India and China set to rule this century

India and China are set to dominate in a new post-western world but “that did not necessarily mean that the USA and Europe have had it,” the last governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, has said.

Patten, now Chancellor of Oxford University, made the remarks in a speech he gave at a recent alumni weekend, held by the university.

Chris Patten speaking at Oxford

Lord Patten of Barnes, famed for handing back the sovereignty of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China in 1997 marking the end of British rule, told the audience of Oxford alumni that there had been a major shift in the global balance of economic power and that India and China would dominate this century, creating a new global hierarchy dominated by the East.

In his speech, ‘What next? Surviving the 21^st century’, based on his namesake book, he spoke of a “fin de siècle” mood pervading America and Europe. But he said he did not accept that the world today was more dangerous than before, pointing out that at the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which coincided with his first term as a student at Oxford University, “the world appeared to be teetering on the edge of nuclear Armageddon.” I don’t think that things are as dangerous today as that,” he added.

While the world knew what it needed to do in order to survive, at present it appeared to “lack the political leadership and international political capacity to rise to the challenge,” he claimed. “We know what needs to be done from the Middle East to climate change. We know the sorts of things the international community should be doing in order to find a sustainable solution,” he went on.

The former Conservative MP and European Commissioner warned that the world population, which increased fourfold in the 20th century, was set to increase from 6.9 billion by a further 2.1 billion by 2050 and the majority of that increase would be in very poor countries, most of which already faced political instability and considerable environmental stress. “The only rich country in the top 10 where population is increasing now is the USA,” he added.

Speaking at The Sheldonian Theatre, where Oxford’s matriculation and graduation ceremonies are held, Patten said we can expect to see an explosion of growth in the numbers of people living cities (which increased 13-fold in the past century), especially in China (where it’s reckoned a billion people will live in cities by 2050). He said we could also expect to see an increase in energy consumption which had already increased 13 fold in the past century because industrial output had increased 40 times and also increased water use (which had increased ninefold in the past century), including possible conflict over water resources between India and China in the future and increased carbon monoxide emissions (which had already increased 17 times in the past century.) All of this was “posing probably the biggest issue for diplomacy, arguably since [The Treaty of] Versailles,” he claimed.

He then spoke of the India growth story and visible power shift already taking place. India has several multinational companies with global brands against which other companies benchmark themselves like Tata, Reliance and Infosys, he said.

“India now invests more in the UK than the UK invests in India,” he added.  He said by 2040 India would probably have the largest population in the world and Chinese pensioners would be the second largest.

China is currently the second largest economy in the world but, by the 2020s, China would overtake the USA to become the largest economy in the world, Patten said.

“It’s a world you can very properly describe as post western. Asia no longer has to define modernity in western terms,” he said.

But he pointed out that it was not all doom and gloom for Europe. While Europe currently had only had seven to 10 per cent of the world’s population, it still produced 21-22 per cent of the world’s output, he said.

 “And there here are serious problems confronting both India and China,” Patten warned and then spoke of the “steady federalisation of the polity in India”.

He pointed out that Gujarat, where more than 1,000 people were killed in the 2002 communal riots, which accounts for just 5 per cent of India’s population, actually contributes 16 per cent of India’s output and 22 per cent of exports.

He also spoke of India suffering from “a criminalisation of politics”, “terrible levels of corruption” which “have raised questions right across the board about the nature of representative democracy in India and about the integrity of legislature, judiciary and bureaucracy."

 “There are three Chief Justices in India today who face criminal charges,” he said. He said the country had “terrible infrastructure problems” and yet the country had “pockets of extraordinary prosperity and sophistication” surrounded by “terrible poverty and awful corruption.”

He then moved on to China. “China also faces huge problems despite its extraordinary economic achievements, with a 1600 per cent increase in its exports to America over the last 15 years, China faces, as does India, huge environmental challenges,” he said.

He said China faced the problem of how to rebalance its economy moving from substantial dependence on manufactured exports to greater investment in domestic infrastructure and greater encouragement of consumption. Despite a huge boom in exports, wages in China remain low. Wages in China, as a proportion of the economy, have fallen from approximately 53 per cent of GDP to less than 40 per cent. Patten also questioned how far China could open up its economy and embrace social and technological change, while keeping an iron grip on its politics.

He hinted that India and China may have to take centre stage not just economically but in global politics and international bodies and affairs too.

“With the US political system gridlocked and with Europe obsessed with its own problems, where will we look to for leadership?” he asked. He said bodies created in the 1940s such as the United Nations were falling to pieces and lacked “moral and political authority” and “ structures were needed” to deal with international cross border problems such as climate change and organised crime.

When considering whether leadership should come from Europe, the 67-year-old former student of Balliol College, who is also chairman of the BBC Trust, pointed out the currency union was falling apart because of the difficulties of running monetary policy with one hand and fiscal policy with another.

When asked about immigration, Patten, a Catholic, who oversaw the oversaw the Pope’s visit to Britain in September 2010, said that populations were falling fast in Europe, especially in Italy, Spain and Poland and the number of people in work supporting those in retirement was falling extremely fast. The consequences of rapidly ageing populations and lower fertility rates meant greater immigration would be required to provide jobs and services in Europe. But he warned Europe would see “some of the tensions” that arise when there is no rapid economic growth alongside mass immigration. He said immigration into Europe was also likely to increase owing to natural disasters elsewhere.

Responding to a question on why British schools weren’t concentrating on teaching Hindi and Mandarin in the light of his forecast, he replied, “My daughter learnt Hindi to appear in a Bollywood film,” referring to Alice Patten, who starred as struggling British filmmaker Sue McKinley  in the hit Hindi movie Rang De Basanti. In an apparent attack on Britain’s youth, he added: “We need to teach them English first.”

