Like Donald Trump, Mr. Modi rose to power demonizing ethnic-religious minorities, immigrants and the establishment media, and boasting about the size of a body part.
.. Arguments over what precisely is to blame for Mr. Trump’s apotheosis —
- inequality,
- callous globalized elites,
- corruptible local legislators,
- zealous ideologues,
- a news media either toxic or complaisant — will only intensify in the coming months.
.. In the case of India, the role of institutional rot — venal legislators, a mendacious media — and the elites’ moral and intellectual truancy is clear. To see it one only has to remember that Mr. Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, was accused of
- supervising mass murder and
- gang rapes of Muslims — and
- consequently was barred from travel to the United States for nearly a decade
— and that none of that prevented him from being elected to India’s highest office.
.. Americans are, as Mr. Frank writes, “a population brought up expecting to enjoy life in what it is often told is the richest country in the world.” In India, one of the poorest countries in the world, “the tutelage of a distant and self-satisfied elite” — to borrow from Ross Douthat, describing America — spawned a much more extravagant sense of entitlement.
.. Suave technocrats, economists and publicists (mostly U.S.-trained) endlessly regurgitated free-market nostrums (imported from America) — what Mr. Frank calls the “liberalism of the rich.”
.. The fervent rhetoric about private wealth-creation and its trickle-down benefits openly mocked, and eventually stigmatized, India’s founding ideals of egalitarian and collective welfare. It is this extraordinary historical reversal, and its slick agents, that must be investigated in order to understand the incendiary appeal of demagoguery in our time.
.. Karl Polanyi described in his 1944 book “The Great Transformation” how civil society and individual liberty are threatened as never before when a society has to reconfigure itself to serve the “utopian experiment of a self-regulating market.”
.. In recent years, smooth-tongued “policy entrepreneurs” (Paul Krugman’s term) advocating free-market reforms and a heavily armed security-state have dominated India’s public sphere.
.. Arvind Panagariya, a colleague of Mr. Bhagwati’s who now works for the Indian government’s economic policy think-tank, took to arguing that Indian children were genetically underweight, and not really as malnourished as the World Health Organization had claimed. The 2015 Nobel laureate Angus Deaton rightly calls such positions “poverty denialism.”
.. economic growth, of the uneven and jobless kind, was creating what the economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen have called “islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa.”
.. All the while they stoked hatred against such enemies of rising India as Kashmiri separatists and their Pakistani supporters.
.. Mr. Modi and his hawkish Twitter account emerged into national politics just as growth faltered
.. “Mein Kampf” is a perennial bestseller in India, Hitler being seen as an exemplary nationalist-cum-people-manager.
.. More important, Mr. Modi grasped then, as astutely as Mr. Trump does now, the terrible political potency of ressentiment. Positioning himself in the gap between the self-righteous beneficiaries of globalization and irascible masses, he claimed to be the son of a modest tea-vendor who had dared to challenge the corrupt old dynasties of quasi-foreign liberals.
.. One of Mr. Modi’s most loyal fan bases was rich Indian-American businesspeople, who were naturally attracted to the promise of a wealthy India allied with the United States.
.. Mr. Trump sought their support, and hailing India’s prime minister as a “great man,”
.. Silicon Valley lined up to hail Mr. Modi’s vision of “Digital India.”
.. B.R. Ambedkar, the main framer of India’s constitution, warned in the 1950s that democracy in India was “only a top dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.”
.. India’s press, fearfully self-censoring, if not barefacedly mendacious, has become, as The Economist reported last month, “more craven than Pakistan’s.”
.. Fewer jobs are being created on Mr. Modi’s watch than under the previous government of quasi-foreign liberals.
.. Mr. Modi appears to be an opportunistic manipulator of disaffection with little to offer apart from the pornography of power and a bogus fantasy of machismo. Mr. Trump looks set to follow his lead.
.. In our own time, a global network of elites has tried to restart the discredited utopian experiment of a self-regulating market. The experiment failed, and again the rage of cheated masses has spawned demagogues who simultaneously promise to avenge the left-behinds and to rewire their alliances with the elites.
2014 Commencement address by Bill and Melinda Gates
Ten years ago, I traveled to India with friends. On the last day there, I spent some time meeting with prostitutes. I expected to talk to them about the risk of AIDS, but they wanted to talk about stigma. Most of these women had been abandoned by their husbands, and that’s why they’d gone into prostitution. They were trying to make enough money to feed their kids. They were so low in the eyes of society that they could be raped and robbed and beaten by anybody – even by police – and nobody cared.
.. Talking to them about their lives was so moving to me. But what I remember most is how much they wanted to touch me and be touched. It was as if physical contact somehow proved their worth. As I was leaving, we took a photo of all of us with our arms linked together.
.. The stigma of AIDS is vicious – especially for women – and the punishment is abandonment.
.. The community they formed became a platform for everything. They were able to set up speed-dial networks to respond to violent attacks. Police and others who raped and robbed them couldn’t get away with it anymore. The women set up systems to encourage savings. They used financial services that helped some of them start businesses and get out of sex work. This was all done by people society considered the lowliest of the low.
.. The pessimists are wrong in my view, but they’re not crazy. If technology is purely market-driven and we don’t focus innovation on the big inequities, then we could have amazing inventions that leave the world even more divided.
