The Reasoned Review

Three months after the eruption of Telangana’s latest independence movement, I want to take a few minutes to examine the issue at large. This dispute has caused so much fury and hatred on both “sides” that it’s easy to forget the genuine historical issues that lie at its root. Every two weeks or so, the students at Osmania University begin new demonstrations. The suicides have not ceased – in fact, they’ve accelerated. A bright young chemical engineering student, age 20, hanged himself a few days ago, leaving a note that specifically identified the delay over Telangana’s statehood as the reason for his death. He joins at least one hundred who have successfully killed themselves for this issue, and several hundred who have tried.

The many supporters of Telangana’s statehood with whom I’ve spoken invariably bring up the historical injustices their region has suffered. These date back to the pre-independence era, when the Nizam of Hyderabad, an “independent prince”, ruled Telangana as a fiefdom within the British Empire. The areas now comprising Andhra were under direct British rule, and as a result, those from Andhra gained exposure to the English language and institutions. This, of course, put them at a natural advantage after Independence, when India adopted an English administrative language and a government modeled after Britain’s.

India’s independence was a bloody, sorrow-filled affair that brought with it a raft of state-related problems, in many ways similar to Telangana’s present dispute. In 1956, the States Reorganization Act divided India along “linguistic” lines, wherein they tried to give every major language group its own state. Ironically, Andhra Pradesh was itself born of such a struggle, as the Reorganization Act largely sprang from agitations for a Telegu-speaking state, what later became Andhra Pradesh.

Any Telegu-speaking state would have to include Telangana, and so it joined the new Andhra Pradesh by what is now known as the “Gentleman’s Agreement”, which stipulated that Telangana be given a certain percentage of state spending with respect to population along with several other demands. Most notably, Telangana demanded – and got- an escape clause which would allow it to secede from Andhra Pradesh at any point it should wish. Later, Andhra tried to forget this aspect, but it forms the central part of Telangana’s legal argument for secession.

The Andhra Pradesh government violated the agreement before the ink dried. In not one year after the signing did Telangana receive any of the promised investment. The region was already “underdeveloped” with comparison to the Andhra region due to its separation from the British Empire and the pervasive corruption of its previous ruler, the Nizam. After centuries of feudal serfdom under the Nizam, Telangana found it had merely traded one oppressor for another.

The statistics bear this out. Telangana has received only 13% of irrigation projects in the state, and it faces discrimination in employment, education, health services, and many other areas. The average citizen of Telangana is noticeably worse off when compared an average citizen of Andhra.

In 1969, Telangana exploded into secession demonstrations that the Andhra police brutally suppressed, killing 300. And then began a long and humiliating list of “programmes” – the “Six-point plan”, the “Eight-Point programme”, etc – each valid only on paper. They essentially put the issue on permanent back-burner, allowing Telangana’s frustrations to slowly simmer for forty years, until now, when they again boiled over.

Irrigation is a major thorn. Telangana lies naturally on a plateau, and rivers tend to flow away from it. To add to that, the Andhra government built two dams that diverted away what little water reached Telangana. As a result, Telangana farmers find themselves at the mercy of the rains. Two or three years of uncertain rainfall, as they’ve just experienced, can utterly ruin them. The monsoons were three months late last year, and no one in India can afford the luxury of climate change denial. Each summer is hotter than the one before it. Telangana, being rain-fed, stands to lose the most. In many ways, this issue can be seen through a climate perspective.

Detractors of Telangana’s statehood generally employ “practical” arguments as to why it would be unwise to grant Telangana independence. Often, they refer, with no intended irony, to Telangana’s historical deprivation as a reason it “needs” Andhra to help it ‘develop’. I have even heard one vehement opponent claim that “they [people from Telangana] are just lazy – they don’t want to work and expect jobs to come to them.” Some level of overt discrimination is thus apparent, at least among certain circles – wealthy ones, I should imagine.

Others wonder whether Telangana will still rely on the fertile Andhra plains after it becomes independent, given the terrifying food inflation rate in India – a sore point to raise since a major aspect of this crisis is agrarian.

One also hears the problem of Hyderabad as a good reason this dispute ought to be evaded, or even ignored. Hyderabad is the capital of the consolidated Andhra Pradesh state, and it happens to be right in the center of Telangana. One reason why Andhra wanted Telangana so badly, many contend, is Hyderabad’s attraction as a capital. The Andhra region has no suitable city. And whether by deliberate planning or unconscious will, Andhra’s significant investment in Hyderabad (“colonization”, some would call it) became an unspoken claim to the land.

Hyderabad now stands as perhaps the fourth most-developed city in India, and it has attracted a surge of foreign investment. The city, hazy and overcrowded as it is, now sports dozens of shopping malls, every major fast-food chain, a “world-class” international airport, a burgeoning IT sector, four 5-star hotels, and a jet-set of American and European businessmen, promising to “do business”.

At various press conferences I’ve attended in my capacity as a newspaper intern I’ve heard Indian scientists, businessmen, and politicians, all talking about how Hyderabad knows no recession, how it will become a “world city” by 2015. Over the last two months, these pronouncements have had a tinge of worry to them. Everyone “knows” – or thinks they know – that if Hyderabad goes to Telangana, investment will be ‘scared off’.

