Go East, Young Man!
Take a good look at the map of India. Divide it with an imaginary white line running from Northwest to Southeast, historically separating the country into two parts: India and Bharat.
The eastern part, in mostly green patches, was once the industrial heartland of Asia where merchant princes thrived during two centuries of colonial enterprise.
This was India.
The western part, an arid wasteland of maharajas and nabobs, belonged to fairy tales and folklore.
That was Bharat.
After Independence, till about the early 1970s, the eastern half remained India’s Ruhr belt, producing
the finest teas, jute; coal, iron ore, bauxite; steel, aluminium and other metals.
And, of course, the Ambassador, the marque four-wheeled contraption that dominated Indian roads for nearly half-a-century.
Then, Indira Gandhi happened!
And industry and mines and banks were nationalised.
And the raw materials produced in the Ruhr began to be transported to new manufacturing hotspots in Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, that had no or little raw material to light up furnaces.
So, rail freight rates were equalised. It didn’t matter what you produced where, as long as rake-loads of coal and ore were hauled all over the country at no extra cost.
And India swapped places with Bharat.
And New India, with its epicentre in New Delhi, was gradually redesigned as a grand theatre of industrial enterprise where the temples of modern India would come up, to, eventually, make way for monstrous monuments to the makers of modern India.
That’s when the hydra-headed monster of Naxalism too was born... in the industrial badlands of what was till yesterday India, and now famished Bharat.
And that monster stomped the shantytowns surrounding the rustbelt ... and deep inside the jungles where minerals were mined. And capital took flight from Ruhr to the wasteland where the India of tomorrow was coming up.
That’s how, first, went out the cash, as honchos stripped assets in the East, reducing giant industrial ecosystems into Jurassic parks.
Next walked out the intellectual in white collar, the quintessential bhadralok, chasing higher raises and high rises.
And finally, crawled out the labourers, literally on their stomachs, rendered jobless by large scale shutdowns.
Next followed Manmohan Singh’s celebrated Economic Reforms of 1991. That’s also when, to raise the momentum of movement of capital, labour and minerals, the government started conceiving the Eastern Freight Corridor to move resources from the East to West. And the Western Freight Corridor to move finished industrial goods and consumer products from the West to East.
It also conceived the massive inland waterway project on the Ganga to move raw materials and goods from sea and the vast deltaic hinterland by boat towards Delhi and beyond.
Work is still in progress along these corridors and the waterway at the time of writing this piece.
The reforms have brought centrestage yesterday’s caravanserais, Ludhiana, Mohali, Gurgaon, Surat, Kandla, Indore, Nashik, Pune, Bangalore...
Once military outposts in medieval and colonial adventure sagas across Bharat that had no other credible reason to exist, emerged on the country’s industrial map as corporate hotspots and playgrounds for India’s noveau riche.
And the workers who left their homes in what was once India, started inhabiting the hovels around the sky-kissing Mansions Of The Gods that they built in the corporate havens of New India -- denied statutory health benefits, housing and pension -- earning barely enough be able to remit pittances back home.
And still more of their ilk joined in. Doing household chores, menial labour and scavenging the grounds, all this while living in sub-human conditions, no better than slaves.
Now, take a good look at the map below once more.
And look at that imaginary white line again that divides the country in a Northwest-Southeast Axis.
To your left stands India, to your right Bharat.
And the industrial hotspots of India’s 1991 reforms have spawned into the COVID hotspots of 2020 India. The green badlands appear mostly safe and secure.
And the rich and privileged of the economically powerful India are crying foul.
Not because it is they who got the virus home, but because the slaves they employed from the resource rich jungles in the East are finally moving back to the comfort and security of their home and hearth.
A trainload of these industrial migrants moved out of Hyderabad in Telangana for Ranchi in Jharkhand the morning of International Labour Day. Soon, the others will flood back to where they came from, robbing the lustre and gloss of giant corporate nameplates in the shadows of which they eked out a living.
Small wonder, there’s a lot of noise to your left of the axis that makes India. Everybody is clamouring to stop the migrants from going back home to a hallucinatory world of starvation. And death. Even as the rich keep an eye on the nearest ventilator in town, no longer sure how to get their dirty jobs done.
Sorry, bossman, there’s no such fear in Bharat.
The winter crop that ripened in spring sunshine has been recently harvested and stocked to feed the boys when they get back home for good.
Which is why if you come down from the ivory towers that you inhabit, and talk to the rustics for whom you shed your crocodile tears, you’ll actually find few among them crying, leave alone starving. They look as cheerful and contented as ever.
That’s reason why there’s peace around the green patches you see on the map...
Bharat is truly calm.
Nobody there is sulking, nobody there is tormenting, nobody there is haunted by what might visit them tomorrow...
Nobody is crying foul.
Yet, you spin your lies.
Now, there’s a yet unfolding story in this epic saga unravelling before our eyes in this Age of Lockdown. In this epic return of the pilgrims.
No matter how bitter and bored you sound complaining of economic slowdown, the migrants aren’t returning to your workplace anytime soon.
For centuries, they have known and lived this life of penury and deprivation ... irrespective of whether you prospered in India or Bharat.
And now that their labour is taking flight, there’s only one way for the rest of the pack to follow.
Rich man India, count your coins and move right back to where both labour and intellect of emaciated
Bharat will find itself at home, oiling the wheels of your fortune.
Go East, young man!
If global capital is mulling a pull out from China, in the wake of an invisible virus, there’s added incentive for desi moolah to run where the mooli (raddish) thrives, now that your playground too is infected.
Back to Essays