BBC News – Is India facing a ‘cultural emergency’?

Is India facing what author Salman Rushdie calls a “cultural emergency” with writers, painters and filmmakers being targeted by the mob? (The Emergency in the 1970s was the darkest hour in Independent India’s history when civil liberties were suspended.)

Consider the events that have made the front pages this week.

Leading academic Ashis Nandy is threatened with arrest after he makes controversial remarks about corruption and disadvantaged groups at the popular Jaipur literary festival. Sir Salman himself is asked to stay away from a film promotion and a literary festival in Calcutta, supposedly one of India’s more liberal cities, because authorities fear protests from fringe Muslim groups. Similar groups have demanded a ban on actor-director Kamal Haasan’s new film Vishwaroopam, prompting the star to complain about “cultural terrorism”.

The outsize controversy over the remarks made by Professor Nandy, who was once voted one of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals by Foreign Policy magazine, demonstrates how fringe groups can threaten free speech with impunity.

At a panel discussion ironically called the Republic of Ideas, the scholar said “most of the corrupt” in India came from its most disadvantaged groups, but he also said that corruption among the rich was less conspicuous.

All hell broke loose: there was a tsunami of media-generated outrage, a police complaint was lodged against Professor Nandy, and prominent Dalit leader Mayawati said he should be sent to prison. Very few people seemed to be listening to Professor Nandy’s patient clarifications. Dalit scholar Kancha Ilaiah said Prof Nandy had made “a bad statement with good intentions”. But the harassment of the good professor is likely to continue.

Sir Salman, who’s no stranger to controversy in India, was asked to stay away from promoting Midnight’s Children, the film based on his novel, and a book fair in Calcutta on Wednesday following fears of fringe Muslim groups protesting against his presence. “Rushdie banished from Calcutta,” said a shocked Telegraph newspaper.

And in Chennai (Madras) in southern India, Kamal Haasan, according to reports, has agreed to personally cut parts of his big budget film Vishwaroopam because some Muslims groups don’t like the way the community has been portrayed in the film.

This after the film has been cleared by official censors, and the high court has thrown out moves to ban the film from being screened. A tired Kamal Haasan said he was fed up with the controversy and contemplating leaving the country.

There’s a grim precedent: one of India’s greatest painters, M F Husain, was literally hounded into exile for drawing a Hindu goddess naked.

Last year cartoonist Sudhir Tailang told me that a “new intolerance” was gripping India. He was dismayed by the arrest of anti-corruption cartoonist Aseem Trivedi after a lawyer complained that his cartoons mocked the country and its constitution.

The new intolerance, many believe, is also being fuelled by a section of India’s sensation-seeking media, which “dumbs down” nuanced debates.

Others argue that politicians should share a large part of the blame. “When politicians abdicate the responsibility of standing up for the average citizen in the face of such action, when they become cheerleaders for intimidation in fact, the republic is in trouble indeed,” says The Indian Express newspaper. The question is, why are most Indian politicians and the government silent about such attacks on free speech?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-21257488

BBC News – Soutik Biswas: A good read for the week

Why do people in one of the world’s most unequal nations avoid talking about inequality?

In a scholarly, must-read essay in The Caravan magazine, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who heads the Delhi-based Centre For Policy Research, writes that India still “breathes an oppressive atmosphere of social inequality” despite significant reduction of poverty.

But a “deep and pervasive culture of avoidance” hobbles clear thinking about inequality. “Everybody hopes the system will change, but absolves themselves of the responsibility for bringing about that change,” writes Mr Mehta, who has taught at Harvard. The scale of silence is unusual, he writes, in a society which is richly plural and argumentative and has democratic politics.

Mr Mehta argues that social distance – caused by divisions of caste and class – reduces trust, makes collective action difficult and perpetuates inequality. Inequality also produces a society which suffers from low self-esteem.

India typically deals with inequality by giving out handouts and pushing affirmative action. But, as Mr Mehta points out, segregated social spaces and caste hierarchies ensure that inequality is alive and well. “The biggest failure of Indian political imagination,” he writes, is “while promising emancipation, it also made caste categories inescapable.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-19867526

BBC News – Why India may not be such an attractive destination for supermarkets

Is India really an attractive destination for global supermarkets?

