A Favorite Parlor Game

Among those volunteers and interns who have been around for any length of time, it has become a favorite parlor game to dissect the many perceived failings—institutional, managerial, missional or otherwise—of Seva Mandir. Anyone who must daily navigate the organization’s strange and tangled byways soon finds that it is not a particularly well run or efficient entity, and neither has it been, by many measures, particularly successful at achieving its aims as a development organization. Theories, or pieces of theories, in the way of explaining these failures abound: the organization is too big, or it got too big too fast; upper management, such as it exists, is incompetent, out of touch, or both; the organization is plagued by a glaring absence of accountability at all levels; it is too bureaucracy-ridden; its employees are demoralized, cynical, and lazy.

Each of these accusations contains at least a glimmer of truth and in some instances perhaps a good deal more, but none is especially useful in pointing toward constructive and realistic reform of the organization. And Seva Mandir is very much in need of reform—its problems are not merely the imaginary outgrowths of the festering frustrations of volunteers. Evaluations of its projects are regularly scathing, turnover among the staff is dizzying, and within the last three years, a number of major donors, including the Ford Foundation, have cut off funding. Seva Mandir should be soul-searching, or at the very least reassessing its direction and purpose—yet it doesn’t appear to be doing either.

The standard prescription among the volunteer punditry is for a massive bloodletting (a fantasy I admit to having also voiced on at least one occasion), which would simultaneously reduce the size of the organization, improve accountability (theoretically), and jolt the staff out of its stupor (and savings could go toward supplementing the paltry salaries of those still standing), but such a step ignores an obvious truth about the not-for-profit world: unlike businesses, which may always trim fat in order to improve performance, even when already making money, non-profits don’t make cutbacks unless financial straits absolutely demand it.

But Seva Mandir isn’t a business and shouldn’t be run like one. Efficiency is a cardinal virtue for any organization, but a non-profit must be careful to always view it as a means to achieving their goals and never as an end itself. Business is as much science as art; it thrives on predictability, certainty, and the efficiency that naturally derives from the two. There’s a reason the private sector isn’t lining up to build clinics, provide clean drinking water, or organize women in the impoverished corners of the world: development isn’t an efficient, predictable process, and it isn’t profitable. Despite at least fifty years of close study, it is almost entirely art and very little science. No business would, for example, attempt to promote sustainable land use patterns among pastoral communities in the African Sahel in order to forestall desertification—not only is there no money in such an initiative, but the probability of success is too limited, and too dependent on forces beyond anyone’s control, to merit the effort, not to mention the resources. Businesses don’t want challenges, they want formulas with easy-to-plug figures, and they’re much better at exploiting existing demand for a product than creating demand for something new.

According to their natures, the private sector and the development world have both divergent aims and divergent approaches to achieving them. Are they then to be judged by the same standards for efficiency and success? One wouldn’t ask Seva Mandir to abandon its non-formal education program because it is expensive and because the majority of its students aren’t ultimately returning to the formal school system, as is the goal. It is understood that attempting to return drop-outs and never-wents to school is a worthwhile endeavor; it shouldn’t be given up simply because it hasn’t achieved a level of success commensurate with the amount of resources being invested in it, or because Seva Mandir is getting more bang for its buck in other programming. Development is like medical research: lack of progress can’t deter further trials, further investment. If a product line fails, it is discontinued; if Seva Mandir’s drinking water pilot fails, are its drinking water efforts to be discontinued as well?

Certainly development organizations should be held to high standards of both efficiency and effectiveness, and for the most part, they are. Donors favor the most effective, most cost efficient organizations—philanthropic foundations, international NGOs, and governments don’t enjoy squandering their money any more than businesses do. But quite simply, calculations of effectiveness and efficiency for the private sector and for the development world require different metrics, and we shouldn’t expect, nor should we even want development organizations to perform like corporations. That is not to say, however, that Seva Mandir has nothing to learn from the world of business, only that it won't better serve the rural poor of Udaipur District by eliminating programs that have produced disappointing returns on money invested.

At Long Last, the Pilot Receives Approval

It was approximately four o’clock in the afternoon on March 31 when word finally came: the clean drinking water pilot project had received official approval from Seva Mandir’s Chief Executive. I arrived in Udaipur and began work on the morning of September 14; March 31, then, was my 200th day (if one counts vacation and weekends) with Seva Mandir. Work on the pilot hasn’t yet begun; it is at least another week off, and probably two. Had I been given some premonition of the start date of work on this, my project, upon arrival in Udaipur—a date attached to a fact, shimmering with the light of undeniable truth—I wonder how I would have received it. With surprise, certainly, but a surprise which may have quickly given way to fear. “Am I going to be hospitalized for an extended period?” I might have worried. Or perhaps I would have rationalized: certainly I was fated, in the months ahead, to be diverted for some time in work of more immediate interest to the organization?

