THE ROVING EYE Full power
on the Arabian Sea By Pepe
Escobar
MUMBAI - "Full power" is the new
Indian mantra. Delivered not in Hindi, Pali,
Gujarati or Malayalam, but in English, with a
smile, by the Mumbai taxi driver, the Goan
marguerita specialist, the Brahmin in Calicut, the
information technology developer in Cochin.
This is the sound of India stepping on the
gas to 21st century great power status - even if
the wheels belong to a rickety Ambassador, the
good old Indian diesel sedan workhorse. This is
the mantra in the cool parts of the Arabian Sea
al-Qaeda fails to
reach.
Maximum city Outside the Gateway
of India - the ultimate vestige of Raj-dom in
south India - a plaque reads "Urbs Prima in
Indis" (First City of India). Soon it may be
the first city of the world. More people live in
Mumbai than in the whole of Australia. Soon more
people will live in Mumbai than in Sao Paulo or
Mexico City; Jakarta, Cairo, Karachi, Shanghai and
other developing world beasts have been bypassed
long ago. As far as mammoth, brash specimens of
urban civilization go, this may be the ultimate
monster.
The Portuguese - after sailing
from Iberia and arriving near this "gateway" more
than three centuries before the British actually
built a gate - called it Bom Bahia, "good bay".
They even called it Boa Vida, "good life". Life
can hardly be good when 51% of Mumbai's population
of at least 15 million - and counting fast - lives
in slums or in the streets.
For roughly
75% of Mumbai's families, "home" means a single
room where five people on average live, cook, eat
and sleep. The one-room-fits-all is a given, and
not only in sprawling slums such as Jogeshwari. In
more ways than one, Mumbai is Maximum City
- the title of a remarkable book by Suketu Mehta,
whose ancestors come from Gujarat and who was born
in another maximum city, Calcutta (now Kolkata),
but considers Mumbai his spiritual home.
But then, in a flash, Maximum Slum gets
connected; virtually every young person in these
overcrowded rooms seems to be learning computer
programming. They are only a click away from
one-room-fits-all to an air con office and the
chance of perhaps one day buying a condo with an
Arabian Sea view.
More than 17% of
Mumbai's population is Muslim. Far from sectarian
affairs, Muslim neighborhoods in Mumbai - where
the best fruit juice stands are to be found -
completely integrate into in the urban jigsaw
puzzle. In India as a whole, 12% of the population
is Muslim - roughly more than 120 million people.
More than half a century after Partition
in 1947 there are almost as many Muslims in India
as in Pakistan. This fact irks people, such as the
leader of the Shiv Sena party, Bal Thackeray - a
character with a penchant for bigotry and
full-power sectarianism, variously designated as
the Sahib, the Supremo, the Remote Control or the
Tiger.
Ten years ago, Shiv Sena, as a
majority partner in a coalition with the Hindu
fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),
finally captured power in the state of
Maharashatra. The new government faced nearly
insurmountable problems - the urban nightmare,
widespread corruption, dreadful relations between
Hindus and Muslims. So what was the number one
priority? They changed the name of the state
capital from Bombay to Mumbai.
A
businessman sipping a gin and tonic at the Harbor
Bar of the Taj - considered the best hotel in
India - guarantees that Shiv Sena's money comes
from an array of "full power" Mumbai businessmen.
He should know. Mumbai is essentially run by a
concrete and real estate lobby. Exclusion is the
name of the game. For the price of a gin and tonic
at the Taj, the masses can buy 36 fabulous fruit
juices in one of the Muslim-controlled
stands.
Shiv Sena could not but be in the
business of exclusion as well. The party has
railed against Gujaratis, south Indians in
general, communists, dalits (untouchables) and of
course Muslims in general (including resident
Bangladeshis). Now it turned against the
neighbors, pressing to redraw the
Karnataka-Maharashtra state border. Even leading
party members such as Pramodh Mutalik can't stand
Thackeray's intolerance; he is quitting to form a
new political party, Karnataka Shiv Sena, with no
links with Shiv Sena in Maharashatra.
Ever
since India was attacked by the "economic reform"
virus, the mainstream media has not failed to
devoutly worship the new sacred cows - first a new
wave of dot com maharajas and Bollywood stars,
then any nouveau riche in sight. A ghastly
Indian Idol - a mutating virus from
American Idol - is on TV, of course, now
two weeks into its second edition.