Soutik Biswas, Delhi Correspondent

Monday, 17 September 2012. On Friday, the government finally cleared a controversial plan to open up its lucrative retail sector to global supermarket chains in an effort to revive a flagging economy.

There has been a massive political kerfuffle over how the supposed invasion of global chains will destroy India’s fabled “mom-and-pop” stores, which have a stranglehold on the retail market.

Yet, it may be much ado about nothing, say many analysts. The political outrage against the government’s decision – which actually comes with several business inhibiting caveats – is outsized, they insist.

Yes, India’s growing economy, favourable demographics and an upwardly mobile middle class do portend a healthy future for organised retail.

Only, one doesn’t quite know when the future will arrive.

At a paltry 4% of the overall sector, organised retail has a low base in India. The overwhelming majority of Indians continues to buy from friendly neighbourhood mom-and-pop stores.

Decoding the customer

But a quarter of the world’s young people live in India, and more than half of Indians are below 25 years of age.

In a booming economy, that should mean a growing middle class, cheap credit and more disposable incomes. That’s something, say consultants, which will make India a very attractive destination for foreigners wanting to invest in retail.

Big retail is struggling in India

The bad news is that nothing of this sort is happening: “mom-and-pop” stores are thriving and big retail, promoted by some of the top business groups in the country, is struggling.

The economic slowdown at home hasn’t helped matters. Big retail footfalls have been hurt by high rents, overcrowding of malls and a credit squeeze.

Also, as a study by management consultant KPMG shows, Indian retailers have also made big mistakes – and the inability to compete with the neighbourhood stores is one of them.

“Mom-and-pop stores already have a model that is preferred by the consumers and is also cost efficient. The big stores are still trying to get their model right in providing an alternative to neighbourhood retailers who offer convenience, credit and personalised service,” the 2009 report says.

Is it then any surprise that most Indian supermarket chains are bleeding, and some – including one with over 1,000 shops – have actually shut down?

One of the suggestions made by KPMG is that big retail needs to work harder at decoding consumer behaviour.

India is a diverse nation and a homogeneous retail strategy is possibly doomed to fail.

“A case in point is discount shopping in India. Indian discount shopping is still fragmented because of diverse culture while Western retailers are able to treat the entire customer base as one. This helps them gain benefits of large-scale promotions and offers,” the report says.

The report suggests that retailers should tailor discount seasons based on festivals of different regions, offer best prices and value added services (happy hours on shopping deals, offers for retirees, contests for students, for example), among other things.

The Indian consumer is a unique beast. In an article aptly titled The Myth Of Big Retail, journalist Sreenivasan Jain tells the story of the head of one of India’s biggest retail chains explaining why his store design actually encouraged overcrowding.

“He called it his ‘butt and brush’ theory, a somewhat cute metaphor to describe how Indians actually prefer to shop in an overcrowded environment [where their butts can theoretically brush against each other],” he wrote.

Even this retailer is deep in the red.

Clearly, it’s not going to be a cakewalk for global supermarket chains entering India. As consultants Ernst & Young warn, they need to understand local tastes, customise their product offerings and secure the right real estate to make things work.

And that will be only the beginning of the hard road ahead.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-19595655

BBC News – Deja vu hits India’s parliament

Soutik Biswas, Delhi correspondent

Saturday 24 August 2012. There is a feeling of deja vu over the present impasse in the parliament.

Last year, the parliament sat for 73 days for over 800 hours. Around 30% of the time was lost due to disruptions, according to the watchdog PRS Legislative Research. A total of 54 bills were listed for consideration and passing into law. Only 28 were actually passed. Some 97 bills were pending when the parliament shut.

Things began on a rosier note this year.

Nearly 90% of the time available during the budget session – March to May with a three-week recess in April – was productive, “significantly higher than the productive time registered in the last few sessions”, according to PRS. Twelve bills were passed, and 17 new bills were introduced. Over 100 bills were pending at the end of the session.

