Saturday 29th November 2008

We're heading out of the office with our cameras, tripod and notebook. Our editor catches us on the way out.

"You'd better be back by sundown," he says in a motherly tone, "or it'll get dangerous." For once this week, he's not talking about the terrorist threat, but the riots that traditionally break out the evening polling booths close.

Today is election day in Delhi. The BJP, the Hindu national party, headed in the city by the aptly-named Vijay Jolly, is challenging the government's Congress party, led by an iron Chief Minister with the more unfortunate title of Sheila Dikshit.

Before the terror attacks, the papers were packed with concerns over the pollution at the Yamuna River, the state of public transport, and the skyrocketing price of tomatoes. But the events in Bombay have muted the pre-election buzz.

The usual election precautions are in place: a police presence on every corner, army lorries in the streets, and three 'dry days' in which alcohol sale is banned across the city. But these scenes are small beer compared to the carnage 700 miles away.

Michelle and I drag our equipment into rickshaws, zipping across the city to interview voters as they hit the polls. Except that they don't seem to be hitting the polls at all.

We step out in the middle of the market and ask for directions to the local polling station. A street wallah shrugs and returns to his job of squeezing fruit. A man buying cigarettes flicks his hand in a general direction. We hail a cycle rickshaw. Our wallah, who must be at least sixty years old, huffs and puffs and every two minutes is forced to get out and push. We ask a young girl where she is going to vote. She says that the voting here has been postponed until next month. After circling another market for fifteen minutes we still haven't found anything, and are beginning to think our rickshaw wallah will not survive another ten yards. We dismount and catch a businessman on his way to work. "I'm sorry," he says, "But no election today. Our candidate has expired." This is not bureaucratic lingo. It turns out he really is dead.

After a while we find a bona fide operational polling station at a school in the bustling bazaar area of Karol Bargh. Children run about, set loose for the day. They mob our legs and jump up at our camera, waving, trying to get on film. We try to look for voters, but are shooed away by stern looking policemen. They tell us we don't have official electoral commission press passes and can't stay. But the cops seem unruffled when we set up ten metres away on the other side of the road. Some of them even pose for the camera.

We park our tripod and get out our notebooks, poised for interview. And wait. And wait some more. The trickle of voters is slow. A man hobbles out on a walking stick, aided by his daughter. Time passes. We look around at the shuttered shops. Only the man selling paan and sweets is open for business. He grins as he takes advantage of other people's discarded business.

A few men venture out of their houses, asking us questions in Hindi. Why are we here? Why aren't we in Mumbai? Surely that's where all the journalists are...

India is the largest democracy in the world. I point this out to a young man in a yellow fleece, who seems to be the only person in the area to speak English.

"All the rich people have left the city," he says. "It's a holiday, after all. Why not go on holiday?" And why are all these people standing around? Why aren't they voting? He simply shrugs.

India is not an apathetic nation, at least not by Western nations' standards. On local election days in Britain, most potential voters barely shake the dust off their shoes, whereas turnouts in India are consistently between 50 and 60 per cent, even at the worst of times. And where middle classes in the UK are more likely to tick the ballot, in India it's often the dalits and lower castes who are particularly active.

But today terror is the buzzword. Democracy is on the back burner. The streets are strangely empty as people remain glued to their televisions and radios, venturing out only to buy some overpriced tomatoes. The only excitement for a truckload of policemen in Central Delhi this afternoon is the sight of two foreign, female reporters, standing beside a video camera and tripod, looking completely lost.

Wednesday 5th November 2008

There's a sign on the door: "schedule of anxiety." It's like a set list taped up outside a concert, though this event will certainly be running to schedule and besides it's far earlier in the morning than any self-respecting rock star would be seen out of bed. We're here to watch the results come in as the polls close for the American election. The Democrats Abroad chapter in Delhi have organised the breakfast for expats, although everyone is here. Ostensibly, to watch history being made.

Inside, the cafe is Bedlam. There are more journalists here than people to document, so TV cameras jostle for space and an elbow-free view, reporters end up interviewing each other, and it's impossible to get a photograph without someone else's flash going off in your face. Waitresses weave in and out of tables and underneath armpits, narrowly deflecting their trays from people's waving arms as victory after victory comes in. A huge map of the US has been drawn on a bed sheet and pinned across the back wall. A girl with a statue of liberty headband is smacking Democrat and Republican logos on the states as they are claimed. It's soon clear that the blues have it. Each new cheer is ever more filled with ecstatic disbelief that the next American President will be the black Democrat from Hawaii. The underdog.

