EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
India: Disappearing the Poor
Some will obligingly efface themselves by consuming pesticide, others will join the doomed ranks of armed resistance
As if to demonstrate that poverty is now a residual issue in the world, the poor are being slowly eliminated from the imagery of the busy global media. "Nowhere in Bollywood films do you see a poor person," says Pandurang Hegde, activist in the forests of northern Karnataka. "There is no place in the iconography of the new India for anything that suggests impoverishment and loss."
Nor on the majority of TV stations which have flooded India with their unblinking radiance. The poor have become peripheral figures, with scarcely walk-on parts in the great drama of liberalisation. All that is known is that those living below the fanciful economic latitudes designated by "the poverty line" are being reduced. Poverty is clearly a mop-up operation, and will eventually be abolished by the rising tide which, as everyone knows, lifts all boats. This is an automatic consequence of economic growth. If the poor scarcely appear in the media, is this because their destiny is to become, if not rich, at least no-longer-poor?
If they have not yet been completely eclipsed, at least their wellbeing is now entrusted to NGOs, charities and international institutions, far more dependable custodians of their welfare than any self-help, or organisation on their own behalf. "The poor" have become an object of piety in a secular world. Who does not strive to raise them out of their misery? Is that after all not the purpose of wealth-creation?
Window-dressing is perhaps the highest art in the culture of globalism. In spite of appearances, poverty exhibits a disagreeable tenacity in the world. Since its removal would be an arduous process, it is, perhaps, easier to obliterate the representation of the poor in the world's media than to wipe out poverty.
It may also be that the media vanishing trick prefigures something far more sinister, preparatory, perhaps, to more material disappearances. For their persistent presence remains a spectre at the global feast. What an agreeable place the world is - or would be - without them: nothing to mar the smiling imagery of plenty, the abundance of the display window and the publicity machine, the shopping mall and the showroom, the wall-to-wall entertainment and TV channels of endless music and laughter.
There are daily intimations of a more brutal dematerialisation of the poor. Wholesale clearances of city slums intensify whenever some spectacular event is to be staged - Beijing has unceremoniously removed its urban poor for the Olympics. Delhi has been cleansing its slums in readiness for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Bengaluru is to become "slum-less" as a result of its "slum clearance with a mission" programme. On almost every map of the world's major cities, the areas occupied by the urban poor appear as blank spaces, emblem of their future erasure.
Their embarrassing presence evokes an archaic world, in which humanity creates its own shelter out of industrial debris, scrapes a living off the garbage heaps of abundance, recycles the discarded goods of others, lives a pinched and frugal existence. In other words, the poor offer a ghastly example of meagre resource-use and compulsory austerity in a context where excess and extravagance are now the norm. No wonder they are increasingly intrusive: they embody our worst nightmare - this could also be our fate when the oil is exhausted, the taps run dry, the world overheats, the seas rise and the deserts encroach ...
Some poor people have also internalised a sense of their own redundancy; and, only too eager to comply with this assessment of their worth, have obligingly rid the world of their presence. At least 140,000 farmers in India committed suicide between 1997 and 2007, almost certainly an underestimate, because the social shame of this cause of death impels many families to conceal it. These suicides are generally attributed to indebtedness: that people can be made to take responsibility for what are clearly socially-induced traumas suggests that the poor have become less capable of resisting personal culpability for the effects of economic forces over which they have no control.
Dr Sanjeev Jain is a psychiatrist at the Nimhans hospital in Bengaluru. He says every night the city hospitals deal with two or three dozen cases of suicide or attempted suicide. These he calls "accidents of modernity", people for whom nothing has replaced decaying structures of meaning. Even the lowest castes - the sweepers and cleaners, removers of waste, tenders of animals and conservers of the environment - have seen many of their functions vanish, as much of their labour has been replaced by machines.
And where the poor do resist, how easy it is to label them outlaws, dacoits, criminals, Naxalites, terrorists. The prime minister of India has said that "the single largest internal security threat comes from Maoists". This, too, is a form of fundamentalism, an ideology of radical nostalgia, a reaction of despair. How simple for the state to shoot them down, and write off their no-account lives as an "encounter" with militants, ultras, extremists, and all the other inventive taxonomies devised to justify the elimination of those they have impoverished to the point of hopelessness.
Arundhati Roy sees preparations for a "genocide" against the poor; although the word is not quite right in the context, since the poor are not a race. Povericide is an inelegant but more accurate word for what Arundhati Roy sees as a corollary of "the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India - the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own".
