By: Colin
Todhunter
Source: Global Research
http://www.globalresearch.ca/poverty-and-rising-social-inequality-in-india/
The issue of poverty keeps rearing its
inconvenient head in India. The Planning Commission tends to keep on shifting
the poverty line, but it is always at a ludicrously low level, which
underestimates the numbers actually living in poverty. But playing fast and
loose with India’s poverty line has almost become a trendy pastime.
The truth is that poverty is an embarrassment.
It is an embarrassment to many of India’s rich and to a good number of
politicians, who like to portray the country as an emerging superpower, with
its space program, sophisticated weaponry, sports towns, growth figures,
Formula 1 race track and gleaming malls.
Apart from such headline-grabbing trappings,
India also houses the second largest number of affluent people in the world,
with three million households having over $100,000 of investable funds. While
this represents just 1.25 per cent of households, it is again the kind of
phenomenon that some love to promote as part the myth of India sitting at the
top table of nations.
Reality check. One in four people in India is
hungry and every second child is underweight and stunted. In 2011, India was
73rd out of 88 countries listed in the annual Global Hunger Index, six places
down from the previous year. The 2010 Multidimensional Poverty Index indicated
that eight Indian states account for more poor people than in the 26 poorest
African countries combined. According to this measure, Bihar, Chhattisgarh,
Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal
have 421 million poor people. This is more than the 410 million poor in the
poorest African countries.
Instead of concentrating on GDP growth figures,
how about we focus on the annual poverty alleviation figure? The former
fluctuates between eight and nine per cent, while the latter is 0.8 per cent,
virtually the same as it was 20 years ago. The sacred scripture of free market
‘trickle-down’ dogma has not delivered.
But, hold on a minute. The eight or nine per
cent GDP economic growth figures tell us that India is thriving. Right? Wrong.
The rich in India are thriving, but the poor, and these days given the
inflationary pressures, many of the middle classes too, are struggling to get
by. If the growth figures tell us anything, it is that they – the poor and
large sections of the middle class – can be said to be paying for the
lifestyles of India’s rich.
The logic of
‘development’
Step inside the gated communities or a plush
27-storey one billion dollar plus Mumbai house and arrive in a Forbes nightmare
world of privilege and wealth. Step inside the brand spanking new shopping
malls, and you could be forgiven for thinking that you were in London or New
York, with the plastic food joints, bland international chains and an
air-conditioned macburger world of cola dens and coffee bars. These swish
temples of modernity are a statement of perhaps where India wanted to be, of
where part of India thinks it now is.
But India is capitalism’s success story, isn’t
it? Or so the media like to tell us. Despite the logic of capitalism being to
drive down costs and increase profits, politicians in the West are trying to
change perceptions of India among their own populations. They are attempting to
eradicate the notion of it being a land of call centres and back offices that
takes jobs from the West and replace it with the idea that trade between India
and the West is a two-way relationship that is creating jobs, growth and higher
living standards for all concerned.
The reality is somewhat different. For example,
a deal struck between India and the US for Harley-Davidsons a couple of years
ago will not benefit plants in the US because a new assembly unit in India is
to be built. Setting up shop in India not only often leads to the use of cheap
exploited labour that works long hours with few if any rights, but also puts
downward pressure on existing labour costs in the West. This is the whole logic
behind ‘outsourcing’. It’s a win-win situation for CEOs and shareholders alike.
Servicing the well-to-do by providing them with
Harleys, overpriced coffee and i-phones is what ‘development’ is all about for
those who will financially profit. On his visit to India in 2010, it was
noticeable that Barak Obama and his entourage had little to say about the 75
per cent of the population that lives on less than two dollars a day. Not much
was said about India’s warped development that creates rich-list billionaires
while maintaining so many in poverty or merely hovering above it. There seems
to be no invite, no reservation at the top table, no impending arrival at
destination corporate-driven-nirvana for those people and others like them.
In the West, workers’ jobs and wages are heading
one way – downwards. In large parts of India, especially with increasing food,
worklessness and petrol costs, things are just as tough. Listening to political
leaders you’d be hard pressed to notice though. They and the media are adept in
twisting the truth and passing off such things to their respective populations
as necessary blips in the journey towards to some cheap con-trick notion of the
promised-land.