But, alas, neither scenario approaches the truth. It has simply taken this long to assess needs, to craft a strategy, to explore the logistical dimensions of that strategy, to create a proposal reflecting those logistical realities, and to have that proposal approved. I’ve written previously on this blog about the incremental nature of development, about how its progress should be measured in generations, but if all development moved at the pace of my little drinking water project, I think we would do better to measure it in centuries.

Four months ago, on December 1, I received the results of bacterial tests conducted on six drinking water sources in Dhala, the pilot village. The previous day I had collected samples from four of the community’s most commonly used wells and two randomly selected households, packed them in ice, and whisked them off to the lab. The results of the tests were startling: None of the samples met the WHO’s minimum standard for levels of coliform (fecal) bacteria—a maximum of 10 organisms/100 milliliters of water. More distressingly, three of the samples—those from the two most commonly used wells in the village and one of the household samples—revealed bacteria counts in excess of 1,800 organisms/100mL.

In all likelihood, nearly everyone in the village was drinking unsafe water, and many were drinking water so contaminated it could give an elephant the runs. The two heavily contaminated wells provide drinking water for eighty-two households—30% of the village. How many others were ingesting hundreds of coliforms—literally—with each sip? And this was the beginning of December; the most dangerous period for drinking water is thought to be from May to August. During the months leading up to monsoon (May and June), many wells run dry and more dangerous sources must be drawn from; when monsoon arrives (July and August), wells are inundated by rainwater and effluent gushing down from the hills, a shit-dimmed tide mingling with the well water. What would tests reveal then?

It would certainly be enlightening to conduct a household health survey in Dhala now. How many cases of typhoid would be reported for the last four months? How many bouts of diarrhea? How many instances of hepatitis? Cholera? How many days of school will have been missed due to waterborne illness? How many days of work? How much income will have been lost? How much discomfort endured? How much misery? Meanwhile, Seva Mandir’s strategy is to deal first with protecting the community’s water supply. Purifying the water will come later, once sufficient momentum has been built within the community for the idea of clean water, the idea that it is something worth investing in. Besides, I am told, people aren’t yet ready to use and maintain a household-level filter, no matter how simple. It’s better to move slowly with these things. Communities must be prepared for changes in thinking and doing; things don’t happen merely because we want them to.

And they’re probably right. Certainly I’ve never implemented a project on the ground in the developing world—not in Africa, nor in India, nor in Rajasthan, nor in Udaipur District, nor in Jhadol Block, and certainly not in Dhala. I must take them at their word; I must trust in their experience, for I haven’t any of it. I make inferences based upon what limited observation I have done here; I calculate probability with a limited set of data. I am not so arrogant as to presume that I know better. Am I?

We will protect wells with walls; we will repair handpumps; we will educate the community. It can’t hurt. Some of it may help, even in the long-term. But I’m afraid that it won’t. Still, after nearly three months of bearing the private indignity of having my ideas undermined and ignored, I am now entirely resigned to the progress of the pilot as currently constituted. After all of this time, it is moving forward, and I am content in that. It is the three months that irks now, the 200 days, the four months elapsed since test results revealed horrific contamination. Certainly this isn’t a case in which torpor is a virtue. Contaminated water continues to be consumed. Volunteers and interns at Seva Mandir are told to scale back their expectations; perhaps Seva Mandir should be meeting us halfway. The notion that change takes time, that development is a painstaking process is a valuable, practical insight—it shouldn’t also be an excuse.

Spring Comes to Udaipur

Spring has arrived in northern India and along with it a measure of relief at the discovery that the changing of seasons here is not merely accompanied by a change in temperature—it may be observed in other transformations as well. Winter had seemed nothing more than a cooler continuation of the post-monsoon autumn; granted the days were shorter (though thankfully not so short as I am accustomed), and a stubborn haze descended upon the city, but the sky was as cloudless and nearly colorless as ever, the sunlight seemed just as direct, if not as intense as it had when I arrived, and the city’s flora surrendered its verdure so deliberately that any change in its hue was scarcely perceptible. Now the coming of fervid spring has had a curious double effect on the plants of the city: some—the bougainvillea and its bushy and creeping brethren, marigolds, roses, and other perennial flowers—bloom riotously, as if in a hothouse; others, primarily trees, betray the pains of an unrelieved thirst. In the past month, the two silver oaks bordering my squarish courtyard, always untidy, have discharged their frond-like leaves onto its surface with a redoubled intensity. The leaves’ former mossy greenness has been subsumed by a sere brown; they crackle underfoot like a gravelly rasp.

