Rather than emulate US swagger, my home country should learn a lesson from America's current jobs crisis
Siddhartha Deb
Prosperity for some: a man cycles past offices near New Delhi. Photograph: Manpreet Romana/AFP/Getty Images
From 2007 to 2009, during the process of gathering material for a
non-fiction book on India, I often found myself exposed to the
aspirations of its upper and middle classes. These people were part of
the 150 or 200 million who had done very well materially from the
economic changes of the past two decades, and as a group they believed
firmly in India as a superpower on a path of infinite growth. The people
I met ranged from extremely wealthy businessmen, part of a super-elite,
to the salaried middle classes. When I encountered them as individuals,
usually in extended sessions, they often showed themselves capable of
nuance and even outright contradiction, from the government official who
expressed understanding for ultra-left guerrillas fighting the
government and mining corporations in central India to the waitress at
an upscale Delhi restaurant who wished, despite her apparent upward
mobility, to have her mother's less affluent but stable life as a
provincial schoolteacher.
But what was apparent in my long
conversations with individuals was hardly ever true in the aggregate. In
the public discourse produced by the upper and middle classes in India –
in newspapers and talk shows, in tweets and television soaps, in the
comments that flood websites should anyone dare make a dissenting note –
such contradictions vanish, replaced by an uncomplicated, almost
cultish faith in India as a success story. In this version of
contemporary India, the material wealth of the upper and middle classes
can only keep on increasing. The comfortable will get rich, the rich get
richer. As for the poor living on 50 cents a day (perhaps as much as
77% of the entire population, according to one government report), they
might see their lot improve. If not, they have only their lack of
ability, effort and merit to blame.
In fact, when a series of
scandals exploded in 2010, the elite response involved fixating on the
corruption of government and politicians. It is true that both
government officials and politicians were involved in the scandals,
which included the shoddy construction of buildings for the Commonwealth
Games and the irregularities involved in auctioning off the mobile
phone spectrum that may have cost the public exchequer $39bn. But
although corporations and the media were quite complicit in such
corruption, as evident from the last of the 2010 scandals,
which involved the income tax department's wiretaps on a British-Indian
corporate lobbyist called Niira Radia, their role vanished in the
anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare last year.
Along
with the corporations and the media, India's middle and upper classes
were particularly eager supporters of Hazare, a former soldier and
social reformer whose primary demand was for the creation of a Jan Lokpal,
a tribunal that would have policing powers over the government and
legislature. When rallying behind Hazare, elite Indians did not raise
questions about inequality, in the way their country lags behind other
poor countries in many social indicators, including the child mortality
rate, underweight children and female youth literacy, or how large
sections of the population from Kashmiris in the north to tribal people
in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh feel the state as nothing
but an oppressive presence.
Those supporting the Hazare movement
seemed unconcerned with such things, instead focusing on government
corruption as all that stood between their present wellbeing and future
prosperity. If only the corrupt state would step aside in certain areas –
obviously not Kashmir, Chhattisgarh or the north-east – the Indian
elites could prosper even further.
The Hazare movement has since
petered out, but its central idea, of the unique meritoriousness of the
middle and upper classes of India, remains. It is an illusion, and it
reminds me of the illusion among the middle and upper classes of another
society, and that is the US. I live and teach in New York, where I've
seen among my students (mostly white, just as elites in India tend to be
mostly upper caste) and in the Occupy Wall Street movement an elite
that has suddenly been forced to examine its notions of unique
meritoriousness and endless prosperity.
The lack of jobs in the
US, something that earlier affected only those in manufacturing and the
service industry, and therefore had an impact mostly on inner city
African Americans, poor immigrants and rural whites, has now worked its
way into the lives of the middle and upper classes, towards even people
with expensive college degrees.
In the conversations I've had with
members of this American middle class, I've been privy to another
reality behind their seemingly affluent facades. I teach writing, and so
I've read, with surprise, about a student whose past consisted of
private school education, a large suburban house, well-paid professional
parents, and global travel, but whose parents are now unemployed, their
large house caught up in endless mortgage payments, and where, along
with attending classes, it is equally important for this student to
scrounge for a subway card and food. It's not just the young who are
afflicted, either. On New Year's Eve, an old friend of mine showed me
around the house he'd fixed up painstakingly over the years. He now
plans to sell it off because, in spite of having a steady job, he can no
longer keep up with the mortgage payments.
It's painful to see
people struggling with such hopelessness. Yet I can't help but note that
it's allowed a significant portion of Americans to shed their shell of
complacency, their belief that they must continue to prosper because
they are deserving and that the world of the marketplace will always
deal them a fair hand. In India, the elites shout themselves hoarse
about emulating America – in its wealth, its swaggering confidence, its
Hummers and parking lots – even as that America ceases to exist. Even in
the land of manifest destiny, destiny has run into its limits, and it
seems only a matter of time before the same turns out to be true for
India's privileged classes.