Democracy on the Road Read online

  Ruchir Sharma

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  DEMOCRACY ON THE ROAD

  A 25-Year Journey through India

  Contents

  PART ONE: BIJNOR SUMMERS 1. The Clock Had No Hands

  2. My First Rally at Age Five, 1979

  3. The Broken State and Babuji’s Last Days, 1993

  4. The View from New York Indians

  PART TWO: THE CONGRESS MEETS ITS MATCH

  1998 TO 2004 5. Indian Politics Is a Deadly Serious Business

  6. How to Ask a Question

  7. Vajpayee Gets Another Chance

  8. ‘The Laptop Chief Minister’

  9. ‘Let Me First Do My Colgate’

  10. Inside 10 Janpath

  11. Why Rajasthan Fooled Us

  12. ‘Ruchir, Please Pray for Me’

  PART THREE: THE RISE OF THE DEVELOPMENT STARS

  2005 TO 2010 13. The Don and the Dynasty

  14. On Naxalite Turf

  15. South to Another India

  16. Downstairs, Upstairs

  17. Live Lion Bait

  18. The ‘Man Next Door’ of Indian Politics

  19. ‘The Super Chief Minister’

  20. Two Thumbs Up for ‘Terrorism’!

  21. Conspiring against ‘The Immortal One’

  22. Multilingual Celebrity

  23. A Mythical Map of Greater India

  24. The Disunited States of India

  PART FOUR: THROWING THE BUMS OUT, AGAIN

  2011 TO 2014 25. Of Marxists and Mamata

  26. Naked Power, Covered Statues

  27. ‘I Know You, and You Know Me’

  28. Bandit Queens and Kings

  29. The ‘Anyone but Congress’ Elections

  PART FIVE: MODI AGAINST THE REST

  2014 TO 2018 30. ‘Modi Will Fix It’

  31. ‘Living the Lives of Insects’

  32. Return of the ‘Mahagathbandhan’

  33. Triumph of the Single Supremos

  34. Chasing the Captain

  35. ‘A Performer, Not a Reformer’

  36. Casternataka

  PART SIX: BACK IN BALANCE 37. ‘Mama Will Protect You’

  38. The Rare Congress Wave?

  39. ‘This Palace Was Once Mighty’

  40. No Country for Strongmen

  Illustrations

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Ruchir Sharma is Head of Emerging Markets and Chief Global Strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. His acclaimed book, Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles (2012), was an international bestseller. Sharma began his career as a writer and still contributes regularly to the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs and other publications. One of the world’s largest investors, he was named one of Foreign Affairs’ Top Global Thinkers in 2012 and one of Bloomberg Market’s 50 most influential thinkers in 2015.

  Part One

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  BIJNOR SUMMERS

  1

  The Clock Had No Hands

  For the first fifteen years of my life, my father’s job as a naval officer took our family from one big city to another, from Delhi to Mumbai to Singapore. Then every summer, we returned for a month to the same small town lost in western Uttar Pradesh—India’s most populous and one of its poorest states. My mother was born in Bijnor, where her family had lived for generations, so off we went to stay with my grandparents.

  Today my ‘big city’ friends are surprised to hear that I spent so much time in a town that defines the word ‘mofussil’, originally a British term for territories outside the colonial capitals of the East India Company, today an Indian term for territories outside the experience of most urbanites. My former classmates see me as cosmopolitan since I wandered farther than most, leaving India for New York and working in global finance; but those of my generation, even those who stayed closest to home, experience small-town India mainly through books. They have not lived there. Those summers in Bijnor, starting in the mid-1970s, are what prepared and inspired me to hit the road, later in life, trying to understand the intensely local, often mofussil passions that shape democracy in India.

  Everyone in our house called grandfather ‘Babuji’, as a mark of respect. He was a criminal defence lawyer and wealthy landlord, but money and community influence were not enough to bring modern amenities to a place like Bijnor in the 1970s and ’80s. Home was a typical landlord’s bungalow, with a big veranda around an open courtyard and a tractor parked out back among the cows and buffaloes, which supplied the milk and the prevailing scent. Also out back were the semi-permanent sheds where the staff lived.

  It was a sprawling home, with two floors and five bedrooms but my entire family slept on the roof, under mosquito netting, to escape the heat. When the sun rose we would move inside to avoid its burning rays, going back to sleep till well past 9 a.m. Breakfast would start around 10 a.m. Time did not follow a regular schedule in Bijnor, not even mealtime. As in many Indian towns, the most visible landmark was the Ghanta Ghar, a clock tower left over from British colonial days, but like most of these relics it didn’t work. In fact the clock had no hands.

  The walls of Babuji’s house were populated with geckos, which never failed to trigger a hullabaloo of shouting and screaming when one fell off the ceiling. Running from the lizards was a bad option, since the summer temperatures often reached 43 degrees, and air conditioning was out of the question. In that era AC was a rare luxury available only in the big cities.

  Instead, Babuji deployed traditional desert coolers, which pump cold water through a box lined with khus-khus, an organic fibre with natural cooling properties, and use a fan to blow out the fresh air. It would shut down when the electricity failed—which was more often than not. Hand fans were always at the ready, strategically placed on the window sills.