One hears often how we must protect “Brand Hyderabad” at all costs. At press conferences and business luncheons, the Caucasian benefactors from America or Europe, those who write the checks, can be seen clucking their tongues in dismay. These protests are “bad for business”.

“Pragmatism” aside, however ,I think it should be clear that Telangana has suffered severe discrimination, and that they deserve some sort of redress for the historical disadvantage at which they find themselves. Further, they’ve been lied to, systemically, for more than forty years. Their anger is legitimate, and it cannot be deferred any longer. However, whether actual statehood is the solution to Telangana’s problems remains to be seen.

I admit my original reaction to these demonstrations was ignorant and uninformed. I saw this movement then as so much emotional nonsense – that even if Telangana had legitimate grievances (which, even at the time, I was beginning to suspect that they did) these pointless demonstrations distracted the political establishment from what should be the real focus of their endeavors: controlling India’s population, reducing the toxic brown cloud lingering above the subcontinent, ensuring equitable water and food distribution, and solving the land problem. I did not realize then that Telangana was agitating precisely for these things, albeit, only for themselves.

David Gargill from Harper’s gives us a harrowing account of decades of carcinogenic pollution from GE to the Hudson River, and its effects today (subscription only):

Before these “probable human carcinogens” were banned in 1977, PCBs [Polychlorine Biphenyl, a known carcinogen] were wantonly spewed from GE’s plants, and they continue to be detected at high levels in riverbed sediments and fish. For years, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation had abrogated its enforcement authority, unofficially sanctioning GE’s malfeasance. But pressure from several national NGOs headquartered in New York, as well as from Hudson-centric groups downriver from the plants, furnished a fresh impetus to act. Environmentalists had seized upon dredging the riverbed as the surest cure for the Hudson’s ills, and by the early 1980s the DEC warmed to the idea of doing its job, pushing for a dredging remedy to be paid for by GE. When the corporation and its unlikely allies in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls—company towns distrustful of bureaucracies—proved immovable objects for the state, the EPA stepped in, bringing the full force of the federal government to bear. In 2002, the agency issued a formal decision that called for dredging, ending GE’s overt resistance and getting the ball rolling (albeit in the manner of Rube Goldberg) toward the $780 million project that commenced this past spring. Over the next six years, some 1.8 million cubic yards of sediment containing roughly 250,000 pounds of PCBs will be removed from 490 acres of riverbed.

I think I speak for many when I say: It’s about time.

VARANASI, India—More than a million devout Hindus bathed in the Ganges River Friday, braving the risk of terrorist attack, stampede and petty crime for the chance to wash away the sins of a lifetime and open the gateway to heaven after death.

But perhaps the greatest threat to the devotees who flocked to Haridwar, India, on one of the most auspicious days of the triennial Kumbh Mela festival, was the water itself.

The river is intensely polluted with sewage and industrial waste. Water-treatment facilities have been unable to keep up with India’s rapid growth, often held back by a shortage of funds and other resources.

Now, the spiritually cleansing waters of the Ganges are about to get some cleaning of their own. The Indian government has embarked on a $4 billion campaign to ensure that by 2020 no untreated municipal sewage or industrial runoff enters the 1,560-mile river.

Oh, the irony is not lost on India – but maybe now they can wash away their sins without having to wash away the raw sewage immediately afterward.

Greenpeace with some great original reporting:

Last night three teams of Greenpeace activists blocked a train transporting nuclear waste to Cherbourg, the heart of the French nuclear reprocessing industry. From Cherbourg it was due to be loaded onto the transport ship Kapitan Kuroptev, destination Russia.   We’ve taken action to tell them that “Russia is not your dumping ground.”

Six Greenpeace activists chained themselves to the railway, at two locations en route to the fuel reprocessing facility. A third team of Greenpeace activists placed a truck on the rails in the centre of Cherbourg, along with a banner saying “Russia is not a nuclear dumping ground”. The train came to a halt just 50 meters short of our activists. For delaying the transport of the illegal nuclear waste they were taken into custody by the police.

The blocked train was carrying 500 tonnes of depleted uranium, just a fraction of what has already been dumped in Russia. The French nuclear companies AREVA and EDF claim there is nothing wrong with these transports, that the material is not waste but a resource that will be processed in Russia, and returned to France as fuel. Unfortunately that’s just not the case.

France is running into the same problem we all will if we begin switching our electricity production from coal to nuclear. What to do with the waste?

Lithium is a key component in “hybrid” and electric car batteries, and is also extraordinarily rare. It’s already evident that not enough lithium exists to replace the world’s existing internal-combustion fleet (more than 1,000,000,000 automobiles and counting) with electric technology.

In a bit of divine irony (god does play dice) most of the world’s lithium lies under South America – mostly under Bolivia’s famous salt flats, with some in Argentina. Car manufacturers and would-be industrial giants (Japan and China) are already trying to corner the market.

Now Toyota wants in, and has reportedly signed a major deal with Argentina to mine its lithium:

A key supplier of Toyota Motor Corp. has formed a partnership to mine lithium in Argentina, securing greater access to a metal critical to the production of future hybrids and electric cars.The partnership, announced late Tuesday, includes Toyota Tsusho Corp. and Australian miner Orocobre Ltd. They will develop a lithium mine in northwestern Argentina, and the project is expected to cost about $100 million, Orocobre Chairman James Calaway said.

