Sunanda K Datta-Ray: The people and the privileged

WHERE MONEY TALKS

An East Bengal saying has it that you don't need a mirror to see the bracelet on your wrist. That was my immediate reaction on reading of the UNDP report on the human condition in India.

Now, the letters of shock and outrage in several newspapers make me feel that, perhaps, you do. Perhaps only an expensive foreign looking glass can convince us of the mess under our nose.

There is a role here for the media to create what sociologists call public space to thrash out public issues. As a 17th century English courtier lamented, newspapers make "the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiors."

That difference between multitude and superiors, the "People" and the "Privileged" who, in Disraeli's view, comprise two "Nations", lies at the heart of the contradiction of dismal statistics and visions of global power. It bears out my complaint that planning and development are always for India and not Indians.

Nor will we make any headway against poverty without coming to grips with the problem of numbers. There could have been a democratic solution but our representative government doesn't quite amount to democracy.

We build sophisticated missiles but not a decent public bus. We buy the best submarines but not a mass water purification system. We are proud of harvesting enough foodgrain to feed everybody but allow rodents, the climate and poor storage to destroy much of it.

The list goes on as India trundles to the Moon on a bullock cart. The yearning for a place at the high table of the United Nations says it all. In spite of the millennium goals, the obsession is with image, prestige and international recognition.

Birth control ceased to be an imperative when Indira Gandhi lost the 1977 election. In practice, contraception is not even mooted to communities that claim a scriptural objection.

Many factors may have dented the once impregnable wisdom of Malthus's population theory but there is no denying that burgeoning numbers cancel out much that is achieved in food, housing, medicine, schooling and jobs. It may even be a curse in disguise that health has improved for, notwithstanding unconscionably high infant mortality, so has longevity.

By and large, the urban educated rich "" Disraeli's Privileged "" practise birth control; the others "" the People "" don't, which emphasises the dangerously non-inclusive nature of society. What happens to the large number of people beyond the pale is nobody's concern.

And these 300 million or more who languish on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day are more important than the 300 million or so middle-class consumers because they drag India down to the level of some sub-Saharan African countries. No wonder Naxalites are rampant in 160 districts of 12 states. They thrive on distress and deprivation.

It is fashionable today to speak of the great divide between India and Bharat. That could be a modern variant of Disraeli's Two-Nation theory providing it is understood that there is no distance between the two entities. The division is not between town and country.

What with bumper crops, tax concessions, assertive "backward" castes and the "brahmanisation" of the traditionally underprivileged, there is plenty of money in the countryside. India and its poorer half "" call it Bharat if you will "" live cheek by jowl, with Bharat lurking round the corner in every city, in bastis and shantytowns that provide metropolitan labour and also the metropolitan underworld.

It's also more than a question of rich and poor. As the higher mortality rate of girl children bears out, wealth, education and status are not necessarily liberating influences.

A well-known gynaecologist tells me that he always hopes to deliver a boy when his patient is the wife of a rich trader. For the grateful father never fails to give him a bonus over and above his fees. Clearly, the thinking in some sections has changed little since Mountstuart

Elphinstone's findings. Even Marx's theory of the history of all society being "the history of class struggle" does not adequately explain the complexities of stratification when caste and class intersect. That is where prejudice is at its most vicious.

An examination of the catchment area of the data that place India 127th in the UNDP's ranking would show who has benefited most from the successes of India's liberalisation "" that there have been successes no one will deny "" and who has failed to do so.

Obviously, things would have been different if the deprived had a voice as well as a vote. That is what I mean about the limitations of representative government. That also explains my misgivings about the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. Everything will depend on implementation, which is something for the media to keep tabs on.

As a policeman told Robin Jeffrey, author of India's Newspaper Revolution, "Once, if one policeman went to a village, the people were afraid. Now, six police may go to a village and people are not afraid. Newspapers have made them know that the police are not supposed to beat them." Vigilance is the cure to many social ills.