The same divergent fortunes can be traced in the flora of the countryside. The hills have never been so ugly in the candid light of mid-day as they are now—even those not entirely denuded seem brown and barren and wretched. The effects of irrigation are manifestly obvious: where green greets the eye water has been channeled. No other living thing, in such impoverished circumstances, can hope to put on such signs of health. The lone exception is a native tree sparely distributed among the hills; its deeply orange blossoms seem unnatural, like the icing confections of a cake decorator. From a distance the trees are beacons, their blossoms fiery heralds of softer springs, lovelier worlds than this.

It is not only the plants that awaken, either; spring in India means rebirth and reawakening for certain segments of the animal kingdom as well. Insects suddenly pullulate: mosquitoes haunt my evenings and flies my morning walk to work; ants march; and a swarm of bees closed the balcony on the third floor of Seva Mandir’s library for days. Bird calls, never silenced, seem more spirited, more resounding. Puppies abound, presenting poignant miniatures of their mongrel parentage (but, alas, a less heartwarming sight when one contemplates their certain fate). The bulls, as if agitated by the heat, are quicker to lock horns and the bristle-backed pigs less active by day, likely for the same reason. A form scuttling along the wall in the kitchen one night proved not a mouse, as I had feared, but an unblinking gecko, returned to life from months of secretive slumber.

The light of the sun has altered too; it is whiter, purer, and, like a newlywed spouse, more honest and less forgiving. The world is better illuminated by degrees; the light, though, is not yet hard and cruel, only brilliant and vaguely unreal, almost otherworldly. Strangely, clouds have begun to appear in the afternoons, shading the world from the sun. Sunday night I heard thunder for the first time since arriving; Monday afternoon the world became gray, and the thunder returned. Lightning flashed in the distance, and a strong wind bent the trees and bushes, scattering the vibrant blossoms of the bougainvillea. A little rain fell. As I walked home, the road seemed newly made—I couldn’t remember when I had last seen pavement glazed by rainwater.

The small storm seemed a revelation, although of what sort, precisely, was not clear. In the India I have known, clouds never worry the face of the sun, and the air is eternally limpid and breathless; rain never keeps down the dust in the street. In such a world, the rumble and flash of a thunder storm assume a primal gravity; they brim with mystery and meaning. Only I fear I’m insufficiently attuned to tease out that meaning: I must be content with the knowledge that the world has indeed changed, as it is wont to this time of year, even in these latitudes. Perhaps the bland and featureless days of sunny calm have truly gone elsewhere, at least for the time being, and if so, I am glad for it. Even if this is as no spring I’ve known before—I’ve held no vigil for the purple-headed crocus or the first robin, harbored no expectation of tulip blooms and cherry blossoms, mourned the passing rites of March Madness and Opening Day, unobserved—the season remains a profound symbol of growth and rebirth. Even the sun can become a weighty emblem of death when it shines so long without opposition.

Reduction, Third Attempt: Playing Fortune-teller, Pt. 2

The trend of farming supplemented by migratory wage labor seems a rough compromise between the desire of the Indian farmer to remain on the land and the desire of the Indian government to see him off it, and yet it is not a compromise that is acceptable from either an economic or social standpoint: under such an unregulated, ad hoc arrangement, too much arable land lies fallow, labor flows and productivity for those industries dependent on the migrant force are unpredictable, and the costs to families imposed by the ruptures of migration, though difficult to measure, are no doubt considerable. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) is, in some sense, an attempt to address this issue, and yet it is plagued by its own serious problems of graft and poor administration. Thus the question must again be posed: How to shift one-sixth of a labor force as large as India’s from the countryside, its ancestral homelands, the plow and the scythe, into the city, the SEZ, and onto the assembly line? Twenty-first century India is not Stalinist Russia; as Nandigram shows, the government can’t simply force people from their farms at riflepoint. Can it?

Meanwhile the pressures of the "agrarian crisis" continue to mount: Indian farmers must contend with the falling prices of many agricultural commodities, including rice; diminished state support for farm livelihoods; a dearth of credit; and, perhaps most ominously, the increasing adversity of meteorological events. Broad scientific consensus suggests that global warming will serve to intensify existing patterns of precipitation: wet areas will receive even more rain, thereby becoming flood-prone; dry areas will receive even less, becoming drought-prone. Semi-arid regions such as southern Rajasthan may tip toward desert and become largely, if not entirely, uncultivable; regions most buffeted by the monsoon in the South and Northeast of India, already menaced by floods on a nearly annual basis, may very well spend every June, July, and August under water. Thus Mother Nature, with an invaluable assist from human negligence, could, at least in part, do what the Indian government cannot: if the science of climate change is sound, many farm families may have little choice but to give up their land. They will migrate to the cities, downtrodden, aggrieved, and ill prepared for life outside of the village.

