The Age of Kali (26 page)

During my tour of Infosys, I found five computer programmers – all Brahmins – reading an e-mail from Goldman Sachs, one of their many clients in New York. Apparently if a New York company has a computer glitch towards the end of the day, they send an e-mail to Bangalore and go home for the evening. The Brahminical
computer boffins at Infosys sort out the problem during the New York night, and when the bankers return to their desks in Manhattan the following morning they find their computers fully operational. The programmers at Infosys are now little cheaper than their First World counterparts; instead they find work on the basis of their abilities and their location, at the opposite end of the world time zone from America. Infosys may be the most successful of the Bangalore software companies, but hundreds of others are equally sophisticated, and they are flourishing too.

Quite how far the new Bangalore had moved away from its immediate hinterland was made horribly clear in mid-October 1996, when it was announced that the 1997 Miss World contest was to be held there.

The state government and the city’s hotels immediately welcomed the move, but no else did. Within weeks an unlikely coalition had formed in protest against what was seen as the ultimate foreign cultural invasion. Feminist suicide squads formed, promising to immolate themselves if the ‘degrading’ pageant went ahead. Hindu fundamentalist organisations such as the RSS and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (which masterminded the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya in 1992) joined hands with their sworn enemies the Muslim Jamaat-i-Islami to decry what they saw as an assault on traditional Indian morality. Closing ranks to defend the chastity of Mother India, the right-wing Hindu BJP stood on the same platform as the (supposedly) left-wing and secular Congress Party.

The Karnataka farmers and the Kannada language chauvinists, not to be outdone, continued their agitations, unloading a trailer-load of cow-dung outside the showroom of one of the Indian sponsors
of Miss World, the consumer electrical-goods company Godrej, coating the interior, the exhibits and even the staff with dollops of slurry. Soon afterwards, a small home-made bomb ‘about the size of an orange’ was thrown at the electrical transformer controlling the lighting of the stadium where the pageant was due to be held. The transformer was undamaged, but a large crater was left in the asphalt nearby. By the end of October strikes, marches and demonstrations were taking place in Bangalore on an almost daily basis.

The day I flew in to town, the South Indian papers contained little news that was not in some way linked to the rapidly escalating protests. The
Deccan Herald
announced on its front page that a thousand commandos of the élite Indian Rapid Action Force were to be drafted in to guard the Miss World contest after ‘the leader of a rural populist activist group had threatened to torch the venue of the show which he described as an example of “cultural imperialism” ’. In another part of town, ‘a group of noted women artistes have expressed their support for the beauty contest. The artistes feel that the protests are nothing but silly and ridiculous exercises. “These protesters are an insecure lot who cannot face the world,” remarked Arundhati Nag, the noted theatre artiste.’

On its op-ed page, the
Hindu
ran a full-page feature linked to the Kentucky Fried Chicken protests. It was entitled ‘Vegetarianism – Ideal Choice’: ‘Scientific investigations have firmly established that vegetarian diet is far better and ideal for one’s health and environment protection,’ claimed the writer, V. Vidyanath. ‘South American forests have been cut down to grow cattle for hamburgers. Some outstanding personalities such as such George Bernard Shaw, William Shakespeare, Percy Shelley and Isaac Newton were vegetarians. To preserve health and environment, the people should prefer vegetarian diet.’

All this seemed, at first, to be a quite spectacular overreaction. Miss World may be tacky and tasteless, but surely only in India could anyone threaten to commit suicide over such an issue. Kentucky Fried Chicken may not be gourmet cuisine, but it surely takes
cultural oversensitivity to a new extreme to regard fast food as an insult to the national honour. Yet when you begin to talk to people in Bangalore, you come to realise that beneath the xenophobia and the nationalism there lies a very reasonable fear of progress, a genuine disorientation in the face of massive change.

Until the early 1990s, Bangalore had been a sleepy, well-to-do city, remarkable only for its botanical gardens, cool climate and excellent racetrack. Everything changed overnight when the city gained the reputation of being the cradle of India’s high-tech revolution. Foreign investment and personnel poured in at a quite extraordinary rate. Unemployed migrant workers followed quickly on their heels, and what had been known as the Garden City suddenly found itself ringed with stinking shanty towns. Because of this unparalleled immigration, between 1971 and 1996 Bangalore’s population jumped from 1.7 million to over six million, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. The pressure on land grew, causing house prices to rise stratospherically, increasing by 50 per cent per annum throughout the early 1990s. As pollution grew worse and the city’s green spaces began to disappear, the average temperature rose by several degrees every year.