And suddenly, it’s yesterday once more.

The ongoing monsoon session – with 20 sittings between August and September – has been deadlocked since with the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh over a report that India lost $33bn (£20bn) by selling coalfields cheaply.

Mr Singh has offered to make a statement on the government’s position, but the BJP, “choosing agitation over debate” as one newspaper describes it, says nothing short of Mr Singh’s resignation will satisfy them.

Look at what India is losing out on.

During the ongoing monsoon session, there are some 29 pending bills for consideration and passing into laws.

These include laws to prevent money laundering, checking corruption, protecting women from sexual harassment at workplace, protecting whistle blowers, amending laws relating to banking and marriage, and regulating higher education, among other things.

But the possibility of these bills being debated or passed looks bleak with every passing day.

Stuck between what many say is an evasive and indecisive government and a belligerently intransigent opposition, bipartisanship appears to have suffered an irretrievable breakdown. This does not bode well for the future of India’s democracy.

India’s parliament has had a chequered history.

The first 13 parliaments passed more than 3,200 bills, but the legislative output slowed down in the 1990s as India’s politics fragmented and political instability grew.

As Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta argued in a paper, political instability and a divided parliament – with the ruling coalition often a minority in the upper house – contributed to the slowing down of output.

They also believe that the parliament takes itself less seriously today, “starkly evident” in the declining number of days it is in session – the number of sittings has declined by about a third since 1950s.

Putting the government on the mat through robust debate is the job of a feisty, vibrant opposition party; but paralysing the house with grandstanding and an obdurate go for broke attitude makes it look petulant and irresponsible. When will India’s political parties stop making a scene and begin debating more in the parliament?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-19364993

BBC News – Why do India’s MPs love guns?

Soutik Biswas

Friday 3 August 2012. Why do so many Indian parliamentarians need guns?

And why are guns being sold to MPs who have criminal cases pending against them?

Nobody quite knows. But the government’s reply to a freedom of information request on gun ownership among MPs has revealed some startling facts:

- 756 guns were sold to MPs and VIPs – usually politicians – in India between 1987 and 2012.

- 82 MPs purchased guns being sold off by the state between 2001 and 2012.

- 18 of these 82 MPs have criminal cases pending against them. They include charges of murder, attempt to murder and kidnapping.

- One of these MPs – Atiq Ahmed from Uttar Pradesh – has 44 criminal cases pending against him.

These mostly imported guns were seized by customs and then sold to MPs – at well below the market price until a few years ago.

Curiously, only MPs can buy these confiscated weapons. Ordinary citizens, according to the watchdog Association for Democratic Reforms, are not eligible even if they have firearms licences.

In a new report, the watchdog raises some pointed questions.

Why should guns be sold only to MPs when many of them already enjoy police protection at state expense?

Why are guns being sold to MPs who have “serious criminal charges” pending against them?

Why are ordinary citizens not eligible to buy these guns?

Does the government track the possession of these guns to check if they have been sold off on the black market?

The government and the MPs have no answers yet.

Right to information activist Ambrish Pandey, who unearthed the information, believes the sale of guns to MPs is a result of an “ad hoc, discretionary and opaque policy of allotment”.

India’s democracy is already facing a serious challenge from criminalisation of politics.

Nearly a third of MPs – 158 out of 543, to be precise – in the lower house face criminal charges in more than 500 cases.

Seventy-four of them face very serious charges, such as murder and abduction.

And now we find that the government has freely sold guns to many of them. What is happening?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-19107433

BBC News – Manmohan Singh and the politics of decency

Tuesday, 12 June 2012. Not so long ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was lauded for his calm demeanour and for practising a politics of decency and reconciliation.

His supporters would say that these qualities stood India in good stead: they cite the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai attacks when Mr Singh refused to indulge in war mongering against Pakistan and ratchet up the tension.

Even his critics would concede that during his government’s fruitful first term in office, the diarchy – the technocrat, politics-averse Mr Singh running the government and the dynast Sonia Gandhi running the party – looked like a smart arrangement.