So next time you see someone driving a hybrid car, ask them where they got the battery. My guess is that the emissions from mining all that lithium more than make up for the gas they save themselves from burning. (And don’t forget all our electricity comes from coal anyway. You know that ain’t clean.)

Bloomberg with a terrifying report:

Jan. 15 (Bloomberg) — Nissan Motor Co.’s factory in central China is making cars almost 24 hours a day, yet Pan Xiaowei still waited three months for her new Tiida compact to arrive at the dealership.

“It wasn’t like this a couple of years ago,” said Pan, 34, whose husband runs a property development company in Shandong province. “We used to buy and get a car straight away, and now you have to pre-order and wait.”

China overtook the U.S. last year as the world’s largest automobile market with sales surging 46 percent to 13.6 million, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. Nissan, Ford Motor Co. and Honda Motor Co. are running their Chinese factories at full capacity, with overtime and weekend shifts, and still can’t deliver enough cars.

“Based on our current growth rate and planning assumptions, the capacity of our two facilities will not be able to accommodate the expected future demand for our products,” Nigel Harris, general manager of Ford’s venture with Chongqing Changan Automobile Co., said in an e-mail.

This is not good. The article also mentions that cars are “ceasing to be a luxury item and are instead becoming a standard consumer product.” And there’s 1000 million of them.

Incidentally, China is already dealing with some major traffic issues, as the Daily Mail demonstrates:

I imagine they’ll be seeing more of this. A few weeks ago, The Nation ran a correspondence piece from Christopher Hayes in China entitled “The Great Leap“. In the opening paragraphs he lets us in on the magnitude of China’s automobile frenzy:

At a tour of a car factory in Chongqing, the guide from Chang’an Motors pointed to the boxy gray minivans rolling off the assembly line and, beaming, said, “There are 800 million Chinese peasants who need these cars!”

He’s right, of course. China “should not be expected to stay forever as a bicycle kingdom,” as Yu Qingtai, special representative for climate change negotiations, told us. But 800 million new cars–think about that for a moment.

Until we shake off this neo-imperial paradigm of “development”, I fear the “third-world” will forever be deceived into chasing an impossible dream, and irrevocably poison themselves in doing so.

Hyderabad is perpetually ensconced in a dim, grey haze. It penetrates every crevasse of every home, fills every lung, and obscures all vision beyond 150 meters or so. It flows, milky-white, from the nozzle of every vehicle (more than a million in Hyderabad alone), and stands as a testament both to India’s vaunted “development” and to the price she pays to attain it. Sitting atop a 5-story terrace one can view in three-hundred sixty degrees the dull miasma hanging low over the city, refracting the sunlight into a cloudy yellow glow.

And still they churn, the endless vehicles and their poisonous effluent. I am told that Hyderabad adds several hundred every day – and India as a whole, tens of  thousands. But it is hard to view such statistics with anything more than curious detachment. From day to day the crowds and pollution do not grow noticeably worse, and one can only meet the prospect of several million new cars by the end of the year with a dreary fatalism.

“What, are we not allowed to drive? Do we not deserve cars?” The civil servant, already receiving his share of bribes, asked with hilarious indignation. It was the same argument put forth by India and the other so-called “developing countries” at the Copenhagen conference. I have heard it often from apologists of India’s pollution, and I can hardly blame them. It is a terrible thing, to constantly be called a “developing country”, a member of the “third world”, to be looked down upon as a “backward nation”. These phrases have so entered the Indian psyche that I have even heard Indians referring to themselves, in all earnestness, as a “second-rate” people.

“Why should only America be allowed to burn carbon?”, he demanded,  “Do we not also deserve to develop? We are not your colony anymore that you may do with what you like! You cannot keep us in subjugation.”

It was an unanswerable argument. The only possible response – a vague gesture to the handkerchiefs one must clutch to their face in order to breathe – somehow failed to deliver the point. It would be difficult to explain that the sort of “development” India seeks is itself a Western construct, a bow to a new form of subjugation, that it implies a terrible poisoning of its “motherland”, oft extolled in song and poetry, but which in practice has been used as a giant latrine. It would be still more difficult to explain that India as a “developed” country is all but impossible, that we would require three Earths to give each of its 1,200 million inhabitants a car, and apartment, a flat-screen television and 3,000 calories per day.

But still one hears, from every podium: “By 2030 India will join the developed world.” Grandiose claims, but bless their hearts, they do give an impression of believing their own rhetoric. Do they know what it means, this “development”? Here one is obliged to start guessing – no one in a position to give a coherent answer seems capable of doing so. Taking aside the superlative definitions (“more steel production, more automobiles, more television, more money”), the unconscious consensus seems to be: To live as they do in the West. To have rebellious, well-fed children. To drive about in motorcars; and above all, to escape the crowds and corruption of the India they know.

“Once India is developed,” a wealthy banker informed me, “we will no longer have to look at that.” He pointed to a stinking open drainage ditch, running parallel to the road. It was rimmed with shanty tenements of cloth and aluminum – tents, really – where women did their washing in the fecal water and their numerous brood ran about naked as the day they were born. What did he think would happen to the ditch, to the people surrounding it? The ditch would be covered, of course, paved into a proper underground sewer. And the people? Well, perhaps they, too, would “develop” like this banker had; they would shed their rags, gain employment, move into a flat, buy a car (well, maybe a scooter), and join the middle class. Heaven is a world where everyone is rich. I’m sure many in India would be happy with a nutritious meal every day; but as India “develops”, their chances of getting even that begin to diminish.

