FACE TO FACE
Beyond the urgent
ANITA JOSHUA
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Edward Luce, former South Asia bureau chief of Financial Times, talks about his book on India and on aspects of modern Indian political life.
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Role reversal: Edward Luce at the launch of his book in Delhi. PHOTO: RAJEEV BHATT
Penguin India had booked a quiet corner of the hotel business centre for Edward Luce to give back-to-back interviews. But, not for the Washington commentator of Financial Times — and former Delhi-based South Asia bureau chief of the paper — the sanitised environs of the business centre. There was no escaping the five star hotel; so he picked a corner of the lobby to lounge and speak to the media about his book In Spite of the Gods while drawing deeply on a cigarette. After all, however starred an Indian hotel might be, it cannot keep away the hustle and bustle that is India — a country he has an abiding interest in and also home to his wife. Excerpts from a conversation...
HOW do you find this role reversal — from being a fly-on-the-wall to becoming the centre of attraction?
Quite pleasurable. Imagine how horrible it would be if nobody were to take the slightest bit of interest. That would be crushing. It's very nice that people are interested in the book. I feel slightly full of pretences. I'm not a scholar of India. I'm a generalist. I primarily wrote the book out of self-indulgence. I love writing and I like writing to length. And, I like being free of the tyranny — at least for a short period of time — of sub-editors and news desks and short-term deadlines. It's only when I took time off to do the book that I understood the phrase "the urgent drives out the merely important". Because then I had the time for the merely important.
The first thing I did was to go back to my notes. I had two full boxes of four-and-a-half years worth of notebooks. I read and condensed each notebook without exception. It took three weeks; I condensed about 150 notebooks into four. The reason I did that is because you only use 10 per cent of your material. You only use the urgent. The important is the stuff you forget and it's amazing how much you forget. It's a great pleasure to have the time to go back and have new thoughts and angles. I completely re-did my plan for the book after these three weeks; changed my schedule, changed where I wanted to go, who I wanted to see and re-did the chapters.
Also, while working on a book, it is something that is entirely yours. It is a solipsistic, interior world that nobody else is a part of. And, then one fine day everybody is coming and asking you about it. It is quite disorienting having people suddenly asking about your book and quoting it back at you after so many months of being alone with it. I honestly think this is not going to teach Indians anything. This isn't written primarily for an Indian readership. It's written more with an international reader's perspective in mind. So, it's particularly nice that lots of Indians are asking about it.
Would you bill yourself as an Indophile?
I would if you had just coined the term. But the term has so much baggage. It has such a strong whiff of Orientalism. I wouldn't use that term. I would say that I'm very fond of and fascinated by India. And, that pre-dates and post-dates being a foreign correspondent here. It's an abiding interest. To me Indophiles are people who spend a lot of time hanging around temples. I appreciate the cultural and aesthetic role of the temples and the diversity of Hinduism but that's not my principal fascination in India.
The much-touted spirituality of India does not attract you?
Not really. But, it doesn't attract me anywhere. I'm not picking on India.
That comes across in your book; particularly the introduction.
Have to admit, the introduction was written purely for a non-Indian reader. If I have to change any part of the book — I'll probably change most of it — I'll definitely get rid of that bit. It feels a bit clichéd.
You say Gandhian influence is undermining attempts to provide better planning for the cities. The Western world holds Gandhi and his philosophy in great awe. But, you don't seem to share that sentiment.
He was a brilliant mobiliser of the masses, a translator and the best populariser of an elitist freedom movement into an idiom the masses could understand, the most effective tactician of the freedom struggle. He was a legendary and towering figure. I would not want to diminish Gandhi and I wouldn't be qualified to do so.
