done to justify their economic oppression, conjuring up an image of the East that degraded every aspect of society including culture and religion. British Orientalists turned Hindu gods into ‘monsters’ even when civilisational achievements in temple architecture left them awestruck. Muslims became synonymous with brutality. The Chinese became opium-eaters. Their own record of citizen-massacres and mass murder through famine was permitted the minutest place in books, and erased from public memory if it escaped censorship. 

The Indian poor were filled with hope in the 1950s, and gave vent to their growing disillusionment in the General Election of 1967. In 1971, Indira Gandhi brought ‘Garibi Hatao’ to the top of the democratic agenda but could not do as much about the promise as she may have wished. The challenge to India’s unity in the 1980s and 1990s, and the heavy price paid, derailed the economic discourse. The economic reforms of the 1990s, essential to the very survival of the nation, delivered disproportionate rewards but, by the turn of the century, the time for excuses was getting over. Suffice to say that if Prime Minister Modi had not lifted Indians out of harsh poverty there would have been perpetual upheaval.  

China’s first experiment in a “great leap forward” under the helmsman Mao Zedong ended in an estimated 55 million deaths and economic disaster because it invested in dislocation of all kinds. The repair work had to be done by Deng Xiaoping. It is far more sensible to march ahead rather than leap forward. You keep your feet on the ground. India marched ahead, but for a long while the pace of the march varied from one class demographic to another. Disparity has not disappeared. It cannot. There is no Utopia, except in books. But India can now assert with confidence that the poor do not belong to another country.   

governanceIndian economyIndian politicsModi at 75Modi’s missionNarendra Modisocial changewomen empowerment