Spite of the Gods

I SIE O E GOS E SAGE ISE O MOE IIA EWA UCE IE, B OW COES rf ii Ioucio 1 1 Goa a Meiea: Ind hzphrn n 2 2 e ua Sais: h ln tntl f Ind tt 64 3 aes o e igeous: h r f Ind lr t 1 06 4 e Imagiay ose: h ntnn thrt f nd ntnl 1 44 5 og ie e Sycoas: h Cnr rt ntnn lv ffr th th hr—Gndh dnt 1 82 6 May Cesces: Sth A dvdd Ml 22 7 A iagua ace: Wh Ind rltn th th Untd Stt nd Chn ll hp th rld n th tntfrt ntr 26 8 ew Iia, O Iia: h nlrd hrtr f Indn drnt 00 Cnln 4 t 6 Glr 375 Indx 379 LITTLE, BROWN First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Little, Brown Copyright © Edward Luce 2006 The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-0-316-72981-9 ISBN-10: 0-316-72981-7 Typeset in Goudy by M Rules Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Little, Brown Book Group Brettenham House Lancaster Place London WC2E 7EN A member of the Hachette Livre Group of Companies www.littlebrown.co.uk EACE This book is not about a love affair with the culture and antiqui- ties of India. I have read too many paeans to India by foreigners to have any thoughts of adding to that extensive list. It is about the changing political economy and society of a country whose future will increasingly affect the rest of the world. When reporting on India for the nnl I usually adhered to the detached and impersonal style that journalists follow. But a book is different and much of what follows is in the first person. Some of what is con- tained in these pages is of a critical nature, occasionally very critical. It is hard to observe and chronicle the workings of India's political, economic and legal systems without sometimes feeling outrage at the squandering of life opportunities for the hundreds of millions of Indians who still live in poverty. Their opportunities are improving, albeit not rapidly enough — but improving never- theless. It is hard, too, not to feel frustration with the large numbers of foreigners and Indians who are still wont to see India through a purely spiritual lens. A lot is written about American and French exceptionalism (neither of which sanctifies poverty, it should be added). A lot more could still be written on the Indian variety. Yet without my deep affection for — and fascination by — India I would never have written this book. Over the years and in the most unexpected ways, India has taught me as much about humanity in general as it has about itself. Although occasionally mystifying, India has always opened its doors to me and other iii I SIE O E GOS inquiring outsiders. With amazingly few exceptions, Indians have been unreservedly kind, open, hospitable and tolerant of the interrogations of an intrusive foreigner. Quite without meaning to do so, India has also taught me how inhospitable we in the west — and especially in Britain — can often be. I hope the reader will recognise that there is no contradiction between criticism and affection. That way the reader will more easily chime with the book's anticipation of India's rise to a much more significant global role in the first few decades of the twenty-first century. In five years of travelling around India, observing events and interviewing people — four years as bureau chief for the nnl and one for this book — I can think of only a handful of occasions when I was denied access to somebody or to some information that I was seeking. Since I have interviewed many hundreds of Indians, some of them on many occasions, it would take a chapter simply to list them. So I will confine mention to a few people who have been consistently helpful, many of whom have become firm friends. With a few exceptions, I have omitted the names of politicians and businessmen, since availability to journalists is a normal part of their professional lives. I would like to express my profound thanks to: Shankar Acharya, Swami Agnivesh, Montek and Isher Ahluwalia, Mani Shankar Aiyar, M. J. Akbar, Sohail Akbar (and his delightful parents in Allahabad), Anil Ambani, Kanti Bajpai, Sanjaya Baru, Surjit Bhalla, Kiran Bhatty and Aslam Khan (`Karen and Islam'), Jagdish Bhagwati, Uday Bhaskar, Rahul Bedi, Farhan Bokhari, Michael and Jenny Carter, Ram Chandra (`Golu'), Vikram Chandra, Vijay Chautiawale, Ashok Chowgule, Stephen P. Cohen, Tarn Das, Nikhil Dey, Jean Dreze, Gordon Duguid, Verghese George, Sagarika Ghosh, Omkar Goswami, Dipankar and