Politics is a fickle business, and three years into the Congress-led government’s second dismal term in office, Mr Singh’s strengths – and the Delhi diarchy – appear to have become liabilities.

They are being blamed for what critics call a paralysis gripping Mr Singh’s government, bogged down by charges of graft and inaction and saddled with an economy which seems to have stalled. “Mr Singh has plainly run out of steam,” the Economist magazine says.

The latest salvo has come from ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, which cut its outlook on India in April.

In an unexceptional report warning that India could be the first Bric nation to lose its investment grade status, the agency’s economists say Mr Singh “often appears to have limited ability to influence his cabinet colleagues and proceed with the liberalisation policy he favours”. It doesn’t forget to remind that Mr Singh is an “unelected” prime minister who “lacks a political base of his own,” and that political power is held by Mrs Gandhi who holds no cabinet position.

Last week, Mr Singh’s former media advisor and journalist Harish Khare launched an unusual broadside against his former boss, hinting that the prime minister’s innate decency may be a handicap. “Manmohan Singh is not corrupt, but he is definitely guilty,” Mr Khare wrote in The Hindu newspaper. “He can be easily charged – along with his political partner Mrs Sonia Gandhi – of pursing a politics of decency and of elevating reconciliation to a matter of state policy.”

‘Cost of confrontation’

Mr Khare blames Mr Singh for not having the pluck to take on cunning civil society activists and rogue corporate interests who are trying to discredit his government; he also criticises him for not using his considerable intellectual heft to challenge government auditors who the government believes have exaggerated the revenue losses due to sale of telecom licences.

“Manmohan Singh is guilty of pursuing the noble quest for reconciliation at the expense of another maxim of statecraft: those who spurn the public authority’s hand of reconciliation must be made to learn the cost of confrontation,” concludes Mr Khare.

Over the weekend, senior journalist Barkha Dutt bemoaned Mr Singh’s “loss of personality”, alluding to how the prime minister took on his government’s key Communist allies during his first term while pushing ahead with the civilian nuclear deal with the US. “The PM’s strongest trait – an indisputable personal decency – has now come to be conflated with his biggest weakness – a timidity of style that prevents robust decision-making. While even today his sharpest critics do not question the PM’s personal integrity, decency is no longer acceptable as a substitute for inaction,” she wrote.

The taciturn and inscrutable Mr Singh – an “antidote to the comedic stereotype of the brash and irate Sikh”, as historian Patrick French once described him – hardly gives interviews. So we really don’t know how he feels about being called a timid and overly decent man who avoids confrontation at the cost of credibility. We also don’t know whether India’s Deng Xiaoping has lost his appetite for economic reforms in the ongoing political battle between reformists and populists, which the latter are clearly winning.

But a rare interview by Mr Singh from 1996 may offer some clues to the problems facing the prime minister today. Reflecting on his years as the finance minister in PV Narasimha Rao’s minority government, Mr Singh told journalist Vir Sanghvi that the liberalisation process he initiated in 1991 ground to a halt after “politics took over on December 6, 1992″, the day Hindu fanatics demolished the Babri mosque. “After that it was just politics that was on everybody’s mind. And an important matter like cutting the fiscal deficit did not receive much importance as it should have been.”

India’s politics is possibly looking as divisive and broken today. The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency, Theodore Roosevelt once said. If the critics are to be believed, it isn’t working in India these days. India needs temperate leaders, and most people believe Mr Singh is one. But temperate leaders needn’t be weak.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-18340413

BBC News – Is the India growth story over?

Soutik Biswas, Delhi Correspondent

Friday, 1 june 2012. Prepare For Worse, a newspaper warns its readers on Friday, on the back of reports that the economy has grown at its slowest pace in nine years.

Goodbye 2020, Hello 1991!, says another, alluding to the 1991 meltdown, which sent India scurrying to the IMF for a bailout.

Are things so dire with Asia’s third-largest economy? Is the India growth story coming to an end?