There is a very strong and deeply rooted cultural romanticism about the village in India. It's primarily upper caste urban people who are the keepers of the flame of this romanticism. I want India to develop and development means urbanisation. It is an inescapable fact. I don't believe that urbanisation means liquidation of culture. France is 90 per cent urban. France is quintessentially French. India has a great urban civilisational heritage. It's not as if India's cradle of culture is purely the village. But partly because of the distortions of the colonial era and partly because — and this is not an original point I'm making — the villages are the least tainted and least interfered with by the colonial presence, the village became the repository in the freedom movement dialectic of Indian culture. That romanticism — which I think is very conservative — is still quite widespread. It is not stopping India urbanising but it's making the urban experience far more callous and bloody than it could be. Urbanisation can be done well. It can be anticipated. Demographic trends can be projected and you can start putting infrastructure in place without having to be Japanese.
I'm a huge admirer of Gandhi. I have a softer spot for Nehru, though.
You seem to have some reservations about India's choice of democracy.
No, I think it did exactly the right thing. I'm particularly unqualified to evaluate decisions like that. I guess it was inevitable to choose the Westminster system. It was probably inevitable to have continuity in the system of administration and it was inevitable that India started off without prosecuting the orchestrators of some of the riots in Partition. All of these are understandable decisions of the time and probably questionable in retrospect. But, I'm not really qualified to question any of that in much detail.
You have worked in two of the biggest democracies of the world: India and now the U.S. How does Indian democracy compare to the American model?
In some ways India is a mirror image of America. In America the middle class vote and the poor don't. In India the poor vote and the middle class have a much lower average turnout. That makes India's electoral outcomes more volatile. Incumbency in America is deeply entrenched. We are about to have mid-term elections in November. There are 435 seats in the House of Representatives. The most that will change hands is 25; it's less than 10 per cent. In India, about 70 per cent of the Lok Sabha seats change hands in each election. It's immensely volatile. Measuring Indian opinion is very hard in comparison to the U.S. Here the minimum sample for a national opinion poll is 40,000. And, still you get it wrong because it is so diverse and so hard to measure. In America, you interview 2,000 people per poll and the survey is usually right. To me, that's one of the best ways of measuring just how much more diverse and less easily predictable India is. They are very different kinds of democracies. One of the most positive things about India is the high — and growing — participation of grassroots voting. It really is a striking contrast to not just America but increasingly other parts of the democratic world.
You seem to have ignored the Left.
That's true. A book like this is arbitrary and selective. You can't possibly cover the political economy of modern India even semi-comprehensively. So, it's selective. I don't talk about the Northeast at all. I don't go into the — I think slightly hyped up — Nepal-Hyderabad red corridor stuff that others are writing about at the moment. I spent a lot of time writing about the Left for FT. I spent a lot of time in West Bengal; not just doing the obligatory interview with Bhattacharya but spending time outside of Kolkata; visiting some of the smaller district capitals, talking to CPM people there, talking to investors. I'd written so much about it for the FT that I got bored of writing about it. I have no grander explanation than that for not treating the Communists in much detail.
You say the Congress is anti-reform.
I know there are the likes of Jairam Ramesh and Chidambaram in the Congress. But, I don't really think Sonia Gandhi has the same vision. I don't think there's a consensus in the Congress party for reform. There is a consensus that the old model is behind us but not about what the new model really should look like or the sequencing or how you play the very delicate politics of it; especially with a minority government.
You say the BJP can't be written off.
Nobody is more delighted than me to see this fratricidal decline. It's a wonderful windfall for the UPA. They haven't really capitalised on it. The Congress was in as bad or worse a state a few years back. And look at the broader Sangh Parivar infrastructure the BJP can still draw upon.
As an aside, the colour of the book.
I disclaim any responsibility for that. The publishers first imposed the title on me. My title was "The Strange Rise of Modern India" which is the sub-title now. But the publishers wanted a punchier title. So, rather than wait for them to impose something like "Elephants and Maharajas" on me, I thought I can live with In Spite of The Gods because it does speak to the slightly Nehruvian bias that I have. It doesn't embarrass me but it doesn't really describe the book. "The Strange Rise..." — strange being non-pejorative — is still my preferred title for the book. The saffron colour for the jacket was also the publishers' choice. I think they were targeting the speculative buyers. I had another battle over footnotes. They didn't want footnotes, as browsers tend to say "I don't want a book with footnotes". I won that battle but lost the one over the saffron cover.
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