Mala Gupta, Shekhar Gupta, Swapan Das Gupta, David Housego, Tony Jesudasan, Prem Shankar Jha, Vijay Kelkar, Sunil Khilnani, Sudheendra Kulkarni, Hanif Lakdawala, Ram Madhav, Moni Malhoutra, Kamal M, Harsh Mander, Ashok EACE i Mehta, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Vinod Mehta, Murli Menon, Khozem Merchant and Malavika Sanghvi, Anjali Mody, Raja Mohan, Jayaprakash Narain, Sunita Narain, Kishan Negi, Nandan Nilekani, T. N. Ninan, Udit Raj, N. and Mariam Ram, Mahesh Rangarajan, Aruna Roy, Raman Roy, Rajdeep Sardesai, Navtej Sarna, Tesi Schaffer, Suhel Seth, Jyotirmaya Sharma, Ajai and Sonia Shukla, N. K. Singh, Mala and Tejbir Singh, Arun Singh, Ashley Tellis, Karan Thapar, Ashutosh Varshney and George Verghese. I would like to underline my thanks to the following people who very kindly took the time to read this manuscript in full and correct errors of fact, judgement and grammar. These were Michael Arthur, Suman Bery, Ramachandra Guha, Andrew Davis and Jackie Shorey, and Krishna Guha. Throughout the process of writing and researching this book, the help, expertise and encouragement of Natasha Fairweather, my agent at A. P. Watt, was always indispensable. It was also a great pleasure and an intellec- tual stimulation to work with Tim Whiting and Steve Guise, my editors at Little, Brown in London and Kris Puopolo, my editor at Doubleday in New York. In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to the nnl , which, apart from allowing me a year's leave of absence to research and write this book, is the ideal employer for a foreign correspondent. No other newspaper permits its reporters such autonomy and latitude in pursuing their inter- ests. The space it makes available for serious stories about India continues to mark it out from most other publications. Not once did the FT attempt to impose any preconceptions on what I wrote. Of very few other newspapers would this description consistently hold true. My acknowledgements conclude with Aparna and Prahlad Basu, my parents-in-law, whose encouragement of my interest in India was equalled only by the insights and experience they were always ready to share. Aparna is a historian and was a professor at Delhi University for many years. Prahlad was — and is — a senior x I SIE O E GOS civil servant in New Delhi. Not many foreign correspondents (or sons-in-law) get this kind of assistance. I would also like to thank my own parents, Rose and Richard, who bear the heroic distinc- tion of having read everything I have ever written, including — I subsequently found out — the diaries that I had clearly marked Do Not Read which I kept as a teenager. Their unquestioning support is one of the reasons I am doing what I want to do in life. This book is dedicated partly to them. The other half of the dedication is to Priya, my wife, whose patience with my eccentric behaviour during the course of this book snapped only once or twice, but whose love has always been unwavering. Although she does not agree with all of my views, discussing them with Priya has helped me to clarify and enrich them. She is my victim and occasionally my culprit. Priya is also in many ways a cause of this book. II IOUCIO To a western observer our civilisation appears as all metaphysics, as to a deaf man piano playing appears to be mere movements of fingers and no music. aiaa agoe eas Iias geaes oe wo wo e oe ie o ieaue i 1913 I had been living in India more than four years when I met André, a sixty-three-year-old Frenchman with a greying ponytail and a passion for Vedantic philosophy. But it felt as though we had met on many previous occasions. I was on a short visit to Auroville, a town in south India founded in 1968 by Mira Alfassa, a nonage- narian Frenchwoman whom everybody calls Mother. She had named the town after Sri Aurobindo, one of India's most cele- brated spiritual leaders, whose life's journey — from student years at Cambridge to underground activism against British colonial rule and finally incarnating as a teacher-savant in a charming corner of peninsular India — merits a book or two in itself. Mother, André told me, had 'departed her body' in 1973, twenty-three years after Sri Aurobindo but, fortunately for the questing Frenchman, sev- eral months after he had arrived in Auroville.

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