The
Tata family - former opium concessionaires -
continues, according to the eternal running joke,
to rule India. But newcomers such as the flashy
Kingfisher guy, Vijay Mallya, who's on everything
from beers to airlines, are sprouting as fast as
ayurvedic centers. A cross between a Mafia don and
a Bollywood superstar, Mallya greets passengers of
Kingfisher Airlines with a smooth rap on how he is
"revolutionizing business and leisure travel", not
least by plugging the King Credit Card, a
co-branded operation with ICICI bank, which offers
"exclusive amenities" and a 24-hour concierge
service.
In 2004, against all odds, the
Hindu fundamentalist coalition headed by the BJP
was voted out of power and the Congress Party-led
coalition - much to its own surprise - was back.
Not by accident the fortress of whoredom in Mumbai
- straight from one of Dante's circles of hell -
is called Congress House, conveniently across the
street from the party's headquarters.
Mumbai reaches parts Sex and the
City screenwriters would not know how to
reach, from Nepali whores for 50 rupees (a little
over US$1) to an army of bar dancers. There used
to be several hundred so-called "beer bars", but
they have been closed down. Nothing remotely
similar to American lap dancing - and nothing
remotely similar in the rest of India for that
matter; the girls dance with all their saris and
blouses on, gyrating on psychedelic-looking stages
to the sound of Bollywood hits.
Unemployed
bar dancers now stop for a juice by the Haji Ali
mosque - the tomb of a Sufi saint joined to the
main coastal road by a causeway where at any one
time one finds a syncretic flow of Hindus and
Muslims alike seeking Ali's blessing. A juice
stand may come with brown sugar - supplying
Mumbai's floating hordes of heroin addicts. Lucky
former beer girls now grace a forest of billboards
selling shampoo and moisturizers to the burgeoning
Indian urban middle class.
For these
designer shampoo masses, pre-marital sex remains a
huge taboo, as well as radioactive material for
the Indian media. The opinion of Sheetal Pandya,
writing to the excellent newspaper DNA, is
emblematic. "My children aren't yet so
Westernized. The subject is not relevant to us.
There is nothing to talk about." Khushboo, a cute
popular actress, was crucified because she said
pre-marital sex is acceptable. The publisher and
editor of Mumbai Mirror was arrested because he
carried a survey on the sexual habits of
Mumbaikars - as the locals are called. And he
didn't even offer a deep plunge into Congress
House.
The ultimate Mumbai experience -
extreme sports India-style - has to be riding the
mad rush of a local train. From Churchgate
station, a ticket to the suburbs costs six rupees
- roughly US12 cents. You may get in, but you may
not be able to get off - and vice versa. If you
are to get off at an ultra-crowded station such as
Dadar, for instance, you must fight for
positioning yourself in an extremely precise spot.
Platforms rush by on both sides of the
train. There are no doors - just two enormous
holes on either side. You must jump before the
train stops at each station, otherwise the
incoming mass of people will overwhelm you. Inside
the compartment, with its gorgeous black fans
hanging from the ceiling like bats, you don't
move; the crowd moves you.
Five years ago,
according to official data, the number of
passengers carried in a nine-car train during rush
hour in Mumbai was 4,500. By now it may be
approaching 6,000. Commuters travel in groups.
Some share food, some sing, some sell underwear,
some chop vegetables for the family dinner. More
than 4,000 a year die, hit by electricity poles
because they were precariously hanging from the
"window". That's life on the go, full power.
Nobody expects the Goan Inquisition
The Portuguese occupation of Goa lasted
451 years. Old Goa used to be bigger than Paris
and London. Today its ghostly buildings are part
of a protected United Nations site. Long gone are
the massive conversions to Christianity by
Franciscan monks; Bollywood is the new
Christianity.
In the neighborhood of
Fontainhas in the state capital Panjim, there are
plenty of azulejos - panels of blue and
yellow ceramic tiles - to be seen, just like in
Portugal, some depicting scenes of Cameos' epic
poem Os Lusiadas.
But the hordes of Indian
tourists bombarding the tomb of St Francis Xavier
with their camera cell phones hardly know that the
Goan Inquisition - which lasted until 1820 -
targeted Jews and Muslims above all, not Hindus.
