India Revisited

...After five long sojourns there and four books on the country to my credit, I suppose I now qualify as an old India hand myself...

...The resident doctor was so alarmed that he transferred her to a regular hospital, where her story surfaced...

...There is reason to hope, though, that as regional movements in Andhra, in Tamil Nadu, in the Punjab, in tragically torn Assam-reject Delhi's domination and become more vigorous, they will also grow in responsibility...

...The heavy defeat of her Congress (I) Party in both cases showed how precarious her grip is on the loyalties of Indians...

...In Andhra, Gandhi had insisted that four Congress chief ministers be displaced within two years...

...This year I returned to India...

...In the case of the Tamil Nadu match works, families in effect sell their children over a period of years for a "salary advance" of 200 rupees each...

...Such workers usuall yearn around 7-8 rupees daily for an adult, maybe half as much for a child...

...A degree of self-sufficiency has been reached that has largely cushioned the country from the effects of the present world recession...

...This was demonstrated by the elections in the southern states...

...Yet India is not a land entirely without hope...

...The location this time was the match and fireworks plants of Tamil Nadu, where some deadly explosions among children stuffing gunpowder into squibs had led to a revelation: In the Ramanathapuram district of that southern state no fewer than 45,000 boys and girls under 15 years old were toiling in dangerous and unhealthy conditions...

...India has the largest population of working children in the world...

...Added to the existing tensions between religious communities-Hindu, Moslem and Sikh-this development has reduced the appeal of ideology...

...As Bhanabi Sen Gupta further noted, "the fast-politicized masses constitute a massive and diversified constituency too large and too complex for any political party to manipulate and control...

...The parents' need guarantees its survival...

...Peasants in the Punjab, for instance, have prospered through mechanized farming...

...A child prostitute, she was suffering from many "life-threatening" ailments...

...Once poor families in thronging Kerala have become well-off on the money their members earn in the oil-rich Gulf states...

...Here she serviced Arabs from the Gulf states for 150 rupees per session, receiving a tiny fraction of the sum...

...Two days after I read the sad story of Tulasa, for example, I encountered another expose of child exploitation...

...That evening an old India hand I had met on the ship took me to parts of the city where the grubby white garments of the crowded sleepers made the side streets look as if they were covered with dirty snow...

...Despite the temporary weakening of civil liberties by Gandhi during the Emergency a few years back, despite her crass attempts at centralization by manipulating the state governments, democracy is still alive...

...Administrations have devoted themselves mainly to preserving their power...

...Then the present role of caste and community politics will diminish...

...This cynical resignation has wrought some alarming changes in Indian politics...

...The comfortable Western-style hotels that a decade ago catered exclusively to foreign tourists and high government officials are now packed with middle-class professionals, businessmen and their families...

...This manipulation of strong traditional groupings has squeezed the poor out of the calculations of Indian politicians...

...With established parties on the wane, caste has reemerged as a force in Indian society...

...The reasons for her defeat are plain enough...

...Because of the vast supply of cheap labor that the country's 685 million people offer, roads in India are built in the most primitive way...

...They would usher their customers inside to offer their perilous favors for a couple of rupees, with only a ragged curtain hiding them from the street...

...By this time the sicknesses she had contracted were worsening, and she was brought to a private nursing home catering to the 10,000 prostitutes of the region...

...Not surprisingly, the electorate showed its disgust when the balloting came...

...Rama Rao...

...The prophecies and postmortems of the Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh elections stressed the efforts of the contenders to woo the castes by promising to further sectional interests...

...And one does not have to seek out brothels or match factories or carpet workshops to find them...

...Mohandas Gandhi's ideal of a society based on revived village life has been a fading dream...

...and 10 p.m...

...True, many poor people worked on these projects (though there were scandals about contractors defrauding their lowest-paid employees...

...Its mark is manifest in the sections of new, pretentious villas on the outskirts of Delhi and other great cities that present a stark contrast to the bustees (settlements of rickety shacks) where the poor emigrants from the countryside live...

