The Indian Villager will have his day, too

We wrote last month on the quiet, but definitive, reassertion of the India that is Bharat; of how the Indian villager is finding himself actually wanted—by corporate giants like HLL and ITC [Find the time, dear reader, to read BusinesWorld’s provoking feature [May 02, Cover Story] on the battles of the balance sheet being played out in the dusty arena of our villages.
The assertion of these simple folk is part of a change that observers have recognized to be part of the new century’s pattern.
As Gurcharan Das, the former chief of Procter and Gamble, observed a couple of years ago, the 21st century began in India, indeed the world, some ten years before we clocked 2000. In 1990, we were “still fiddling with the fax machine; when the decade ended we were zipping around the world through email, grandmoms were scanning and forwarding pictures to their childen, and the generation of 20s and thirties was talking of gigabytes and bandwidth.”
That change in Village India was thanks also to a significant change that went unnoticed by the urban middle class: the panchayati raj. The old village headman, or gaon bhooda [village elder], can no longer take power for granted, for there will be a next time—another election that will determine the legitimacy of his rule.
In some ways, the advent of the two Sardars—Manmohan Singh and Montek Singh Ahluwalia—in 1991 marked the start of the new century for us all. They gave us, under the Narasimha Rao dispensation, economic freedom, if we got political freedom in 1947. And that helped, even if slowly, loosen the vice-like grip of the bureaucrat and the politician.
The lower caste continued to rise—as we’ve seen in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh—through the ballot box, and thanks also to growing literacy. Before we deride the absurd rule that those two states have seen over the last decade [between Laloo and Mayawati], let us remember that it is part of a transition that the lower castes are wrestling with. They will find their way out of it, toward progress and advancement. The important thing is, unlike in the past, it is part of a democratic tradition.
These winds of change and liberalization are slowly empowering the average Indian villager.
In an odd way, as Das observes in a reflective essay [The Elephant Paradigm, Penguin, Rs 295], “in this devolution of power, we seem to be returning to the India of yore, to Mahatma Gandhi’s India of the autonomous village. In the past, no matter who ruled India—whether it was the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Mughals or the chaos of a thousand local rajas and nawabs—the ordinary Indian’s life had begun and ended in the village. Now again authority is coming closer to the individual, he could influence it, and take charge of his life.”
This is a pattern that will bring subtle but big change in the decades ahead. We are at what Malcolm Gladwell called a ‘Tipping Point’ of a seminal change that can potentially be the harbinger of a massive transformation.
As the marketplace woos the rural Indian, there is a return of his esteem; of his dignity.
And so there is the emergence, as Das says, “of a new voice of the farmer at the ubiquitous yellow STD/ISD/PCO sign enquiring about market rates in the mandi towns before they harvest his crops”.
That’s an India which will define and incubate opportunity and innovation in an exciting new way.
— Ed.