Look Back in Anger

Look Back in Anger

“That voice that cries out doesn't have to be a weakling's does it?” 
― John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

Looking back at 1991 from 2012, the year the world was supposed to come to an end, according to an addled misunderstanding of the Mayan Calendar; is like looking at a road that one can’t do a U turn on.

We are on a “Travelator” with our feet glued to the rubber, a kind of Changi Airport “slow-mo” through infinity. This is because, despite the vigour of our political discourse, no party or coalition in power has sought to unravel the liberalisation process started by the Narasimha Rao Government. It can be reasonably assumed that in the future too, it may be hard to discern forward movement, but the Indian State is not for turning tail either.

Progress after all, like the proverbial river, is a continuum. There is still water rushing by in that river, as it was in 1991, and indeed for decades, even centuries, before that, but it is not, indubitably, the same water. With changes in courses and droughts, floods and spates, it is debatable if it’s actually the “same” river as well.

This analogy, like all analogies, can’t be stretched too far. In present days of humungous dams and the noxious state of the Yamuna at Delhi, the limitations to the perpetual have become graphically evident. But, if one were to tell pre-1991 stories to a 21 year old today, the disbelief is palpable, just as encountering the Yamuna in triumphant puissance at Yamunotri is. And alongside, is a question in his or her eyes. What was wrong with your generation and the ones that preceded yours?

Why did you and all the fancy folk that fought for our independence, create that absurd world of poverty and shortages and bad technology for those years since taking charge? Weren’t you clamouring to be given a chance to set things right?

Are our chronic bottlenecks in infrastructure, no water, the frustrating power outages, the outdated laws, the stifling bureaucracy, the brutal law and order situation, bad educational and health facilities, crumbling public buildings, wholesale corruption etc. today just a consequence of the sloth and lack of vision of the elders? Are we, today’s 21 year olds, just paying for our pitri doshas?

And are we behind the times because we were completely misguided and callous for the forty-four years from 1947 to 1991?

It is difficult to defend oneself in the face of such sweeping indictment, but self respect demands one must try. What then about the formidable “commanding heights of the economy” philosophy that gave us a backbone of long gestation heavy industry undertaken by the Government in a plethora of PSUs? A lot of countries don’t have that kind of base because of over reliance on the private sector with much shorter perspectives. We can aspire to building our own aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines and frigates too, in our own shipyards, thanks to this backstop to our industrial capacities.

 And those shining IIMs and IITs, praised around the globe, that have turned out the very people that both animate and populate half the IT companies around the world? And the number of engineers, doctors and lawyers we have graduated who are second to none in their abilities? What of them?

If our primary education and healthcare systems are poor they can now be set right. In the old days, there were very limited resources, and one had to prioritise. And no, we have no answer as to why we were and are still so poor in the “inclusive” sense, when we are potentially amongst the richest nations in the world.

But, and not just because of our adequate foreign exchange reserves now, if, in the ordinary sense, we have any money to rub together now, almost all of it has come to us since 1991, and the opening up of the Indian economy.

So what would have happened in we were not forced to liberalise our Socialist ways in 1991 by the World Bank? Which did, it must be admitted, pull us back from the precipice of bankruptcy.  

We might have stayed a Soviet client state, but only if the Soviet Union itself had not collapsed. Russia is not quite the USSR as our new armament deals and security/nuclear cooperation with it reveal. We have also been waiting years for that Admiral Goroshkov/Vikramaditya aircraft carrier to arrive at vastly inflated cost.  

We needed to tilt towards the US for those softer terms of engagement with the West, those accesses, give-aways, throw-ins, subsidies, the inclusion and protection; without diplomatically making it too obvious.

Perhaps this sugar daddy could have been China, as it remains an ideological mentor to our Left parties, and paradoxically, to the Maoist terrorists and other subversives too. They want to influence and destroy us at the same time, trade with us and menace us too. It is a very interesting dialectic.

This alliance nevertheless could conceivably have happened, particularly if the CPM had actually allowed Comrade Basu to come to Delhi and become PM. And, of course, if Mr. Jyoti Basu had managed to rule for much longer than the mere months that the Janata Government experiment actually lasted.

But, as it happened, we turned to America. It is the same America that bailed us out in our non-aligned heyday, and saved us from further humiliation at the hands of the Chinese in 1962, and starvation too, as it happened, for almost a decade beyond. They sent their US Peace Corps wafting through our countryside, along with the munificence of the “PL 480” programme of wheat, milk and rice gifted by the US to India.