...Of course, one cannot deny the magnitude of the tasks in health, feeding and employment that successive Indian governments have faced since 1947, all exacerbated by a rising flood of people nearing 700 million at last count, second only to China...

...It continues in Kashmir, too, where the carpet industry has 7,000 children between the ages of eight and 10 tending looms, an occupation that renders them susceptible to asthma and tuberculosis...

...On my most recent journey, I sometimes slipped into a reverie and imagined the shade of Mohandas K. Gandhi, that relentless critic of his countrymen's faults, admonishing today's Indians that 36 years after the departure of the British they can no longer blame an imperial oppressor for the wrongs they inflict on each other...

...Anywhere in India long distance telephoning between 6 p.m...

...The disquieting fact is that in recent years Delhi seems to have fatalistically accepted the doctrine, "ye have the poor always with you...

...It continues in a way that is no longer the case in so many developing countries (like India's neighbors: Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma...

...Then he guided me through that grim area of human degradation known as "the Cages"-the brothel district where the girls sat outside little booths with iron-barred gates...

...The diagnosis was only partly exhausted by "tuberculosis and tubercular meningitis, which inhibited the flow of cerobro-spinal fluid to her brain...

...I was assured by knowledgeable relief sources that in remote spots, adults in roadmaking still receive daily wages of only 4 rupees, as they did when I first saw them in '61...

...In a country where the per capita yearly income is about $150, the people at the bottom have to draw in money from the toil of every family member simply to stay alive...

...Below the top layer a gray mass of another 30-40 per cent struggles, confusedly holding its own against truly crushing poverty-the condition of the remaining 40 per cent, approximately 300 million unfortunates who have no land, no money and no security...

...After that temporary benefit is taken into account, however, the appalling reality remains: This colossal sum was spent on a sports event in a country where the very same year thousands in Bihar died of famine, where bustees around the capital have a single water tap for hundreds of families, where tens of thousands of villages have polluted wells, where untouchability-linked with destitution-still flourishes in many rural areas, and where tens of millions grow up illiterate...

...In spite of legislation dating back to 1948 decreeing that youngsters below the age of 14 may not be employed in a factory, no genuine attempts have been made to end the widespread practice...

...Perhaps one-fifth of all Indians-no more-are actively participating in this continuing economic upswing, creating a kind of floating bourgeois crust...

...If a poor family has a bit of land, the children cultivate it alongside the parents...

...The sole machine used is the roller that compresses the manually laid stones and asphalt...

...The chances of the Communists taking advantage of this new situation by creating a nationally effective party are fortunately remote...

...The most distressed political animals in India today are chief ministers of states ruled by Congress...

...The extreme centralism of Gandhi's rule has discredited the state governments controlled by her organizationfirst because it has sheltered some corrupt local ministers, but more because it has left little authority at the local level...

...To someone seeing them after traveling thousands of miles through the towns and villages, the costly glory seemed to mock India's distress...

...To the spectators who came for the Games alone, the grand new structures-put up in areas from which many poor people were evicted-no doubt bespoke the glory of India...

...Wherever a road is under construction women and children pummel the rock, often injuring their eyes with splinters...

...Conflicts among Brahmins and untouchables have taken on a political relevance unknown in the early days of independence...

...The situation was accurately described recently by the political journalist Bhanabi Sen Gupta: "Lack of inner democracy in the political parties, especially the Congress, has alienated them from large sections of the rural elite and the urban-rural voter...

...Certainly my memory was given a jolt when, picking up an issue of India Today, I discovered that notwithstanding a succession of overtly puritanical administrations both in Delhi and Bombay's state of Maharashtra, the Cages still flourished, perhaps more briskly than 20 years ago...

...Tulasa's misfortunes began as a 12-year-old girl in a Nepali village, when a friend of her family enticed her away and gave her to a gang that smuggled her across the border to Bombay, where a madame bought her for 5,000 rupees (under $500...