Outside two girls have their faces pressed to the window, confusedly peeking in at the cameras and flashing lights and cappuccinos. One of them has a huge open sore on her leg, weeping infected pus. Every time someone comes out of the cafe for a break from the chaos, she runs up and thrusts her leg in their face. Her companion crouches down and holds their shoes, asking for rupees. Neither are having much success.

Back inside the cafe, McCain makes his concession speech. There are titters among the crowd, some of whom are wearing Democrat hats in the shape of horses heads. There's whispered debate over whether some of his comments are backhanded slurs to their victorious hero. When eventually Obama appears, with Michelle, Malia and Sasha, there is bacchanalian whooping and cheering. As Obama makes his victory address, there is a reverent hush. Tears are shed, twinkling in the TV screen light.

And the biggest cheer comes as Obama delivers his message to those, 'beyond our shores', promising a 'new hope' for those watching in "parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world."

I wonder what the little girl peeking through the window thinks. Obama won't give her a rupee, or the medicine for her leg. The speech would be impossible for her to understand, even if she were to know more English than 'hungry' and 'sir' and 'please'. The optimism would be impossible for her to understand because it's an optimism of ideals and not of s physical reality she could grasp. But Obama is without doubt the greatest leader to come in our generation. And what can be hoped on a day like today is that those inspired by Obama can be inspired to help her.

As we leave the cafe, the morning air is finally beginning to warm up. The little girls are sitting in the gutter. Someone inside the cafe has given them half a packet of cookies, and one of them has a small American flag. She's not really sure what it is, much less what she's supposed to do with it, but it seems to amuse her for a while and they play contentedly, crumbs in their hands and between their teeth. Perhaps this is the new dawn Obama was talking about.

Tuesday 4th November 2008

We are sitting in the dark tonight, reverently silent, eyes glued to laptops. We sit in the dark because no one can extricate themselves from their seats to switch the lights on. All that can be seen through the blackness are the glows of small apple logos and the flicker of the snowy TV reception in the corner. No one speaks. Everyone has iPod phones in, listening to CNN streamed off the internet.

Tonight represents the pinnacle of this month's anticipation. Five Americans live with me, the lone Brit - two from New York, one from San Francisco, another from St Louis and a last, unfortunately, from Wisconsin, America’s equivalent of Bognor. Since we’re all journalists, we’re all, according to most Republicans at least, Obamaphiles who have controlled this entire election campaign, steering it in the Democrats’ favour. They’re probably right. Therefore, for lack of dinnertime debate, we spend our evening swapping internet satire, from Sarah Palin being fooled by comedians to, well, Sarah Palin being fooled by comedians. There has also been a breakdancing Obama, a Halloween Palin, and a hamster-faced McCain. The latter didn’t even need any photoshopping.

In any case, election mania has by no means been confined to our household. India, like most other countries outside America, has become Obama-crazy. The newspapers have, for days, asked, not ‘what India can do for America’ but ‘what Obama can do for India.’ The election result a foregone conclusion, of course. But what seems more interesting is that where America demanded of India circa Dubya Bush, India is expecting some kind of recompense from the first Black President.

Like the rest of the world, Indians see Obama as a kindly face, and have done so colourblind. Obama is celebrated here, his profile on the masthead of the Times of India almost every day for the past two weeks. It would be interesting to take a poll of how many Indians realise that the votes have yet to be counted. A puja was said today, and an astrological prediction that the Democrats have a 75% chance of winning. “His reign is going to be a long and prosperous one,” according to the guru involved. There is both a South Indian Vedic Chart and a North Indian Vedic chart drawn up to calculate Obama’s fate with precision.

“Everyone seems to be supporting Barack Obama,” says the anchor on CNN India as I sit here typing. “I don’t understand.” What he doesn’t understand is not Obama’s popularity, but why anyone is even bothering to count the votes. India loves him, America loves him.

But India’s enthusiasm for America’s black hero is itself confusing. There are few black faces, even in Delhi. The small enclave of Africans who do live here are mostly male, without families, and known for gang activity and dealing drugs to the bad boys of the Delhi suburbs. Apart from the Democratic candidate, the only other black faces in the newspapers in the last few weeks have been the Somali pirates that are snatching Indian sailors from the seas. Africans in India don’t really exist, and when they do, they’re hardly celebrated as potential history-makers.

And Obama is unlikely to change that. He escapes the barbarism branding because being articulate, with an American accent, he becomes white, or at least of a completely different race to blacks living in Delhi. It’s not likely that a black man would ever run for government in India. The liberal press in other large democracies do some soul searching, asking themselves where their next great black leader might come from. in India, the idea is so unthinkable that it would never enter an editorial meeting. It’s laughable, even.