The Holy Office didn't have a whiff of a sense of
humor: it banned turmeric, basil, incense,
marigolds, dhotis, saris, astrology, alchemy and
it destroyed Hindu temples as a bonus.
According to the only surviving first-hand
account, by the French physician Charles Dellon,
the bowels of the Holy Office headquarters would
put Abu Ghraib to shame. Even some of the former
Portuguese governors, depicted in a collection of
oil paintings, look positively evil. The old table
used by the inquisitors to deliberate how best to
send people to the gallows has survived, as well
as the crucifix - a Christ with eerie, prying eyes
- which used to hang over it, now haunting readers
of Abu Ghraib torture practices in a small chapel
in Fontainhas.
The rest is of course
tropical idleness - or its mass packaging by the
tourism industry, just as in Kuta in Bali, Boracay
in the Philippines or Koh Samui in Thailand.
Young, Western discovery armies, trying to flee
globalization, reach the shores of idyllic Palolem
beaches just to step into globalization-in-a-hut,
serviced with pizza ovens imported from Italy,
Russian or Israeli breakfast , laughing Buddhas
made in China and fast-relaxing ayurvedic centers.
Ayurvedic massage comes from Kerala.
Cynics equate it with turning yourself into a fish
swimming in a bowl of thick oil. Girls from
Sheffield, Leningrad or Tel Aviv swear it's better
than carrying your own personal guru. Western
decadents stick to "full power" margueritas
washing down shark steaks.
China rules, of
course, as a Panjim shop owner attests. "The
response for Chinese goods is encouraging. People
like to buy attractive goods at a cheaper price."
And then there's the ubiquitous eco-friendly
syndrome - Goa's self-image as an unspoilt
tropical paradise.
A so-called resort in
Palolem, rather a collection of shacks owned by a
German with no beach view, advertises itself as
eco-friendly, while sitting around a huge pile of
garbage. Mumbai, in more ways than one, is coming
to Goa. Ecological campaigner Joe D'Souza goes
straight to the point. "Slowly but steadily and
even certainly, the entire Goa state is developing
dubiously into a large mega slum."
The
arrival of the Christian imperialist Vasco
da Gama, the ruthless Portuguese Argonaut who
"discovered" India - as if Indian civilization had
not existed for millennia - was horrified by the
non-Christians of south India. He would flee
modern, pagan Goa as the plague - but not after
applying his own brand of diplomacy, which mixed
elements of kidnapping, mutilation and murder.
The love affair between the West and Asia
was never a love affair in the first place. Da
Gama opened the sea link between Europe and Asia
in 1497-99 with only three puny caravels, and this
decades after Chinese Admiral Zheng He's seven
expeditions from 1405 to 1433, each featuring up
to 300 ships carrying up to 30,000 men. Long
before da Gama - not to mention Columbus and
Magellan - began their globe-trotting, of
globe-sailing, the Ming dynasty had already
developed state-of-the-art technology in
shipbuilding, navigation and astrology. The
Chinese never tried to usurp local land or local
power. They just wanted to trade.
So did
the Portuguese - at least according to the
official story in the West. Thus the Monty
Pythonesque exchange between a Portuguese
convict-exile - and not da Gama, who remained in
his caravel - as he stepped into Indian shores and
met "two Moors from Tunis" who spoke Castillian
and Genoese (the Portuguese were initially thought
to be Muslims from the Maghreb):
The
two Moors: The devil take you! What
brought you here?
The Portuguese
discoverer: We came to seek Christians and
spices.
A fascinating insight on what
Asians think about this huge misunderstanding is
supplied by Indian scholar Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
professor of Indian history and culture at the
University of Oxford and formerly at the
prestigious Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales in Paris.
One of Sanjay's books,
the remarkable The Career and Legend of Vasco
da Gama (Cambridge University Press), written
with vast erudition and a wicked sense of humor,
provoked tempests of rage in Portugal. Academic
circles accused him of portraying national hero
Vasco as no more than a brutish "imperialist
pirate" (that's actually the interpretation of
most Indian Marxist-nationalist scholars in
Kerala).
It's much more complicated than
that. Even after independence, Indian
schoolchildren kept growing up learning that India
was "discovered" in 1498 by a European navigator
and a bunch of 170 illiterate sailors in three
small ships. It was still the same dialectic of
the economic and military power of the colonizer
imposed over the native population. What Sanjay
does - based on vast Portuguese-language
historical documentation - is to set the record
straight.