The US has gone on to become globocop and the centre of a unipolar world now with China chafing at the bit a little, particularly in its neighbourhood.

It is therefore no wonder we meekly agreed to the prescriptions of the World Bank in 1991, controlled as it is lock, stock and two smoking barrels by the US.

India had a week’s foreign exchange left at the time, and had to infamously hock some of its physical gold reserves. Besides, look at the chronology. The great Socialist dream had all but died. China was not Mao’s but Deng’s. The Iron Curtain had gone. And the camp followers were of no use. Today’s Socialism is a very different thing. It runs on seas of oil in Venezuela and it pays for Cuba, orphaned after the demise of the USSR too.

Our Socialist days and nights never added up. But oddly, the ruling UPA can’t quite let go of the headiness of asking for votes in the name of the aam aadmi, translated helpfully by billionaire businessman  Mr.Robert Vadra, as “mango people”, rather than development.  

The Republic of India cannot stand alone without a security alliance despite the high-minded rhetoric of the Non-aligned Movement. We can’t, in the absence of a technologically decent military industry of our own, and the financial muscle to fuel it.

This may however come about in the years to come. It is more than likely to happen, not because of our diplomacy or our intelligence, though they too have, and will continue to play a part. This is illustrated by the nuclear deal pulled off in UPA I. But we will essentially grow much stronger because of the voracious appetite of our domestic market, only second to that of China. The world is eager to service that demand and reap the rewards. And that makes us future rich no matter how hard we try to stay poor.

The pre 1991 scenario, the morass of unfulfilled hopes, the hypocrisy of preaching what the preachers themselves do not follow, could perhaps be likened to the hit John Osborne play of 1956, “Look Back in Anger”, also made into a film three times.

It was all about the tensions between the world-view of a working class man married to an upper class woman and her friend, conjoined in a love triangle, loving and hating simultaneously.

It spawned the phrase ‘angry young man”, as the male protagonist railed against the soul destroying inequities of working-class British life just after the Second World War. The Empire was gone. Britain was now a US satellite living on handouts and rations.

This anger against an unjust fate was juxtaposed with a sense of betrayal emanating from the protagonist’s upper-class wife and mistress, not trapped in class angst like him, but with enough dead ends of their own in a changed, more egalitarian world.

In India, the same phrase was applied to a phenomenal new star called Amitabh Bacchchan who smouldered in the Salim-Javed scripted “Deewar” (1975). A film in which the hero emoted against the inequities of being poor and trapped in a Socialist India of the Seventies.

Of course, a commercial super-hit like Deewar did not frame the narrative in these terms, but that is what it was. And like John Osborne’s male protagonist’s upper class wife, Amitabh Bacchchan, scrabbling on the street to make a living, also had a girlfriend who was an upper-class smoking, drinking, sleeping without benefit of wedlock, sort of young woman; played memorably by Parveen Babi.  

And Amitabh Bacchchan, our own “angry young man” built his career on the persona in film after film with Salim-Javed in close attendance. And it resonated with an adoring audience that lapped up every one of his vigilante escapades delivering a rough and ready justice and equity every time.

1991 then, probably gave the Indian back his right to expect his dreams to come true. We may be a long way from Tipperary still, but we can certainly aspire today. We could become a developed country some day. But in the forty four years before 1991, it wasn’t very Indian to want things.

What was promoted by rote instead was a spirit of  Gandhian simplicity and sacrifice. But, like the huge and immensely strong cart-horse Boxer in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”(1945); one might wonder why it all dissolved into self serving cynicism and intolerance. Wasn’t Socialism meant to be more equitable than Colonialism and the Zamindari System? Then why didn’t it deliver?

On the other hand, these 21 years of Reform since 1991, such as they are, have been transformational for India. Our possibilities and achievements have leap-frogged ahead compared to the previous decades. This, despite a very slow pace of progress, riddled with protests such as the ones currently plaguing the FDI in multi-brand retailing.

Also, we have certainly not carried the poor along with us in any meaningful manner, but is this a failure of the principle of the free market, or a shabby and sometimes non-existent implementation of its tenets? In any case we are on the Travelator and there are no stops scheduled.   

       

(1,809 words)

December 22^nd, 2012

Gautam Mukherjee