The alumni weekend, named Meeting Minds – 21st century challenges, offered a packed three-day programme of more than 120 events for alumni.

Oxford academics from a range of departments delivered lectures showing how they were tackling a range of global challenges from population growth to increased energy consumption, climate change, lives spent on social networking sites, the science behind earthquakes and emerging infectious diseases.

A highlight was a ‘Mathematical Tour of Oxford’ by Professor Marcus du Sautoy, who had presented the BBC documentary ‘The Story of Maths’, which had revealed that Indians had made many of the key mathematical breakthroughs in the world before the West had and before Sir Isaac Newton was born, including inventing the zero, despite common misapprehensions that Maths was a Western invention. © Naomi Canton 2011

Who were the rioters, what motivated them and can India teach us a lesson?

I could be psychic.

I wrote about the breakdown of the social fabric of British society in February 2009. That was before the current riots in England that have sent the media and government into a frenzy analysing the causes. See http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/expat-on-the-edge/2009/02/18/what-i-like-about-india/ Back then whilst living in India, I compared Indian teenagers to those in the UK and quickly spotted that those in India had aspirations and values, were far better behaved than their counterparts in the UK and the anti-social behaviour and gangs that blighted Britain’s streets did not exist in India.  And bizarrely, in India there is barely a welfare state to speak of. Unlike in Britain.

I also wrote about the unhealthy dependency on the welfare state here in the UK. See http://naomicanton.blogspot.com/2010/10/huge-spending-cuts-right-way-forward.html. Within days of moving back to England from India I was immediately stunned at how how much Britons get from the state for free, compared to say, Indians in India: free homes, unemployment benefit, child benefit, free schools and much more. No one in India got any of this and yet India’s country’s economy was soaring, jobs were increasing, their family unit was intact and their teenagers well-behaved and ambitious, unlike ours. In India everyone had a job, even if menial. Meanwhile in Britain, foreigners (mainly from mainland Europe) worked in the cafes and hotels while the Brits took Jobseekers Allowance. And whinged.

Now  we have just witnessed the England riots 2011, which were not dissimilar to the Paris Riots in 2005, 2007 and 2009. The core complaints of the rioters in both cases seemed to be that they were feeling left out, jobless, alienated and deprived. An “us “and “them” culture had emerged and a feeling the state had let them down.

Yet, why do Britons feel deprived and alienated when they live in Britain, one of the richest countries in the world? A country that millions of asylum seekers are still queuing up to enter…A country with a welfare state invented in 1911 and enhanced in the 1940s that other nations can only dream of?

Many British politicians deny poverty plays a role and are putting the riots down to a lack of discipline in schools and poor parenting, which has created a generation that would rather steal a plasma TV than save up for one. Given that the teachers who teach in British schools are highly trained, why are the schools in inner city areas so very bad? Why are they failing to instil any discipline in children?Many blame the laws in the UK which give too many rights to pupils and don’t allow teachers to punish them if they misbehave.  Teachers daren’t discipline pupils for fear of getting abused by the parents. Has the British state school system failed? If it hasn’t, how come we have ended up with a generation of delinquents happy to riot and loot with no respect for their neighbourhoods? How come drug dealers are allowed to stand at the school gates?   There is clearly a level of law-breaking in terms of gangs and drug dealing in and around inner city schools that society, schools, parents and the police have, till now, overlooked.

The national curriculum in British schools does not have enough relevance to modern Britain either. Employers say that when school-leavers apply for jobs they have no skills of use. Why don’t schools teach useful subjects such as how to do tax returns, how to be self-employed, how to make money from stocks and shares, how to write CVs and dress for interviews and so on?

The proliferation of gangs in inner city areas is also very much to blame. Mark Duggan, the black man whose death sparked the riots, was a member of one such gang. How did the British police let these gangs get so out of hand? Police have said that 25 per cent of those held after the disturbances are linked to gangs.

It is no coincidence Duggan came from Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, a council estate that was also the scene of violent riots in 1985 after a Caribbean woman was murdered there. That time the riots led to the death of a policeman, a death linked to the same gang Duggan was in. This time was it the rioters’ offspring rioting? The police had reason to believe Duggan, a crack cocaine dealer, was out to avenge a fellow gang member's murder on the night they had him under surveillance and shot him. London has seen 92 similar gang related murders in the last two years but none have made it to headline news.

High unemployment among black Afro Caribbean male youth is also clearly a factor in the riots. In an interview with the BBC back in January 2010, way before the current riots happened (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8468308.stm ) Jeremy Crook, director of the Black Training and Enterprise Group (BTEG), said part of the problem was there were very few black role models in Britain.

"Amongst black men, unemployment is about 20% - if a quarter of adult males don't work for 10-20 years, it doesn't give communities much aspiration, it demoralises and dissuades young people.

"They look to alternatives and get involved in gangs,” he said.

Almost half of black people aged between 16 and 24 were unemployed, at that time, compared with 20% of white people of the same age, the Institute for Public Policy Research then claimed. 

When asked why the they did it, the rioters said “Because the Government has cut my EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance) or “I applied for a job at that electronics store and they didn’t reply to my email so now it’s payback time.” Hardly a justification.

Some politicians are blaming parents, not schools, but as one mother from a council estate told a TV channel last week:  “We have no control of our children. They don’t even do what we tell them. If we say they are grounded they barge past us and go out the door. If we try and smack them they say ‘You are not allowed to touch us; that is what we are told us at school.'"

Many parents handed their children into police when they saw their pictures released as suspects in the riots, so it does seem to me that most parents did not condone the rioting.

