Anatomy of a cosmetic democracy

The White Tiger by Arvind Adiga; Harper Collins; Price: Rs.395; 321 pp

This widely acclaimed book, which recently won the £100,000 (Rs.75 lakh) Booker prize awarded annually in London for the most outstanding work of fiction, needs to be read by everyone — especially within the self-delusional great Indian middle class — who has bought the 21st century India shining story. But to fully appreciate this excoriating tour de force which narrates the metamorphosis of a village rickshaw puller’s son into a 21st century shining India  entrepreneurial success, it’s pertinent to bear its historical context (not presented in the book) in mind.

Driven by relentless ridicule heaped upon it by India’s new genre business publications and also because in the early 1990s the nation was tottering on the edge of  bankruptcy, in July 1992, India’s political establishment — particularly the then ruling Congress party led by its greatly under-rated prime minister, the late P.V. Narasimha Rao — made a dramatic u-turn, abandoning its post-independence socialist economic development model. In effect it dismantled the notorious licence-permit-quota economic regime which for over four decades, had bound Indian industry and enterprise hand and foot, requiring every business decision to be cleared by the country’s corrupt neta-babu (politician-bureaucrat) oligarchy.

The impact of this unduly belated decision was dramatic. The long-suppressed entrepreneurial spirit of  the country’s businessmen freed, the Indian economy leaped out of the rut of its 3.5 percent Hindu rate of annual growth, and began recording 5 percent plus rates of growth, even during the 1995-99 period of political instability in New Delhi and the state capitals. And in 1999 when a coalition led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was voted into power at the Centre, for the next five years, annual GDP growth continued its upward trajectory averaging almost 8 percent, the second highest (after China) worldwide.

Carried away by almost double digit rates of growth and rising foreign exchange reserves in the early new millennium era of low inflation, the BJP leadership was blind to the reality that the fruits of unprecedented economic growth were being enjoyed by Indian industry and the urban middle class, with vast swathes of the population untouched. In 2004 when the BJP leadership called a general election and fought it on the campaign platform of  Shining India, it was unexpectedly bested by the Congress party, which conversely promised to extend the benefits of high economic growth to the aam admi (common man). But four years later, with another general election imminent, the Congress leadership is becoming painfully aware that the original sin of 40 years of sham socialism, which skewed India’s development and failed to address the basic food, clothing, shelter, education and healthcare needs of the rural majority, cannot be undone in a hurry.

The autobiography of Balram Halwai, who succeeds in escaping the Darkness ruled with an iron grip by the pan-chewing Great Socialist and his compradors, is structured as a letter to the Chinese prime minister, who impressed by the new image of resurgent India, expresses a wish to meet with some of the go-getting entrepreneurs of Bangalore, where Halwai has landed up after escaping from the Darkness. It narrates the story of a  son of a rickshaw puller plying his beast of burden vocation in a village on the banks of the holy Ganges (“full of faeces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion and seven different kinds of industrial acids”). Pulled out of primary school to sweep the floors of the village teashop, Halwai hears of the chauffeur’s vocation, learns to drive and begs a driver’s job with one of the four landlord families who have the sanction of the Great Socialist (“a plump man with spiky white hair and chubby cheeks”) to extort arbitrary taxes and cuts from all commercial activity in the district.

He gets his first break when he schemes a transfer to Delhi, to serve as Ashok and Madam Pinky’s chauffeur. The couple lives on the 13th floor in a swanky apartment in  the shimmering new city of Gurgaon, on the outskirts of Delhi.

Therein begins the modernisation of Balram Halwai. As he learns about the wicked ways of the ruling classes and their utter disregard and casual indifference to the poor, he presents unsparing vignettes of the Delhi imperium, a microcosm of contemporary India. Here the rich and the politicos live in grand style, patronising fancy malls and five-star hotels without a jot of care or sympathy for the “half-baked” subaltern class, living below the stairs and in festering neighbourhood slums.

And although by prevalent Indian standards, Ashok is a relative liberal who occasionally empathises with the protagonist, the latter can’t help developing a hatred for him. He ultimately murders him, to steal a bagful of cash accumulated to pay off a politician for favours rendered to Ashok’s family back in the Darkness. With the loot he flees to the hip and happening entrepreneurs’ haven that is Bangalore, where through the simple expedient of bribing a top cop who slaps false cases on his rivals, Balram Halwai sets himself up as a successful entrepreneur, running a taxi fleet for call centre employees.

Yet the punch of this deft and engrossing — even though its letter format is somewhat corny — debut novel is not in its rags-to-riches story line; it’s in its searing social commentary. As he traces the rise of  the barely literate Balram Halwai for which incidentally, he pays a terrible price — his entire family in the Darkness is wiped out as per standard operating procedure in the rural hinterland — Adiga exposes the flagrant corruption, shocking socio-economic inequalities and  utter lack of meaningful compassion in shining India, hijacked by an amoral bourgeoisie which gives itself high marks for the cosmetic democracy it has imposed upon the nation.

Dilip Thakore