A Tale of Two Indias — page 2

Chat-show host simi garewal, who interviews the new rich on her weekly show Rendezvous, has no doubt about her nation's transformation. "It's all changed," she says. "Suddenly India's a candy store. It's about wanting to own, to possess, to be in the newspapers, show off and be recognized." As Gurcharan Das, author of India Unbound—a book that examines the economy's growth since 1991—said in Outlook newsmagazine recently: "Money, like sex, is out of the closet. Everybody wants to be rich, and live rich."

Yet for many traditionalists, the consumer boom is an assault on India's soul. Underneath its surface exuberance, they maintain, India is defined by a restraint reflected in Gandhian frugality, Victorian morality, even cricket. Money, they argue, is vulgar. For these cultural guardians, the new India represents decay. They point to the garish coffee chains replacing modest chai houses, the vogue for blond hair, the beery gangs of software engineers in Bangalore's pubs. "Gandhi may still be an icon," says columnist Swapan Dasgupta, "but Gandhism is dead as a dodo."

In some ways, the new India is a throwback to an earlier time. For centuries the subcontinent was a land of maharajas and urchins, a caste-iron divide backed by a Hindu faith that encouraged the poor to know their place and respect their elders and betters. Then along came Gandhi. As well as challenging the idea of British rule, the Mahatma fought its substance, too. In contrast to imperial pomp and snobbery, Gandhi dressed in homespun rags, walked barefoot, and welcomed Brahmans and untouchables alike. His message was one of freedom from oppression by wealth as much as by race. Fifty years ago in newly independent India, castes mixed in the street and overt displays of wealth were more than crass—they were suspicious. But today rich and poor lead wholly separate lives. The rich shop in malls, patronize private schools and hospitals, and relax in gyms and spas. The poor live in slums, send their children to work, and can't afford health care.

This economic partition means that a two-bedroom flat in south Bombay, with a view of the 700,000-resident Dharavi slum, may sell for $750,000. Construction giant Sahara offers Swiss-style chalets and Burmese-style teak villas in a secure 2,025-hectare park outside Bombay. Manager Seemanto Roy says Amby Valley will have artificial lakes, a golf course, an indoor ski slope and a dial-a-nightclub service enabling residents to order lights and sound to their own patios. When residents venture out, they can be whisked by a high-speed train to downtown Bombay, which Roy says will cut a three-hour trek through the slums to 20 minutes in comfort. In the words of Delhi University politics professor Achin Vanaik, those on the train will avoid the "angry humiliation" of India's backwardness.

Just 200 km north of Bombay, in the village of Patilpada, that backwardness is all too visible. In virtually every house, there is at least one child with a distended belly and stick limbs. Teacher Davidas Bhodore, 27, says three children from the village starved to death so far this year, as did 30 in the immediate area. A hospital admissions blackboard at nearby Jawahar tells the same story: by noon on one day in August, 23 children have arrived with grade 3 malnutrition, meaning that they are just 50-60% of normal weight. Another 15 register at less than 50% of normal weight. Official statistics show that between March 2003 and June 2004, 9,245 children died in the countryside around Bombay, India's business capital. Though the Maharashtra state government denies that any of these deaths were from starvation, doctors privately say many are and that officials pressure them to write any other cause of death. Slumped in her Patilpada doorway, Jaie Bhambruy, 32, struggles to pull her one-year-old twins onto her breasts. The children, one wailing, one limp, are too weak to suckle. "We went to the hospital," she says, "but they sent us away [BRACKET {so as}] not to embarrass the government." At the hospital, Dr. Marad Randas estimates that 15% of the local population is malnourished, and talks about families who live "without education, without clothes, without a sense of time." Asked if Bombay seems like a different world, he replies, "Something like that."

Some see the seeds of unrest in India's divide. Professor Vanaik says that flaunting wealth in a desert of poverty is not only "obscene" but provocative. Like others, he explains the defeat in the national parliamentary election in May of the ruling coalition led by the right-of-center Bharatiya Janata Party as an expression of anger at India's members-only boom. The new government of Congress Party Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has made narrowing the gap between the two Indias a priority. Montek Singh Ah-luwalia, the Prime Minister's policy coordinator and deputy head of the Planning Commission, says: "Growth cannot be the sole focus of our action. We need to re-deploy expenditure to health, education and agriculture." Vanaik points to the anticity, antidevelopment 10,000-strong rebel Naxalite army, which runs a virtual state in rural central India, as an example of the risks of rising discontent. On Nov. 25, as a sign of the group's gathering strength, a band of Naxalite guerrillas killed 17 policemen in an ambush outside the northern city of Varanasi. "The poor have retaliated against a repressive government and our battle will continue," said rebel leader Kameswar Baitha in a statement. "Our fight is against the exploitative forces in the government. The poor are now waking up." Says Vanaik: "There's dissatisfaction in the countryside and a crisis of expectation among the young. These displays of wealth let them see the life they want, but after a while they realize the idea of this prosperity coming to them is ridiculous. Then conditions are ripe for all sorts of explosions and social turmoil."

Such unrest might be headed off if India's new rich learned how to spread the wealth. But as Mallya himself admits: "There is no collective interest in India. Only vested interests." There are exceptions to that rule. Parmeshwar Godrej, for example, has been instrumental in pulling in Bollywood and cricket stars to front India's first meaningful national aids-awareness campaign, while Premji has put millions of dollars into education projects. Nevertheless, India's ability to provide a safety net for its poor is sabotaged by tax cheats, who underreport India's true national income by half, concerned tax officials say. And it is an American—Bill Gates—rather than an Indian who is the largest donor to charitable causes in the country.

But giving to the poor doesn't only mean giving money. Subrata Roy—whose son manages Amby Valley—exemplifies how wealth can benefit more than just the wealthy. Roy started with $43 in a rural savings scheme in 1978. Today, his Sahara group has assets worth $11 billion. A rival to beer king Mallya in flamboyance, he lives in a palace in Lucknow, complete with an artificial waterfall and a 10,000-liter fish tank. But Roy also employs 700,000 people. In a little more than a quarter-century, he has become India's second largest employer after the railways. "I can remember people who started with me on bicycles and a one-room house," says Roy. "Now, they have a Mercedes and a good house."

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