But it is true that many parents are so busy working to earn enough money to live in the UK, they have no time for family life. Their kids are being brought up by X boxes, not people. Or rap music. In India the cost of living is lower and pressures are less great on average household incomes, plus there is the option of maid.

Single mums have faced a lot of flak in recent weeks too, being blamed for the riots with claims that young men are being denied a male role model instead joining a gang and taking on a gang master as a father figure. I have friends who are single mums who have raised fabulous children. But then again they are a) educated and b) do not live on sink estates.  Those who tick both of the above boxes do appear to be producing badly-behaved children at an alarming rate, the girls of which are becoming teenage single mothers themselves. But is this to blame for the rioting?

I do not think we cannot blame women for being single as I’m sure many of them are single because their husband or boyfriend has got up and left them or died.

So in short, blame is being put on gang culture and rap music for glorifying violence, single mums for denying young men male role models, council estates, unemployed youth, poor discipline in schools, poor parenting, weak prison sentences that do not act as a deterrent, a lack of social mobility, the class system, public spending cuts, a lack of personal responsibility and lack of respect for the police, particularly following allegations of corruption in the phone hacking scandal.

Of all these youth unemployment, a lack of personal responsibility, gangs and the depressing life and culture of sink estates are to blame, in my view. These sink estates were originally built between the First and Second World Wars to rehouse people displaced in the slum clearance programmes. Many of these estates are now synonymous with violence, drunkenness, drug-dealing and gangs. The schools that serve them tend to have disruptive and underachieving pupils. There is a vicious spiral. No wonder this is the second riot at Broadwater Farm.

Prince Charles hit the nail on the head, when visiting riot-hit Hackney. He said national community service was the answer and pointed out extra-curricular activities were severely lacking at many secondary schools.  ''Half the problem is that people join gangs because it's a cry for help and they're looking for a sense of belonging. Schools don't have enough extra-curricular activities now. There are not enough organised games or other kinds of activities. Young people need self-confidence; we have to motivate and encourage them and give them responsibility. You need to be exhausted and have that energy channelled into useful activities," he said.

Interestingly the young people he spoke to said, what everyone has been thinking, that they were given far too much, had far too many rights and not enough discipline. They expected things to be given to them without working; they needed to be made to want to work. The issue was schools, families and the environment in which they lived, not race or class, they said.

So what is the solution? Well, firstly, we can look at India. The difference between India and the UK is that:-

1) In India people know they have to get a job and go out and earn a living to survive. There is no welfare system to depend on.

2) The family unit is still cherished and single mothers frowned upon meaning most children are brought up in two parent families.

3) The education system is authoritarian and pupils have to respect teachers. Authority, parents and older people are respected and people live in fear of the police and being sent to prison. (Not the case in the UK).

Apart from that I think encouraging  and allowing the police to use harsher tactics in dealing with riots (such as tear gas and plastic bullets) and making sentences for all crimes less lenient so that being put in the dock does act as a deterrent to youngsters, would help. Plus the prison experience should be made more uncomfortable and perhaps TVs and DVD players taken away. An Afro-Caribbean woman told a TV channel here: “In Africa the prisons are horrible and no one wants to go to prison. Here in Britain they are too nice and not a deterrent.”

 Police should be allowed to ban head and face coverings at any public gathering and force the wearer to remove it whenever there is suspicion of a crime being committed. It is ludicrous we have looters allowed to go out with scarves tied round their faces and commit crimes.

But the problems are clearly even more complex. David Cameron has made the right decision to bring in Bill Bratton to advise on the gang problem and yes, a compulsory youth national community service, as suggested by Prince Charles is a great idea. Free parenting classes should be on offer to anyone that wants them, more money needs to be spent on youth services, and stricter discipline and punishments in schools is required as well.

But there is still one massive problem remaining....

Youth unemployment.

How that will ever get solved in recession-hit Britain is anyone’s guess. Who is going to create the jobs?

The Indian expat in Britain

I have been meeting up with various Indian people in the UK since coming back to live in England. By Indian I mean Indian visitor or expat, not British Asian (or British Indian,  as some prefer to be called, referring to British citizens of Indian heritage either born here or who started arriving in the 1950s.) Indeed about 20 years ago most British people’s only exposure to Indians in the UK was  the immigrants who moved here en masse in the 50s, 60s and 70s and their offspring and their offspring’s offspring. Now with the wealth and skills set increasing in India, more Indians are coming to Britain to study Masters and MBAs and many of those are managing to find work and get employed here afterwards. Others are coming directly on highly skilled migrant work visas to work in sectors like IT with companies such as Infosys, Aviva on 2-3 year contracts. Many are already here as doctors and priests. This MBA/IT/highly-skilled set makes up a new genre of Indian you will find in British cities and towns, quite different to their counterpart, the British Asian. It’s funny because, having lived in Mumbai for more than 3 years, I can spot an Indian expat a mile off. They are distinctly quite different, in their accent, dress and behaviour, to a British Asian/Indian. 

Meeting them is interesting for me. I'm curious to see, having been an expat, how well they adapt to the UK, or not; whether they integrate or not and watch the little faux pax or gaffes they unknowingly make that arise from cultural misunderstandings. I know I made many similar gaffes and faux pax in India. I also know, having lived overseas, that it is important to overlook those faux pax as they only arise from being raised in a different culture and society. They are never intentionally offensive. When I was in Mumbai I also made blunders, but, sadly, whereas some people overlooked them, others did not.