Hyderabad is “developing” faster than most Indian cities and is now now considered an “IT capital of India. Shopping malls now tower where modest two-story houses sat only a decade ago. Several Indian IT companies chose to make their headquarters here (including, unfortunately, the Satyam ponzi-scheme) and the five-star hotels, of which Hyderabad now has four, sprang like mushrooms after the rain. The unceasing air traffic came to overwhelm Hyderabad’s ramshackle little two-runway airport, and, sniffing a “development opportunity”, it began expropriating land to build what would become India’s biggest airport. The facility at Samshabad opened in 2009 to great fanfare and adulation; encompassing more than 5,000 acres, it stood as the latest avatar of India’s “progress”. Hyderabadis speak with open pride of their beloved airport, of the “progress” it signifies, the “modernity” it heralds.

But what of that 5000-acre stretch’s previous inhabitants? I’ve asked quite a few people, but no one quite knows. Some say confidently, “that was government land” with the assumption that it had no inhabitants, while others say vaguely, “Oh, I’m sure they were somehow compensated.” None of the major newspapers focused on the villager’s situation, save for the Deccan Herald, which ran an article on June 24, 2000, when the airport was still being planned.

This article deserves to be read in full, but here is a taste of what went on (all emphasis mine):

About 1500 families of more than 10 villages near Hyderabad are spending sleepless nights. The people are faced with losing their homes, land and their livelihood as the government plans to acquire about 5000 acres to build the prestigious international airport in Shamshabad mandal near Hyderabad, abutting the Hyderabad-Bangalore highway. ”What is thisdevelopment? How is an airport useful to us?” asked Mrs Nagamani, mother of three sons, with tears in her eyes. Her village, Chinnagollapally, is one of the 10 that is going to be acquired. ”It is like mowing down a tree and making the birds homeless,” she said.

And another view:

Balaraj Goud of the same village said the only alternative open to them was to turn into rag-pickers, and then they would have to live with the ”sin” of displacing the present rag-pickers and depriving them of their livelihood. ”Perhaps the government should drop a bomb on us to spare us this trauma and then take our village for development,” Goud said bitterly.

At least the villagers received some remuneration, right?

The Shamshabad International Airport Land-losers Welfare Association points out that the government was dealing a double blow to the affected people. Not only is it displacing them, but offering a pittance of a compensation of Rs 45,000 per acre whereas the prevailing market rate is between Rs 160,000 and Rs 220,000 per acre.

On the bright side, at least the jet-setting businessmen, those gurus of development, will have a nice airport to land in, and a nearby 5-star hotel too!

Such examples abound. They are an inextricable by-product of “development” – at least, in the prevailing model – as inevitable as soot from a fire.

The dominant political slogan for the BJP a few years ago was “India Shining!”, to which Sonia Gandhi countered, “Who is India Shining for?” It was all meaningless political sloganeering, but Sonia’s response, I think, hit closer to the mark. At any rate, her party trounced the BJP in that election. But, having won, they turned around, as so often happens in politics, and began to advocate what they once denounced. India must shine after all – the world is watching. India was a land of problems, but those problems had a ready nostrum: Development!

Meanwhile, it is clear that as India “develops” its problems have tended to exacerbate, not ease. Social inequality is undoubtedly on the rise; where, before, the rich were merely well-to-do, now they command trillions of rupees, billions of dollars, while 500 million (almost twice the population of the US) still lives on less than 20 rupees per day. And more money inevitably means more corruption, something with which India has always wrestled, but which now threatens to swallow its fragile polity whole. The pollution in Hyderabad is quite characteristic of all Indian cities, and has begun to spread to the countryside. Trash now litters the entire 200 km stretch between Hyderabad and Warangal; the fields lay rotten and fallow, littered with so many plastic bags.

It is important to realize that these problems are borne of “development”, and they cannot be erased with yet more “development”. The pollution, the social stratification, the political corruption, the dilution of culture, the overpopulation – these are all the fruits of progress. Against them, what can one boast? That rich young men can finally buy Nike? That businessmen now wear suits instead of dhotis and travel first-class to New York? That 5 city-dwellers get a “European” flat for every 500 that sleep in the street?

“They laughed at him then, but Gandhi was a green thinker ahead of his time,” a wise coworker told me. And I wonder how many of India’s problems might have been avoided had they followed his prescriptions. In Gandhi’s numerous articles he consistently spoke out against mechanization, against the machine civilization, against cities, and even a centralized state. The India of his dreams was an exclusively rural country, “a village republic”, as he once called it, bereft of centralized politics beyond the level of a village council. I think Gandhi’s view of ‘development’ can be summed in his reaction to mechanized agriculture. “Show me a tractor,” he said, “that makes milk and fertilizer while it plows our fields.”

He was laughed at then, and even now evokes much derision among Indians. Predictably, the complaints against him are that he was “anti-development”, he “wanted to keep us poor”, he was a “selfish man”.  But taking aside his personal flaws (which, one must admit, were substantial), Gandhi stood as a nationalist, a defender against the corrupting influences of Britain (then the premier representative of “the west”), a pursuer of a vision of India which may have been flawed, but, in the sense which I think most would give the word, was at least “authentic”.

