Unrelenting poverty amid stupendous achievements
Sir Nicholas Fenn, VST patron and former UK High Commissioner to India, spoke to a meeting of VST supporters on the theme: 'Why India?'
1. Indian poverty
Unimaginable poverty. Nationally pervasive, locally profound. 350m. More than Africa. More than Latin America. Predominantly rural.
Compounded by the other issues: population, illiteracy, disease; Communalism, Casteism, Criminalisation and Corruption. Discrimination against lower castes and tribes.
Discrimination against women, against Muslims, against the poor who cannot pay.
On any basis of poverty, any basis of desperation, any basis of compassion, the awfulness of India must rank it high in terms of need.
2. Indian Capacity.
But the glory of India is also relevant. India‘s free, tolerant , pluralist and democratic society is well able to profit from the discreet support of the voluntary sector.
Illustrate from experience with Sight Savers International (Sir Nicholas was formerly a trustee).
With 15 million blind people in India, 1 million in Bihar alone, need for sight saving and rehabilitation of blind people is insatiable. So too, is it in Africa.
But we found in India more efficient partners, more skilled ophthalmic surgeons, more articulate advocates, more enthusiasm for self-help.
It cost us twice as much to restore sight to a blind African as to a blind Indian. Since both were equally blind, equally deserving and since resources were limited should we not redirect all funding from Africa to India and restore sight to twice as many people? Make double the impact on sum total of human happiness? Get more bang for our buck?
Of course this was politically impossible and I made myself unpopular my shameless partisanship.
But the broad point holds: India is fertile ground for investment in happiness.
3. Indian Bureaucracy
Indians often blame the British for Indian bureaucracy. My retort was always the same: Yes, we invented it, but you perfected it. The lower reaches of the Indian service, underpaid, idle and corrupt, are indeed frustrating partners in any enterprise. It is always safer for them to make no decision.
The Indian political and administrative elite are rightly proud of the stupendous achievements of independent India.
They know perfectly well the imperfections of their own society – witness the astonishing self-flagellation over the Commonwealth Games. They know that poverty is institutionalised; caste and gender discrimination is widespread; local governments are unevenly efficient. It is not useful to rub their noses in it. Better to respect their systems, admire their achievements and engage their collaboration. Takes time, but works.
4. Indian philanthropy
There are innumerable charities in India, some of them very good indeed, some of them acts of piety in memory of the founder of a locally successful company. The instinct for compassion in India is as strong as it is in Britain.
For a whole range of reasons Indian charities need foreign partners. British charities working in India certainly need Indian partners.
If I am right about Indo-British relations, British and Indian charities are natural partners. The whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.
There is a creative synergy about this partnership, in the voluntary sector, as in commerce and politics.
Awfulness of India
a. Poverty: The details have changed since my time, but the substance remains.
350 million in a state of absolute poverty by UN statistics. More than Africa, more than Latin America, and a larger middle class than the USA.
India lives in a village. The urban squalor shocks the tourist; but the issue is the unrelenting, grinding, caste-bound poverty of the countryside.
b. Population. Too many Indians. 932617034 according to the population clock outside the All-India Institute of Medical Science on the day we left Delhi in 1996. It is 1.1bn now. It will overtake China by 2025 to become the most populous country on Earth.
c. Illiteracy:
Half of these teeming millions are illiterate: ½ billion people who can neither read nor write.
5% are crippled – the population of England on crutches
15 million blind people, 70% of them cataract blind: 10½ million miracles waiting to happen – at £18 a throw. Why don’t we do it all tomorrow?
Then we must add the four great evils listed by President Shankar Dayal Sharma on Republic Day 1996.
Communalism: 80% Hindu – but India is also the second largest Muslim state in the world. 150 Muslims cannot be treated as second class citizens. India is a secular state or it is nothing. The exploitation of religion for political purposes strikes at the heart of the democratic secular state. Ayodhya is in the news again, reminding us of the disaster that struck India in December 1992.