There is a shift in power occurring across the
world – from the poor and less well off to the rich, boosted by an economic
system that ensures the flow of wealth goes upwards via what academic David
Harvey calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and these days reflected in
massive handouts to bankers, public services cutbacks or wages that continue to
fall in real terms. When politicians speak of ‘inclusive growth’, it is nice
talk. But that’s all it is. How could it be anything else, especially in India
as the government continues to sell the country to western financial and
corporate interests?
The new colonial
masters
India has been moving increasingly closer to the
US in recent years and, by implication, complying with its geo-political and
economic hegemony. In return for the US sanctioning, supplying and facilitating
the development of India’s nuclear industry (despite India not being a
signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and having developed a nuclear bomb –
contrast its treatment to that of Iran, which is a signatory and cannot be
proved to be pursing a nuclear weapons programme), the Indian economy is being
prized open on behalf of western retail, agribusiness, pharmaceutical and
various other concerns.
On August 15, India celebrated Independence Day.
Some 65 years earlier, Nehru stood in Delhi and spoke about a tryst with
destiny. Free from the shackles of British colonialism, India was on course for
a bright new future.
But appealing to base instincts, greed and narcissism
has become the priority value of ‘modern’ India. Shopping and consumerism have
become the concerns and priorities of India’s misinformed and misled creamy
layer. Misinformed by news outlets that pass off infotainment for news.
Misinformed by a government that cosies up to western multi-nationals with
secretive ‘Memorandums of Understanding’ and then proceeds to target some of
the poorest people in the country as ‘the enemy within’.
Part of India’s own self proclaimed ‘war on
terror’ is taking place in the highly mineral rich mountains and jungles of
Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh. State governments have
already signed hundreds of agreements with companies to begin mining and build
steel and aluminum plants and other industries. How easy it was for the Indian
government to discredit any legitimate protestor in those regions as a Maoist
or Naxalite insurgent. How easy it was for it to then attempt to secure those
areas for rich foreign companies by killing thousands and forcing nearly 50,000
adivasis (tribal people) into camps in order to control dissent.
Some 300,000 people have been forcibly
displaced. Hundreds of thousands of security personnel have poured into the
region with sophisticated military hardware.
Despite Nehru’s misty eyed views, the Indian and
western elites are now the new colonial masters in India. Is this the bright
new future he had in mind?
But imagine for a moment a world where India
pursued a more independent path that would be strident in its rejection of predatory
capitalism and US-led militarism increasingly aimed at China, India’s
neighbour.
Imagine a model of development that would in
fact be inspired by particular policies adopted by the likes of Cuba, Bhutan,
Venezuela, Costa Rica and Bolivia, which place strong emphasis on health,
‘happiness’, education or bio-diverse agriculture and not least on the rights
of indigenous peoples, sustainability, respect for the environment and/or
common ownership.
Unfortunately, imagination does not match the
reality.
For many foreigners who visit India, it is the
land of the great philosophies. It is the land of spirituality, morality and
enlightenment. Many view India through this distorted prism. It is this
rose-tinted perception that brings them here. For other foreigners, however, it
is a land ripe for the taking. And Washington knows it.
India threw off the shackles of colonialism in
1947. And long ago it threw off the shackles of any moral philosophy. There’s a
new game in town. And it’s based on selling anything you can get your hands on
to the highest bidder, even the soul of the country. Now there is a new
colonial master on the block.
Whether it’s the waging of war on its poorest
people or the collusion with foreign governments and corporations to loot the
economy for profit, successive Indian administrations have conspired to deceive
their own people as they work hand in glove with Wall Street and proponents of
‘free trade’ and neo-liberalism to sell the lie of freedom and independence to
an affluent section of the population eager to believe it and willing to regard
the oppression of the country’s poorest folk as ‘collateral damage’ in the
drive to secure ‘necessary economic infrastructure’.
With 75 per cent of the population living on
less than two dollars a day, the influence of western agribusiness leading to
well over 200,000 farmers’ suicides and large parts of the country under
military law, politicians and the media abroad still talk of India as
capitalism’s miracle, as democracy’s great success story. The old clichés and
convenient lies are often trotted out about a land of enterprise and growth,
Bollywood and glitz, millionaires and cyber parks.
But there’s always Bollywood novacaine, the
infotainment obsessed media or the latest Forbes rich list to distract or dull
the pain, isn’t there? Better still – the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen in
drawing a new poverty line will do just fine.
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