Fiscal and trade deficits are soaring, the rupee is at a historic low, reforms are stalled due to obdurate politics and a hesitant government, inflation is high and investment and consumption are down. Growth in key manufacturing and infrastructure has dipped sharply.

Services, usually a double-digit growth booster, are hovering around 8%. Most worryingly, farm growth is at a below 2% and a below-normal monsoon has been forecast. It is ironical that all this is happening under the leadership of an Oxford-educated economist.

The government has been attributing the downturn to the global economy catching a cold. But it is clearly more than that.

For clues listen to Bimal Jalan, former governor of India’s central bank and a respected economist. “There’s something happening that we are not quite in grips with so something needs to be done,” he told a business channel.

Dr Jalan believes that a deeper structural and systemic problem is wreaking havoc with the economy.

“You can import as much oil as you want, you can pay for it because your reserves are high, and your exports are doing reasonably well even though they may not have done so well in one or two quarters. Your current account deficit is higher than you expected, but still we can afford it, there is no great problem. So what is it that’s lacking and that we don’t have?” he wonders.

What India doesn’t have is a bipartisan, mature political consensus on the direction that the economy must take. How can a small group of politicians in the parliament stymie major reforms? Has India’s politics and economy become hostage to petty interests, helped abundantly by a government which is seen as effete and weak?

A broken politics makes for a broken economy. Does India need political reforms first before it can even dream about moving on significant economic reforms?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-18291949

BBC News – Why is the Indian Premier League floundering?

Soutik Buswas, Delhi Correspondent

Are cricket fans turning their backs on the ongoing fifth edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL), the world’s showcase fast cricket contest?

If TV ratings figures are to be believed, fans have had enough of cricket despite the nine-team, 76-match, seven-week Twenty20 tourney.

Viewer ratings were down 18.7% in the first six games – a time when interest in the tournament traditionally peaks – compared with the same period last year.

That’s not all. Season V began on a wrong note with a tawdry Bollywood song-and-dance opening show which even appears to have put off fans. Two top sponsors have withdrawn. Brand and communication consultants are warning that the IPL brand is in “choppy waters”, and the league needs a “stronger game plan to rejuvenate the brand”. One brand consultancy firm has downgraded the league’s value to $3.67bn, down 11% from 2010.

Remember, the response to IPL Season IV last year was lukewarm. TV ratings dropped by 29% and even the final met a tepid response. Cricket fans were savouring India’s spectacular win in the World Cup which preceded the tournament, and had little appetite for more cricket.

Why is the thrill gone this year – at least in the early stages of the tournament? After all, this is the tournament which combines the sublime (sledgehammer batting, close finishes) and the ridiculous (Bollywood entertainment, cheerleaders, “strategic time outs” in the middle of the games to facilitate advertising breaks). Indians love tamasha (entertainment), and the IPL is still the best tamasha on offer.

For one, after the song and dances are over, it’s finally all about cricket. India is still licking its wounds after a nightmarish international season in which it lost eight overseas Test matches on the trot – its worst run since the 1960s. Though Sachin Tendulkar’s 100th international hundred in Dhaka last month was a welcome diversion, India failed to pick up the Asia Cup.

Don’t disrespect the fan, Rahul Dravid eloquently said at last year’s Bradman Oration, and to expect fans to flock to cheer non-performing cricketers at the highest level is a bit fey.

Also, Indian stars are the league’s biggest draw, and most of them have been performing indifferently or are absent in the ongoing edition. Tendulkar is hurt after the first game, and Sehwag and Dhoni, two big hitters, haven’t fired yet. VVS Laxman isn’t playing this season. Yuvraj Singh is recovering from cancer and is out of the game for a while. Saurav Ganguly’s batting is past its sell-by date. Rahul Dravid is playing a post-retirement nostalgia gig. Yusuf Pathan, a Twenty20 star, has fizzled out. When the stars are largely down and out, fans stay away.

Fans also seem to be confused about whom to support. The IPL is a city-based league aiming to build up fan bases in half-a-dozen big Indian cities. But when Calcutta’s icon Saurav Ganguly, Delhi’s favourite Gautam Gambhir and Bangalore’s biggest star Rahul Dravid end up leading the teams of Pune, Calcutta and Rajasthan, fan loyalties to home teams can begin to fray easily.