Yet it’s not as if India hasn’t voted a non-ethnically Indian candidate into power before. Four years ago, a woman born in Vincenza, Italy was triumphant at the polls. Edvige Antonia Albina Maino, better known as Sonia Gandhi, had a father who was a fascist officer and didn’t even visit India until shortly before she married Rajiv Gandhi at the age of 33. After winning the election, she renounced power in favour of Manmohan Singh. Had she taken it, she would have been India’s first Roman Catholic Prime Minister.

The Americans sitting around the room are receive messages from home from friends and boyfriends, mourning the length of lines at polling stations, competing with anecdotes about how long they spent in the queue, but excited about the likelihood of change. They sit on the edge of an historic decision. Four years ago, India already made one. Whether they’ll ever make another is yet to be known. In the meantime, the rest of Delhi is happy to live vicariously, cheerleading the Kenyan-American.

Saturday 25th October 2008

“I don’t know when I’m even going to have the time to read this,” Meena said, turning to the young guy driving our car. She was waving a copy of Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger towards him. Immediately, she turned back to the phone conversation she was having on the tiny Nokia in her palm and proceeded to argue in Hindi. Meena was sealing a deal with one of her advertising clients. It hasn’t stopped fascinating me that Hindi, like German, seems to be one of those languages which makes people sound like they’re constantly arguing, even when they’re just asking for directions on the street.

White Tiger is not written in Hindi. But it does read as one long argument, and one which most Indians have been ready to join, on one side or the other. For many, the fact that Adiga’s novel was named winner of the Booker Prize a fortnight ago (the second Indian to take the award in three years) was hardly a cause for celebration. The novel exposes Indian’s servant culture to eyes that used to ignore the underbelly, not least because the underbelly are the people who work in their kitchens, drive their cars, and sweep their floors. The Times of India hardly greeted it with rapturous applause.

I comment on Meena’s book, explaining that I’m reading it too. But what’s new? Half of the young people in Delhi are reading it. It’s on sale from every street vendor in Connaught Place, piles of white hardbacked copies wrapped in plastic. “He’s under house arrest, you know?” she says. “Really?” She looks harried. She’s waiting for a callback. “Well, no, I mean, it’s like self-imposed house arrest. People want to kill him. He has police outside his house.”

“Why doesn’t he move to another country? Or just outside of Delhi?” I ask, questioning why anyone would want to be a martyr to their first novel, especially when they were already working on a second. Meena looks at me and shrugs, as if to say, ‘why doesn’t anyone?’.

Adiga’s book has offended many in its criticism of modern India. Religion, money, illiteracy, poverty, sanitation, new business, corruption: all these issues, boils on the social conscience of the Indian Middle classes, are ruptured by his narrative. And worse, it’s narrated in the form of a letter from a lowly Indian servant to the Chinese Premier, India’s arch-rival bar none.

It’s easy to be power-blind in India. But India’s servant culture is everywhere. It didn’t leave with the masters and the memsahibs and the hierarchy of the British Raj. Everywhere, labourers works for those who buy them. Labour is so cheap here: the millions of deeply poor Indians who need jobs and food can likewise be employed in vast numbers by the other side of the yawning social chasm - the most wealthy - who can afford to buy several of them. The very poorest won’t leave, no matter how badly they are treated, because of the cash they send home and the pride their family take in their employment in a good household. Adiga’s narrator Balram is servant to his master Mr Ashok and his wife Pinky Madam: Indian entrepreneurs who boast about their days living in New York, drink cocktails and eat steak at TGI Friday’s in Connaught Place, and hang portraits of their dogs, Cuddles and Puddles, on the walls of their mansion. Balram is paid a fraction of the amount Mr Ashok regularly takes to meetings in suitcases to bribe politicians. He is forced to lie to take the blame when a child is run over by a drunk Pinky Madam; it is only narrowly he escapes jail. He watches his master count wads of cash, visit prostitutes, return home drunk, hit and abuse him. He stays silent for a paycheck.

But the very poorest do not stand at a respectful distance and bow low to the floor: they pull at your sleeve and push their small, shrivelled babies into your arms, grabbing at your elbows and asking for a few rupees. In their eyes you can see not only their hunger but their anger, and they demand, unlike the London homeless who look up lethargically and apologetically.

The servants are the other half of the poor, the silent half. People dressed in uniforms still bow to you, and it’s easy to get used to such treatment, even to expect it. Today, I leave my desk at the office for two minutes, and when I return there is a young man cleaning my keyboard and mouse with a duster. I wait, tapping my foot, incredulous that such an unexpected, pointless, and time-consuming task is happening when I have important Facebooking to do.

One half of the Indian poor pinch and grab at clean, wealthy hands and demand a small fraction of what these hands own. The other half stay clean, play dumb, take abuse, and wait for their measly paycheck. It is to the latter that Adiga gives a voice.