In Mumbai, some Indians were welcoming of expats and others were not. I know that some Indians made me feel really different. They did not include me in things, would not confide in me or gossip with me or would say really strange things to me.  As a British woman I also had to fight stereotypes in India. I remember one Indian woman saying to me, “You know how all western women write about sex in their blogs and Indian woman bloggers don’t well..” I was furious. Since when did all western women write about sex in their blogs!! (I know I have touched on relationships, but still…) On another occasion an Indian woman said, “You know how all French people are manic depressives, well it’s because they are spoilt and have not had to endure the hardships Indians have, well….” Such sweeping generalisations spring from ignorance and I generally ignored the remarks. Similarly there was an element of Indians who had a post-colonial hangover. If I dared to criticise India, the response would be “So you want to rule us again?”  Or “Why do you think your culture is superior to ours?” I didn’t. I may have been merely mentioning something or other that could be improved in India (like the fact drivers don’t stop at zebra crossings. They don’t in Rome either and I get equally annoyed there.) I can think of plenty of things that can be improved in England too. I don’t see why I have to continually praise a place. And I don’t. Some of the most interesting discussions with one’s friends can come from debating how to improve or solve social issues. If there were no social issues to solve, what would we discuss? Men and make-up? There was also a resistance among some Indians towards expats getting jobs in Mumbai. If you explained to them that the Indian diaspora was massive and millions of Indians had jobs overseas it made no difference. They were not overseas and didn’t care. Of course outside this stereotyping and prejudice were many very decent, intelligent, bright, spiritual, welcoming Indians who I thoroughly enjoyed meeting.

Expats take to India differently. There are some that ‘go native’ so to speak, refuse to mix with other expats, eat only at street food stalls and so on…There are others who refuse to mix with Indians , slag off India and are only seen at five star hotel brunches. I liked to be somewhere between the two extremes, with half Indian and half expat friends, semi integrated but making the occasional gaffe. One area I did struggle with was using the words, Sir or Madam. This to an English person is completely alien. To my knowledge, the UK, Sir is only used in the British Army and possibly when a commoner meets Royalty. Otherwise it might be used by a waitress in a very posh five star hotel in London to a customer. No one uses this as a form of respect for elders or people more experienced/powerful than you, as they do in India. I also could not bring myself to use the word thrice instead of three times or ride a moped without a helmet. 

But now I am the local in my own country and seeing how the Indian expats get on intrigues me. I was out with an Indian friend the other day at the cinema. After buying the tickets he asked the ticket booth man if he had any change. When the man refused my friend blew his top at him.  I was shocked as it is not acceptable to be that rude to someone selling tickets at a cinema. Then outside a Big Issue seller came to speak to me when I was with my friend and my friend said in a loud voice, “How dare you interrupt our conversation?” I was taken aback as, again, in England we would never speak so rudely to a Big Issue seller either. We know they are homeless and selling the Big Issue to make ends meet. But I guess my Indian friend treated him as though he was a rickshaw driver, day labourer or beggar who had come up and barged into our conversation, something unthinkable in India. They know their place in Indian society and probably would not dare. But England is far more egalitarian. The person selling Big Issue might be homeless today, but yesterday he may have been in a good job. The ticket booth man is probably studying a Masters or working as an actor. In India sadly the treatment of rickshaw drivers, waiters, maids and the like is not always the same as here and sometimes they are treated with immense disrsepect. I didn’t say anything at the time but decided if I met this Indian friend again and got to know him better I would mention it.

Another funny incident happened when I was with an Indian friend going out for a meal and I asked him what cuisine he wanted. “Something spicy” he said. This will pose problems in England where most food is not spicy and we eat a lot of French and Italian cuisine. I explained that left us with Bangladeshi or Mexican cuisine and there wasn’t a Mexican restaurant in the town where we were. He finally caved in and we went to a French restaurant. He was unable to comprehend the French menu. (The menus are always in French in French restaurant in the UK to add to the experience. For Brits they are pretty easy to decipher as we are used to it.) “What is canard?” he asked. “What is poulet?” He asked. Of course he spoke about 7 languages but French was not one of them. For the Brits French is pretty easy. Then the food came and whilst I raved about the food, he seemed unimpressed, probably similar to how I had reacted when an Indian once friend took me to a Rajasthani traditional restaurant in Gujarat where I couldn't get to grips with the unusual food at all. I exclaimed, “Isn’t French food just the best!” tucking into a rare steak with frites. “You know French food is the most gourmet in the world and yet I barely came across a single French restaurant in India,” I remarked. “There is a reason for that,” my Indian friend, who did not eat beef, said dryly.

Meanwhile the British friend I was with kept calling him middle-class. He was saying it to compliment him on how well-brought up and well-spoken he was, but the Indian kept merely smiling; this was the other meaning of the Indian smile and I knew it. I finally explained to my British friend that being called middle class in India isn’t  seen as a great compliment– it’s basically seen there as what we describe as lower class here – you need to say upper middle class to refer to what my friend was trying to communicate…Middle-class in England  conjures up Wimbledon, Henley, private education, four bedroomed-detached house, professional occupation, tennis, rugby, Berkshire etc…But in India it refers  to the  masses, not the upper echelons of  society. It conjures up a very simple home and life in India. So this was another cross-cultural miscommunication, I figured. When I explained it to both of them, the Indian stopped the ear-to-ear grin and his shoulders seemed to relax. He admitted he had been baffled by the constant comment he was middle-class. “I  just could not understand why you kept on telling me I was middle-class,” he said.

