Ruchir Sharma - Democracy on the Road

1. PART TWO: THE CONGRESS MEETS ITS MATCH
   1998 TO 2004
2. PART THREE: THE RISE OF THE DEVELOPMENT STARS
   2005 TO 2010
3. PART FOUR: THROWING THE BUMS OUT, AGAIN
   2011 TO 2014
4. PART FIVE: MODI AGAINST THE REST
   2014 TO 2018

ALLEN LANE

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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published in India by Penguin Random House India 2019
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2019

Copyright Ruchir Sharma, 2019

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-38808-2

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Ruchir Sharma is Head of Emerging Markets and Chief Global Strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. His acclaimed book, Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles (2012), was an international bestseller. Sharma began his career as a writer and still contributes regularly to the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs and other publications. One of the worlds largest investors, he was named one of Foreign Affairs Top Global Thinkers in 2012 and one of Bloomberg Markets 50 most influential thinkers in 2015.

For the first fifteen years of my life, my fathers job as a naval officer took our family from one big city to another, from Delhi to Mumbai to Singapore. Then every summer, we returned for a month to the same small town lost in western Uttar PradeshIndias most populous and one of its poorest states. My mother was born in Bijnor, where her family had lived for generations, so off we went to stay with my grandparents.

Today my big city friends are surprised to hear that I spent so much time in a town that defines the word mofussil, originally a British term for territories outside the colonial capitals of the East India Company, today an Indian term for territories outside the experience of most urbanites. My former classmates see me as cosmopolitan since I wandered farther than most, leaving India for New York and working in global finance; but those of my generation, even those who stayed closest to home, experience small-town India mainly through books. They have not lived there. Those summers in Bijnor, starting in the mid-1970s, are what prepared and inspired me to hit the road, later in life, trying to understand the intensely local, often mofussil passions that shape democracy in India.

Everyone in our house called grandfather Babuji, as a mark of respect. He was a criminal defence lawyer and wealthy landlord, but money and community influence were not enough to bring modern amenities to a place like Bijnor in the 1970s and 80s. Home was a typical landlords bungalow, with a big veranda around an open courtyard and a tractor parked out back among the cows and buffaloes, which supplied the milk and the prevailing scent. Also out back were the semi-permanent sheds where the staff lived.

It was a sprawling home, with two floors and five bedrooms but my entire family slept on the roof, under mosquito netting, to escape the heat. When the sun rose we would move inside to avoid its burning rays, going back to sleep till well past 9 a.m. Breakfast would start around 10 a.m. Time did not follow a regular schedule in Bijnor, not even mealtime. As in many Indian towns, the most visible landmark was the Ghanta Ghar, a clock tower left over from British colonial days, but like most of these relics it didnt work. In fact the clock had no hands.

The walls of Babujis house were populated with geckos, which never failed to trigger a hullabaloo of shouting and screaming when one fell off the ceiling. Running from the lizards was a bad option, since the summer temperatures often reached 43 degrees, and air conditioning was out of the question. In that era AC was a rare luxury available only in the big cities.

Instead, Babuji deployed traditional desert coolers, which pump cold water through a box lined with khus-khus, an organic fibre with natural cooling properties, and use a fan to blow out the fresh air. It would shut down when the electricity failedwhich was more often than not. Hand fans were always at the ready, strategically placed on the window sills.

My most searing recollections have less to do with the slow rhythm of live in the glaring sun than the social life, though it was all accepted as normal in Bijnor at the time. Small-town India in the 1980s was not so much politically incorrect as pre-politically correcta place I imagine was not unlike the United States of the late nineteenth century, where otherwise decent people didnt hesitate to discriminate based on class, race or religion.

Our summer family often grew to as many as a dozen people, including a couple of unmarried aunts, who in my recollection were particularly vigilant about defending caste order. Nowhere was this order enforced more strictly than in regard to the castes formerly known as untouchables, who had been renamed more respectfully by the post-Independence government as the Scheduled Castes, and by their own leaders more proudly as Dalits. In Bijnor, a woman of the lowest Dalit caste was known as a mehatrani or sweepress, and they had been assigned by the lottery of Indias ancient caste hierarchy the task of cleaning toilets.

The squat-style latrines had to be emptied and cleaned every morning, by hand, because the taps often spat out nothing but air, and most of our water came from a hand pump in the yard. Once a mehatrani had cleaned the bathroom, workers of a higher casteJats or the Brahmins who minded the kitchenwould enter to douse the floor with water, washing away the fingerprints of the mehatrani. If my sister or I or one of the cousins should accidentally touch or be touched by a mehatrani, the adults would step in and march us straight away to the bath. Even if our hands should graze a towel that had been handled by a mehatrani, an adult relative would cry foul and send us off to have our bodies bathed and clothes washed.