India today has transformed into nothing of the sort; it has shed whatever authenticity it one had and has settled, as if it already knew its place, back into an imperial role. With every Coca-cola sold, every pair of Nikes worn, India slips further  away from whatever independence it may have gained.

And looking now upon this wasted continent, half-developed, half-forgotten, one cannot help but feel despair. Unwittingly, India has allowed itself to become colonized once again!

The Telangana issue defies any resolution and now drags into its sixth week of open agitation. Hyderabad is once again on strike until the New Year; the buses have halted, the stores closed, and the city’s 2.5 million workers are taking a week off. The pretext for this recent outburst lies in the Congress Party’s qualification of its promise two weeks ago for an independent Telangana.

The Telangana masses, drunk with emotion, burned and rioted their way to a favorable statement from Congress, the ruling party. And only now, three weeks later, did they realize that the Congress Party has no say in this matter, that this is a question only India’s Parliament can definitely decide. When they were told as much, the Telangana leaders became infuriated and began spouting epithets about “betrayal”, “lies,” and so forth. K. Chandrashekar Rao, the leader of the separatists, thundered in a speech yesterday that Telangana would “go nuclear” if its demands were not met, that all 100 Telangana Members of Parliament and Legislators would resign simultaneously, adding to India’s storied history of constitutional crises. He also vaguely threatened that the strikes would devolve into violence, but this will likely happen with or without his benediction.

How indicative of the essential dysfunction in Indian politics, that it took three weeks to realize Parliament’s role in this affair! Any declaration of state separation is, after all, completely illegal without parliamentary approval, yet until now this apparently had not occurred to anyone. Two weeks ago everyone took it as given that if Sonia Gandhi (India’s un-elected puppetmaster) decided to separate Telangana, then bang it would go. Only now do they realize that India is not, after all, an open dictatorship; that Parliament, degraded though it may be, still carries at least some significance.

So, once again, Hyderabad is treated to the chanting processions, the emotional speeches, and occasional outbursts of violence. Superficially, one can see this as a stark affirmation of the endless divisions plaguing India, of the tribal mentality ( if you’ll pardon the expression) that pervades India’s politics. Anthropologists call it “coalition thinking”, Orwell was content to call it “nationalism”, but the result is the same tendency to mix one’s identity in with a larger group, to consider an attack upon one an attack on the whole, to be willing to light one’s self on fire rather than sacrifice group “prestige”.

A friend tried to explain it to me in American terms: “You know how in America you have white people and black people? Just like that, here we have ‘Andhra’ and ‘Telangana’.” He exaggerated, but not very grossly. Relations have not yet degenerated into institutional slavery, but people who hail from the coast undeniably consider themselves different from interior-dwellers. They speak the same language, but the most minor differences in slang are inflated to demonstrate their separateness. And every group wants its intrests to be put first; every group holds the other with cool contempt.

The Andhra-Telangana dispute is just one symptom of this line of thinking, and it goes far beyond state rivalries. Every language group is its own coalition, every geographical area, every caste, every sub-caste. I recently read of a massacre perpetrated by the higher-order castes in a nearby village, something which happens too often in India. A dalit (“untouchable”) had dared to use the public water-pump, and for that the villagers got together and lynched 40 members of his caste; their houses burned, and the corpses of their children were thrown in a pile outside the village. The thought process behind such an atrocity defies reason. One person’s “mistake”  counted as a collective transgression – and punishment went not only to him, but to his caste at large.

“In this country, we only care about ourselves,” explained a man on the street, “If I have food to eat, if my children are well, what more should I bother? What’s mine is mine. You worry about yourself.” His English stuttered, but he expressed his meaning with sparkling clarity. “Once we stop thinking like this, our country will be number one. What progress can there be when nobody cares about her? [and here he pointed to the pictured woman above.]“

But apart from the selfishness and nationalism of Indian politics, the Telangana issue is but one battle in an ongoing political dispute in India over the ideal size of its states. This argument has precedent going back to independence, when large swaths of India were carved into administrative provinces; first corresponding to the British system, then along linguistic lines, and now, to judge by the history of the past month, any group who agitates with sufficient vigor can form a state. The dispute sees a fairly even split along party lines: the Congress Party, India’s most powerful, prefers large states, and the various other parties, with their alphabet soup of names (BJP, TDP, TRS, CPI, CPI (M), CPI (M-L), etc.) favor smaller districts. Each claims their plan will allow for “efficiency”, “rural development”, “better use of resources”, and so forth – but no one seems to know which is actually better.

Of course, it would not be very difficult to conduct a survey, taking all relevent variables into account, and arrive at a definitive answer as to the ideal size of administrative districts. But it is a powerful feature of Indian politics that such a survey would never happen, that the various coalitions will sit content in their self-assured outrage. An issue which could, conceivably, be decided once and for all, finds itself artificially prolonged.

I do not know whether Telangana will succeed in its ambitions, much less do I care. I do know that India’s problems – its fearful poverty, its grossly unequal distribution, its lung-withering pollution, its systemic corruption – are much larger than this petty regional dispute. Still more do I know that the students and citizens now engaging in battle with the police could not be compelled to march in favor of clean air or an end to India’s stratified society. Some of this spectacle’s more cynical observers acknowledge that even if they get Telangana, nothing substantial will change; they will only have exchanged one corrupt set of rulers for another.