  My most searing recollections have less to do with the slow rhythm of live in the glaring sun than the social life, though it was all accepted as normal in Bijnor at the time. Small-town India in the 1980s was not so much politically incorrect as pre-politically correct—a place I imagine was not unlike the United States of the late nineteenth century, where otherwise decent people didn’t hesitate to discriminate based on class, race or religion.

  Our summer family often grew to as many as a dozen people, including a couple of unmarried aunts, who in my recollection were particularly vigilant about defending caste order. Nowhere was this order enforced more strictly than in regard to the castes formerly known as ‘untouchables’, who had been renamed more respectfully by the post-Independence government as the Scheduled Castes, and by their own leaders more proudly as Dalits. In Bijnor, a woman of the lowest Dalit caste was known as a mehatrani or ‘sweepress’, and they had been assigned by the lottery of India’s ancient caste hierarchy the task of cleaning toilets.

  The squat-style latrines had to be emptied and cleaned every morning, by hand, because the taps often spat out nothing but air, and most of our water came from a hand pump in the yard. Once a mehatrani had cleaned the bathroom, workers of a higher caste—Jats or the Brahmins who minded the kitchen—would enter to douse the floor with water, washing away the fingerprints of the mehatrani. If my sister or I or one of the cousins should accidentally touch or be touched by a mehatrani, the adults would step in and march us straight away to the bath. Even if our hands should graze a towel that had been handled by a mehatrani, an adult relative would cry foul and send us off to have our bodies bathed and clothes washed.

  Otherwise, the adults left us kids mostly to our own devices. At that time in India no parent felt the compulsion to keep children instructed or entertained twenty-four hours a day, as they
seem to today. Once we finished our small load of summer homework, we were on our own, and profoundly bored. We left our urban existence in Mumbai or Singapore with their swimming pools and restaurants for Bijnor, where there was absolutely nothing for a child to do.

  Television was no relief, since the one state channel broadcast only a few hours in the evening, presenting educational programmes on agriculture and husbandry, dry government news, and a sprinkle of entertainment—if the power was on. For a kid like me the main entertainment was watching the adults, which in Bijnor proved to be fascinating. Babuji’s home, a hub of the Bijnor community where people from all walks of life came and went all the time, was an open stage for these raw dramas.

  The scene after breakfast seems more unreal to me now than when I was a child. Before heading off to work at the courthouse, Babuji would hold an informal court on the veranda, stretching out on a chaise lounge as clients lined up at his feet. They ran the gamut of backcountry criminality including murderers, rapists and dacoits—bandits who made the dirt roads around Bijnor too dangerous to drive at night. Typically from the lower castes, Babuji’s clients would not have been allowed in the front door even if they had been squeaky clean.

  The most hardened criminals never dared asked Babuji for privacy from each other or a schoolboy sitting there wide-eyed as they told their lurid tales, and as he counselled them on how to comport themselves in court. It was clear they saw Babuji as both a saviour and a local legend, beyond questioning.

  One story had it that dacoits had once ambushed his car, but he scared them off simply by jumping out and yelling. His name and face were enough to protect him from criminals who knew they might one day need his help in court. More than that, many of his house staff and even some townspeople called grandfather ‘Babuji’ out of love and respect for his role as a community leader who paid well, cared for the families of his workers and provided for their children’s education.

  When I was too young to go into town myself, the days would drag by slowly, with lunch rolling out somewhere around three in the afternoon. Then, at long last, when Babuji got home in the early evening, he would take my little sister Shumita and me out for the highlight of our day, a ride in his aging white Hindustan Ambassador, a model that had the shape and aerodynamics of a bowler hat and is now extinct.

  Occasionally, Babuji would take us to see a numaish, a travelling carnival with rides and lowbrow entertainment spectacles such as fire eaters and clowns pirouetting on a long pole, street theatre, and booths selling paintbrushes, bangles and other handmade trinkets. At other times, just to beat the afternoon heat, Babuji would accompany us to the local movie theatre, which was one of the first buildings in town to acquire a generator, so the khus-khus coolers could be relied on to function.

  I assume in retrospect that Babuji never thought much about whether the films, including tales of rape and revenge like Insaaf ka Tarazu (Scales of Justice) and Zakhmi Aurat (Wounded Woman), were appropriate for kids. His aim was to escape the heat, and let us enjoy the breeze from the fans, not to expose us to films for mature audiences.

  It was childhood without safety bumpers. Once when I was six years old, Babuji took me on what he figured would be a fun trip: visiting clients in the local jail, but it left memories that chill me to this day. Though some of the prisoners seemed amused to see a young boy and welcomed me warmly, I have never forgotten the squalor of their dark and dank cells, the inmates packed in shoulder to shoulder, dressed in dirty white uniforms, their hardship-hollowed eyes.