As we left the French restaurant we walked past a group of English woman. It was a cold night and they were all, without fail, in mini dresses or mini-skirts, which hung almost below their knicker lines, they had completely bare legs and stilettos. Some had tattoos; others had cigarettes dropping out of their mouths. Most were heavily made up. There were 100s of them all appearing from nowhere, heading for the local dodgy nightclub of the Home Counties town we were in. I was rather embarrassed by this sight and explained to my Indian friend that not all British woman dressed or behaved like this.  I hadn’t seen anything like it myself for years. My female friends and I were more likely to be seen in a country pub in designer jeans and a T shirt than anywhere like this and we never dressed like that in the evenings.  These women all looked like they had one intention in mind, and it is a sentence that is three words long. The Indian friend had no idea that what he had seen and experienced did not represent British women or indeed British society.  If anything, it represented a segment of British society - one that would not be found at Cheltenham Ladies College or in the King’s Road, London or in a British law firm.  “There is a different kind of English woman,” I started to explain as best I could. “Not all British women dress like this.  I am different, for starters,” I said proud of my designer jeans and black top I was in, my stock ‘night out’ outfit, in fact.  “Oh you mean the plain Jane!” he said confidently, in a thick Indian accent. I swallowed my anger, as did the British guy who was with me. I realised the Indian expat had no clue what the connotations of the phrase Plain Jane were.  I have been called many things to date, but not till now, anyway plain. Anyway I forgave him, as you have to, if you want to befriend a foreigner in your homeland. It reminded me of when an Indian in Mumbai had said I looked well fed. I couldn’t have been more offended but he had said it with a big grin as though he was complimenting me and this Indian in England who said I was a plain Jane was also grinning from ear to ear.  I fathomed that expats will make faux pax and social blunders in the mind of the locals, wherever they are, but ignoring them is the best thing to do. Apart from the plain Jane remark, we had had a great evening. The same with the guy I had gone to the cinema with. On both occasions we had discussed politics, culture, and society and exchanged ideas. In fact, the Indian expats had even been so kind as to decipher aspects of Indian society I had not been able to understand. What was the point of holding a social gaffe against them?

I guess what I have learnt from all this is -  you have to be elastic – you have to be able to give and stretch your boundaries of acceptance  and what is normal far more with a foreigners, than with the locals, and don’t expect them to integrate fully (why should they?) but the rewards will be worth it. You will get things from friendships with foreigners you can’t get from friendships with locals, so please be open-minded.

Arundhati Roy vs. New India

Booker prize winning novelist Arundhati Roy’s book launch in India was disrupted by protestors recently. But in Britain recently she walked into a packed lecture theatre at the University of London to rapturous applause.

The 49-year-old, who has been accused of hating her homeland, arrived at The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London several days ago with no star fanfare, dressed in a simple green sari. She mingled freely with guests queuing up to see her, before taking her seat at her first ever public lecture at the British university.

The controversial novelist-turned political activist was in the UK on a whirlwind publicity tour to promote the Adivasi resistance movement in India and her book, Broken Republic: Three Essays, published by Hamish Hamilton.

Arundhati Roy giving the lecture at SOAS in London recently

The previous week, she had appeared on Newsnight, a BBC current affairs programme watched by millions, in which she had informed the British public that the Indian economic success story was a “lie” because 80 million people in India were living on less than Rs 20 a day, there were more poor people living in India than in Africa, and that India’s growth rate was “built on taking land from the poor” and “vandalising India’s Constitution.”

As guests eagerly queued up for her free public forum, titled ‘Burning Ground: Mining, Adivasis and India's Civil War’, at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS on Sunday, two young people handed out leaflets advertising another UK lecture Roy had lined up in London later in the week – organised by a group that calls itself the International Campaign Against War on People of India. The A4 leaflet was titled ‘Stop the genocidal war against the tribal people of India.’ On its website the group claims it aims to “expose the Indian government's war on the people in India” and their attempts to “grab land and minerals” from areas where tribal people live.

 “Before stepping up on to the stage I was asked whether I was nervous when I had to speak in front of large numbers of people. But now there is more fury in me and the nervousness went away a long time ago,” Roy bellowed to the SOAS lecture hall.

“I want you all to know that the Indian Government is going to deploy the army, spending US$45bn in central India to fight the poorest people in the world. This is what is about to happen,” she continued in a serious voice, pausing intermittently to lend her words even more power. 


She then shifted into a sarcastic tone. “So, whenever you start thinking that India is such a bubbly, cuddly modern democracy, then please pay attention to this,” she said to the audience of predominantly postgraduates, students, NGO workers and academics.

The audience packed The Brunei Gallery

“This is a very old story, the old story of mining,” she said simplifying a complex matter into a few words. “The story of mining and environmental destruction,” she went on. “And of indigenous people.” Thus in sparse words she had evoked parallels with the California Gold Rush, the impact of mining on the Aborigines way of life in Australia and all the former colonial powers’ exploitation of resources.

Roy is furious about the decades-old Maoist insurgency in central and eastern India in which more than 6,000 people have lost their lives. Whilst it is an uprising that the prime minister of India has declared as “the single greatest threat to India’s internal security”, suggesting it is a greater threat to India than that of Jihadist terrorists from Pakistan,  Roy has an entirely different perspective. She sees it as an unjust war against simple, poor Adivasis who are merely and rightfully resisting being displaced by large corporations for mining projects.

A video link was set up to stream her talk into another lecture theatre simultaneously as so many people had come to London listen to the famous novelist.

John Hollingsworth, Brunei Gallery Exhibitions Manager, had organised the public forum, with funding from a variety of organisations including The Gandhi Foundation. Despite being free, tickets had had to be reserved in advance and it was overbooked two weeks in advance. He said: “Initial interest was so high we could have filled the 300 seat Brunei Gallery three times over. It did not need much publicity as word of mouth spread very quickly.”