And global warming will make its presence felt in India in other, more insidious (though perhaps no less catastrophic) ways. Last year scientists were shocked to discover that ice cores taken from Himalayan glaciers revealed no evidence of the radioactive fall-out generated by atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s and '60s, thus suggesting that the glaciers have been shrinking for at least the past half-century. Given that the ice fields of the Himalayas provide drinking water for half of the Indian population, their diminishment is serious cause for alarm. A concerted national water conservation effort seems warranted, and the most logical first step would be to impose strict limits on the amount of water made available for irrigation, since the practice consumes far more of the resource than any other activity. From the Indian government's perspective, such an imposition would be doubly advantageous: not only would it conserve water, but it would further hasten the flight of the Indian farmer to the city.

Despite myriad hardships, most of the 16% of the workforce to be absorbed by the manufacturing sector will cling to the land. Farming for many Indians isn’t a way of life; it is life itself, all some families have known for millennia. Dozens of daily suicides attest to the fact that faced with economic ruin, many Indian farmers would rather die than forfeit their land. But if the Indian government is determined to thoroughly modernize its economy, to ensure that everyone shares in the rewards of the Asian Century—if it feels, as that old absolving saw goes, it must act for the good of the nation—by hook or by crook, it will have its way. Further blood will be shed, and the only matter in question will be whether more farmers perish by their own hands or via the clammy appendages of state sanctioned violence.

But for the loss of life likely to accompany a new, modernized, rationalized Indian economy, odds are that a rousting of the countryside wouldn’t threaten the legitimacy of the state. Repression would be decentralized and local, resistance fierce but fragmented, and the central government would be reluctant to intervene, both out of deference for state sovereignty and out of self interest. Those who remained on the land—after all, the overwhelming majority of rural Indians—would be grateful for their good fortune and inclined to remain silent, lest they also find themselves compelled to vacate. Nandigram, whose atrocities were well documented in the press, inspired the outrage of the intelligentsia and politicos in Kolkata and Delhi and a large demonstration or two, but little in the way of widespread condemnation from the masses—I have not once heard it mentioned in conversation in Udaipur. City dwellers might see little evidence of the enormities of their government’s policy and care still less; that is, until the displaced and destitute begin swarming into the cities.

Here, finally, is the event with the power to ignite the nation and all of its latent and not so latent prejudices. A migration of more than 100 million embittered and resentful village dwellers—one driven by resource scarcity, natural and man-made calamity, and government coercion, whether overt or not—into India’s already bursting cities over the course of, say, fifteen years, if not properly planned for and managed, could have disastrous consequences. Not only would such a migration strain already woeful infrastructure, thicken already clotted streets, swell the ranks of the unemployed, heighten competition for resources, and boost crime rates, it would also provide a ready supply of scapegoats for a political class whose strategy of first and last resort has long been one of divide and conquer. India is already a society of the aggrieved, and for the shrewd Indian politician, every grievance represents an opportunity. The opportunities proffered by a massive and rapid urbanization of the rural population (or at least a part of it) would be bountiful blessings indeed.

Put another way, the disaffection engendered by a Great Indian Migration—that belonging to both the dispossessed farmer and the put upon urbanite—would be a vein so deep and so rich that politicians would fall over themselves in their haste to exploit it. Disaffection, the fountainhead of Indian political power, is also malleable, particularly when felt generally, for general disaffection can be most easily twisted to desired political ends. Blame can then be assigned where most convenient: today to migrants, tomorrow to Muslims, the next day to upper caste oppressors. In the event of a face-off, both dispossessed farmers and put upon urbanites would have their cheerleaders, strategists, and co-opters among the political class—harboring excess stores of anger and resentment, the two factions would function as ideal instruments of political ambition. And it's not as if either side will require much goading in order to take up the lathi, cudgel, and torch, or much convincing to divert their wrath, as necessary, to other objects—those which best serve their political sponsors and their own preexisting prejudices—as, notwithstanding the Gandhian legacy, the impulse to violence is still strong in Indian society, as it is in most of the world.

It takes little imagination to conceive of a scenario in which the violence borne of such a conflict swiftly widens its clutches, spreads from city to city, escalates in ferocity, turning into something its political abetters can no longer summon, direct, and dismiss when convenient; the malignant feeling feeding such violence cannot be neatly allayed, being so deeply rooted and diverse in aspect that timelines for reconciliation must be understood not in weeks or months but in years. Of course such a scenario first depends upon a lengthy and improbable concatenation of neglect, misfortune, malfeasance, and treachery in order to come to life...but even that slight probability must be carefully considered. The Indian state is not nearly so stable, nor so assured of prosperity as is widely believed.