...Meanwhile, the ranks of the poor have kept pace with the steady increase in population...

...Imagining that their circumstance is determined by karma, or predestination, they still rarely offer help to the destitute...

...A month later she was sold to a quickie brothel for 7,000 rupees, and six months after that to a higher-class house for 7,500 rupees...

...The central government has never revealed the total expenditure incurred by the rather vainglorious festival...

...At times these depredations remind one of the most harrowing passages of Friedrich Engels on the England of the Industrial Revolution...

...In the tones of some subterranean 18th-century novel about the British underworld, the article I read described the ghastly fate of a Nepali girl named Tulasa who had turned up in a local hospital...

...Politics have become highly competitive at the local level, creating an apparently disturbing dichotomy between a 'strong' regime at the center and 'weak' governments in the states...

...Any journey along the Indian roads provides a fair sampling...

...acute genito-urinary tract infections, which ultimately affected her kidneys...

...At the same time, there is no doubt that in terms of total productivity the economy has expanded considerably over the last two decades...

...Child labor persists in India not merely because of the rapacity of contractors and manufacturers seeking cheap hands...

...The days are past when Congress could rely on an automatic majority thanks to its role in gaining independence...

...The Christmas I spent at the Lake Palace in Udaipur seemed to have been transformed into a festival for Hindus on holiday from their faith...

...A few flesh traffickers were then arrested-without much effect on a trade that has been going on uninterrupted since Bombay first arose on the mudflats, always tolerated by the police officers and politicians who cull their share of the profits...

...But Design, the prestigious, reliable Delhi magazine of planning and architecture, has estimated that public and private outlays cannot have been much less than 500 crores of rupees, or approximately $500 million...

...During days averaging 12 hours the older children were paid a maximum of seven rupees (about 75 cents) per day...

...A new and genuinely federal unity may emerge in India-one that will be more sensitive to the poor and to authentic local needs, and less concerned with puffing the country up into a political giant that boasts grandiose monuments...

...A generation and more of independence has not improved the attitudes of the rich...

...In Andhra she lost to a new regional party, Telugu Desam, led by charismatic film actor N.T...

...they dump the rubble and level it for the roller to grind into a road...

...India now turns out an astonishing number of products, some as sophisticated as air conditioners, watches and X-ray units...

...is difficult because the lines are tied up by merchants calling all over the country at cheap night rates, making deals in commodities...

...The women usually carry the broken stone in brass bowls or wicker baskets on their heads...

...The money went into stadiums and swimming pools, a village for athletes, overpasses and road widenings, plus a number of hotels, some not completed in time for the games (and the ones that were done were not filled to capacity...

...Insecurity of power of chief ministers and ministers has encouraged corruption and abuse of power, and the weakening of the popular support base of political parties has [made them] dependent on the Mafia, the urban-rural lumpen elements and black money to win elections...

...Perhaps there is no more vivid recent example of the neglect of Indians' real welfare by the elite than the Asian Games, held in Delhi in late 1982...

...Various Democratic Socialist parties have virtually vanished from the scene, and even the formidable Communist movement in Kerala has become increasingly affected by the wire-pulling of the Hindu castes and prominent Christian communities in that state...

...their strength in Kerala and Bengal seems destined to travel poorly...

...several sexually transmitted diseases and the possibility of hydrocephalus...

...the landless try to earn cash by hiring themselves out...

...Most relief and rehabilitation ventures in India are funded by foreign donors...

...During my visit, crucial elections took place in two southern states-Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh-formerly regarded as Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's strongholds...

...many between the ages of four and seven were being paid less than a third of that...

...The stones are also broken with hammers, as our convicts used to do...

...A survey in 1972-73 estimated the number of those employed who are between the ages of five and 15 at more than 16 million...

...Certain classes and regions are evidently doing well...