  My grandfather loved to give us little quizzes on maths and civics, and when I got a couple of questions right he would tell my mother: ‘Oh you must make him join the IAS!’ That is the Indian Administrative Service, the pinnacle of the Central bureaucracy, which also appoints the leading official in towns like Bijnor, the district magistrate or DM. The DM wields immense power in a country where people look to local government to solve all of life’s problems. Brahmins like my grandfather admired knowledge and power, and saw the pursuit of money as the déclassé preserve of the Banias, the caste most closely associated with commerce. Babuji’s fondest hope for me was that I should join the IAS.

  Most evenings, Babuji would drive us through Bijnor’s bustling market to his farmlands on the far side of town, about 20 kilometres from home. The Ambassador would bounce into the tiny settlements where his workers lived, and Babuji would check in on how the rice and sugar cane harvests were coming along. If my sister and I got lucky we would be offered a glass of sugar cane juice, or have a chance to bathe in the water from a tube well, which taps into groundwater using steel tubes and is common all over the country.

  Babuji owned tens of acres of land, employing about a hundred labourers, and these evening visits were conducted in the manner of a feudal lord inspecting his charges, guided by unspoken rules dictating who could sit in whose presence and on what piece of furniture, and in whose homes we could drink the water.

  There was one set of rules based on the Hindu caste system with Brahmins like Babuji at the top, another overlapping set based on religion that discriminated against many groups, particularly Muslims. At Babuji’s house, staff would welcome wealthy Muslims inside, but would bring out special Muslim-only crockery for their tea. The cook at home was always a Brahmin, perhaps owing to the intimate connection between the chef’s hands and the family meals.

  Muslim staff—even the labourers who worked my grandfather’s fields—were not allowed inside, which created some comically awkward scenes. In the morning, Babuji would sit at one end of the courtyard, shaving or reading the paper in the shade of the veranda, and occasionally he would carry on a conversation with a worker standing out in the road. Instead of moving closer to one another, they would bridge the gap in class and space by raising their voices, bellowing back and forth down the long veranda.

  After sunset, Babuji would hold a very different kind of gathering in the living room with friends and dignitaries of stature similar to his own. In this circle the accepted form for raising issues with lower-caste passers-by was a string of abuse, punctuated with an epithet. I remember the day a lower-caste woman got off a bus in front of our house and began defecating in the street, triggering a torrent of insults from Babuji’s agitated friends capped by ‘Gawar!’ Literally, Uneducated!

  Adults felt no need to soften their language around children, who quickly internalized the manners of the time and place. Before one of my last summers in Bijnor, Babuji had installed a diesel generator, and when the staff failed to turn it on one day when the power failed, he unleashed the usual abuse, but left out the epithet. Without missing a beat, my little cousin, newly arrived from London, chimed in, ‘Behen chod!’ Sister fucker! She was four.

  Everyone laughed at how brassy this little girl was, finishing her grandfather’s sentences like that. Nothing in these exchanges ever damaged Babuji’s reputation as a benevolent community leader, because this was the deeply held norm in the community. No one in our household, family or servant, ever questioned the way things were, at least not openly enough for a teenager to hear.

  Many Indians even today place great value on the light skin colour that society associates with upper class and caste, and at Babuji’s house the staff would make a white skin cream from the milk of the cows and buffaloes. My unmarried aunts would apply the cream in the morning and roam the house looking like so many ghosts. One summer we came straight from Singapore, where Shumita had spent long hours by the pool, and when she arrived dark and tan in Bijnor, my grandparents were aghast. They upbraided my parents for failing to take care of their fair granddaughter, who for the rest of that stay was required to apply the milk cream every morning. Shumita was no fan of this pungent cosmetic and called it the ‘Stinky’.

  We also paid summer visits to my father’s ancestral home in Jaipur, the state capital of Rajasthan, which was often cast as another poor northern state like Uttar Pradesh. But Jaipur was nothing like Bijnor. With a population of less than 100,
000 people, Bijnor proper was less than a tenth as populous as Jaipur, which was culturally much less remote. Time was more structured, electricity supply was predictable, and water flowed from pipes in the house—not from a hand pump in the yard. My paternal great-grandfather was a judge at the high court, my grandmother a retired official of the state education department. Lunch and dinner were followed by ‘postprandial’ walks with my great-grandfather to discuss P.G. Wodehouse and other English authors. The meals were healthier, less thick with oil and ghee. Discrimination was an undercurrent, not an open sore. One never heard house staff addressed with abuses punctuated by an epithet.

  I didn’t know it of course, but by the late 1980s Hindu nationalists were starting to rise as a political force, tapping the anti-Muslim sentiments simmering in places like Bijnor to challenge the ruling Congress party, and its stated vision of a secular and tolerant India. What I saw was on TV, which started to reflect a Hindu nationalist sensibility.

  The single channel started broadcasting a Sunday morning series dramatizing mythological Hindu epics, starting with the Ramayana and later the Mahabharata. Every Sunday at 10 a.m. life in Bijnor would come to a halt as people flocked to TV sets to take in these epics. Many Indians came to treat the commercial melodramas as a religious ritual, lighting incense sticks in front of the TV as a mark of respect to the onscreen deities. Actors who played the gods came to be treated like gods in real life, and the most popular ones later stood for elections. In all my Bijnor summers these weekly TV-viewing rituals were among the few events for which the adults assembled on time.