As if to support this grim scenario, the ghost of hunger is presently being invoked by the global information machines. The cost of staple foods continues to rise - thanks, we are told, to changing appetites of (some of) the people of India and China, the diversion of agricultural land to jatropha, soya or sugar-cane for biofuel, the using up of fertile farmland for infrastructural projects (India lost over a million hectares of agricultural land between 1990 and 2005), erratic harvests which may or may not be an early symptom of climate change. The Malthusian insight, that no place is set at nature's banquet for the poor, has been revised: no longer nature's banquet, it is now a feast crafted by a global food manufacturing industry.
The poor are scattered and divided. While some will doubtless obligingly efface themselves by consuming pesticide, jumping on to the railway track or hanging themselves from a ceiling fan, others will join the doomed ranks of armed resistance, while yet others will almost certainly be drawn into spectacular acts of violence and terror.
In the perpetual artificial sunshine of the technosphere, within the global gated community in which all the inhabitants are rich, the poor have already ceased to exist. But it is one thing to banish them from the enchanted islands of plenty, that virtual reality of the fantasists of wealth, but quite another to erase them from a material world in which they remain an obdurate majority. Their refusal to go quietly into the oblivion for which they are apparently destined is likely to take unpredictable and malignant forms; since they are the footsoldiers of the militias, Maoists, mafiosi and militants who have flooded the spaces evacuated by governments for whom the poor no longer count.
Jeremy Seabrook is the author of over forty books.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
13 Comments so far
Show AllThis author says media corporations in India are acting as though:
"Poverty is clearly a mop-up operation, and will eventually be abolished by the rising tide which, as everyone knows, lifts all boats. This is an automatic consequence of economic growth."
This is the message that American media (and other) corporations have been trying to send in America too--for decades now. Corporations are corporations, anywhere. They tend to say and do similar things, anywhere. The struggle of whether people, through their governments, shall control corporations or whether the order of society shall be the other way around, is a worldwide thing. It is probably the centermost of questions about what we now call "globalization" or "globalism". To the extent that people "win", then the poor matter and their plight is publicly exposed. To the extent that corporations "win", then the poor matter less and their plight is intentionally obscured by other racier, sexier and shallower images peddled to the public for "entertainment".
The same in Peru and much of Latin America -- though they all talk about "the war on poverty". The point is that if all the poor (say those on <$2/day) disappeared today a massive "readjustment" amongst those remaining would quickly reestablish the same income inequality. The Poor as individuals don't buy very much but they do buy. Put together all those two billion or more Poor constitute an enormous market. If they disappeared (or perhaps even if they ceased being poor) the crisis would be a thousand times bigger than the current housing crisis. The majority of those presently "comfortable" people would become the New Poor. Those who held onto their wealth would continue to be embarrassed and complain about their bad image.
I wonder how much it costs to have a huge poor segment of the population, as far as crime, lost productivity/business enterprise, riot costs, healthcare costs, etc ...versus how much it would cost to have everybody in a middle class, safe, clean, healthy, happy, and with booming business. Seems like the latter would produce so much more, even for the greedy ones ...but you almost never see it happen (except in mega-wealthy northwest Europe). Strange that.
The status of the poor is same in all the countries that have embraced the greed-based capitalism. the governments represent the interests of the corporates and the rich. The main stream media is controlled by the same, and so they bombard the society with the "corporate" narrative. Take the example of the Indian newspaper, The Hindu. Till few years back, it was pro-poor. Now it is collaborated with CNN and one can understand what to expect in this newspaper. In the US not much news about the poor. How many Americans in Los Angeles know where Skid Row is, leave alone knowing the condition of the poor there. The victims of Katrina, who are dispersed, are forgotten by the government and the media. So apathy and indifference towards the economically poor is endemic all over the world. This continues as long as the voice and the rights of the economically poor are suppressed by the morally poor.
Oligarchy, Oligarchy, Oligarchy - don't matter a dime if they're Brahmin Caste Aryans, or Celt Aryans - they get drunk on human blood and suck the marrow from the bones of any human they can get their hands on. Here, there, anywhere. They are not humans, they are richfilth, they are your Masters. They own EVERYTHING, FOREVER.
Welcome to your America. America chose Oligarchy. Not going to survive it. Sorry. Bad choice.
Piece.
