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by Jeremy Seabrook

The recent Indian election clearly shows the incompatibility between the economic 'reforms' which benefit only the minority elite, and the needs of the destitute majority.

Whatever the result of the elections in India signified, it was an emphatic vote in favour of social justice. It was a vote against a one-sided showy development of the consuming classes, whose conspicuous display of wealth had been presented to the world (and to the poor) as the essence of the new India, rather than as the superficial phenomenon it is.

It must be very inconvenient for the beneficiaries of this form of development that the poor have a vote that weighs as heavily as theirs. For the outcome, although a rebuff for communalism and xenophobia, clearly showed that most people do not feel they have participated fully in the economic 'success' which India is said to have enjoyed in recent years.

Yet this places the new government in an awkward and intractable position. It cannot disregard what the majority has said. Yet, at the same time, neither can it alienate the superior arbitrage of 'the market'.

The 'reforms' which Congress itself initiated in the early 1990s, and which were carried on with such ,clat and conviction by the NDA (National Democratic Alliance), cannot be reversed. There is, it seems, no turning back in the great adventure of globalisation.

Nothing could illustrate more clearly the dilemma confronting the administrators of the better tomorrow - and not only in India. If the concerns of poor people are not addressed, the government will swiftly forfeit the support that swept it to victory.

If, on the other hand, there are any archaic and old-fashioned attempts to resort to redistributive justice, if the rich should be asked to underwrite even the smallest improvement in the lives of the poor, their howls of protest will be registered by those sensitive monitors of well-being, in the stock markets of the world.

Foreign investors may take fright - and flight - and the economic miracle will, as miracles must in this life, evaporate. Government intervention is perceived as Marxist mischief, even if this is the only way to ensure the survival of the most vulnerable.

This places a heavy responsibility upon the Left - if their atrophied imagination can devise nothing more creative than an end to disinvestments and re-nationalisation, they also will do the poor no favours.

The early response - stock market panic as a reaction to the new government's promise to divert more resources to India's impoverished countryside - clearly shows the contradiction: the 'worry' of markets is pitted against the survival of human beings. This tests the UN Millennium dedication to 'halving the number of people in poverty by 2015'.

Is sympathy for the poor greater than tenderness for investors? It is reported that analysts accused the government of abandoning reforms in three crucial areas: privatisation of state firms, labour law changes and privatisation of power utilities - all of these involve the further disemployment of people in a country where tens of millions are without livelihood or underemployed.

How to reconcile the conflicting demands of poverty-abatement and the tendentiously named 'reforms' is the core conundrum facing the administration. The model which it has inherited is based upon the fundamental (and fundamentalist) belief that economic growth is the panacea for all ills. The growth rate of 7-8% is, apparently, sacrosanct.

Only by the creation of wealth, more wealth, much more wealth, will it be possible for the poor to experience some lessening of their poverty. Nothing must interfere with the making of money: this is the supreme axiom underlying globalisation.

The retreat of government from economic intervention, a wholesome abstinence from economic management, free rein to the adventurers and entrepreneurs who know the occult art of spinning straw into gold - these are the essentials for the holy mysteries of wealth-creation.

In this sunny model of progress, the rich are no longer the enemies of the poor. They are friends, protectors, even lovers of the poor. How globalism has transformed the world! Landlords have become philanthropists. Bankers are changed into do-gooders.

Moneylenders are the embodiment of human charity. Employers are the genial providers of labour, even at starvation wages. The world, we are constantly being told, has changed.

But it hasn't changed that much. And this is why the poor voted for some relief from want and privation amidst the abundance which India now advertises to the world. That, too, is why the Leftist parties made gains beyond their greatest expectations.

But who are to be the agents who will transfer at least some of the riches of the country to the excluded and humiliated? How can the government do anything that might threaten economic success as defined by the international financial institutions, even if the fruits of that success fall disproportionately into the ample laps of those who already have plenty?

This election has revealed the fundamental fault-line in the otherwise seamless story of globalisation which, the West says constantly, it wants to make 'work for the poor'. This, decoded, means nothing more nor less than the old remedy of endless economic growth.

There is no other pathway to empowerment, regeneration, capacity-building, participation, and all the other polysyllabic words in the jargon of a development, which serves its practitioners rather than its beneficiaries.

The NDA had hoped that the reflection of the wealth of others might light up the lives of the poor with patriotic hope. Virtual food, vicarious repletion, surrogate comfort are poor substitutes to those whose main daily meal consists of chapattis, with salt and green chilli for savour - the principal sustenance of too many hungry people.

Nor is it, as some commentators declared, a question only of the rural poor. In west Delhi last year, I met large numbers of elderly people who had been compelled to migrate to the city in old age to stay with their children in city slums, since they could no longer survive in the village. They were not always welcome.

Indeed, poverty itself is on the move, and setting up its abode in the heart of the motors of economic growth themselves - the big cities.

This is, perhaps, one reason why the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) performed so badly even in the metropolitan areas. The growing incidence of urban poverty is the next great crisis waiting to overwhelm the world.

This election has revealed one thing clearly. And that is, that all the figures and statistics about poverty are fiction. No one really knows the extent and depth of poverty in India.

Official estimates - that a mere 20% are now living below some insubstantial and elastic poverty line - bear no relation to the landless labourer, the seasonal migrant, the dispossessed adivasi (tribal), the widowed or abandoned woman, the woman with disability, the mentally disturbed, the evicted and shelterless.

If half the children in India are malnourished, should we conclude, not that they are suffering from chronic want, but that their parents are mistreating them?

In the UN Human Development Index in 2003, India came 127th out of 175 countries. It was number 83 on the Global Corruption Index. Maternal mortality is 540 per 100,000 live births, while infant mortality is 67 per 1,000. There were 927 females born in 2001, down from 945 in 1991.

In 2001, the per capita consumption of cereal dropped to an all-time low of 140.56 kg per head; pulses, at 10.62 kg, were also at their lowest. No doubt, this partly reflects the availability of imported luxury foods to certain sections of the people; but far more significant actors have been a cut in the purchasing power of the poor, because of falling prices they get for their crops, and a decrease in subsidies in their purchase of food.

Well, the poor have spoken, their periodic voiceless but eloquent declaration through the ballot box. The comeback of Congress suggests that India has perhaps now joined the rest of the world in routinely voting out those who do little or nothing for them, only to reinstate them five years later, since there is no alternative to the imperatives of global economic necessity.

Are we witnessing the installation of a revolving door for ruling castes and classes, whose destiny it is always to fail the majorities that vote for them; or will the new government actually find some way to engage with the growing inequality in one of the most unequal societies on earth?

- Third World Network Features

www.Pathmaconstruction.com

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