A land of bombastic claims

Book review of 'Superfast Primetime Ultimate Nation'

Superfast Primetime Ultimate Nation

The Relentless Invention of Modern India

Adam Roberts

Hachette India

311 pages; Rs 599

The book title Superfast Primetime Ultimate Nation may seem one of the most puzzling in recent memory, but Adam Roberts has a wise and witty explanation for it. “Understatement gets you nowhere in crowded, noisy, easily distracted India. Even overstatement often falls short,” he writes, pointing to the country’s “Shatabdi Superfast Expresses” and other examples of wordy overreach. “In India, a land of bombastic claims, you must be bold.”

Mr Roberts, The Economist’s former South Asia bureau chief, was among the most well-travelled of journalists covering India and is a terrific reporter (disclosure: We became friendly when both of us worked in Delhi). Superfast Primetime begins on the Vivek Express, as it makes its 83-hour,  4,200-km journey from Assam to Kerala. It is an easy entry point into understanding the diversity and divisions of India. The train brings with it many migrants seeking better opportunities in places such as Bengaluru, where below Business Standard’s office, for instance, one is as likely to hear Assamese and Bengali as Kannada.

The leitmotif of this book is the ground it covers, literally and otherwise. Mr Roberts has done the “back-breaking two-day”car-ride necessary to get to Tawang. He meets the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala and comes away with the gem that the current Chinese president’s father, Xi Zhongxun, a first-generation leader purged by Chairman Mao who later led the first economic reforms in Guangdong in the late 1970s, gifted the Dalai Lama a wristwatch. In Abbottabad the day after Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy Seals, Mr Roberts reports that many neighbours heard the attack on his home that night and thought India was invading.

Mr Roberts travelled both to Rahul Gandhi’s constituency of Amethi and Yogi Adityanath’s Gorakhpur and offers a damning indictment. “He came at midnight. I don’t know why he came but he stayed until 3 am and left,” says a village woman in Amethi who cooked “dinner” for Rahul Gandhi. He promised her house would be repaired — and it wasn’t.

Making the point that India’s lack of hygiene is a major reason why the country has the largest population of malnourished children under five years, Mr Roberts observes in Gorakhpur “children playing cricket in a field that looked entirely covered by plastic and other junk.” Cows ate plastic bags; “the rubbish at their feet, lifted by gusts of wind flapped like the beating wings of dying birds.”

His assessment of India’s politics is sound. Mr Roberts quotes the academic Milan Vaishnav as arguing that “it is not that caste logic is over, but it is now caste-plus.” In large part, the reason is that the Bharatiya Janata Party has ably fused Hindu majoritarianism and hyper-nationalism with the promise of development. Ahead of the 2014 national elections, Narendra Modi’s record as chief minister in Gujarat was part of a campaign projected far and wide across the country. Relatively few journalists and columnists in New Delhi appear to have done much reporting there, however. But Mr Roberts has criss-crossed the state, from the comic Potemkin village that is Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT) with its European garbage disposal system but no foreign bankers to Vadnagar, the village where the prime minister grew up. He interviewed both Mr Modi when he was chief minister in Gujarat and Sanjiv Bhatt, one of the senior police officers critical of Mr Modi’s handling of the riots in 2002. In Vadnagar, the town leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, named Dasharathbhai Patel, recalls that when they were young, Mr Modi and he led a group with brooms to clean the village and were mocked by Dalits. In games, Mr Modi was always the captain, he reports, and in a drama about villagers “worshipping a prince’s sandal in a temple,” Mr Modi invariably played the prince.

Mr Roberts gives the state under Mr Modi, who he interviewed as prime minister as well, credit for the stream-lined processes with which it sought to attract investment and managed its power supply but also includes a chapter entitled “Why Gujarat, 2002, Still Matters.” Like other observers, the author finds the proportion of children in Gujarat who were underweight at 33 per cent was higher than the national average. An international health official tells Mr Roberts that at a clinic used mostly by tribal women on the edge of the capital Gandhinagar, she found a two-day-old baby lying near its mother, “unwashed, dangerously cold, and not yet breast-feeding.” The health official asked a nurse for water to wash the child, but the taps were dry. She used bottled water instead and then found the clinic had no soap.

Despite so much vivid detail about the problems that hold India back, notably also in a chapter on the disregard we show for our rivers and our mountainsides as the author does the pilgrimage to Amarnath, Superfast Primetime closes by making the most fantastic claim of all. The final chapter posits India in 2047 against the United States of 1876; Mr Roberts’ point is that the rapidly industrialising, democratic 19th century United States soon overtook Europe. India could be poised for a similar catch-up, he suggests. Earlier in the book, he quotes the academic Kanti Bajpai who says “it is fanciful to think India will nip at China. It is an idea promoted by the West and the media.” This is closer to the truth. For all its faults, China’s success was also built on the efforts of energetic village doctors and reasonably well-run, primary health government clinics, which had soap and water.