[Reader-list] Roger Cohen: Inequality, Indian Style (NYT)

[Patrice Riemens]

Original to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/opinion/cohen-inequality-indian-style.html

Inequality, Indian Style
By ROGER COHEN
Published: December 19, 2013

NEW DELHI — As we weave through early-morning Delhi traffic on his
motorbike, Ravi Gulati gets into a riff about status symbols in India, how
from Armani jeans to Audis they are almost all Western, and how his car, a
cheap and practical Maruti van that seats eight but won’t win any beauty
contests, is a source of derision every time he pulls up at a five-star
hotel for some lavish weeklong wedding (although he tries to avoid these
occasions) that has cost more than is imaginable to a poor Indian.

Gulati, a mild-mannered man in his early 40s, was on the fast track to
fortune, an M.B.A. student at a top school, the Indian Institute of
Management, when a course he took on Indian agriculture taught by a
professor who had walked, like Gandhi, from village to village got him
thinking that his country had lost the plot and that an elite gobbling up
new condos for $3 million or more had grown blind to the fact that
trickle-down was a downright myth. A booming India of rising middle-class
fortunes had parted company with a bigger one still mired in distress, and
without any real debate India, like much of the world, had embraced
Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no such thing as society” as a prevailing
idea.

Nowhere is inequality — what President Obama this month called “the
defining challenge of our time” — more in your face than in India.
Brand-filled shopping malls spread. So do shanties. A rich man builds a
27-story house for his family in a nation of 1.2 billion people where more
than a quarter of them — or roughly the U.S. population — lives on less
than two bucks a day. Outdoor defecation is still widespread. Yet when
Gulati, a social activist engaged in teaching poor Delhi kids through a
nongovernmental organization called Manzil, tries to interest his peers in
the subject of inequality, he tends to find the conversation goes nowhere,
drowned by talk of some juicy real-estate deal for farmland south of
Delhi, the latest Bollywood hot item numbers, or the Silicon-Valley
success story of yet another Indian immigrant.

“We are giving aid to America. It’s crazy!” Gulati tells me. “We are
sending our finest minds all over the world to help enrich the countries
they adopt, but not India, which desperately needs them.” He points to a
shanty where “children lie in the mud while their parents look for work.”

He gets exercised over the impunity of politicians cutting sweet deals for
themselves and walking off with suitcases of cash, the greed-is-good top 1
percent, the lousy infrastructure and inadequate schools, the first-world
privatized services for the rich and substandard public service for the
rest, the blindness of privilege — and it strikes me that globalization
has thrown up the same issues of inequality everywhere as mobile capital
outsmarts immobile workers, and mass culture enshrines money as the
supreme value, and well-paid lobbyists burrow away in the interests of the
cosseted few against any social compact.

The debate around these themes in India follows lines you hear around the
world, with a rising nationalist right insisting the poor must work
harder, that they receive too many entitlements as it is, that
deregulation and the animal instincts of the self-made man are the answer,
that the left with its handouts (and in India’s case the heavy post-war
state planning of Nehru) has failed. While, from the other side, voices
like Gulati’s rise protesting a me-me-me world gone mad; insisting that
society does exist; that the social compact is essential and hinges on
acknowledgment of the commonweal; that a livable minimum wage is
important; that solidarity alone can provide shelter, education, equal
opportunity and social protection to the neediest, as well as hope for a
future in which income distribution stops heading in a U.S. direction
where, as Obama pointed out this month, the average C.E.O. now makes 273
times the average worker compared to 20 to 30 times in the past.

The world needs more Ravi Gulatis. It does not need more Indian
businessmen building 27-story homes. When a phrase like “the bottom 90
percent” rolls off the tongue as if this were a normal state of affairs,
something is amiss. The common man and woman have been had. Gulati’s
motorbike is 15 years old. It goes. Internal beauty trumps external show —
surely an Indian idea even if not the prevailing ethos.

Gulati rows against the tide. In the words of Harsh Mander, a social
worker and writer he admires, a hyper-connected India has “exiled the poor
from our conscience and consciousness.” It learned some of that trick from
America. The winds are shifting but, as Bill de Blasio will discover, the
invisible forces driving increasing inequality are implacable, from New
Delhi to New York. Policy change can help, but the real change, as with
Gulati’s epiphany, must come from within each of us.