Reduction, Third Attempt: Playing Fortune-teller, Pt. 1

The answer does not much stretch the imagination; it’s an old story really, with a few contemporary twists. Too many people, not enough land—that’s how the most ancient strand goes. The trope about the government pushing to modernize its economy and getting pushed back has been around for a couple of centuries as well; a parallel tale is that of the agrarian nation urbanizing too rapidly. But too many people, not enough water? That’s more contemporary. And stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Climate change will make everything a whole lot worse.

The thesis isn’t terribly original, and the equation even simpler: Scarce resources that grow ever scarcer; an enormous, burgeoning, and largely uneducated rural population being herded against its will into cities; massive generalized resentment; a society divided against itself in more ways than can be counted; and a nation with a bloody history, a long memory, and politicians eager to exploit differences within the population for a soupcon of power. I’m not suggesting that large-scale civil strife in India is inevitable, or even that it’s likely; but I am suggesting that the Indian government—and the rest of the world, for that matter—ignores the elements in this equation at its peril. The future character and composition of the Indian state, and by extension that of South Asia, may very well depend upon the Indian government’s ability to relieve or sublimate the strain of those forces that have already begun to tug at the margins of society.

As has already been noted, 56% of the Indian workforce is employed in the agricultural sector; furthermore, seven of every ten Indians live in rural areas. For many reasons the status quo will not endure; for starters, agriculture is the least productive and least dynamic sector of the economy—if India is serious about achieving broad-based, pro-poor growth, it cannot permit the majority of its workforce to scrabble away in the fields at hardly better than subsistence levels. The problem is one perhaps inherent to the sector (no major modern world economy rests on a foundation of agriculture), but it is undoubtedly one driven by scarcity: ninety-six percent of Indian farmers work plots of two hectares (five acres) or less. It is the rural population that continues to drive population growth in India, and with each successive generation of farmers coming of age, family holdings are further subdivided, shares of land become smaller, and it becomes increasingly difficult to make a living from the earth.

It is already commonplace for farmers in India’s arid and semi-arid zones to migrate seasonally to towns and cities seeking work as wage laborers in construction and other unskilled trades (in fact, within Seva Mandir’s purview, families garner the majority of their income from wage labor, not from farming). Due to water scarcity and the absence of irrigation infrastructure, most are able to only grow a single crop annually, or two at best—farmers in those regions blessed by liberal rainfall are capable of raising three. However, given the inexorable carving of the fields, perhaps it will soon become common, if it hasn’t already, for even those farmers in high precipitation areas to spend at least part of the year as wage laborers in order to make ends meet. Yet in spite of the momentum of this trend, the hoped for demographic transition is no nearer as consequence; given the option, few Indian farmers will abandon their farms in favor of the better (though still miserably) compensated life of a full-time wage laborer. They will only turn from the land grudgingly, with rancor and bitterness, if they turn from it at all.

But given national economic imperatives and the exigencies of land and water scarcity, the pressure on the Indian farmer to leave his land is daily ratcheting in intensity. In 2006, current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—the former Minister of Finance who oversaw India’s economic liberalization in the early ‘90s—said, "Manufacturing has to be the sponge which absorbs people who need to move out of agriculture in pursuit of higher incomes." The government has predicted that the percentage of the nation’s workforce in the agricultural sector will fall from 56% to 40% by 2026--this perhaps reveals more an implicit goal than any expectation of organic economic reshuffling. And if India is to have any hope of addressing the astonishing poverty of the bottom third of its population, this is perhaps a low-end target. Even at that, is it a realistic one? How to induce more than 100 million people to move off of the land if they simply don't want to?

Some clues have already emerged: in several states the government, citing powers of eminent domain, has seized farmland for the establishment of Special Economic Zones (SEZs)—manufacturing and industrial centers often gifted to foreign consortiums and bundled with tax holiday bows and ribbons of relaxed labor and environmental standards. Farmers and their political allies have opposed such seizures on principle and claim that owners of expropriated land have not been fairly compensated. Last week in Punjab farmers blockaded railroads in protest of one such land grab; last March, in Nandigram, West Bengal, recalcitrant villagers refused to abandon 10,000 acres destined to become a chemical hub and at least fourteen were killed in the subsequent face-off with police. Violence flared again in November when Communist Party of India (CPI) cadres attempted to retake the land on behalf of the government; dozens more were killed and the cadres burned homes and corpses in a clumsy attempt to conceal their crimes.