Such hyper-development obviously leads to massive strains. The government of Karnataka, which had proved adept at attracting foreign investment, soon showed itself to be wholly unable to cope with the massive expansion it had helped to generate. Suddenly there was never enough electricity; some weeks power was totally absent. It was the same with water, which was usually available in the taps for less than an hour a day. In summer it often disappeared completely for whole weeks at time.

Everywhere the old colonial bungalows began to be pulled down and replaced by towering office-blocks. In a feeble attempt to keep the roads from clogging, the city’s glorious green roundabouts were all bulldozed. Bangaloreans were horrified by what was happening to their once beautiful city. The writer and historian T.P. Issar, who published a book on the city’s architecture at the end of the 1980s, told me that his book is now of only archival value: 95 per cent of
the buildings he described and illustrated less than ten years ago have now been pulled down.

‘These demonstrations are simply expressions of people’s alarm at what is happening to Bangalore,’ he said. ‘Some people have certainly made a lot of money, but most have found that their life has got worse: think of the volume of traffic, the noise, the pollution. The people here have good reason to fear the future. In a few years everything that is familiar in this city has been destroyed. The opening of these restaurants and the fuss about Miss World, these are just flashpoints.’

The growing discontent in the city was perhaps best articulated by the youthful General Secretary of the BJP, Anand Kumar, who has recently thrown his weight behind the protests. ‘What I am objecting to is not any individual restaurant or beauty contest, but the mindset they both represent,’ he told me as he sat in Gandhian homespun beneath a framed and garlanded picture of Shivaji. ‘The entry of multinationals in to Bangalore over the last few years has initiated a spiral of prices. The rich have flooded in, and the poor can no longer afford housing, education, transport, or even the most basic amenities. In this country half the population – 460 million people – has a daily income of not more than ten rupees [twenty pence]. A situation where millions are kept in poverty, without education, while a microscopic minority enjoys all the facilities available to the élite classes of Britain and America cannot continue indefinitely.’

I asked why Pizza Hut or Kentucky Fried Chicken should be the target, rather than the government or the houses of the rich.

‘These foreign restaurants are symbols of the disparity between rich and poor,’ replied Kumar. ‘Only the tiny Westernised élite want to eat there, or indeed can afford to eat there. There is a burning discontent which has begun to be directed against these outlets. A popular upsurge is growing that wants to hit out at those symbols.

‘Take my word for it,’ he said ominously. ‘It won’t be long before this becomes an explosive situation.’

If some of the causes of the current unrest are peculiar to Bangalore, similar problems of hyper-development beset many Indian cities. Across much of metropolitan India, electricity and water are often unavailable for hours each day. Property prices are rising steeply, and roads everywhere are becoming impossibly jammed and polluted.

Yet however bad things become, an unofficial wave of privatisation has enabled the rich to cushion themselves from the worst effects of this incipient urban breakdown. Many wealthy Indians now possess their own electricity generators, and most have found ways of guaranteeing themselves a constant water supply, using their own pumps to store water during the brief periods it is available. Meanwhile the poor get poorer, with over half the population now officially living under the poverty line. India’s rural masses are remarkable for their ability to endure hardship without complaint, but it is open to question whether this will remain so forever.

Economic liberalisation and the sudden introduction of multinationals in to India has meant that the kind of social changes that transformed Britain in the half-century since the Second World War have been compressed in to less than a decade. The gap between rich and poor has visibly widened, and for the first time since Independence it has become possible – indeed acceptable – to flaunt wealth.

Bombay, for example, now has the highest office rents in the world, and no fewer than 150 diet clinics, notwithstanding the fact that in the city’s slums death from starvation is still far from uncommon. In parts of the city Mercedes now outnumber Hindustan Ambassadors, yet the slums nearby become ever larger, ever uglier. Moreover, the spread of cable and satellite television,
beaming programmes like
Baywatch
and
The Bold and the Beautiful
in to millions of ordinary
mofussil
towns and villages, has made vast numbers of Indians aware for the first time of how the other half lives, inevitably generating resentment that others are enjoying a lifestyle that to them is totally inaccessible. An Inspector General of Police told me that towards the end of the 1980s, as satellite dishes and cable began to reach the remoter parts of his state, the crime in his area rose exponentially. The poor had become aware for the first time of what they were missing.

As the experience of Bangalore shows, symbols of Westernisation – be they pizza restaurants, beauty pageants or multinational businesses – may soon find themselves made scapegoats for the disorientation, social upheaval and dislocation the country is currently undergoing.

On my last day in Bangalore, I woke up to find that every wall was pasted with flyers announcing ‘
A MAMMOTH PROCESSION AND PROTEST MEETING: PROTEST INVASION OF WESTERN LIFESTYLE AND SAVE NATIONAL HONOUR
.’ Changing my plans, I asked the autorickshaw-driver to take me straight to the venue.