Book review
Luce explains modern India as few can, having lived in country for 5 years and married. He gives tough love, sprinkled with brilliant sardonic British humor. Massive caste, gender and rural gap in literacy and opportunity. Corrupting and sometimes illiterate politicians, and a national government (iAS) with millions of patronage jobs ripe with abuse and bribery. Thoroughly institutionalized government corruption, and socially accepted inequality due to caste and religious differences, hold 80% of India back. Massive differences between effective, modernizing states (Kerala, Tamil Madu) and bad states (like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh).
‘according to India’s government, on any given day 1/3 of teachers are absent from government schools. In the state of be hard, lesson 3% of government schools have electricity and less than 20% of toilets for their teachers.’p248
How can a country like that have nuclear weapons and a space satellite program, and graduate some of the worlds top software engineers including the CEO of Google? Yet this data is confirmed by World Bank research as recently as 2004.
“In a pattern that is familiar to India, the protests were carried out in the name of the poor, in spite of the fact that the poor would appear to be the victims of the status quo.” p211 Luce is writing about New Delhi water policy, but this is repeated more severely with internet.org and elitist net-neutrality arguments blocking all internet access for the poor.
Uttar Pradesh, practice is India’s most populous state, with 180 million people in the northern Hindi belt. In the 2017 elections, the BJP won a landslide victory over the Muslim/lower caste (MY) coalition, which had institutionalized corruption to the extent of looting 70-80% of development and poverty budgets. Chief minister of UP is Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu priest who has a history of communal violence within the RSS, a semi military far right Hindu nationalist ‘volunteer organization’.
Modi appears as head of the Indian state of Gujarat, where he presided over a massive riot that killed thousands of muslim neighbors, including women and children burned alive. Luce must feel aghast now that he is PM under a revived Hindu nationalist government, which Luce also derides repeatedly. For example, when the BJP rewrote textbooks in 1998, they declared Indus/Vedic civilization as the source of all global civilizations and omitted that Gandhi was killed by an Hindu nationalist.
According to India’s 2011 census, the child gender ratio in Mori’s Gujarat was 886 girls for each 1000 boys. In Punjab, the other statebordering Pakistan, it is 846. Ultrasound meets crazy cultural gender bias.
Dowries are increasing in price, as womens’ families become more able to afford them. Is this ‘western materialism’, or is the whole dowery system a disgusting anachronism? If five boys keep being born for every four girls, I can guess which one’s going to be more valuable in 20 years.
Perhaps 40 million children in India do not go to school, primarily because they are working as child labor. Laws formally private it, but it is seen as an inevitable consequence of poverty, and can only be improved through abstract changes in poverty. Specifically, the IKEA/UNICEF/Rugmark project does not avoid the child labor. p325
‘The notion that children should do what their parents do – and be denied, inadvertently or otherwise, the skills to make their own choice when they’re old enough – is deeply conservative.[…] It provides and underpinning to the culture of the nepotism the afflicts politics” p327
An executive managing 1500 people (3% of the company) at Infosys, earns US$50,000 per year, after ITT graduation, and tours the world visiting his customers. Caste doesn’t matter to him or his peers, and we can hope this meritocracy is the future. p298
I noticed just one Londoner/2007-style mistake: ‘India has nothing to fear from further financial liberalization.’ p340
- Goodreads rating – 3.85
- DIGEST – Karel Baloun