Reduction, Second Attempt: Playing Doctor

Begin with history, which is perhaps the greatest predictor of such things. Though it’s tempting to view India through the gloss of that famous epithet “World’s Biggest Democracy”, its sixty years of nationhood have been more notable for their tumult than stability: three wars with Pakistan, and the conflict over Kashmir still simmering; war with China; the assassinations of two prime ministers; two years of emergency rule; battles with Punjabi separatists; and throughout, periodic flarings of civil unrest. Given such a history, it’s remarkable that democracy should have endured at all—many post-colonial nations have collapsed into authoritarianism or calcified as one-party states beneath far less wrenching pressures. Despite thirty years of relative political stability, however, India remains a nation wracked by forces that try the mettle of its democracy: Naxalite (Maoist) rebels in the South and Northeast; wrangling with Pakistan over borders and territory and the concomitant threat of terrorism on Indian soil (although it should be noted that terrorism in India has many faces and many objects); agitation over political and other reservations by Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and Other Backward Classes (OBCs); and the omnipresent specter of “communalism”—euphemism in polite society—the press, political circles—for Hindu-Muslim violence.

With Pakistan absorbed in a struggle for the preservation of its historically (more or less) secular and democratic state, it is communalism that is perhaps the clearest present threat to Indian peace and prosperity (although some would argue, and not without merit, that in its instability Pakistan represents an even graver threat to India than it does when at peace). The danger of communal violence seems especially keen now that the Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) is resurgent following important victories in state elections in December (including a volatile contest in the key state of Gujarat). Historically, BJP leaders have had little compunction about exploiting and even instigating Hindu-Muslim tensions for political gain. Indian politicians are, if anything, even more prone than their American counterparts to foist blame on their enemies for any national misfortune or disgrace—accusation and recrimination being a sort of double reflex in politics here—and the BJP is almost as fond of blaming Muslims and other non-Hindus for the country’s ills as it is the nationally ruling Congress Party. It’s no coincidence that the BJP played an incendiary role in India’s two most recent large-scale incidents of communal violence, each of which resulted in thousands of deaths, primarily of Muslims.

And yet, given the overwhelmingly Hindu character of the nation—82% of the populace, as opposed to only 13% Muslim—it seems unlikely that communalism itself poses an existential threat to India (unless, that is, it should manage to precipitate nuclear war on the subcontinent)—although not insignificant, the Muslim minority could not endure a protracted skirmish with Hindu nationalists. Though perhaps the most profound schism in Indian society, the Hindu-Muslim divide is not one so wide as to cause permanent rupture. In fact, no single divide in India is broad enough to threaten a lasting division of the nation; it is the aggregate fracturing of hundreds of minute divisions among its people that, given a single seismic event, one shaking the entire country, could cause the entire edifice of the state to crumble.

It is a terrible irony that some of the nation’s greatest strengths—its diversity, its commitment to political, educational, and economic inclusion of traditionally marginalized populations, and its strongly federal system of governance, among others—are also fundamental sources of division. In the U.S. we tend to think of diversity as an unalloyed good, a desideratum, something to be striven for as a just end in itself rather than as a means to some other goal, forgetting that diversity, however desirable and beneficial, is also very often a catalyst for conflict (which isn’t to say that it should ever be forsworn as a social goal or otherwise). India is a state comprised of thousands of ethnic groups, castes, sub-castes, jatis, and other distinct populations. It is the birthplace of three major world religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism), and with the exception of Indonesia and Pakistan, it is home to more Muslims than any other nation on the planet. The last census found that more than 1,600 languages are spoken within its borders. Indians joke that India is not a single large country, but thousands of tiny ones: travel only fifty kilometers from wherever you are, they say, and you will encounter a new language, a new culture. This is said with pride and a bit of astonishment; even Indians can’t believe how disparate the nation’s population is.

This grand diversity, so different from our conception of the term, one which defines diversity most readily in racial and national terms—diversity is the New York melting pot—isn’t inherently dangerous, especially so long as all of its constituents share some common identity or sustaining narrative of unity. This isn’t necessarily true of India, where, despite a visible patriotism among its people, significant segments of the population tend not to identify with their country of birth and residence (one old man in a village I visited in September didn’t even understand that he was a citizen of a broader political entity called India). The nation’s extensive system of political, educational, and employment reservations for SCs, STs, and OBCs—an impressive and commendable program of affirmative action—has often exacerbated this disassociation from nation in favor of narrower allegiances to caste or tribe.