As for a reaction from the Indian Government to all the allegations, he said: “The Indian Government was invited to the opening of the exhibition and our first seminar to put their own point forward, but as far as we are aware, no representative was able to attend.”

Roy has been on a tirade against the Indian Government ever since she took up social causes such as opposing such as the Narmada Dam and supporting Kashmir’s independence, following the success of her first novel The God of Small Things, which won the Man Booker prize in 1997. In recent months her controversial campaign to garner support for the Maoists has intensified, a viewpoint that has led to fierce criticism in India, where she irks some of the burgeoning middle class. She was denounced by a few protesters as a ‘Murdabad’ at her latest book launch at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi recently.

She began her speech at SOAS talking about climate change, the state of the planet and declared the world was in crisis. “Just look at the plastic in the ocean and the state of the forests,” she said.

Arundhati Roy remained passionate throughout her speech

But before long she was attacking her homeland claiming India’s democracy was sham.

“India’s USP is that it is a democracy but unlike western nations, who when they were industrialising, were developing laws and codes of civil rights, India started colonising itself,” she said.

She then posed the question: “Are Maoists really Maoists since 95 per cent are Adivasi?”

Reading extracts from Broken Republic, she spoke about Adivasis being killed in what were “merely described as encounters by the Indian media” and that the atrocities being committed were blatantly “ignored by the Indian media.” According to her, more than 200 MOUs have been signed by the Indian government giving tribal land to corporations for industrial projects. She said more than 400,000 people were displaced and Rs700 billion spent to make way for The Commonwealth Games, which a lot of athletes and the Queen did not attend “to celebrate the British Empire.” She also spoke about protests by pavement dwellers and those displaced by Special Economic Zones that were ignored by the media. They have now become gangs of slaves moving from city to city building new India, which has no relevance to them, she declared.

Roy, who has even spent time with the Maoist guerrillas in the forest, said “I asked the women why they joined the guerrilla army and they said they had watched their sisters and mothers get raped. It’s not just about mining corporations, it’s about feudalism and casteism. They wanted to escape even the patriarchy of their own society,” she said, in a rare moment of criticism of patriarchal tribal societies. “India has some of the most extraordinary women in the world yet people commit female foeticide” she said. “This is a struggle for the whole world, it’s everyone’s struggle, not just India’s.

“Now we have the rich who look down on the poor thinking what are they doing drinking the water in our rivers and living in our forests?”

As for the legitimacy and morality of armed resistance, she was intransigent. “I have been accused of being a terrorist and a Marxist but someone has got to stop the violence. If you live in a forest village in a tribal area and 800 people come and burn down your village , what are you supposed to do? Declare a hunger strike? The politics of the non-violent struggle is an effective form of theatre but only if there is an audience. There is no audience in the forest. The hungry can’t go on a hunger strike. These people have nothing and it is not reported so they have no choice. What is happening in India is genocide and people have the right to resist by whatever means possible,” she said.

She fell short of commenting on the atrocities committed by Maoists in the so-called red corridor of central and eastern India where they are fighting the Indian army or of expressing any sympathy for victims of Maoist attacks, a subjective stance that continues to draws fierce criticism within some quarters in India.

Indeed, while the main target of the Maoist insurgents has been the police and the army, civilians have also been killed in the violent uprising that has seen trains hijacked, buses bombed, landmine attacks, ambushes, kidnappings and executions.

Felix Padel and Samarendra Das, authors of Out of This Earth: East Indian Adivasis and The Aluminium Cartel (2010), were also speakers. 

On the far right is Felix Padel, a descendant of Charles Darwin

They have written a book that explores how the mining of bauxite to make aluminium is linked to corruption, international banks, the London Metal Exchange, multinational companies and the destruction of Adivasis communities.

Padel, a freelance British anthropologist, and great great grandson of Charles Darwin, has lived in India 30 years. He said that the Indian Government had “invented the Maoist as a bogeyman” to get public support behind attacks on Adivasis. “I see the war on Maoists as a war against tribal people,” he said, echoing Roy. 

He spoke about how large well-known Indian corporate houses controlled the media and so when their steel or mining arms forcibly displaced Adivasis to start steel plants and mines in virgin forests, the media did not cover it. He even claimed major international bodies like The World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the UK Department for International Development, were tied up in the racket by giving loans for building roads and mine infrastructure and that  “squeaky clean offices in London”  were linked to the corruption.

“Many people do not know that a civil war is happening in India. This is the worst war that has ever taken place in India, especially because it’s directed against villagers who have been there for hundreds of years,” added Padel, who is married to an Adivasi woman and lives in a remote village in Orissa.

“Chattisgarh has become a hell on earth. The tribes are civilised in terms of law, the position of women and children. There is only one war in India that is similar to this and that is the Kalinga War when Emperor Ashoka attacked the state of Kalinga.”

The atmosphere changed when a member of the audience  of Indian origin, grabbed the mike and read a question from a crumpled up piece of file paper, asking Roy why she was so negative about India and requesting her to list three things she liked about India.

The first man to ask a question attacked Arundhati Roy

As his lengthy criticism of Roy continued, a large number of the audience started booing and hissing him, but he continued unperturbed, dogged that he was on the right course.   After listening patiently, Roy retorted that she was  proud of “the resistance movement in India” and then talked about the “spirit and imagination of India” she was trying to protect. The next question was from another young man of Indian origin. He also was critical of Roy and wanted evidence the media was controlled by corporates and questioned Roy’s intractable stance India was a Hindu state. Roy replied that 95 per cent of profits of mainstream papers in India came from corporate adverts and that they would pull adverts if stories appeared that they did not like. All the wars 

Arundhati Roy was unperturbed by criticism

against Adivasis were being waged in non-Hindu states, she claimed.