But to secure that exchange, the public burns its buses, and crack goes the police baton on the protesters’ heads. Taking in the emotional chants and the endless marches under the beating sun, one cannot help but think: How different it would be, were they to march against hunger, against farmer suicides, against the blue haze that permeates every major city! With what a voice could they rise against the staggering corruption, the millionaire legislators, the all-powerful police constables! The extent to which one becomes sensitized to such circumstances never ceases to amaze. Dostoevsky was right: Man can get used to anything.

After coughing abundantly on the blue smoke of the auto-rickshaws perpetually swarming through Hyderabad, I turned to a friend in disgust. And he shrugged! “What can one do? That’s the way things are” – it was the same response I receive when discussing corruption in Indian politics, how more than 40 convicted criminals contested last month’s municipal electons. “Politicians are corrupt – what can you do?” I have not spoken with one Indian who denies that their country’s terrifying overpopulation. Yet they take it as a matter of course that one must marry and have children. “Cheh, you must have children! Two or three at least! Otherwise how will you live?”

A peculiar strain of escapism pervades this Telangana movement. The Indian youth desires nothing more than to escape the corruption, the poverty, the mind-boggling overpopulation, the roads choked with filth, and make a nice life for themselves in America. But if they can’t? Well, then at least they have their regional pride – at least they can agitate for Telangana! It is a proxy issue, a veiled symptom of a far deeper illness. That the masses of India remain petulant, divided, in the face of it all might suggest, as V.S Naipaul once suggested, a “defect of vision”, which no measure of “development” has yet corrected.

Looking forward to India’s future, I am pessimistic. An auto-rickshaw driver gave me a toothless grin as he pulled out seven soiled, crumpled black-and-white photographs. His seven children.

India! Where the streets run yellow
With the urine of every fellow
Horns blare loud, and crowds roar large,
Where pollution and apathy paint a collage!

India! Thou hast reached your limit
Of people – 5,000 born every minute!
Well, no matter, you’ll make them room,
If it gets too crowded – send the poor to the moon!

India! Bullock cart and airplane!
Where life is a misery, and life is a game!
Light and darkness live side-by-side
And you know one takes the other for a ride!

India! Giant caught in a lurch
Both modern and rural, and you know which is worse!
With coal and petrol, you move farther away,
They’ll never run out – or then, so you say

India! Adidas, Reebok and Nike
Creep their way into your national psyche!
The British have left,  but 60 years hence,
You still view it all through the imperial lens!

India! oh, the world’s largest slum
Where two meals a day means having great fun!
Skyscrapers tower, and tents sprawl beside
And the one and the other will never coincide!

Johann Hari gives us an excellent rundown of Copenhagen’s failures in today’s issue of the Independent. In it, he outlines the three major “discarded ideas”, which the rich polluters didn’t even bother to consider. Here are some salient passages, but the article is definitely worth reading in its entirety:

Discarded Idea One: The International Environmental Court. Any cuts that leaders claim they would like as a result of Copenhagen will be purely voluntary. If a government decides not to follow them, nothing will happen, except a mild blush, and disastrous warming. Canada signed up to cut its emissions at Kyoto, and then increased them by 26 per cent – and there were no consequences. Copenhagen could unleash a hundred Canadas.

Discarded Idea Two: Leave the fossil fuels in the ground. At meetings here, an extraordinary piece of hypocrisy has been pointed out by the new international chair of Friends of the Earth, Nnimmo Bassey, and the environmental writer George Monbiot. The governments of the world say they want drastically to cut their use of fossil fuels, yet at the same time they are enthusiastically digging up any fossil fuels they can find, and hunting for more. They are holding a fire extinguisher in one hand and a flame-thrower in the other.

As some of our more “conservative” elements might say: “Drill, baby, drill!”

Walking down an Indian thoroughfare in 2009 will strike anyone with previous experience of the country — something has changed. It isn’t so much the visible poverty, the pollution, or the surging, unceasing crowds; having grown, they still resemble their 1990s counterparts. Nor should the lawless traffic, the variety of vehicles, or the belches of black smoke they exude come as very much of a surprise. The rickshaws have multiplied, the cities sprawl, the population grows by, oh, 50,000 per day, but this is all very much as it has been. But one can now buy from any major US or European business; and therein lies the difference.

At the screening of a film on climate change, an audience member remarked, “Three years ago, in Hyderabad, there wasn’t a single shopping mall. Now there are eight on Banjara Hills Road alone. The city probably has twenty by now.” And so it does; great glittering concrete towers dot the dusty roads advertising McDonalds, Adidas, Gucci, and a hundred other brands.  Naomi Klein, in her excellent No Logo, attested that “the most successful corporations don’t sell products. They sell brands.” By that standard the Euro-American conglomerates who have wormed their way to the subcontinent have seen wide success indeed.

Wearing Reebok shoes, owning a Ford automobile, sporting Levi’s and sipping your Coke blares a clear message to the unwashed Indian masses: “I am not one of you. I have made it.” It is undeniable that association with western brands immediately elevates one, sets one apart from the teeming peasants below. They, after all, must wear no-name brands, and many consider themselves lucky to own one set of clothes. Living side by side as they do, the rich and poor occupy wholly different worlds, each as alien to the other as it would be to the moon.