Interest will possibly pick up during the knockouts and the final at the fag end of the league. It may even pick up with more high-scoring games, edge-of-the-seat finishes, and big-bang batting by the stars.

But authorities simply cannot afford to let the IPL crash.

Listen to Sharda Ugra, India’s top cricket writer, and you know why. “The IPL has now become a key component of world cricket’s economy,” she writes. “If it falters and fails because it is not alert to the audience climate around it, the domino effect around the cricket world will be damaging. Cricket’s superstar status in many parts of its empire will be downgraded from club class to cattle class – all holy cows included.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-17699415

BBC News – Why President Zardari’s visit is a small bonus

Soutik Biswas, Delhi correspondent

Thursday, 5 April 2012. Hope is not a policy, but neither is despair, as South Asia expert Stephen Cohen says in a recent essay on Pakistan.

So it is with relations between India and Pakistan.

The past few days have shown how fragile the relationship can be – even as India welcomed President Asif Ali Zardari’s private trip to India on Sunday – the first by a Pakistani head of state for seven years – and PM Manmohan Singh invited him for lunch, the $10m US bounty for Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, provoked the cleric to openly launch a fresh attack against India (and the US).

But people live in hope, so Indian media is gung-ho about Mr Zardari’s visit.

They say the Pakistani president must be applauded for trying to end trade discrimination against India, easing petroleum imports from across the border, and moving towards a liberal visa deal.

“Under Mr Zardari’s watch, India and Pakistan are considering a sweeping agenda for economic co-operation for the first time in decades. The prime minister has every reason to welcome Mr Zardari warmly and consider the next steps in consolidating the unexpected movement in bilateral relations,” the Indian Express wrote.

Analyst C Raja Mohan believes Mr Singh must make an official trip to Pakistan after his meeting with Mr Zardari. “For his part,” he wrote, “Mr Singh should convey to Mr Zardari his readiness to move as fast and as far as the Pakistan president is willing to go.” Others like Jyoti Malhotra actually find Mr Zardari’s visit to the shrine of a famous Sufi Muslim saint in Rajasthan loaded with symbolism in these troubled times. “Clearly, Mr Zardari has stolen an imaginative moment from the bitter-sullen history of India-Pakistan, by asking to come to pay his respects to a cherished and much-beloved saint across the Indian subcontinent,” she wrote.

The relations between two neighbours remain complex. A 2010 Pew survey found 53% of the respondents in Pakistan chose India as the greater threat to their country, and only 26% chose the Taliban and al-Qaeda. At the same time 72% said it was important to improve relations with India, and about 75% wanted more trade relations and talks with India.

Pundits like Mr Cohen believe that it will “take the [Pakistan] army’s compliance, strong political leadership, and resolutely independent-minded foreign ministers to secure any significant shift of approach towards India”.

None of this appears to be in much evidence at the moment.

Both countries have seriously weakened governments that makes them unable to move towards any radical confidence building measures. In the current circumstances, President Zardari’s visit can only be a small bonus.

And as scholars like Kanti Bajpai suggest, India must remain patient (even if faced with another Mumbai-style attack), continue to engage with Islamabad, help the civilian government in Pakistan politically, try to resolve a few outstanding disputes like Siachen and Sir Creek, build a relationship with the army and explore the possibility of cooperating with Islamabad on the future of Afghanistan. Despair does not help mend a stormy relationship.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-17622008

BBC Column, Soutik Biswas – Is hope a fiction for India’s poor?

Soutik Biswas, Delhi correspondent

Wednesday, 15 February 2012. “We try so many things,” a girl in Annawadi, a slum in Mumbai tells Katherine Boo, “but the world doesn’t move in our favour”.

Annawadi is a “sumpy plug of slum” in the biggest city – “a place of festering grievance and ambient envy” – of a country which holds a third of the world’s poor. It is where the Pulitzer prize-winning New Yorker journalist Boo’s first book Behind the Beautiful Forevers is located.