The Price of Glee in China
This is Easterlin’s Paradox, the observation that a country in general does not get happier as it becomes richer. This is very controversial, with statisticians analyzing and reanalyzing data and crunching it a bunch of different ways. In the latest volley in this eternal war, Easterlin’s side came out with data from 37 countries over 30 years, including many countries that underwent spectacular growth during that time, and confirmed their original conclusion
.. Here we see a lot of cultural variation in this apparent happiness-income relationship. For example, Latin American countries are consistently poor but happy; Eastern European countries are usually richer but sadder than African countries, et cetera. Looking at the original graph above, you’d expect Chinese growth to make them much happier; looking at this graph, you notice that China’s three rich neighbors – Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea – are all about as happy as China. South Korea, despite making five times more money, is less happy than China is. If China’s income quintuples, why would you expect it to look like France or Ireland rather than South Korea?
.. A UN report theorizes that although richer countries tend to be happier, this is more likely due to factors other than income, like freedom, social trust, and stable families.
.. Let’s assume for a second that all this is true. National income does not matter for national happiness, and if China’s growth continues to skyrocket then in twenty years it will be as rich as Japan but not an iota happier than it is today. What do wedo with this kind of knowledge?
.. Or let me ask a more specific question. Suppose that some free trade pact will increase US unemployment by 1%, but also accelerate the development of some undeveloped foreign country like India into hyper-speed. In twenty years, India’s GDP per capita will go from $1,500/year to $10,000/year. The only cost will be a million or so extra unemployed Americans, plus all that coal that the newly vibrant India is burning probably won’t be very good for the fight against global warming.
As long as a woman has a husband, she has esteem in the village
These chelas are actually darogas, the hereditary servants who are the illegitimate offspring of a thakur with a daori, or female servant. The girls who were born to daoris were mostly killed at birth; the rest were either given away as dowry during the weddings of their legitimate daughters to chiefs and nobles, or married to other chelas.
The nobles, chiefs and thakurs housed the daoris in separate accommodations, often on the fringes of the havelis. Apart from serving as concubines for these thakurs, the daoris also doubled as rudaalis, or mourners, for the family in times of death and sickness.
.. “Women’s brains are hardwired to feel loss and grief. They have a weak heart,” the Thakur says, patting his chest under his kurta. “We don’t allow the women in our families to make a sight of themselves outside our homes. High-caste woman do not cry in front of commoners. Even if their husbands die, they need to preserve their dignity. These low-caste women, rudaalis, do the job for them. The whole village feels the loss . . . She represents their sadness,” he says, concluding his speech, and the chelas furiously nod their heads, as if mentally applauding him.
.. “Do they live with their families or—”
“No, no,” interjects the Thakur before I can finish the question. “They live in their own kutiya near the haveli. These women have no family. We are their family. The whole village is their family. Once they leave their home and come as a gift to me in marriage, they never go back, even to visit. They have to live with us in the village and serve us menfolk.
.. “Can I meet them?”
“No, madam, our women have to preserve their lajja,” he answers immediately, as if the possibility of such a feat had never been considered before. “They can’t be out in the open. It is their duty to take care of the children and men of the households. We don’t allow them to meet strangers. After all, we have to protect their virtue. You can ask me whatever you want to know. They are delicate fragile things . . .”
.. “Do you have any sisters?’ I ask the chela, a young boy with lost brown eyes.
“No, two were born to my mother, but died a few days after they were born. We don’t keep girl children, madam.”
.. Pushing the envelope a bit further, I ask one of the boys, “So is the Thakur your father?”
“No, madam, I only have a mother. We are not supposed to have fathers. My mother also never had a father,” he replies, in a low, even tone, his head slightly lowered.
.. “Do you know what the going rate for dowry is around here, madam?” he says in a mocking tone.
“It is six to eight kilos of gold at least. Plus, if you are from a rich family, you have to give them servants, cars, silver, welcome them with your heads lowered, and heed to their incessant demands. Last year, a girl’s wedding took place for the first time in this village in eighty years. She was among the few who survived. They tried to poison her but she vomited it out. So her family assumed that she was a gift from Lord Krishna and kept her.”
.. Where women’s participation in the public realm is carefully policed, occupying the position of a concubine gives them and their children access to the homes of rich landed men. They pray—to the god Bheruji, who himself was a lusty bachelor and loved seducing young girls, especially from lower castes—for these men to live long lives. In a way, they seize these cultural and religious practices to achieve dignity, which—otherwise, being landless, impoverished women—would not be accessible to them.
.. They also devised rituals where their high status and position was preserved, which translated into elaborate death rituals. Lamenters and mourners, hence, gained precedence, and unfortunate women who were widowed, impoverished or served as servants in the royal households were turned into rudaalis, or professional mourners. “The rudaali, somewhat “chose” her future the moment she survived her birth to a lower-caste mother,” murmurs Satar.
.. The rest sing praises in his memory.
“Yes, yes, he liked his moustache trimmed downwards,” says his barber.
“He helped me get my daughter married to his munshi’s son. What a great man!” whispers another.
“He did that without any commission?” asks another. “Just two kilos of gold and my three goats.”
.. But this is only the first session: the performance goes on for twelve days after a death. A longer mourning period better explains the family’s class denomination, and the more theatrical the act, the more it is spoken about in the neighbours’ homes.
.. “As long as a woman has a husband, she has esteem in the village,” says Feroja, one of the three rudaalis at the mourning. “With him gone, she has to cover her face from strangers, keep away from pujas and be the unlucky one who caused her husband’s death.”