Book extract: The life of a nation still unfree

Title: The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India

Author: Gopalkrishna Gandhi

Publisher: Aleph

Pages: 624

Price: Rs`999 (hardcover)

In July 2024, a veteran economist and teacher of economics, C.T. Kurien, passed away. V.K. Ramachandran, himself one of India’s senior economists, in a tribute to him, said of Kurien: ‘...he maintained that three related questions were required to understand an economy: ‘Who owns what?, ‘Who does what?’ and ‘Who gets what?’

Like Gandhi’s ‘talisman’ — “Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test: recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything [from] it?”— the late economist’s three questions are a key to understanding not just independent India’s economic condition, but its life as a whole.

Who owns what in independent India? I cannot quite answer that wide question, but I can answer a variant of the question: Who is it that does not own that basic thing, economic security, in India? Thanks to old hierarchies and new priorities, some 220 million Indians subsist below the . They may be said to own nothing by way of saleable, heritable, not to speak of profitable property. There are many estimates of the number of wretchedly poor and destitute in India.

And it should be noted, with more than ordinary relief, that according to a United Nations report—no less—as of 12 July 2023, India ‘lifted’ approximately 415 million individuals out of poverty between 2005-06 and 2019-21, ‘with notable progress seen among the most and marginalised populations, including children and disadvantaged caste groups’.

But along with this statistic, must be seen another: As per the last census of 2011, India is, to mix metaphors, ‘home’ to 450 million who have left home, who are internal . A sizeable section of these may not have migrated in distress, and yet there is no doubt that the bulk of them have opted to exit home and homestead to find work as what they had by way of livelihood was either monetarily inadequate or professionally untenable, the dynamics of mechanised development having compromised the availability of basic resources like land, water and timber and all but killed the market for many lowcost products.

And over and above this, the ‘owning’ of resources and opportunities has had to contend with the crippling effects of climate change and the bizarre phenomenon of zoonotic diseases on livelihoods. We, the people of India, who, according to the , now stand at slightly over 1.428 billion, edging past China’s population of 1.425 billion, are now a house divided between the urban population of upwardly mobile aspirants who want to and dream of living in towns that are morphing into cities, cities into metropolises and metropolises into Singapore or Hong Kong on the one hand, and another, largely rural population, seeing migration and lurching from under-employment at home to uncertain wage-earning mass [migration] ‘out under the sky’.

Who does what in India? countries in the United Nations Human Development Index 2022. It ranks, shockingly, at 111 out of 125 nations in the . In the , we are at 129 out of 146 countries surveyed. That is, eighteenth from the bottom. In the, India stands at 176 out of 180 nations surveyed. Fifth from the bottom. ‘We do rank,’ as Sainath tells us, ‘at No. 3, though, in the Forbes Billionaires list.’ So, to the question ‘Who does what?’ One answer is there are Indians who celebrate pre-wedding events, weddings, and post-wedding events at a scale that beats world records.

They are doing what they are doing without self-consciousness, and the rest of India watches that, as it would a film, without resentment or recrimination — a wonder in itself. And there are Indians who, a street’s turn away from the extravaganzas just described, wash themselves and their utensils and clothes in hand-operated pumps that yield water erratically at best, reluctantly at worst. Who gets what in India? Not what is deserved or in the right proportion, but in chaotic haphazardness, which taxation does not quite correct, state interventions have not been able to rectify, and politics has been unable to mend.