Modern crust on poverty

The Statesman

As India pursues its trajectory of sustained development, no aspect of its society is likely to remain untouched by “modernisation”. This includes poverty. For economic growth, whatever its merits, is no panacea for poverty, as the evidence from the USA and Europe attests: poverty is not abated, but it is transformed.There is a vast difference between poverty as a consequence of a dearth of natural resources, and money-poverty, which prevents people from buying in everything needful for a dignified life. The first is a poverty of resources - the result of failed food production, natural disaster or an existential absence of the necessities of survival. The latter is a product of human-made injustice, of fabricated shortages, of contrived inadequacy.Reactions to the first are often fatalistic: what is to be done in a world of insufficiency, drought or flood, visitations of disease or pests that ruin crops. That is not to say that poor people have not traditionally developed strategies for survival - knowledge of where to find hunger foods, traditional remedies against sickness, multiple cropping as a fallback in the event of a single crop being wiped out.

Reactions to the second - which, of course, the proponents of modernisation seek to present as though it were the same thing as “natural” poverty - are less passive. For everyone knows that the wealth of industrial society far exceeds what is necessary for the survival and subsistence of everyone. In the contemporary world, the industrial system advertises itself and its prodigious capacity to produce - its iconography pervades the whole planet. So when people are hungry, cold and sick in the presence of global plenty, it is not to be expected that their response will be as it was when they were confronted by empty fields, continuous rain or the air full of insects that devour all growing things.Since modernised poverty is imposed by the very system that boasts its ability to create wealth, the response by the poor is bound to be more proactive: for it will be a reaction to systematically imposed violence.It is to be expected that the ancient torpor, the age-old acquiescence and fatalism of a rooted peasantry, will mutate. As people move from rural areas which can no longer sustain them, to the great urban agglomerations, poverty goes with them into the slums and tenements of the city.And there, poverty will become a very different phenomenon, aggravated by great concentrations of people who have little or nothing.

Modernised poverty appears as deprivation, a significant word, since it expresses the situation precisely: something is being withheld, namely the means of achieving a dignified life. There are two significant ways in which poor people seek to remedy their plight. The first is to absorb the prevailing ideology of individualism, and take personal action. This involves do-it-yourself alleviation of their outcast state by any means possible.In the urban setting especially, there will be a great increase in crime - theft, burglary, robbery, cheating, forgery, counterfeit goods, dealing in forbidden substances. This has been the experience in the rich world, and this is what India must expect, embarked as it now is, apparently irreversibly, on the road of perpetual reform, modernisation and change. The people who bless the rewards of liberalisation are the same who deplore the loss of social cohesion, the lack of respect, the decline of honesty. They should understand that these things are inseparable: growing insecurity of unjustly distributed wealth is the price they have to pay for the gains they have made; and if this means the rise of the chain-snatcher, the intruder, the ruthless miscreant and the killer, this should also be clearly understood.

The second response is a form of collective reaction. Naxalism or Maoism now affect large swathes of India, particularly rural areas where subsistence and traditional ways of life are under attack from the industrial paradigm - land alienated from Dalits, farmers, people who have made a peaceable living from time immemorial, but whose lands are required either for agribusiness or for infrastructural projects, and who are being turned into nomads by the evictions of industrial society.The government often plays the role of middleman in these transactions which cheat people of the value of their land ~ a value that has never been measured in money, since it has meant continuity, sustenance and survival, aspects of life which cannot be quantified in monetary terms.“Naxalism”, unrest, disturbances and protests against the loss of land are presented by the myopic ruling classes as though these were aspects of wilful wickedness, as if these were aspects of a gratuitous “terrorism” and not the actions of the despairing, people who are being transformed from sedate and conservative peasantry into a ragged future proletariat.

They are being compelled to scrape a living on the margins of a money-economy, in place of self-reliance, providing for themselves and their families out of their own land, their own efforts and skills.The people in remote, rural areas are not living in a separate society from the middle class in the metros and main towns: they are paying the price of the ease and affluence of those advantaged by India’s vaunted economic miracles. To affect horror and outrage against the actions of “Maoists” is an avoidance of responsibility by those who are beneficiaries of the changes in India.Neither getting tough on outlaws, nor firm action against criminality will eliminate conflict and strife.For India is conducting an economic policy which is colonial in origin; and the only hinterland from which surplus value can be extracted is through the exploitation of its own people, the peasant and the Dalits, and the land of the cultivators and farmers. The ancient acceptance of destiny by a mute and toiling poor is being subverted by the engines of “progress”.

There are two things wrong with the model of development imported from the rich capitalist societies and imposed upon India. The first is that the initial accumulation and wealth of the “advanced” countries derived in large measure from colonial and neo-colonial appropriation of goods, resources, and the setting up of an unfair global system which continues to disadvantage the poor of the earth. The second objection is that this model does nothing to alleviate inequality, even in the heart of the great global imperium of wealth.The USA and Europe, with all the advantages of the purloined substance of the peoples of the world, still cannot remove poverty, even less mitigate inequality: these remain among the most unfair societies in the world.India is the site of a vast social and economic experiment. Will India, with its old injustices, its casteism and hierarchies, easily accept the modernisation of poverty and inequity, or will the experience of artificial scarcities, human-made impoverishment, growing unfairness in a world of abundance also alter the temper and sensibility of the people? Will modernised poverty make them more angry, intractable and likely to revolt, either as criminals or political radicals?

It may be that the rulers of India are content to sit it out, to wait and see. But the growth in both crime and political disorder ought at least to sow disquiet in their minds. They show little sign of any perturbation over the future governability of a country they have delivered so eagerly to alien doctrines of partial and unjust enrichment.

The author lives in Britain. He has written plays for the stage, TV and radio, made TV documentaries, published more than 30 books and contributed to leading journals around the world. email:yrn63@dial.pipex.com