Prayers for a Nation

Last night, I began to watch Best of Enemies, an American film about school integration in Durham, a town in the deep South, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan functioned with impunity, and recruited young men to “save our way of life”, by intimidation, arson, lynching, and economic boycott. 

When I finish the film - hopefully tonight - it will join my long list* of cinema about the iniquity African Americans have faced through the centuries. In documenting these struggles, and celebrating its warriors, American cinema has done what a reflective art form needs to do - help build a society that is more integrated, less driven by the politics, and the violence, of identity.

India is, of course, one step ahead of the US: our national film awards have a category for Best Feature Film on National Integration. The latest winner was Kashmir Files, about the exodus of Hindu pandits from Kashmir. Singapore banned the film, out of concern that its screening would stoke enmity between communities. In India, state governments championed the film, and we witnessed such examples of national integration as “people in theatres shouting hateful slogans and calling for violence against Muslims”.**

In other spheres of nation-building, though, we have a long way to go. In the same edition of Gimme Mo, I wrote about Bihar, India’s nation-within-a-nation that would rank as the world’s  eleventh-largest and eleventh-poorest, were it independent. Probably worse, actually, because an independent Bihar wouldn’t receive a massive annual transfer of funds from the Union government of India.

Later, I took a brief trip to Bihar, to try and get a sense of conditions on the ground. Since then, I have been seeking opportunities to engage with those working in Bihar and with students of economics and policy. Recently, at the end of a long interaction with one deeply thoughtful policy analyst, I asked, 

“What do you see as the best scenario for Bihar twenty years from now?”

“Out-migration - 10 or 20 million Biharis leave the state for better economic prospects, and funnel some funds back for its development.”

A sad notion, that the best way to improve the lot of your homeland is to leave. The human and emotional loss of sundered families and hollowed communities is deeply scarring. It is in the nature of being human to yearn for your offspring, and their offspring, to be a part of your life. Both Kerala and Punjab are dealing with the psychological cost of a continual exodus of their people. Yet, in the cold gaze of an economist, the 120 billion USD that Indians abroad send home every year goes a long way toward meeting our need for foreign exchange.

And so, my second prayer for our nation - that we create fertile ground for our young to find meaningful employment close to home and family.

My third wish - that our children get a decent education, which gives them half a shot at participating in the modern world. In 2023, Artificial Intelligence looks like dominating the globe’s investments in technology. Maybe there will be seeds in there to improve the cognitive skills of our school-going children, but for the time being, they are crippled: less than half of our 5th grade kids can understand a 2nd grade text. And, as the ASER*** reports have painstakingly documented for twenty years, learning outcomes are just not improving.

About 30% of our children are stunted, and in Bihar, 63.5% of children suffer from anaemia. In the 21st century, for a country that boasts of world leadership, this is an absolute shame.  Please, can we figure out a way to feed our children?

The data on anaemia and stunting was gathered by the 5th National Family Health Survey, which also revealed that 19% of Indian households do not have access to toilet facilities. This flew in the face of our claims to India being free of Open Defecation. This spawned a minor, but influential, industry in debunking the methodology of the survey, of surveys in general, in criticising the rural bias of Indian sample surveys, and even in suggesting that anaemia is a colonial concept. This particular chapter ended with the sacking of the director of the institute that conducted the study - the International Institute for Population Studies - for administrative reasons, which of course had nothing to do with the content of his work, 

Over the last decade, we’ve seen this time and again - inconvenient data has been suppressed and vilified, surveys on consumption and the informal sector vacated, even the national census abandoned. I’m fond of telling the start-up entrepreneurs I work with that they need to put sound metrics in place, if they want to grow their enterprises in a sound fashion. For our nation, the largest in the world, do let’s go back to respecting the sanctity and strategic value of data.

Rukmini S, who wrote the wonderful book, Whole Numbers and Half-Truths, told me not to be so despondent about data, because there is a great deal of information available in the public domain, and increasingly, valuable data is being generated by private citizens. This is a welcome development; for many years the most regular data on employment was being generated by the private research body, the Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE). As a broader prayer, we must find ways to work around the ineptitude and negligence of our governments.

For the most part, Indians have voted in this direction with their feet. The shift towards private schools and colleges has been a secular trend in India, and an estimated 70% of healthcare expenditure comes out of the Indian citizen’s pockets. Given our low levels of income, this is a deeply unfortunate state of affairs, but at least the option exists. In areas where government has a natural monopoly, the very logic of the modern nation state denies that possibility. I’m thinking particularly of the ‘justice’ system. Two-speed delivery of justice is not unknown in many nations, and we have favoured TV anchors getting bail in a matter of hours, whereas others are incarcerated for years without charges being framed. The politics of any moment apart, India holds the global record - a sordid one - for the highest percentage of its jail population being held without conviction. The number is so high - 77%, or almost 4 out of 5 prisoners, have not yet been tried - that Indian English has a term for it, ‘undertrials’. Guilty, until the state finds the time to admit that they are innocent.

We need to get the government out of the way of most things, out of imports and exports, out of industrial licencing and land laws, of letting private schools and universities function, and the media do their job, and, and, and… but where justice is at the very core of governance, can we, please, speed up the delivery of justice?

The other ‘temple of democracy’ is the parliament. At the moment, it is a rubber-stamp, which recently went from being circular to lozenge-shaped, but a rubber stamp nonetheless. A bill’s fate is known before it reaches the floor, and debate, which should be at the heart of a democracy, has all but vanished. Once the anti-defection law came into being, a legislator could no longer vote by conscience, or intellect, for to defy the party whip is to invite disqualification. ‘Whip’ is such an unfortunate word to occupy such a central place in the highest chambers of a constitutional democracy. And yet, so appropriate - a nation run by the brute force of overseers who enforce the party line.

And so, my prayer for laws that are the outcome of intelligent, informed debate.

I’m going to end this Sunday litany with two pleas that are deeply personal. Perhaps they have a wider significance, too, but I will not disguise the truth that they emanate from my own selfish desires. 

The first is about the quality of our water-bodies. Wherever I travel in the world, from the Thames to the Rhine, from British Columbia to Bali, people swim in their local lakes and rivers. Why not in the Yamuna? Or the Ganga, which after 10 years of Namami Gange, still has a coliform content that is measured in millions, rather than hundreds, per 100 ml of water. India is a warm country, blessed with rainfall and water bodies. Please make it safe for us to play and swim in clean waters.

And the last is about our passports. My overseas travel this year has been plagued, and shaped, by the mistrust of the Indian passport holder. If we can improve the strength of our economy and our social fabric, if every Indian is not seen as a potential immigrant, we will be welcomed as tourists, artistes, and business travellers, funelling commerce and culture through immigration desks, and into the nations of the world. Till this happens, the plea of the President of India, printed on the first page of our passports, will remain unheard,

“ …allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford him or her every assistance and protection.”  

Hear us, oh Lord of Free Travel.

* My own list is in the Nov 26 edition of Gimme Mo: https://mohitsatyanand.substack.com/p/if-bihar-were-a-nation-if-beale-street

**Scroll: https://scroll.in/latest/1054840/the-kashmir-files-wins-national-integration-award

*** Annual State of Education Report - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X8gZ2Az19mWl0V9QFpRCJdKci5UrTJss6XFkZ1OH_hc/edit

**** https://www.livemint.com/specials/the-mystery-of-india-s-overcrowded-prisons-11680605086207.html#:~:text=Globally%2C%20one%20in%20three%20prisoners,havoc%20on%20the%20justice%20system.