Casteism: Unintelligible to foreigners. The sum total of your previous existences adds up to your karma and delivers you at birth into a rigid place in society. Those at the bottom of the heap – the Dalits – or below the bottom – the Arunthathiyars – are systematically vilified, ostracised, excluded. And this, too, strikes at the heart of democracy. The awakening of the lower castes and tribes – and their exploitation by politicians – is a crucial development of recent years. Politicians who come to power on the votes of one caste must govern in the face of the hostility of others.
Criminalisation of politics was already rife in my time. About 50 MPs had criminal records and boasted of the private armies which they used to deliver their votes. The first two acts of one state government were to repeal the law against cheating in examinations and the law against banditry in the state.
Corruption: We in Britain wring our hands over sleaze, electoral malpractice and MPs expenses. Rightly so. But we do not begin to understand how the systematic exploitation of public office for private gain gnaws at the vitals of the body politic.
All this is not malicious foreign gossip. My source is the then President of India. It was proclaimed again by the Indian leaders on the 60th anniversary in 2007. This self-criticism does them much credit.
The Indian press has been merciless over the preparations for the Commonwealth Games:
The Times of India: We make tall claims about growth, but we treat our poor worse than animals. We aspire to be a world power but cannot provide clean drinking water. We are the world’s biggest democracy but we solve our problems with loaded guns. These are the symptoms of a failed state.
Mid-Day (more succinctly) Sure, Dude, our low standards make it really OK to have crap in the living room of our guests.
The Glory of India.
Beside all this awfulness, we must set the glory of India:
It is easy to recite a litany of India’s spectacular achievement:
Economic reform
9% growth rate
Rising investment and trade
Member of G20
Nuclear weapons, missiles, satellite technology
Bangalore a major player in world IT, etc, etc.
But I am not really thinking of the material achievements. Instead:
The resilience, authority and integrity of the Supreme Court
A remarkable prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, a model of humility and integrity in power, and an intellectual match for any leader in the world.
The contempt of the public for the corrupt politicians.
A free and investigative press
An Army that abhors politics; isolated in its cantonments, loyal to its professional ethos, heterogeneous in recruitment, preoccupied with military duties – there will not be a coup d’etat in India. Contrast the neighbours!
The panchayati raj, a functioning system of local government. VST reminds us that it functions better in some places than in others. But it owes little to the Westminster pattern of the Lok Sabha. The underlying reality is 2,000 years older in the habit of village elders to settle their affairs by democratic discussion.
The saving grace is India’s society: tolerant, secular and exuberantly free. The traveller cannot escape the clash of opinions, the strident individuality, the fiercely independent press. Every Indian has a notion from which ever other Indian dissents, all talking at once in sixteen official languages.
Indian elections need 1 million polling booths, 2 million policemen, 5 million election officials, 800 million voters. Democracy on such a scale is a wonder of the world. And when Indian governments are defeated at the polls they go.
That is the secret of Indian unity in diversity; and the main ground for confidence that liberty will survive betrayal by the politicians.
These, at least, are the enduring impressions left on me by five years as British High Commissioner in India. They may serve as a curtain-raiser and background for our deliberations today.
Indo-British Relations
Since I was for five years a custodian of Indo-British relations, you may expect me to say a few words about the relationship.
Our long historical association gave rise to animosity, but also to a traditional friendship. We had things in common which we valued:
Habits of thought and language
Parliamentary democracy and the rule of law
Independent judiciary, impartial public service, non-political army
Culture, cricket and the Commonwealth
But this was compatible with radically different views of the world in Nato and the Non-Aligned Movement. India was a formal ally of the Soviet Union. Bilateral relations were frankly scratchy.
Then three things happened.
The end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the Soviet Union cast India adrift from moorings and obliged us all to come to terms with new realities;
Indian economic reform, leading to an open market economy, made India suddenly more interesting to Britain, and
British participation in the EU and our own economic recovery made Britain more interesting to India.