Sanjay explains how for the
Portuguese court and merchants in the late 15th
century:
Asia was simply too complex to be
accommodated within the existing regime of
compromises. Many elements in the Portuguese
nobility saw sense in the North African
campaigns, which after all brought glory and at
times fortunes. The Atlantic too seemed to make
sense as a relatively low-cost, high-return
affair, underwritten by Lisbon's cosmopolitan
mercantile class. But Asia seemed at once too
vast, too distant, and too risky a venture.
So the Portuguese were not exactly
interested in "discovering" something so vast and
distant. But King Dom Manuel was. And why? Because
five centuries before Bill Clinton and George W
Bush, he already had his own road map for the
Middle East.
Just like Bush, Dom Manuel
had a strong messianic streak. Everything for him
evolved around the capture of Jerusalem. This had
to do with many factors: the religious dimension
of the Portuguese adventure of navigating the
globe; the residual momentum of the turbulent
cohabitation with Islam in Iberia; and of course
the victory of the Reconquista, the Iberians
finally expelling the Moors from southern Europe.
As one of the foremost chroniclers of the time,
Joao de Barros, put it, this all had to do with
the rise "in the land of Arabia [of] that great
anti-Christ Muhammad".
Sanjay debunks the
myth that trade in the Indian Ocean after the year
750 was a monopoly of the "Islamic world-economy",
or that the Indian Ocean was a "Muslim lake". He
shows how other non-Muslim Asian merchants -
Gujaratis, Tamil, Syrian Christians from southwest
India, Chinese from Fukien (Fujian) - were in the
picture, and he also points out conflicts between
Muslims, such as the celebrated Arab navigator
Ahmad ibn Majid describing Malays as "bad people".
So da Gama and the Portuguese - who
"discovered" India only because they had hired a
"Moor from Gujarat" as a pilot - were only one
more among the players in this great trading game,
certainly a player of certified ruthlessness. But
they never managed to monopolize the spice trade.
Sanjay also observes how Asian nationalists from
different countries have always contrasted "the
greed and rapine of the Portuguese" with "the
scientific generosity and openness of spirit" of
an Arab navigator such as Ahmad ibn Majid.
To say that the Portuguese raised hell
against Muslims in the Indian Ocean would be an
understatement. Da Gama terrorized Muslims who
traded with the Red Sea (the Portuguese assumed
they were all from the Middle East, and dubbed
them "the Moors of Mecca", but they came from
everywhere, from Yemen and the Hadramut in Arabia
to Iraq and the Maghreb). They were Arabs,
Persians, Gujaratis, Khorasanis, Decccanis. The
Portuguese practically managed to expel them all
from Kerala's ports, especially Calicut.
When Che meets Krishna Kerala,
self-described God's own country, or the country
where God is inherent to a lot of small things,
may be the ultimate magic realism metaphor of
all-inclusive Indian cosmology - complete with
communists, salafis, technology freaks, Virgin
Marys, women in burqas, portraits of Che
Guevara and lost souls driving psychedelic buses
with stereo horns at terrifying speeds through the
lush, dense, tropical greenery.
For
comfort, the thing is to forget all things
ayurvedic; nothing beats a thali - the
stainless steel tray the size of a huge pizza on
which small bowls of vegetable curries, curds,
deserts and other delectable goods are disposed to
endless refills. The long and winding one-lane
road along the Malabar coast, dotted with green
mosques, women in burqas, temptresses
advertising cell phones, murals of Jesus Christ
and dominated by those terrifying buses, is
actually a street linking an agglomeration of
villages. As road movies go, it offers an
unparalleled glimpse into rural India - usually
terra incognita for the bulk of India and global
media.
India's hundreds of millions of
poor suffered tremendously with the neo-liberal
religious dogma of the 1990s. Prices were
globalized while their incomes remained
Indianized. According to the UN Human Development
Index, it's better to be poor in occupied
Palestine than in the so-called Indian "tiger
economy".
But Kerala is something else. In
1957, it became the first state in the world to
elect a communist government democratically. It
bears the most equitable land distribution in the
country. A glimpse of village life reveals that
poverty is much less acute than in other parts of
India. Health and education indicators are also
much better. The literacy rate is virtually 100%.
And political awareness is obviously high.
