LOOKING AWAY
Harsh Mander
Speaking Tiger;
418 pages; Rs 495
What is the "animal spirit" that India needs to unleash in order to become a better society? At a time when the phrase is readily understood as an exhortation to roar like a lion, Harsh Mander's book looks beyond the entrepreneurial aggression that the current polity goads out of its citizens. It pleads for Indians to focus as aggressively on the question of inequality.
It talks not about the uncorked and aggressive spirit of the economically better endowed India but the warmer spirit of those who survive on the margins of Indian economy. Mr Mander strings together stories from the margins. There are narratives about homeless children surviving in urban squalor at one end of the spectrum and of chronic malnutrition entrenched in tribal India at the other.
Running through the pages you get to read of stories such as that of 60-year-old Abdul who came to Delhi from Assam looking for his mentally ill son and, instead, was sentenced to jail for three years for beggary. You hear of the suffering of the riot victims of Gujarat and the crimes and prejudices they faced as a community.
A good part of the book is also the narrative of the author's clear and absolute belief that Narendra Modi is the wrong choice as the country's prime minister. He makes no bones about it and expresses his reasons for the distrust without mincing any words. As he writes, "I am convinced that the battle for India's soul will be won in the end by the ideas of justice, equality, solidarity, public compassion and reason. The social losers of the 2014 election are ultimately on the right side of history." If Mr Mander was tweeting quotes from the book right now, one can be sure he would keep the bhakt-trolls busy for the full tenure of this government.
Mr Mander, to introduce him to younger readers, resigned from the Indian Administrative Service in the wake of the Gujarat riots and in a later avatar became one of the most prominent members of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA)'s National Advisory Council (NAC) - a body that the incoming National Democratic Alliance leadership has reviled as extra-constitutional.
He played a seminal role in writing the National Food Security Act and other rights-based regulations and laws for the UPA government, though the final shape of some of these legal frames were substantially different from the ones he advocated - a result of realpolitik that the Congress had to play to adjust to the contradictory voices within.
But this book is not about his role in the NAC as an advisor who helped fashion policy for the UPA in a particular direction. The book is a look at the world outside Lutyens' Delhi and the "safe" zones that the middle class mostly inhabits.
In the chapter "Limits to Our Empathy" Mr Mander looks at the upsurge of anger against the brutal rape in Delhi that brought the masses out on to the streets, but he also shines a light on the limit of this urban empathy that may occasionally erupt from the society. He mentions the same suffering that many women have gone through beyond Delhi and how the same India tends to easily be blind to these cases. One wishes he had dwelt more and deliberated longer on these contradictions that lock our society.
And this is the one weakness of Mr Mander's book. He hints at the structural injustices and inequality the Indian society has built deeply into its DNA, but he does not tackle them as engagingly as he does with the question of blindness of citizens as individuals to injustice and inequality.
Perhaps that was not his intention. If he intended to jolt his reader into seeing another India, he does that well and does it repeatedly through his book. If one was looking for policy prescriptions, the book does not hold many. But if one is searching for a moral compass that should guide policy making towards a more just and equal society, then Mr Mander's book is like a good cup of coffee one should drink to wake up.
Harsh Mander
Speaking Tiger;
418 pages; Rs 495
What is the "animal spirit" that India needs to unleash in order to become a better society? At a time when the phrase is readily understood as an exhortation to roar like a lion, Harsh Mander's book looks beyond the entrepreneurial aggression that the current polity goads out of its citizens. It pleads for Indians to focus as aggressively on the question of inequality.
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It talks not about the uncorked and aggressive spirit of the economically better endowed India but the warmer spirit of those who survive on the margins of Indian economy. Mr Mander strings together stories from the margins. There are narratives about homeless children surviving in urban squalor at one end of the spectrum and of chronic malnutrition entrenched in tribal India at the other.
Running through the pages you get to read of stories such as that of 60-year-old Abdul who came to Delhi from Assam looking for his mentally ill son and, instead, was sentenced to jail for three years for beggary. You hear of the suffering of the riot victims of Gujarat and the crimes and prejudices they faced as a community.
A good part of the book is also the narrative of the author's clear and absolute belief that Narendra Modi is the wrong choice as the country's prime minister. He makes no bones about it and expresses his reasons for the distrust without mincing any words. As he writes, "I am convinced that the battle for India's soul will be won in the end by the ideas of justice, equality, solidarity, public compassion and reason. The social losers of the 2014 election are ultimately on the right side of history." If Mr Mander was tweeting quotes from the book right now, one can be sure he would keep the bhakt-trolls busy for the full tenure of this government.
Mr Mander, to introduce him to younger readers, resigned from the Indian Administrative Service in the wake of the Gujarat riots and in a later avatar became one of the most prominent members of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA)'s National Advisory Council (NAC) - a body that the incoming National Democratic Alliance leadership has reviled as extra-constitutional.
He played a seminal role in writing the National Food Security Act and other rights-based regulations and laws for the UPA government, though the final shape of some of these legal frames were substantially different from the ones he advocated - a result of realpolitik that the Congress had to play to adjust to the contradictory voices within.
But this book is not about his role in the NAC as an advisor who helped fashion policy for the UPA in a particular direction. The book is a look at the world outside Lutyens' Delhi and the "safe" zones that the middle class mostly inhabits.
In the chapter "Limits to Our Empathy" Mr Mander looks at the upsurge of anger against the brutal rape in Delhi that brought the masses out on to the streets, but he also shines a light on the limit of this urban empathy that may occasionally erupt from the society. He mentions the same suffering that many women have gone through beyond Delhi and how the same India tends to easily be blind to these cases. One wishes he had dwelt more and deliberated longer on these contradictions that lock our society.
And this is the one weakness of Mr Mander's book. He hints at the structural injustices and inequality the Indian society has built deeply into its DNA, but he does not tackle them as engagingly as he does with the question of blindness of citizens as individuals to injustice and inequality.
Perhaps that was not his intention. If he intended to jolt his reader into seeing another India, he does that well and does it repeatedly through his book. If one was looking for policy prescriptions, the book does not hold many. But if one is searching for a moral compass that should guide policy making towards a more just and equal society, then Mr Mander's book is like a good cup of coffee one should drink to wake up.