Yin and yang

The more you think of India today, the more it brings to mind the opening sentences of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. At one level, it is hard to be anything but optimistic about India as its economy powers along. You can also justify a leap of faith, and believe that governance standards will improve as the middle-class grows exponentially and demands quality public services. And if India is indeed going to be the world's third largest economy in about 15 years, the journey from here to there must inevitably be one of the most exciting that the world has seen. The problem with this vision, or dream, is that other realities intrude. And the contra-list is familiar too: the largest concentration of the world's poor, rapidly growing inequality, no progress on key public health indicators like immunisation coverage, and the failure of virtually every anti-poverty scheme conceived and executed by the government. As for the middle class, it retreats into enclaves where the services that the government fails to provide are bought from private providers.

This us-them scenario plays out in other ways. Investors celebrate the stock market indices reaching all-time highs, but the capital inflow which contributes to that contributes also to the strengthening of the rupee, forcing exporters to down shutters and throw more than 50,000 people out of work in just the garments-textiles sector. The special economic zones are welcomed enthusiastically by businessmen, but many of them sit on land taken from farmers who are marching this week to Delhi to register their protest and make people conscious of their condition. Perhaps a dozen large industrial projects are held up because of battles between the companies setting them up and local people who fear the loss of their livelihood. Naxalism spreads even as the ranks of the wealthy grow. Industry enjoys record profit levels, but farmers are committing suicide.

When the good news and bad news intermingles so seamlessly, you can feel upbeat or downbeat depending on the headlines of the week. Last week, there was the extraordinary conduct of the telecom minister on some key issues in the mobile phone space "" raising all the old concerns about the spread of crony capitalism. The Tehelka tapes served to focus on the worst aspects of Indian politics "" crass communalism and people functioning beyond the pale of the law without either remorse or retribution. With Left leaders meeting with their counterparts in a nascent 'third force', the odds have lengthened on getting a stable government after the next elections. And the Prime Minister's review of key infrastructural projects showed such patchy progress that projects that should have been finished by now are less than a third done.

The existence of problems is in itself no reason for despondency. Problems are what you would expect in a society that is at an annual income per head of $1,000, and still moulding its systems and traditions for the modern age, as also moulding people to function within the confines of those systems. Dichotomies too have long been summarised in the old cliche of India and Bharat. What should cause worry is if the dichotomy grows and problems do not get tackled, or get bigger; and if the systems that already exist are reduced to empty shells, retaining the form but without the substance""so that we have the illusion of a modern state with a strong middle class and functioning through the rule of law, when all that we have under the surface is predatory feudalism, rank lawlessness and tribalism. And yet it is hard to be despondent in a society that is seeing more progress on more fronts than at any previous period in its history, when the numbers above the poverty line have nearly trebled in a little over three decades, and when the soul of a nation long suppressed is in fact finding utterance in ways both predictable and unexpected.