Why do they not yet revolt, and find their own voice? Partly, because they need the rupees. But there is still a deeply-entrenched servant-master mentality that verges on Stockholm Syndrome. Balram stays with his master not only because he gets paid, but because he deeply admires him. He is caught between conflictingfeelings of great moral inferiority and hatred. Like Balram, many are taken from the provincial life of the village, where the hub of life is the milk-producing water buffalo, and brought into the city, in a uniform, in a house, in the drivers seat of a Toyota Qualis. Like the British before them, Indian masters believe they are civilizing the village animals, and the village animals believe they are being civilised.

When will the revolution come? It’s difficult to believe that a serving-class consciousness will rise up from an award-winning novel; one that is being absorbed by the Indian middle classes and lauded by Western white literati. As the urban population grows (and it’s expected that half of Indians will live in cities by 2050) it may be that live-in servants are no longer sourced from villages, and instead day servants, with working hours and lives of their own, will feel looser loyalties and demand more rights.

Regardless of speculation, Adiga’s novel demands. And not just of the middle classes, but of those who serve them.

“The book of the revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian,” writes Adiga. “Crap it out and read.”

Thursday 23rd October 2008

It’s just over two weeks until the American Presidential election, but in this apartment in Central Delhi you might be mistaken for thinking it is happening tomorrow. There are flags pinned across the paintings of Indian landscapes: they read, “Change we can believe in!” and “McCain: same Again!”. A girls sits in the corner by a banner declaring, “Vote from Abroad!”, her laptop perched on her knees, covered with an image of Obama’s face, mid-speech. Instead of the scent of incense smell of freshly-baked brownies drifts from the kitchen. The table is covered with finger-foods: mini sausages on sticks, precision-cut crudites, and nachos with salsa. The A/C whirrs gently. A handful of women frantically check lists and grab their mobile phones, on their starting blocks and ready to begin. Here is the Democrats Abroad phone bank.

These six women are serving one of their countries, whilst living in another. All of them Indian-American, though more American than Indian (in the way that only those with duel citizenship know, they also feel more Indian when they are in America). They are scattered all around the room, perching on the edge of sofas with mobile phone in one ear and finger pushed in the other, speaking to other expats. “Have you requested your form from Washington yet, ma’am?”; “You can FedEx it – it only costs 90 rupees”; and “I’m afraid that registration has closed in the state of Texas. But you can encourage others, right?” It must be the only call center in India staffed by Americans.

If theres only one thing that India is proud of, it the fact that it is the largest democracy in the world – with a potential votership of over one billion people. It’s the one trump card India holds in it’s competition with China. It’s possible to vote with a fingersprint next to a symbol for that even the fact that its literacy rate is waning in comparison – 61% compared to China’s 91% – it still manages to keep the d-word. And with it, remain a friend of the West.

There is a heads on race this general election, almost as nail-biting as that in America.the Congress Party (known as Cong, which makes them sound like they emerged from the jungle) is currently in government under the leadership of Manmohan Singh. Their only direct rivals are the BJP, or Hindu Nationalist Party. But with a country of such a disparate, disconnected votership, most vote in their immediate interests: who will give them a job, and who will fight for their class rights. Politics is still very much drawn along caste, rather than party lines. There’s a saying, “in India, you don’t caste your vote, you vote your caste.” Of course, corruption is endemic, and bribery is always an issue. But there will always be those who throw stones – and knowing the state of most voting systems around the world,they probably live in glass houses anyway.

India remains the largest democracy in the world. It is fairly incredible that such a sizeable landmass and population, with so many currents running through it (not least that of terrorism) has remained such. Only once has it teetered on the path of autocracy, with the emergency motions passed by Indira Gandhi in the 1970s. “A billion people and and it’s a democracy,” George W. Bush once said, as if he were admiring the lassoing of a particularly fine specimen of bullock, “Now ain’t that something.”

Obama today promised that India would be one of his top priorities. The Indian media, glossing over the words “one of”, reported the statement as if the two countries were best friends. India needs the US, but it also looks increasingly likely that soon the US will need India. The two will remain democracies, and proud of it. India may lack literacy, it may lack basic santitation, and it could even get overtaken by China as the software capital of the world. But every citizen, though they may be on the breadline, can put a fingerprint on a voting card and make their small voice heard.

So the two countries stand side by side with democratic values, or so India would like to think. It’s only right, therefore, that India should help America’s elections in any way it can, even with crudites and election-branded Apple macs. And though tonight, these women with brownies and Diet Coke by their side are calling American ex-pats, it seems they could be on the phone to any Indian as they chirrup. “Wow, congratulations on voting,” one says, “and thanks for your enthusiasm for our country’s democracy.”