In rural India, poverty is endemic, but at least in rural villages where people can farm the land, food is abundant. People in rural villages keep chickens, pigs, cattle, goats, turkeys, ducks. The government of India is trying to electrify rural communities and even furnishes each hut with one light bulb. Universal education is a goal of the Indian government, although they have a long way to go. What I have seen in India is the displacement of people in favor of corporate farming. This forces people into cities to find work or beg. The "free" market is anything but fair. One of the unintended consequences of modernization is the ecological disaster of garbage, mostly plastic packaging materials and plastic bags.
This is what I have sensed and thought about for a while now, but to see it described here in this article is chilling. I traveled to India in 1990/1991. At that time coming from San Francisco, where I used to get panhandled by at least 10/12 homeless people on my way to work. I noticed how in India there was not the same ostracisation from society of the poor in its varying degrees in India as in America. It seemed to me, there, that "poor" was just one of the things you could be in life. There seemed to be an acceptance and a societal cohesiveness and peace at that time. I remember large pastoral green lawns in Delhi being dotted with people; crouched with small knives in their hands, grooming these endless lawns and farms we would pass everywhere were dotted with the colorful dhotis and saris of men, women and children. Not to over-romanticize..but it did seem at that time that India had reached some level of equanimity after all of their colonialization/ revolution. I also witnessed a shocking level of material greed among those upwardly mobile types in the nicer shopping mall areas. Accustomed to thinking of Indians as very spiritual, it was suprising to see the kind of materialism there, that I see here in the U.S.of A. I am sad for all the poor people of the world and especially India. "Low castes" are now experiencing -again- after their own Utopian era what it is like to not be a "full member" of Society. This is also how it is, increasingly for the poor in America. Already 1 in 99.1 American citizens are in prison right now. New detention centres that hold scores of people have been built. We see where this is going..
Thanks. Well written article.
Yes, what GKL said: "What I have seen in India is the displacement of people in favor of corporate farming. This forces people into cities to find work or beg."
Worked well here in the States. Now nobody knows where there food comes from... and that that is the culprit for our obesity and sickness... for the benefit of the pharmaceutical companies.
Fair wealth/power distribution is a bitch. Depopulation can be hell.
What is Mr. Seabrook's point? Is he asserting that poverty in India is increasing at an ever greater rate or that the Indian government is not doing enough to redistribute wealth. If so he has not provided any evidence in his write up. It is quite easy to show concern for people whom you don't care anything about. Does he even know or care that Bengaluru and Bangalore is the same place?
Seabrook is a long-time friend of India. His 1995 collection of vignettes, Notes from Another India, are outstanding.
Things are far grimmer in India than people realize.
Many even in the middle classes are only barely getting by, simply by relying on living at home. In Delhi and Bengaluru, young people's lives are lived like there is no tomorrow. The contingent work of the new high tech coolies, lack any semblance of long term security. People are also getting taken in by various scams, backed up by multinational brand names.
I have a cousin who now suffers from all sorts of health ailments from working crazy hours for these tech companies. These same companies don't offer health benefits, so what's even a middle class Indian supposed to do for health care? Flee to Scandinavia or Canada?
The health and education systems are also in free fall collapse. Ever since India jumped on the neoliberal bandwagon, the entire public system has given up the ghost. Now people have to pay extortionary amounts just to get a decent education, and even then, most of these institutions are fly-by-night operations.
And when the American economy contracts, so will India's young software dependent economy. These upper middle classes are not even producing any goods like the vast reserve armies of labor are doing in China. Tech support and call centers are dispensable. Manufacturing is not.
With the spiral costs of staple foods, we will see an explosion. However, India has a whole may fall to fascism due to the failures of the neoliberal Congress government.
DEEPA
i agree with all you've said. i have worked alongside many poor indians, bangladeshis, pakistanis, egyptians, sudanese and what i've found is, they are the most giving, kind people there are. and i believe this stems from the fact that they have no attachment to 'material' things as is the wont of greedy rich capitalists. for all their poverty they can still manage to smile and joke. and when any of these 'meltdowns' occur it will be the poor who survive as they know nothing better. the rich will be the ones who really suffer as they won't be able to fend for themselves............
Materialism is one thing, but creating a system where people are allowed to die their way out of a system that needs change is something wholly different. India has some of the kindest people in the world, who face an option of death or life every single day. The government is effectively swamped by numbers, and so doesn't do much of anything, the corporations that offer, as a percentage of population, a tiny number of jobs offer even less in social terms to the communities they operate in.Both could do more: generally they do nothing.
Which is also how much we do, as well.
Solving Third World poverty is something the World has to address itself to, but for New Zealand in the 1930s the answer was isolating the internal economy and building up a prosperous middle class out of not very much at all. It took 30 years.