We rediscovered each other.
Douglas Hurd came to India in January 1992, pronounced our traditional friendship inadequate, and – with his Indian colleague Madhavsinh Solanki instituted a “Structured Dialogue” under which we have been discussing all manner of things, quietly and bilaterally, ever since. He said in public that “Our instincts and our interests begin to run together”.
The heart of the matter: Indo-British Partnership Initiative, established in 1993 by two prime ministers to expand trade, investment and technology transfer in both directions:
Visible trade rose 70% in two years
British investment in India multiplied tenfold in two years;
New joint ventures: 172 in year one; 193 in year two; 158 in first nine months of year 3: that is 523 in the first one thousand days, one every other day.
This rapid success transformed our view, each of the other. Our political differences were dwarfed by our economic partnership. If we make enough money out of each other, we can talk to each other in private about quite sensitive things.
John Major in Bombay in 1996: We have banished the ghosts of an empire that nobody mourns, rejecting both nostalgia and resentment, and building instead a modern partnership between our sovereign democracies.
Of course we cherish our common heritage – but we add something new; and enduring because built not on sentiment but on interests.
At least that was the rhetoric when we left India in 1996.
Then came 1997.
The 50th anniversary of Indian independence;
A state visit by Her Majesty the Queen in celebration of fifty years
A new British government proclaiming an “ethical foreign policy” who saw India not as an economic opportunity but as a political problem, focusing in public on human rights and Kashmir, and guaranteeing that HMQ’s visit would be a disaster instead of a triumph.
We have of course recovered because of the enduring interests. David Cameron in Hyderabad the other day proclaimed the same eternal verities as John Major in Bombay in 1996. It made me wonder which prime minister I had been working for.
Two elements of the rapprochement of the early 1990s might be worth mention in the context of our theme:
Indian reform in 1991. Narasimha Rao showed himself the world’s most implausible revolutionary. He deserved more gratitude in India than he got. With Manmohan Singh he had the courage to reverse the economic inheritance of 40 years, open the economy to the outside world and make possible all sorts of thing that were not possible before. He did so because he saw no alternative. As he told me at the time: “You don’t shilly shally with disaster.”
These measures were controversial in India. They seemed to be harsh on the poor. They were difficult for the left. I had a running argument on this subject with Sir Mark Tully, without doubt the most authoritative foreign voice on India, who thought India was selling her heritage for a mess of pottage. But you can’t help the poor unless you first generate the resources – and the resources were multiplying. There seemed to be an emerging political consensus on reform.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, one Kenneth Clarke, came to India in 1995 in search of this consensus. He talked to the Congress Government at the Centre; to the BJP Government of Rajasthan; to the Communist Government of West Bengal; to the Shiv Shena Government of Maharashtra; to the Janata Dal Government in Karnataka. He reached the conclusion that there was no ideological consensus. But there was something better – a common economic imperative.
British Aid Programme, then as now was the largest in the world. We used to build power stations – better done by the private sector. So we moved from the macro to the micro:
Primary education in Andhra Pradesh
Primary health care in Orissa
Slum improvement programmes in Bombay and Calcutta
DFID support for voluntary sector programmes in rural areas, including DFID support for CST.
There we have it.
India faces daunting political, social and economic problems, armed with the weapons of economic reform and a free society.
Britain and India have emerged from the shadow of the Raj and learned to make money out of each other. We are famously a nation of shopkeepers. Malcolm Rifkind (Scottish, Jewish secretary of state): An Indian is the only person in the world who can buy from a Scot and sell to a Jew and still make a profit!
In conclusion, Why support VST
Because, in a nation no stranger to entrenched poverty and desperate need, we work among the poorest
Because our purpose is the empowerment of the excluded – of whom there are many.
Because our special skill is listening, and responding to the enthusiasm of those who will benefit, working alongside, not from above.
Because expenditure on administration is minimal. What we give goes to India.
Such a charity deserves support.
Let’s make it happen.