Who Celebrates the Resident Indian?

Come January and the Indian state will engage in its annual jamboree for commemorating overseas or Non-Resident Indians, the Bharatiya Pravasi Divas. The 2008 edition is scheduled to be held in Delhi. As with earlier iterations of the event, there will be a frenzy of media coverage. Platitudes about the relationship between the diaspora and homeland will be generated by all parties. There will be controversies over the individuals selected for awards. The Indian Left and Hindu Right alike will grumble about the ideological affiliation and views of awardees. The Economic Right will be quite happy with the event, since the PBD is essentially an affirmation of all that they hold dear: a glorification of wealth, the need for foreign investment and global capital to make its way to India in larger volumes, stronger relations between Indian business and Indian-American entrepreneurs, and so on.

And along with all of this, there will be terrible traffic jams in Delhi. The roads around Pragati Maidan, where the event is likely to be held, will be choked with cars, autos, buses, and two-wheelers. Office goers, street vendors who sell food in the area, people using the route to get to any number of places for business, and travelers passing through the city will all be inconvenienced. The interests of resident Indians, in short, will be ignored and sacrificed for the interests of Non-Resident Indians.

All of this is deliciously ironic. Till the late 1980s, Non-Resident Indians were largely absent from the imagination of the Indian state. The Nehruvian project of nation-building required Indians, at the very least, to stay in India. Indians who chose to settle abroad were considered unpatriotic by a judgmental Indian society, and were labelled betrayers of nation, community, and family alike. Hindi films routinely poked fun at overseas Indians as deracinated traitors. The 1991 economic reforms, which provided the enabling conditions for the new privileged status of the NRI, were a response to a crisis created in part by NRIs themselves. Liberalization was a response to a balance-of-payments crisis in 1991, brought on by the First Gulf War and exacerbated by panic-striken NRIs withdrawing their money from India. And the icing on the cake: the party that first realized and tapped into the potentialities of the NRI pool was the ultra-nationalistic BJP.

Don't get me wrong. I think the achievements of Non-Resident Indians should indeed be celebrated and rewarded. I think the earlier view of NRIs as unpatriotic and anti-national was extremely unfair and prejudiced. And the sharing of experiences of resident Indians, NRIs, and PIOs (People of Indian Origin) from different parts of the world can only be mutually enriching.

But as is the case with many things that we Indians do, we swing from one extreme to another. In the last several years, the pronouncements of the mainstream English-language Indian media; numerous Indian policymakers; scholars, and practioners working in development and economics; beacons of industry; and the professionals who people the corporate world would seem to suggest that NRI qualities should be emulated by all Indians. Indeed several scholars have noted that the Non-Resident Indian (especially, the American NRI) is now held up as an ideal model of Indian identity for the era of globalization. The American NRI is said to combine cultural loyalty to both India and America with the attributes of economic efficiency and productivity. Top this off with a great work ethic, a dash of entrepreneurial spirit, and a commitment to the free-market and you get the Millennium Edition Indian.

To allow the Millennium Edition Indian to emerge by the million, a whole arsenal of neoliberals tells us that we need to throw out the detritus of the Nehruvian and Gandhian visions for India and embrace a Reagan-Thatcher type disciplining of Indian state, society, and market alike. We are also told that a good dose of the ideas of Hayek and his contemporary legatees is the need of the hour. (This, of course, is an ironic twist on the prescriptions of the Indian Left, who are always shoving Marx down our throats, with their talk about bourgeois interests, modes of production, surplus value, and so on). Indians, so the neoliberal mantra goes, really need an education in the free-market philosoophy of political and economic freedom. And they need to look Westward, especially to the guidance of the World Bank and IMF, for learning how to be more efficient, productive, and hard working, for weeding out corruption, for mastering practices of governance, and son on.

To put it bluntly, this perspective is immensely arrogant and patronizing. Indians do not need an education in how to be productive and efficient. For every government official or Indian who shirks work or is corrupt, you will find many who are dedicated, committed, and good at what they do. The demographic that I know best is the middle class salaried segment of Indian society. In my parents' generation, my own, and those generations in between that fall in this demographic, I know and know of countless Indians who are excellent at their work. These Indians regularly put in 10- and 12-hour work days, over and above spending a couple of hours traveling. It goes without saying that they do know how to maximize their productivity and optimize their time. They do not take or give bribes, and do not lack for integrity. Yes, compared to hundreds of millions in India, they are, in relative terms, elites. But, from a global perspective (a trendy phrase, these days), they do not have the luxuries of the middle or even the working classes in affluent Western societies: for example, the options of weekend vacations, flexi-time jobs, shorter distances to work in better public transport, or telecommuting.

I do not wish to single out the Indian middle class for special praise. Other segments of Indian society also possess these very values of productivity, efficiency, and enterprise in good measure. The average street vendor in Bombay works a 12-14 hour day, and manages to make ends meet after having to pay the local cop his weekly hafta. Working women in Bombay local trains multitask by peeling and chopping vegetables on their ride in to work; those vegetables are packed and preserved for cooking when the women will return home in the evenings. The sight of the women running to catch the local trains, mangalsutra in mouth, is proof that they do not need lectures in the virtue of enterprise.

Private enterprise by itself is not a magic solution to India's problems. In India, the private sector suffers from many of the maladies that dog the public sector: a hierarchical work culture that demands conformity and stifles creative thinking, a poor system for ensuring the effective of employees' rights, lack of accountability and transparency, and an excessively bureaucratic mentality that afflicts organizations from top to bottom.

Indian intellectuals, scholars, policymakers, and laypersons are also self-critical and self-aware enough not to romanticize or uncritically accept the views of Nehru and Gandhi. We have always had a diverse enough range of voices not to be hyper-nationalist and blinkered about the anticolonial freedom struggle either. Numerous Indian scholars and activists have from the time of independence onward subjected the actions and policies of the Indian state to rigorous scrutiny. If the neoliberals are to be believed, no one other than them has ever thought of these matters.

It is easy to bandy about terms like 'global governance,' 'good governance,' or 'human capital' but what do these terms mean on the ground? How does governance operate in specific Indian contexts in the public or private sector? How is it inflected by, and how does it, in turn, inflect, caste and class dynamics? How does one tap human capital in strongly hierarchical work cultures? These are questions that deserve detailed examination based on observations on the ground, a not strident advocacy and unthinking transplantation of ideologies and theories generated elsewhere (usually in Europe) as a cure-all.

It was a myth of colonial ideology that Indians were lazy, slothful, and inefficient. The new neoliberal mantra about Indians eerily echoes that stereotype. Three years ago, I was in Delhi around the time of Pravasi Bharatiya Divas. On one of the days of the event, I had to go in to the central part of the city, past Pragati Maidan. Sure enough, I got stuck in an unholy mess of traffic. I noticed a man selling cleaning cloths for cars at the traffic light a few feet ahead. It was around 9 in the morning. Almost 12 hours later, when I was returning home, I noticed the same man at the light, still attempting to persuade people at the signal to buy the cloths.

Who celebrates such enterprise and initiative? Who offers this person an award for his commitment? Who celebrates this resident Indian?