The current turmoil has taken much of the shine off the so-called ‘New India.'
Casting a glance back at how India appeared to the outside world just a few months ago is rather like looking at grainy footage of yesteryear: a booming economy, IT whiz-kids making waves all over the globe, top ranking in international Test cricket, the ICC Cricket World Cup in the bag, Bollywood on the roll. It seemed India couldn't get anything wrong. All the good news fit to print was coming out of India. And set against the crisis in Pakistan, lurching from one embarrassment to another, the Indian “miracle” looked even more stark.
The British media never quite seemed to get enough of this “new” and “happening” India. For many leading journals, it became the default cover story whenever they ran out of ideas. The Economist produced two special India editions within a span of a few weeks (“Contest of the century: China V India”; and “How India's growth will outpace China”). New Statesman had its latest India cover only last month, with the poser: “Should we fear this new superpower?”
But that was “then.” Fast forward and the headlines these days are about India's “stalled” economic reforms; high inflation; speculation about the political fallout of Sonia Gandhi's illness; the 4-0 “whitewash” in cricket; and, of course, the popular “revolt” against corruption, dubbed the “Indian spring.”
“It feels like the bad old 1980s again,” said an Indian expatriate.
There has been extensive British media coverage of social activist Anna Hazare's campaign with front page reports and photographs topped by special commentaries by familiar India “experts.” One London daily ran a full-page report under a four-column, screaming headline: “The grinding routine of corruption that drove ordinary people to Hazare's side.”
For a creative take, some newspapers have turned to young Indian novelists. The Guardian carried a breathless front-page dispatch from Chetan Bhagat. Its opening line was: “At the time I write this, millions of my countrymen are on the streets, fighting for a strong anti-corruption law. Many more are glued to their TV sets, watching developments as the initially defiant Indian government looks on track to eat humble pie.”
In the Financial Times, another young novelist, Rana Dasgupta, extolled Hazare's “fearlessness” and “Gandhian tactics.” These were “very bad times” for India with millions of Indians “tired of watching a corrupt, swaggering political class taking the best for itself.”
“Only in a bad time would a movement such as Mr. Hazare's elicit such widespread and emotional allegiance,” he wrote.
The so-called “Team Anna” will not be pleased by a lot of what has been written about their leader by some very sober commentators. He has been widely ridiculed for describing his campaign as India's “second freedom struggle,” and for attempting to appropriate the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. His own often crude and authoritarian methods, such as meting out corporal punishment for drinking, and his opaque links with divisive and intolerant groups, have also come under scrutiny.
Arundhati Roy's critique in The Hindu of the Hazare campaign has been widely quoted in British newspaper reports from India.
“Booker star leads growing backlash against graft protests,” reported The Times, citing Arundhati Roy's article in which she criticised Hazare's campaign for its “aggressive nationalism” and “draconian” methods. Her criticism, it said, was “echoed by other columnists but the backlash is unlikely to stop the momentum behind what is becoming a mass movement.”
Much of the criticism of Hazare has centred on his bid to cast himself in the image of a latter-day Gandhi. Patrick French, the author of India: a Portrait, called it a “farce.”
Writing in The Sunday Times under the headline “Firebrand in Gandhi garb leads middle class India to revolt,” he said: “Anna Hazare, the Gandhian crusader, is not so much an imitation of Gandhi — the ‘mahatma,' or ‘great soul' — as an imitation of his later imitators. In the decades since independence in 1947, India has seen a procession of latter-day saints claiming to be completing the great man's work. For years Vinoba Bhave dressed in the Gandhian outfit of a white dhoti and shawl, and persuaded landlords to give their spare fields to the poor. Jayaprakash Narayan's popular agitation in the early 1970s provoked Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister, to declare a state of national emergency. Now we have Hazare. Following his release from prison on Friday, he said: ‘The fight for freedom has started. India is still not independent.' His followers, largely vocal members of India's assertive new middle class, are delighted.”
James Lamont in FT pointed out that until barely six months ago Mr. Hazare was “an obscure civil society leader in India's western state of Maharashtra,'' with a reputation for teaching “morals by tying young offenders to trees.”
A profile in The Observer highlighted worries about his “populist contempt” for institutions, such as Parliament, and his “apparent authoritarianism,” pointing to his call “for corrupt officials to be hanged.” It said his “vision of an India of teetotal, vegetarian rural communities” appealed to “India's right wing.”
“So too does his faith,” it added.
Reservations about Hazare's campaign notwithstanding, the current turmoil (not to mention the stuttering economy and the white-wash in cricket) has taken much of the shine off the so-called “New India.”
It may not be like the “bad old 1980s,” but certainly this is not how “India 2011” was supposed to turn out.