The reservation system, conceived of to speed the integration of all segments of the population—specifically those historically repressed—into broader Indian society and to redress past injustice, has, in some cases, resulted in the hardening of traditional distinctions. Ethnic identity often becomes more important than national identity, because it affords advancement; resentment builds among the non-SC, ST, or OBC population, particularly its impoverished elements; unrecognized marginalized groups agitate, often violently, for legal recognition of SC, ST, or OBC status; and recognized SC, ST, and OBC groups stridently oppose the efforts of these groups because their recognition will result in a reduction in the reservations of the already recognized groups. In Rajasthan, the Gujjar people currently seek ST status and are employing large-scale demonstrations and blocking roads in pursuit of that end; their fiercest opponent hasn’t been the police but the Meenas, one of Rajasthan’s ST groups.

Given India’s history, diversity, and vastness, both of area and population, the nation’s federalism is both strategic and concessionary—it seems the best way to govern an enormous, far-flung, and multifarious population as well as a necessary acknowledgement of the country’s heritage of fragmentary administration—even the British failed to bring the nation under a single, central government. India is nearly as much colonial fabrication as any African state, and perhaps the only thing in which Indians have ever been united was their detestation of colonial rule; thus the reliance on a system of governance in which Indians states have been given an autonomy of which the American Federalist Society would heartily approve. Yet federalism has also perpetuated the historical geographic and cultural divisions of the subcontinent and highlighted the inequalities between populations—the development of southern states such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu is several generations advanced beyond that of others like Bihar, Orissa, and Assam, where the quality of life of inhabitants is more typical of sub-Saharan Africa and the world’s least developed countries than what one would expect of an emerging economic power like India.

In the minds of Indians, state lines are too often more than imaginary boundaries; they are tangible demarcations of different peoples. In a nation where everyone is an “other” to everyone else, state affiliation is just another way of defining the “otherhood” of another person. And the fracturing of state identity is not yet complete: three new states were born in 2000 out of old ones—Uttaranchal from Uttar Pradesh, Jharkand from Bihar, and Chhattisgarh from Madhya Pradesh—and it seems likely that another state, to be called Bundelkhand, will emerge from Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh by the end of the decade. Tribal regions in several other states, following the lead of Jharkand and Chhattisgarh, are also working toward independence. The further atomization of the Indian state, with all of its ramifying social implications, seems inevitable.

On January 27, Raj Thackeray, the leader of the Maharashtra Navnirman Shena (a Hindu nationalist party and affiliate of the BJP), publicly denounced the presence of North Indians in Mumbai, specifically citing emigrants from the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (incidentally two of the poorest states in the country), claiming that they were taking South Indian jobs and insulting South Indian culture with their adherence to native practices. Mumbai is India’s most cosmopolitan city; Thackeray’s outburst was roughly equivalent to Al Sharpton telling all of the Mississippians and Alabamans in New York City to get the hell out. Thackeray’s xenophobia (if it can even be called that) seems absurd, and yet it inspired a wave of violence that left at least one man dead; on Saturday Thackeray warned against public celebrations of Uttar Pradesh Day in Maharashstra, suggesting that Shiv Sena members would put down by force all who disobeyed his extralegal proscription. The hullabaloo surrounding Thackeray is a morbid outgrowth of an endemic prejudice: in private conversation I have been told by educated South Indians that North Indians are generally unfriendly, arrogant, and disdainful toward those who don’t speak Hindi, and many North Indians' opinions of Southerners are equally derogatory.

Hindu vs. Muslim (and other non-Hindus), caste vs. caste, tribe vs. tribe, state vs. state, tribal vs. non-tribal, North vs. South: all are divisions daily in evidence in India’s newspapers. The largely invisible divisions and resentments of class, education, and rural vs. urban populations are no less profound for their latency. In a nation of a billion ruptures--some tiny cracks, others daunting crevasses, but none so large as to alone be capable of collapsing the idea of the Indian state--what sort of force is then capable of convulsing the entire nation at once, thereby acting on multiple ruptures concurrently?

Reduction, First Attempt: Like V.S.

I have quixotically hoped, during my time in India, to arrive at some confident assaying of the Indian character—the spirit of the nation, the psyche of its people, that sort of thing—knowing full well that it was, by its very nature, an impossible undertaking, and probably an undesirable one as well. I have wanted, in some sense, to do as V.S. Naipaul has so often done—to enfold an entire country, a people, in a single well-crafted sentence, to encapsulate them in a terse declaration, to reduce them to a single idea. Naipaul really has reduced entire peoples—that is the proper word—for he rarely has had much but scorn for the inhabitants of what people used to call the Third World. He has found them ignorant and superstitious and wanting for industry and originality; after having traveled much of the post-colonial world in the last half century, his assessment of the progress of its inhabitants is starkly uncharitable. They have grown and achieved little, he feels, since the lifting of the colonial yoke—the implication being that if a people clamor for independence, they should not then squander its dispensation.