An outgrowth of Indian capitalism which seems to be on everyone’s lips these days is the dreaded mining mafia. Consisting of large mineral firms and small scavenger operations, this interest group acts wholly outside Indian law, though nearly every lawmaker is in on the deal. Their power stems from the vaunted “deregulation” India underwent in the 1990s. The Indian Government  sold its mining operations then to private corporations at ridiculously low rates. These companies turned around and began exploiting their newly acquired resources at fantastic profit. Many of these mines lie on ‘tribal areas’ – undeveloped forests where dwindling communities carry out a traditional, pre-industrial lifestyle. With their new lease on ‘development’, the mining conglomerates began brutally clearing forests and villages, eager for the valuable minerals below. The villagers organized and fought back in an attempt to preserve their homes, at which point India began its notorious “Operation Green Hunt“, a devastating offensive using modern weaponry on landless farmers, much in the manner of America in Pakistan. Here, too, government acts only in the interest of the wealthy.

A typical report from Operation Green Hunt:

Gachanpalli is a small village some 30 km from the town of Konta in Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh. According to witnesses, the security forces raided Gachanpalli sometime in late October. They allegedly killed Madvi Admaya, Madkam Sulaya, Madvi Joga, Kovasi Gangaya, Madkam Moiyi. Witnesses say four of the five men were past 60 and too old to escape into the jungle. Madkam Moiyi was apparently crippled and incapable of walking. They were said to have been bayoneted and shot to death in the middle of the village.

Or take, for instance, the actions of Coca-Cola, a brand much beloved in India, whose customers number in the tens of millions:

Tests conducted by a variety of agencies, including the government of India, confirmed that Coca-Cola products contained high levels of pesticides, and as a result, the Parliament of India has banned the sale of Coca-Cola in its cafeteria. However, Coca-Cola not only continues to sell drinks laced with poisons in India (that could never be sold in the US and EU), it is also introducing new products in the Indian market. And as if selling drinks with DDT and other pesticides to Indians was not enough, one of Coca-Cola’s latest bottling facilities to open in India, in Ballia, is located in an area with a severe contamination of arsenic in its groundwater.

One could multiply such examples. The corruption here would shock and disgust anyone used to its coy western counterpart. It is not uncommon for high-ranking officials to retire with tens of millions of dollars in bribes. India’s graft bears striking resemblance to “campaign donations” in the US, but it remains much more powerful, and impossibly more open. In India, enough money can induce the government to overlook anything.

This is a land of beggars and billionaires, where a single person could eliminate hunger, child labor, and slavery if he chose. “Some people in this country have trillions of rupees!” a friend of mine remarked, “They could feed every homeless man here, for generations! Why don’t they?” I admit I could not answer, but if pressed I would say: “Because the poor are invisible in this country.” How many times one sees a well-dressed young man avert his eyes to a destitute on the street! How often one hears a wealthy businessman arguing with a cab driver over what amounts to a few cents! India has finally imbibed that spirit of the free market (“make as much money as you can, and screw everyone else”). Thus, no one pays much attention to the plight of the poor in India. “They’ll get on as they always have, why should I share with them?” seems the overriding sentiment.

In many ways, perhaps more than can be counted here, India mirrors America of the early 20th century. As then, one sees now in India a burgeoning middle class, a vast nouveau riche who can live like kings for the first time. Again, one sees the same disregard for environmentalism or even basic cleanliness, typified by India’s refusal to cut carbon emissions, but truly brought home by the clouds of car exhaust that permeate every major city and the rotting piles of refuse on every street corner. America in the 1950s, before the Clean Air and Water Acts, was incomparably dirty, where open sewage flowed into rivers, where one car in twenty had a catalytic converter, where factories and power plants blew their unfiltered smoke into the shifting winds. Before President Johnson’s “Great Society” legislation, the American ghettos were a terrible blight upon their cities, the chasm between rich and poor yawned wide, and one could still encounter open starvation on the streets. Just as one can in India today.

India resembles a spacecraft entering a black hole. As it crosses the event horizon, the front of the craft accelerates faster than the rear, causing it to stretch (theoretically) to an infinite length. The rich in India have become unimaginably richer in the past two decades, while the poor have seen no such gains. Much as the Rockefellers and Morgans of old, the Ambanis and Tatas of today’s India race ahead, amassing billions and trillions of rupees, while the rest of the country makes do with mere thousands. Just as in America, this is ceasing to present a problem. No longer do large sums of money taint one as corrupt, a thief – on the contrary, many young Indians today thirst for the chance to become the next Ambani, to make the next billion. It has become a national obsession, if such a thing can be said to exist.

One need look no further than the legion of “computer science” students choking the halls of every Indian university for evidence. The students I have spoken with give no particular reason as to why they should choose computer science; in fact, they invariably betray a strong distaste for the subject, but it is the easiest way to get a job and the surest way to find a place in America, so students flock to those programs by the million.

And so it goes, the steady, unyielding rhythms of India of old making way for the hyper-consumerist capitalism of New India. Yet more than one half of the country has been left behind. More than 500 million have no regular food supplies, no access to clean water. 400 million are illiterate. Today, the population mired in poverty is greater than the entire population of India in 1947, at independence.

But what grand eloquence we hear on India’s so-called “development”!

