Reflections: The grace of bare necessities

While many of my colleagues confidently discuss India’s manifest destiny to shape the course of global affairs, my concern is whether there will ever come a time when Indians as a whole will be able to claim the assets and attributes of a developed nation. That concern is even greater as I tour China 12 years after my first visit in 2002 and see the extent of change, physical as well as psychological.

Living in Britain or America, one tried not to compare the surroundings with India. Britain after all was one of the countries to pioneer the Industrial Revolution; the United States is still the world’s richest nation. The vast difference in size and numbers made any comparison seem unfair after we moved to tiny, booming, spick and span Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew’s laboratory could produce miracles that were impossible in India’s huge, bubbling, anarchic cauldron. In fact, I was nostalgically reminded of home the first time I crossed the causeway to Johore Bahru in adjacent Malaysia and saw a clock tower whose clock had stopped working. Even Malaysia has moved ahead since then.

It’s impossible to gloss over the difference in China with its vast landmass, more than 1.3 billion people, turbulent history and sufferings at the hands of foreign forces. If China can overcome the handicaps of the past to meet the future with assurance, why can’t India? After visiting India in the 1960s, Richard Nixon wrote that the wonder was not that India was badly governed but that it was governed at all. Must that always be our epitaph?

I am not talking of high policy decisions like the rejection from New Year’s Day of Mao Zedong’s one-child programme or Xi Jinping’s reforms in the People’s Liberation Army a day or two later. I am speaking of potable water, health care, free schools, sound housing, details of daily life indicating caring governance and native vigour.

Packed eating houses confirm the China Cuisine Association’s claim of spiralling revenue from medium and low-end restaurants. But it isn’t without significance that Western food is still as unpopular as in 2002 when my wife and I dined in solitary splendour in the red and gold magnificence of an empty American Club in Beijing. This time, we were alone in the Western dining room of the Holiday Inn in Kunming. Clearly, the Chinese can do without European food as they can do without the English language.

More to the point, a new law was passed last week to stamp out domestic violence. Around then, 92 “zombie enterprises” were identified for closure because they can’t make new products or earn profits. The chairman of China Telecommunications Corp, the country’s third biggest telecom carrier, is being investigated for “disciplinary violations” which is usually a euphemism for corruption. Animal lovers are grumbling against pets being banned from most shopping malls and public transport.

China today blends modernity with Asian grace. I used to think the Japanese were addicted to bowing but every time we turn into the hotel’s wide drive the sentry on duty bows deeply from the waist. The bushes that line eight-lane avenues are covered in nylon as protection from winter frost. A water truck drives slowly past, hosing down the greenery that remains exposed. The ground under flyovers is a blaze of purple and yellow flowers. I am envious of broad, clean-swept pavements, smart double-deckers and blocks of modern flats for ordinary folk as I lie in my hotel bed in Lijiang watching Orion the Hunter ride the star-studded sky above the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.

Stirrings in the wind recall Edgar Snow writing, “Anything is possible in China, if it is done in the Chinese manner.” A China Central Television (CCTV) programme the other day showed an American and a Chinese discussing the scope of conflict between the rule of law and rule of the party and the judiciary’s role in that situation. A 39-year-old man in Dali says he has asked a friend in the US to bring him back a Bose headphone. He had no idea Bose was Indian and thought I was offering him India-made headphones. “You can buy ‘Made in China’ Bose earphones,” he says, “but I don’t trust them.” He knows of the youths on the Shanghai Bund hawking “Lolex watches …Three for ten dollars” and the “Omega” clocks in round glass globules of all sizes that are sold in village marts all over Yunnan.

Economic comfort has bred confidence, and the Chinese can afford to be candid about these shortcomings. It’s the economic achievement that one envies for in it is rooted a nation’s pride. It enables them to talk normally of the Ming and Ch’ing dynasties instead of harping on the Long March and Mao and Deng Xiaoping.

We have been tinkering with the economy for nearly 70 years without the result that can sustain pride, which is not to be confused with bombast. The merit of Marx’s opinion that British rule alone edged India’s fragmented medieval society towards unified modernity deserves to be acknowledged. So does Mao’s view that “Indian independence would never be realised without an agrarian revolution.” Presumably Mao meant more than the technical sovereignty that his country could have claimed under the Kuomintang.

Just as Swachchh Bharat has had no effect on India’s dirt, a single high-speed train won’t achieve what Clement Attlee’s revolution did in Britain. Neither will membership of the United Nations Security Council. Only an honestly implemented and far more radical reform process can guarantee welfare for all and ensure that we need not feel ashamed about the living style and standards of large sections of India’s populace.

(The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author)