It is likely that Naipaul has only escaped lasting opprobrium because, as a native of Trinidad, he was once one of the liberated peoples that he savages; just as only a black person can utter “nigger” and not be castigated, so can only a post-colonial describe his own country as a “picaroon society with its taste for corruption and violence and its lack of respect for the person” without serious censure (it also doesn’t hurt that his writing bursts with a rare intelligence and percipience). That’s not to say that Naipaul doesn’t acknowledge and tacitly condemn the deleterious colonial legacy, in particular its psychological effects; his position on the issue is not an extreme one, and yet his thinking does represent one particular polar strain—that the problems of the post-colonial world can largely be imputed to its people and culture—in the interpretation of its history. But in examining his work, one must accept, with the requisite grain of salt, Naipaul’s fundamental conservatism, his arrogance, his chauvinism, and the fact that these tendencies have only deepened with age (he has even gone so far as to recently deprecate the work of his erstwhile friend and fellow Caribbean native and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott).

An opposing strain of interpretation suggests that colonialism arrested and blighted the efflorescence of established and well-ordered societies the world over, where people lived largely peaceful and mutually reinforcing existences free from the taint of the unfettered pursuit of profit, the impulse to exploit the natural world, and the desire to master one’s fellow man. This romanticization possesses more than the whiff of the Noble Savage myth in it, and notwithstanding the slivers to be found in each of these strains of interpretation, it should be evident that the whole truth, as it invariably does, lies somewhere in between the two.

Naipaul has been especially critical of his ancestral homeland, and perhaps no nation has so embodied the frustrated promise of the pre- and post-colonial periods as has India. India’s value as a trading hub to the Portuguese, British, and French was enormous—it may very well have been the most precious jewel in the diadem of Empire—and few if any post-colonial nations have contributed more (both through its native population and its diaspora), in real terms, to the world economically and culturally since independence. Everyone is by now familiar with the presumptive narrative of Indian ascent: the still fecund IT industry, the febrile financial sector, the burgeoning professional class, the prodigious entertainment biz, the enlightened government (“the world’s biggest democracy”!)—we have entered the Asian century, even if it’s not yet evident.

And yet: the agricultural sector’s share of the economy is shrinking, even as it employs the majority (56%) of the Indian workforce. The epidemic of farmer suicides seems intractable, as does the scourge of female feticide. Primary school enrollment is abysmally low and the child mortality rate disturbingly high, particularly for a nation aspiring toward a position of global prominence--India was ranked only 128th out of 177 countries in the UN's most recent Human Development Report. The entire country has a mere 5,000 miles of four-lane highway; in comparison, China has constructed more than 15,000 miles of 4-6 lane access-controlled expressways in the last ten years alone. And while a staggering number of Chinese, 180 million, live on the equivalent of less than US$1 per day (the World Bank measure of extreme poverty), 370 million Indians contend with such destitution. That’s almost one-quarter again the entire population of the U.S. and considerably more than the 300 million living in extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa—and people speak of this impoverished mass as the “other” India, as if it represented some aberrancy.

Sir Vidia, the Grand Belittler, would undoubtedly seize upon the recalcitrant residue of brutality clinging to Indian culture as evidence of its prevailing backwardness: the feticide of course, but also the preponderance of lynchings, the acid attacks of spurned suitors, the culture of scholastic bullying (known as “ragging”; it seems to inspire at least one prominent murder case each month), the temple stampedes, the so-called “communal” violence (to which we shall return). Such appeals are a double-edged sword, however, as most cultures harbor an atavistic bloodlust, even Naipaul’s beloved British; an accounting of the signifiers of contemporary American brutality would likely consume the better part of an entire post.

What is most distressing about India, then, is not its brutality, which is quite commonplace even among so-called “advanced” societies, or its dismal social indicators, or even the boggling number of poor; it is the very real fracturing of its populace along hundreds, if not thousands of fault lines, both visible and invisible—cracks delineating religion, caste, class, wealth, politics, geography, culture, and language, among other things—which, when coupled with a tendency toward brutality among certain segments of its population, is the greatest cause for alarm. Though perhaps I am alone in suggesting such a possibility, it seems that India possesses more than the necessary ingredients for fierce and protracted civil strife—though one not imminent or even near enough to be easily discernible, it might arrive twenty or thirty years in the future, when the forces of cleavage have had time to widen small fissures into unbridgeable chasms of discontent and alienation.