A young man on the street was gracious enough to share his opinions regarding India:

“Corruption is endemic here. Let’s say, for example, I get stopped by the police. I jumped a red light. Now I can either take the ticket, around Rs. 1000 or so, or I can simply bribe the policeman, say Rs. 200. Who, I ask you, would prefer to pay the ticket? 99.9% of us will just give the bribe and  be done with it. That sort of thing simply cannot happen in America.”

“Oh yes, income inequality is still huge, still a major problem, but I think there is reason to believe it is getting better. If you came here, say, 10 years ago, you would have seen it a lot worse. Come in another 10 years or so, and you’ll likely see it less. Can poverty ever be truly eradicated here? Probably not. The rich are getting a lot richer in this country; they have been for the past two decades. The poor have not seen anything like that; life for the bottom has continued in much the same way.”

“Pollution… well, what can you say about a people who throw their trash on the ground and then blithely forget it? These are cultural problems, but they are also political problems. You think there isn’t enough money to make it so that people don’t have to beg? You think we lack the knowledge and manpower – I mean, you think it’s beyond us to construct a decent municipal trash system, to make sure the sewer reaches all areas of the city, to make regularized trash pickup a basic right? Of course it isn’t, but the political will to enact such programs just isn’t there. The vested interests who run our political system would rather see our resources to go different ends. Their ends. Look at New York City – every vehicle has a catalytic converter, trash is superbly managed – hell, there’s a trash can on every street corner. We’re a long way from that.”

“In fact, I would say we in India are about 100 years behind the West.”

(At this, I demurred.)

“No, certainly we are! The things you take for granted there – social security, regularized pensions, food banks, homeless shelters, scrupulous policeman; we have none of those here. P. Sainath said that all the judges and magistrates in India don’t have the power of a single police constable, and he said it right. We hardly even have a sense of ourselves as a nation, as such. We would much rather identify with smaller communal structures: Religion, race, caste, social status, and so forth. What do the Indian billionaires really have in common with the destitute on the street? Not a damn thing.”

“But – and here is the rub – we are all implicated! Take the example of the policeman. Who will say they have never given a bribe?  I know I have. Our politicians – we say they are corrupt, we complain and moan, but in the end who elected them? We did. It is a vicious circle, without a beginning or end.”

“Perhaps I misspoke, however. If I could point to a beginning of the circle, it would surely be the population. All of our problems stem from that. But again, it is a cultural problem. Everyone gets married here; it is basically a law. And if you get married and don’t have kids, people will immediately assume something is wrong. The gossip one hears! ‘Cheh, did you hear so-and-so still hasn’t had a child? They’ve been married for more than a year! I think his wife may be infertile. Such a shame, such a shame!” One cannot escape talk like that, and one cannot, I think, live with it for more than a short time. So we are compelled to have children by a thousand different pressures. And one is not enough, you must have at least two! And woe unto you if they turn out to be girls, especially if you’re poor! In that case the dominant strategy is to just keep having children until a boy turns up. What can you do in the face of that? We distribute condoms, but nobody uses them – we hold sessions on family planning, but no one shows up.”

“About the future, I am not too optimistic. Our pollution corresponds directly with our need for an “affluent lifestyle”, and there is no getting away from it. We rely on coal to an alarming extent. Our population keeps growing and there seems no power strong enough to check it. 40% of our population is under the age of 30, but that is both a blessing and a curse. What will we do in ten years when they all start to want families?”

The Center for Media and Democracy turns us on to a thoroughly scurrilous attempt on the part of Big Gas and Oil to downplay the negative effects of CO2 output.

“CO2 is Green”, a new Montana-based advocacy group, derives its dollars from the Coal and Oil Industry and has the sheer audacity to claim that “There is no scientific evidence that CO2 [carbon dioxide] is a pollutant. In fact higher CO2 levels than we have today would help the Earth’s ecosystems.” without breaking into guilt-induced conniptions.  Here we have yet another example of “The Big Lie” technique. If you can make a such a statement as above on television with a straight face, many people will conclude that it must be true. No one could possibly be audacious enough to repeat such a patently absurd claim unless there was some truth to it of which the public is not aware. Thus, the idea that “CO2 is not a pollutant” will likely enter into mainstream discourse, despite the fact that almost every scientist declares the opposite.

Some of you may recall this is not the first time our oil companies have undertaken such an advertising campaign. Indeed, as Greenpeace revealed earlier this year, Exxon-Mobil secretly funded much of the Global Warming denial we saw earlier this decade. On podium after podium, cable news show after fabricated report, their hired “scientists” spread the claims that (a) Global warming doesn’t exist and (b) even assuming it does, Global Warming isn’t man-made. Now, of course, we see both of those statements for the patent falsehood  they present, but at the time they proved quite influential and likely set us back years in dealing with this problem.

Today, a new generation of pseudo-scientists, such as our friend H. Leighton Steward, a former executive of Enron, wish to spread the message that CO2 is a “net benefit” for the planet – and, presumably, that we are doing our earth a huge service by burning coal and oil.

Please watch their commercial. It gives an excellent overview of the false populism and junk science employed by the coal and oil industries to defend what remains, in the last analysis, a thoroughly indefensible business. And I would encourage everyone to do precisely what they suggest at the end by contacting your Senator, except instead of agitating for even more pollution, ask them to clear our airwaves of deleterious propaganda.