 “India is a democracy but a democracy for a few people” she continued. “The day the Indian Constitution came into being was a dark day for Adivasis. Yet tribal people were there before India existed.”

The discussion then moved on to press censorship and the corruption of  well-known international NGOs, ending with loud applause with most of the audience seemingly agreeing with Roy’s take on India’s civil war.

Outside the lecture hall guests looked around a two floor photo exhibition called A Disappearing World: Ancient Traditions Under Threat in Tribal India by Robert Wallis an American independent photojournalist based in the UK. Wallis had travelled to Jharkhand, one of the richest states in India in terms of minerals, and photographed Adivasi who he said were being displaced by large mining corporations that were moving into their forest homelands to extract coal and minerals such as coal, copper, iron ore and bauxalite.

The walls were filled with pictures of Adivasis first in their traditional mud or leaf homes, then in urban slums and resettlement camps, where he said they had been forcibly removed and rehoused to make way for open-cast mining of coal, iron ore and bauxite. In some pictures they were scavengers on the peripheries of mines. The captions sated they had been dispossessed of their homes and heritage and without work, ended up scavenging or working at salve labour rates amid  dire conditions left them with respiratory diseases and tuberculosis. One  picture showed a couple from the Birhar tribes with their hunting nets. A caption stated they were returning home having caught nothing as wildlife was disappearing and there were no animals to hunt owing to the destruction of the forest habitat.

Nearby people queued up for Broken Republic costing £18 (Rs1,400) a copy, while outside the Gallery, one of the young Indian origin men who had criticised Roy was smoking a cigarette continuing the  debate outside with a friend.  “It’s because of things like this,” he said pointing at his expensive blackberry and mobile phone, “that my generation is excited. New India is bringing us opportunities and things we never had before. She is seen as a joke in India. Very few people take her seriously.” He paused and dragged on his cigarette. “It’s just governance that is the problem.”

The eternal beauty of Tagore's writing reaches rural Britain

The sun shone as I sat at a trendy hippyish café inside a beautiful grand county estate in Devon. I felt like I was at a similarly hedonistically intellectual event, the Jaipur Literature Festival, but I was, in fact at the Tagore Festival, which was being held, bizarrely not in Derby, Bradford, Southall or any other British Indian haunt,  but rather in rural Devon.

About 2,000 people had descended on the new age town of Totnes (where I once went on a shiatsu course)  earlier this month for The Tagore Festival, held to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the famous Nobel prize winning Bengali writer and artist’s birth.

Auto rickshaws, creating the India vibe, plied festival goers up to the Dartington Hall Estate, a venue deliberately chosen because it was turned into a centre to promote arts, sustainability and social justice in 1925 inspired by Tagore, then friends with the owners, Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, who had visited his famed Santiniketan in West Bengal, where Gandhi sent his children. The two men actually shared a lot of values but Tagore was not an ardent nationalist like the Father of the Nation.

Dartington Hall is a grand stately home inside a huge luscious estate in the county of Devon, not known for its Indian connections. For the festival, a huge elephant had been erected on the lawns, with garlands around it and a smell of curry wafted from tents erected to sell chai and samosas.


Intellectuals, hippies and middle-class families intermingled on the lawns as Indian fusion music pounded out from speakers.


Surprisingly, most of the delegates on the day I went were Caucasian and not Asian. I had thought it would be a draw for the British Asian community, but a bit like yoga, curry houses and Asian underground music, Tagore seems to have imprinted himself on the non-Asian British psyche possibly more than that of the psyche of the Indian origin community in the UK.

Like many young Indians, I too, had heard of, but never read Tagore. That is until I got to the exhibition where his poetry moved me. It was as powerful and enlightening as that of Shakespeare or Wordsworth. I was surprised it was not taught in every Indian school. My Indian friend informed me Tagore was taught in West Bengal but not, for example, in Maharashtra, which I found strange. To me, he was India’s Shakespeare – surely he should be on the national curriculum - or maybe there is someone better? 

The festival consisted of a series of speeches by different speakers ranging from Deepak Chopra to Mark Tully and there was also an exhibition of Tagore and his relationship with Dartington Hall. This included genuine letters from Tagore to the Elmhirsts. 


One of the most bizarre items on exhibit was a real grey wiry lock of the poet’s beard inside a plastic case. The grey hair had apparently been sent to Dartington upon Tagore’s death in 1941; his robe and hat that he had left there were also on display. This lock of beard, perfectly preserved, became a major taking point in the Indian press afterwards.

What impressed me somewhat more than that was how much of the community of Devon had been doing Tagore-related activities to celebrate Tagore’s enduring spirit. So, for example, students from nearby schools had created a Tagore sculpture trail made out of intricate carvings inspired by Tagore’s poems using oak grown on the estate and milled locally. There was also a bell made by a local sculptor in his name.


 Five local schools had taken part in an all-day art workshop combining Tagore’s writing with art. It was heartening to see the Indian poet having such an influence on English schools and young people.

But most people on the day I went were there for Deepak Chopra’s two sessions which had queues stretching across the lawn. 


After signing copies of his new (56th?) book, Chopra went on stage to give a speech.

“I do not know why but I felt good when I read his poems,” the qualified doctor and multi-millionaire author said, revealing he was 12 when he started reading the poems. “Sometimes in medicine you encounter death and there is solace in his poetry and it allowed me to transcend even the fear of death,” he said quoting from Tagore’s poetry.

I was not aware of the moment

When I first crossed the threshold of this life.

What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery

like a bud in the forest at midnight!

