'Real India' from the top down

Democracy on the Road: 
 

A 25-year Journey through India

Ruchir Sharma

Penguin; Rs 699, 389 pages

Ruchir Sharma, a well-regarded economist and author of the bestselling Breakout Nations, returns with a book on a recurrent theme of his work as an international market analyst: summarising the impact that a change of guard in India has on the investment potential of the country.

In that role, Mr Sharma has been covering Indian elections since the 1990s, starting out from Delhi in his caravan with a number of journalists all of whom have come to occupy centre stage in mainstream media: Rajiv Shukla, Shekhar Gupta, Prannoy and Radhika Roy, and so on.

Photo: Amazon.in

In quick chapters, Mr Sharma gives us a bird’s eye view of the elections he has covered, mixing political commentary with the trials of surviving small-town (and smaller) India. He starts with a discussion of his privileged upbringing — his maternal grandfather was one of the richest landowners in Bijnor — and dovetails this into a discussion of India’s elections that, even read with the greatest sympathy, cannot escape the whiff of condescension.

In his account of a rally helmed by Sonia Gandhi before the 1998 national election, he is unable to contain his glee at being provided a special enclosure next to the stage as a member of the English-language press. The pictures that make up the book’s centrefold reinforce this feeling, as the group shares the living room with the likes of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. 

Mr Sharma reiterates the dramatic changes that have shaped Indian politics over the past 25 years, including the rise of caste-based parties and the surge in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s popularity. But his analysis is generally sympathetic to the Congress. Particularly interesting are his interactions with the Gandhis, which throw light as much on the Gandhis’ political views as on Mr Sharma’s proclivities.

Two instances stand out. One pertains to Mr Sharma’s meeting with Sonia and Rahul Gandhi at 10 Janpath in 2002. His purpose was to convince the Gandhis of the need to back economic reforms, a theme on which he was unable to make much headway. “I got complete radio silence,” he writes, on the proposals he had put before the duo. 

This is not surprising, as Mr Sharma himself admits, but what jars is his belief, since demolished comprehensively in the Modi era, that India can undertake a reform programme that is completely driven by the Washington Consensus. The Gandhis may belong to the extreme end of the spectrum but no political party, not even that of Mr Sharma’s poster boy Chandrababu Naidu, will argue for a complete dismantling of the welfare state.

The other instance is Mr Sharma’s meeting with Priyanka Gandhi at an Amethi guest house in 2004. When asked why Amethi was so backward, Ms Gandhi repeated her father’s infamous adage about the fruits of development not percolating to the poor due to inefficiency and corruption in the system. Mr Sharma, while surprised at the answer, refuses to probe its utter disingenuousness. What is striking is the dichotomy between Mr Sharma’s repeated mention of the power the Gandhis wield and his blanket acceptance of the reason for the status quo offered by Priyanka. 

For obvious reasons, the second half of the book focuses largely on Narendra Modi. Mr Sharma recounts the time he and the team got an interview with him in Aurangabad in the runup to the Maharashtra Assembly polls of 2009. The interview finished before it began when one member of the crew asked Mr Modi about Ishrat Jahan. Later, Mr Modi would refuse to meet the team for insulting him repeatedly.

Mr Sharma charts the rise of the future prime minister through his third consecutive win in the Gujarat Assembly election of 2012. The Modi of this era is different from earlier avatars. More confident of his place in the party and certain of his rising popularity, he is now less in-your-face about his dislike for journalists. Of course, now as prime minister, he can choose whom to speak to.

Mr Sharma’s book is a reminder of the erstwhile Modi, one whom India was still unsure about in the runup to the 2014 national election. That certainly has changed. The prime minister has many critics but the point of criticism has shifted definitively to his tenure. 

Democracy On The Road is a personalised account of one man’s efforts to understand India’s elections. Engaging in parts, it sometimes reads as if it were written by a foreigner who means well but is ultimately little more than a disinterested observer. One of the defining characteristics of the Modi era is the distaste for established networks of power and privilege, and it is hard to shake off the feeling that Mr Sharma’s attempt here springs from the same distant, enfeebled gaze at what, in enlightened circles, is called the real India.