A little more than two moths ago there was a
monster industrial strike in India - involving
more than 40 million people. Kerala participated
with full force. Indian mainstream media depicted
the strike as a devastating blow to the country's
image as an investment destination. Not from the
point of view of the Indian working class.
Da Gama actually "discovered" Kerala. His
"reckless sailing" (according to the locals)
during a monsoon led him and his 170 sailors to
land in Kappad, a small, undeveloped beach 23
kilometers north of Calicut. Da Gama, for many
Keralans the precursor of globalization and
Western imperialism, is celebrated with a small
plaque; Keralans actually don't think much about
him nowadays, nor did they ever.
Global
tourism eschews Calicut and prefers to hit Fort
Cochin, the one area of big, brash southern
metropolis Kochi, formerly Cochin, which is still
dotted with Portuguese palaces and Dutch homes -
most converted into guesthouses. Fort Cochin reeks
of Kuta in Bali and Thamel in Kathmandu - a theme
park for Westerners; the same applies to the famed
Kerala backwaters, an intricate configuration of
lakes, canals, rivers and rivulets negotiated by
Kerala longboats, gondola-like vessels operated
with poles and sails.
It's impossible to
do Kerala's backwaters on one's own terms; it's
all packaged, American theme-park style. So the
real action in the Malabar coast is actually in
Kochi itself, the sprawling Indian city a
half-an-hour ferry ride away from Fort Cochin -
where one can sample the full spectacle of the
Indian middle classes in "full power" mode.
Drivers, carpenters, construction workers,
they are all in "full power" mode. Not only in
Kerala; most of all in the Gulf. From Kochi, it's
easier to fly to Muscat or Dubai than to Kolkata.
According to the World Bank's Global
Economic Prospects 2006 report, expat Indians
pumped a staggering US$ 21.7 billion into the
Indian economy in 2004. Two million Malayalees -
Kerala migrants - are responsible for 34% of this
total. And most are working in the Gulf, as well
as migrants from Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and
Rajasthan.
According to the International
Labor Organization, there are 10 million Indian
migrants around the world - 3.6 million of them in
West Asia. There may be up to 100 million ethnic
Indians across the globe.
Life in the
fast lane The Indian stockmarket has risen
by more than 20% in 2005. The country once again
may grow by an annual 7% - in fact 7.5%, according
to JP Morgan in Singapore. But it's not all a tale
of successful outsourcing - although Cochin is
also investing heavily in its own information
technology (IT) park. The entire IT and office
service industry in India - so hyped by global
corporate media - employs only 1 million people in
a country of more than 1 billion.
Every
Asian specialist and his neighbor says India now
needs a boom in export-oriented manufacturing - so
the overwhelming masses may be lifted out of
poverty. The boom may eventually come, says a
Mumbai businessman, but at an Indian pace.
Catastrophic infrastructure (but the
Mumbai local trains miraculously arrive on time)
and Byzantine regulations need to be urgently
tackled. Kerala for its part does not want blind,
neo-liberal "economic reform" per se - or a
mushroom forest of Wal-Marts; the social effects
would be extremely destabilizing.
India
gets 11 times less foreign direct investment (FDI)
than China - mostly because caps are imposed in
many politically sensitive sectors, such as
aviation, insurance, coal mining, media and the
retail business. The Manmohan Singh government's
priorities are essentially correct; investment in
infrastructure, agriculture, health and education.
Singh publicly recognizes that "bureaucratic
mindset and corruption continues to act as
roadblock to enterprise and progress", but he also
adds that "Indians are ready to take on the
world".
The Indian Express ("journalism of
courage") offers a road map. "We have to increase
agricultural production." Additionally, "states
should set up special economic zones and each zone
should specialize in different commodities for
exports." The textile industry - bypassed by India
and South Korea - is considered a thing of the
past. "Massive and rapid industrialization is
imperative to absorb the semi-skilled and skilled
manpower now out of jobs." And FDI has to come
from the Indian diaspora. "India should explore
and motivate overseas Indians to invest in India."
It will happen - at an Indian pace. But
certainly not for those taxi drivers in Mumbai,
those demented, horn-honking buses on the
back roads of Kerala, those computer whizzes in
the back of a shack, those commuters hanging from
a train window and dodging lethal poles. All
they've got left is the energy to blast ahead and
chase their mini India-as-a-great-power dream -
full power.
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