When in the morning I looked upon the light

I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world,

that the inscrutable without name and form

had taken me in its arms in the form of my own mother.

Even so, in death the same unknown will appear as ever known to me.

And because I love this life,

I know I shall love death as well.

In a private interview with me before the speech, Chopra, a down-to-earth man who lacked the social pretensions one might expect from a millionaire, said: “Tagore has great relevance in the world today when you look at for example the ecological devastation happening all around us. “ He explained that Tagore believed the universe was inseparable from the stream of life running through our veins and Tagore would be very unhappy with the way the environment was being destroyed.

“I think Tagore would be disappointed with modern India, the fact that the country boasts about being an emerging superpower when it has more malnourished children than in Sub-Saharan Africa and politics is rife with corruption. 350 million Indians live in radical poverty,” he said. He said Tagore would want to see India pursue a more “authentic spirituality.” I asked him to elaborate. “ The spirituality there is the same old stuff that’s been recycled over 1000s of years  from gurus to disciples, it’s very self-absorbed and not about helping others, nor is it practical, with some exceptions, it is very narcissistic,” he said.

He was critical of the lack of state support for Tagore in India. “He’s better known in south America than in India because India does not promote him at all. Very few people in India have read his works because India is on a race to conform yet he is as great as Shakespeare. India does not promote him at all. How many people know about this festival?” he asked rhetorically.  It was indeed strange that the profile of Tagore, India’s only Nobel laureate in literature, was not higher.

Satish Kumar, a former Jain monk, who edits Resurgence magazine, and was the artistic director of the week-long event, also criticised the Indian Government for not supporting the British event.  “The Indian Government did not support the festival,” he declared. “I asked them to pay for some Indian artists to come here and they would not so they did not come. Mark Tully came at his own expense. People in England know more about Bollywood than Tagore.”

He blamed it on the modern Indian growth story: aggressive pursuit of economic growth, above spiritual, personal or artistic growth.

“Tagore would not approve of the way the main thrust of India at the moment is economic growth and materialism, and that despite 60 years of Independence in India, millions of people there are without homes and food,” he said.

He added Tagore would be heartbroken with the whole world today, not just India. He was referring to the materialism and destruction of natural resources everywhere.

He added that Tagore could lift the spirit of the common man and was accessible to him. “He should be taught in every school. He is widely read in Bengali schools but not elsewhere,” he explained.

Kumar also gave a speech in which he spoke about the importance of “using our hands”, “our imagination, spirituality and creativity” and “working at a local level,” commenting that “that was religion,” and what Tagore advocated. “We should replace the three R’s, that is reading, writing and arithmetic, with the heart, hands and head, “ he commented:  “We are all connected. Tagore is the Shakespeare of India because he touches the depths of the human soul and that is the gift of Shakespeare too. How to treat land, people and nature – all this can be found in his writings. He taught that the natural world is not just a source of economic wellbeing, but also spiritual wellbeing.  For Tagore, God is not someone in the clouds; he is a divine presence in all living beings.”

I liked this concept and it reminded me of the essence of Shintoism. Kumar was very pleased with the turnout, despite the low attendance of British Asians: “It’s a people’s festival. Our aim is to popularise Tagore,” he said. "We have had people fly in from overseas."

But the one woman I spoke to sunbathing on the lawn, said she was there because of Kumar, not Tagore, or even Chopra. "I just love his magazine Resurgence and his thinking about everything in the world," she told me. "I am his soulmate. I came across his book in a second-hand bookshop. I had not heard of Tagore but I came because of Satish Kumar."

Amit Chaudhuri, author of five novels and who is a professor at the University of East Anglia, also gave a speech, in which he was critical of the English translation of Gitanjali, Tagore’s most famous work, saying it had a “semi mystical tone not present in the Bengali version” and the playfulness of Tagore’s writing in Bengali was lost in the translation, making the poems the property of “new-age people, spiritualists and Khali Gibran followers.

 “He is not widely read in India and that is because he is a nightmare to translate and those who do translate him, do so with plenty of passion but not enough judiciousness.  The common man does not have access to his writing, except in Bengali where it is popular kitsch culture,” he added derisively.

So while the literary world argued over what the real merits of Tagore were and why he isn't more of a success in today's society (unlike in 1913 when he was propagated as a literary genius) , I was left to mull over why the Indian and West Bengal governments had not jumped at the chance to promote their literary talent, the only Indian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, to the world. 

Perhaps they are angry with Dartington Hall Trust for making a killing out of selling 12 rare Tagore paintings at Sotheby’s last year and not handing the paintings over to them for free. Or maybe they simply thought the Trust had enough money to put on the festival following the £1.5 m auction in June 2010. 

One day in spring, a woman came

In my lonely woods,

In the lovely form of the Beloved.

Came, to give to my songs, melodies,

To give to my dreams, sweetness.

Suddenly a wild wave

Broke over my heart's shores

And drowned all language.

To my lips no name came,

She stood beneath the tree, turned,

Glanced at my face, made sad with pain,

And with quick steps, came and sat by me.

Taking my hands in hers, she said:

'You do not know me, nor I you--

I wonder how this could be?'

I said:

'We two shall build, a bridge for ever

Between two beings, each to the other unknown,

This eager wonder is at the heart of things.'

The cry that is in my heart is also the cry of her heart;

The thread with which she binds me binds her too.

Her have I sought everywhere,

Her have I worshipped within me,

Hidden in that worship she has sought me too.

Crossing the wide oceans, she came to steal my heart.

She forgot to return, having lost her own.

Her own charms play traitor to her,

She spreads her net, knowing not

Whether she will catch or be caught.

~Rabindranath Tagore