BOOK
REVIEW
TITLE:
DEMOCRACY ON THE ROAD-A 25 YEAR JOURNEY
THROUGH INDIA
AUTHOR:
RUCHIR SHARMA
PUBLISHER:
ALLEN LANE/PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE INDIA, 2019
PRICE: Rs. 699/-
Failed
Nehruvianism Overtaken By Rising Hindu Nationalism
Ruchir Sharma is fond of emphasizing India’s many castes,
religions and languages as the key to understanding it and its electoral
behaviour. He is an Indian Brahmin, patrician and sweeping in tone, based in
New York. Sharma works there as the Chief Global Strategist and head of the
Emerging Markets Equity team at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, managing
over $ 25 billion in assets. He is also an author and columnist.
On the side, though something of a “Free Market” votary, Sharma
writes regularly and mellifluously for the left-leaning New York Times. His
columns and essays have also appeared in Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street
Journal, the Financial Times, The Times of India and many other publications.
His earlier books Breakout
Nations and The Rise and Fall of
Nations, with the titles echoing the original hero of Capitalism, Adam
Smith, have been bestsellers on the New York Times Bestseller lists.
This one, Democracy
on the Road traces the decline of the “cult of the Gandhis”, in typically
Indian zig-zag fashion, low on predictability- and the inexorable rise of “Hindu Nationalists”. This,
to replace the “Congress’s infatuation with socialism”. Sharma writes always
with elegance and wry humour, if not with any deep insight of India's future
direction.
The book begins with Sharma’s periodic visits to India on
holiday growing up, and the homes of his two sets of grandparents. Both of his
grandfathers were big-wigs in the legal profession. His maternal grandfather
was a prominent lawyer and landlord in “mofussil” Bijnor. His paternal
grandfather was a judge in much more urbanised Jaipur. In this period, amusingly, he frequently
refers to the swearing by the “pillars of the community” watching state-run TV
together, at the ham-fisted Indira Gandhi era propaganda.
The lens he brings to the task is not new, and perhaps
does not take into account the unifying effects of the smart phone, the
internet, 24x7 news and opinion that is accessed in real time in every Indian
language.
Sharma, the quintessential overseas Indian, is the umpteenth external
political observer, skeptical about its cohesiveness. This ranges from the
“Orientalist” of the 17th and 18th centuries, to Winston
Churchill, arch-imperialist that he was.
This book, aimed primarily at a foreign audience given
its many asides, explanations of the peculiarities and idiosyncracies, is also
true to form.
Sharma writes: “A key
lesson, which would be driven home on every trip for the next twenty years, was
that Bijnor is only one slice of India, which is so thinly diced between
thousands of castes and hundreds of languages, many isolated in a pocket inside
a single state, that it is better understood as many countries than one. The
reality of the ‘Many Indias’ is nonetheless a source of great controversy,
particularly among the nationalists who would like to live in a country united
under one culture. But there is no other way to think about India that can
explain the way its democracy works, or why its elections are so full of
surprises”.
In this book Sharma follows various campaign trails over
the last couple of decades in different parts of the country, drawing pen
portraits of aspiring and established politicians.
There is social commentary on their chances based on opinion gathered on the
stump. There is travelogue style local colour, and a brand Kerouac romance of
the open road injected by the writer in Sharma.
Sometimes, he is travelling with other journalists and
commentators, in a couple of “wedding Volvos”, that over the 20 years, “expands
to four”.
He describes, for example, the campaign trail in northern
India, circa 1999, that brought in the Vajpayee government for the second time.
In another chapter, Sharma is in undivided Andhra Pradesh, following
Chandrababu Naidu. During another
election, Sharma meets Mayawati, along with his fellow travellers, mostly from
the NDTV camp.
He meets Sonia and Rahul Gandhi at 10, Janpath, but cuts
no ice with his suggestions of Rajiv Gandhi style economic reforms. The mother-son
duo seem firmly committed to socialism of the Indira Gandhi “mai-baap” type.
Ruchir Sharma’s bias towards high-growth reformist policies
does not quite overcome his sympathies for the Nehruvian “Idea of India” with
its blatant tilt towards the minorities.
Sharma gently mocks the majoritarian worldview prevalent in many parts
today, and doesn’t hide his surprise when the BJP wins under Vajpayee. He is
most amused, along with his group of Congress favouring journalists, at the “India
Shining” campaign that ended Vajpayee’s tenure in 2004 too.
Sharma covers a
number of State Assembly elections important today because of his commentary on
many of the regional leaders who form part of the loosely knit Opposition
today.
Sharma could not really fault Modi when he covered the
elections in Gujarat himself : Gujarati
businessmen told us that Modi lacked completely the deep suspicions of the
private sector that had long animated the Congress party, indeed most parties
in India”. But Sharma is hamstrung by the company he kept. The likes of Prannoy
Roy of NDTV and Shekhar Gupta of Indian Express at the time, harp constantly, not
on development, that Modi wanted to talk about, but on his attitude towards
Muslims. Modi, of course, won a landslide victory in 2002, even if Sharma does
call him, somewhat sniffily, a “Strongman” - both as Chief Minister, and again
later, as Prime Minister.
There are more pen portraits- Shivraj Singh Chauhan
of Madhya Pradesh, Vasundhara Raje of
Rajasthan. BS Yedurappa of Karnataka at
the general elections of 2009.
As the general elections of 2019 loom now, Sharma ends
the book unwavering in his vote for “diversity”. He writes, probably by way of
consolation to those who do not want Modi to win again: “Those who fear that
rising nationalism threatens India’s democracy, also tend to underestimate the
check provided by subnational pride. Many Indians still see themselves first as
Bengalis, Maharashtrians, Tamils, Gujaratis or Telegus, and they are much more
likely to support a strongman (or woman) at the state level than in Delhi”.
Ruchir Sharma is quite wrong, despite his 25 years of
coverage of the Indian elections described in this book. The Indian electorate
sees Narendra Modi as the man of destiny to take India to the top of the table.
A man needs to be strong and visionary to do this, and the people of India,
subnational pride notwithstanding, are with him and his leadership.
(1,061
words)
February
26th 2019
For:
The Sunday Pioneer, AGENDA, BOOKS
Gautam
Mukherjee
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