Annawadi is where more than 3,000 people have squatted on land belonging to the local airport and live “packed into, or on top of” 335 huts. It is a place “magnificently positioned for a trafficker in rich’s people’s garbage”, where the New India collides with the Old.

Nobody in Annawadi is considered poor by India’s official benchmarks. The residents are among the 100 million Indians freed from poverty since 1991, when India embarked on liberalising its economy.

‘Garbage justice’

Boo’s story – a stirring and gritty non-fiction narrative, one of the best ever written by a foreigner on India – revolves around the self-immolation of a cantankerous, one-legged slum woman called Fatima Sheikh and how her neighbour and a hardworking, young garbage trader called Abdul and his family are framed on a charge of murdering her. Fatima’s death is a liberation from enervating poverty, and a chance for some eighbours to make money from Abdul’s family, who are making a bit more money than the rest from selling recyclables.

This is when Abdul realises that the Indian criminal justice system was a “market like garbage” – “innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags”.

Boo adopted what she calls the “vagrant-sociology approach” and followed Abdul and his neighbours of this unexceptional slum over the course of several years – November 2007 to March 2011 – to see “who got ahead and who didn’t, and why, as India prospered”.

She used more than 3,000 public records, many obtained using India’s right to information law, to validate her narrative, written in assured reported speech. The account of the hours leading to the self-immolation of Fatima Sheikh derives from repeated interviews of 168 people as well as police, hospital, morgue and court records. Mindful of the risk of over interpretation, the books wears its enormous research lightly.

Boo’s narrative is peopled by a vast range of gripping characters from Annawadi, the world from which New India shies away.

An aspiring slum boss woman who volunteers for a local Hindu right-wing party. A man who paints his horses with stripes and rents out the fake zebras to birthday parties of middle-class children. A corrupt nun who runs a children’s home. A deranged man who talks to a luxury hotel building skirting the slum.

Then there’s a bunch of young scavengers and thieves, ravaged by rats and high on white correction fluid, who live, work and die quickly. They are the young flotsam that India breathlessly parades as its demographic dividend when, in reality, the children, tired and brutalised, are already past their sell-by-date.

Bleak

The people of Annawadi are also caught up in the hideous web of corruption and official venality which hurts the poor most, and lead utterly de-humanising lives in a city that aspires to become India’s Shanghai. It is far removed from the dreadful stereotype of the happy-poor Mumbai of Slumdog Millionaire.

Behind The Beautiful Forevers  

The local councillor runs fake schools, doctors at free government hospitals and policemen extort the poor with faint promise of life and justice, and self-help groups operate as loan sharks for the poorest. The young in Annawadi drop dead like flies – run over by traffic, knifed by rival gangs, laid low by disease; while the elders – not much older – die anyway. Girls prefer a certain brand of rat poison to end their lives.

Behind The Beautiful Forevers is a bleak, heart-breaking book, which leaves you numb with anger, helplessness and pain. In this age of globalisation, Boo writes, hope is not a fiction. But hope flickers dimly in Annawadi as the “unpredictability of daily life has a way of grinding down individual promise”.

Boo asks some uncomfortable questions: What is the “infrastructure of opportunity” in India? What capabilities does the market offer? What capabilities are wasted? Why don’t places like Mumbai where filthy slums stand cheek-by-jowl with the world’s priciest buildings explode into violence? Why don’t unequal societies implode? What happens to the powerless when, among powerful Indians, the distribution of opportunity is “typically an insider trade”.

Boo has an interesting take on corruption, rife in societies like India’s. Corruption is seen as blocking India’s global ambitions.

But, she writes, for the “poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained”.

On the other hand, Boo believes, corruption stymies our moral universe more than economic possibility. Suffering, she writes, “can sabotage innate capacities for moral action”. In a capricious world of corrupt governments and ruthless markets the idea of a mutually supportive community is a myth: it is “blisteringly hard”, she writes, to be good in such conditions. “If the house is crooked and crumbling”, Boo writes, “and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-17038326