Living the dream of prosperity- Real India

[Desi Cartman]

WE SAT on the foreshore, the cow and I, and gazed out at the ships coming and going in Cochin Harbour. The cow clearly was not surprised to see me there, and after a month in India, it was no surprise to me that the cow was there either. It had been decades since I had been to India for any length of time. Years ago I had studied India at university, backpacked around it, drenched myself in its culture, its politics, its social and economic problems. In those days, when the world looked at India at all, it was with a sense of pity. Not any more. The triumph of Slumdog Millionaire at the Oscars symbolises a dramatic change in how the world sees India — and how India sees itself. In the film, Jamal and Salim leave the slums behind them. In its own way, India is on the same course. In the cities, you can almost feel the self-confidence of the new India. This year, India will produce more than five times as much in many goods and services as it did when I was last there. This year, with China, it will be one of the world's few engines of growth. Since 1980, per capita incomes have trebled in real buying power. You would think all that should have changed the country, and yes it has. In Mumbai and the other big cities, towers of residential apartments now soar above streets choked with cars, each pursuing its own idea of the road rules. There are hundreds of TV channels, thousands of designer clothing stores, and even the people eating cheap food at street stalls look well fed. Yet anything you say about India, the opposite is also true. Across India, governments are constantly being thrown out of office because in much of rural India the benefits of rapid growth are not flowing, but trickling. India's coastal cities are thriving, but farmers and the poorer Hindi-speaking heartland have fallen way behind. In Mumbai, billionaire industrialist Mukesh Ambani is building himself a 27-storey home overlooking the Arabian Sea, while a few kilometres away, a million people crowd into two square kilometres in Dharavi, the slum that inspired Slumdog Millionaire. After a month back in India, what surprised me was not how much had changed in all that time, but how much hadn't. India is still India. The cows still wander freely through Cochin, even Mumbai and Delhi. Slumdogs lie across the footpaths. The slums grow even bigger. And India still smells the same, it's as dirty as ever, and it's covered with litter. J. K. Galbraith once described India as "functioning anarchy". It still is. Laws are passed, but only sporadically applied. The courts are free, and judges exercise that freedom by making new law whenever they feel Parliament has fallen down on the job. But to get your case heard can take a decade. India is the world's largest democracy, and a real one, where Governments regularly lose office. Yet its political parties, at all levels, tend to operate as feudal estates, where power passes from father to son — or in the case of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, from mother (Indira Gandhi) to son (Rajiv) to son's widow (Sonia, now Congress party president, and the real ruler of the country) and grandson (Rahul, now 38 and being groomed to take over). Above all, India in many ways still lacks a culture of responsibility towards others. It has set up anti-poverty programs, but corrupt officials and contractors keep siphoning off the benefits, so that even with all that growth, hundreds of millions of Indians still live in absolute poverty. We met some of them on a tour of Dharavi, Asia's biggest slum. Off its narrow, dark alleyways, families of five or six cram into homes the size of an Australian child's bedroom. Most have no water, let alone toilets (yet, our guide noted, they all have TVs). Until the anti-Muslim riots depicted in Slumdog Millionaire, there were no schools or medical facilities. Yet Dharavi is a place of hope for people fleeing India's even poorer villages, where farms are now so small that you can't live off them. It offers a Dickensian world where workers toil from dawn till dark for $3 a day as casual labourers, or in crude recycling industries — green in theory, black in practice — where plastics, aluminium and steel are melted down for re-use. You watch men toiling with no protection amid the heat and toxic fumes, and remind yourself that they came here because village life offered them even less. India has achieved a lot, justifying the new pride in the country. But it also has serious battles ahead of it, none more crucial than the growing divide between secular values and those of Hindu fundamentalists. Decades of tolerance have seen the emergence of seriously fascist movements, pledged to eradicate what Bal Thackeray, leader of the Shiv Sena, calls "the Islamic tumour". And they're not joking. Their main enemy is Islam, but in January alone, Hindu fundamentalist thugs physically attacked, among other things, young women drinking in a pub, a newspaper office, a minister's home, buses and bank offices owned by a rival state government and, of course, a cinema complex showing Slumdog Millionaire. But old hands point out that Hindu extremism has been part of the India mix for decades. So has its cultural opposite, Bollywood — where there are no Hindu films, no Muslim films, just Indian films made by Hindus and Muslims working together. And in the future India, Bollywood's values are more likely to rule.

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