[The New York Times] http://www.nytimes.com/
* .October 2, 2010
Games India Isn’t Ready to PlayBy PANKAJ MISHRA
Mashobra, India
ON Friday afternoon, public spaces across north India were flooded with
policemen and paramilitaries. Thousands of alleged “troublemakers” were
arrested. The sending of bulk text messages from mobile phones was banned.
These precautions had nothing to do with the opening on Sunday of the
Commonwealth Games, the athletic competition among the nations of the former
British Empire that so many Indians have hoped would be their country’s
symbolic coming out as a world power.
Rather, the police were out in force because an Indian court had pronounced its
verdict on the site in the town of Ayodhya that has been long claimed by Hindu
nationalists as the birthplace of Lord Rama. The government did not want a
repeat of the horrific mob violence that in 1992 had followed the destruction
by Hindu nationalists of a 16th-century mosque standing on the land in question.
Shortly after the verdict, which split the disputed site unequally in favor of
Hindus and to the detriment of Muslims, I went for a walk through the Himalayan
village near my home. Even here, 600 miles from Ayodhya, people seemed to be
playing it safe, the market partly closed, and shopkeepers clustered around
television sets behind shutters.
Only the migrant laborers, who have come hundreds of miles from central India
to the Himalayas, were still at work, men, women and even children carrying
heavy stones on their heads at the construction projects that litter the
hillsides.
Easily identified — the parents small and thin and dark, and the children with
distended bellies and rust-brown hair that speak of chronic malnutrition —
these migrant laborers have been a regular sight here for some years, building
summer homes for the affluent of Delhi all day, and then huddling under tin
shacks at night.
I stopped to talk to a couple I know. All morning news channels had been
working themselves into a frenzy of fear and anxiety. Even the more sober
commentators fretted whether our “rising economic superpower” would be torn
apart again over the question of whether the mythical Lord Rama was born in a
ramshackle provincial town.
But the laborers hadn’t heard of the court verdict. As colder weather
approaches, their greatest anxiety seemed to be to protect themselves: the
punitive rains this summer have blown away the roofs of their living quarters.
And it seemed only right that these helots of India’s globalized economy should
be indifferent to the possible despoiling of India’s image in the West.
•
So who is anxious over India’s image in the wealthy world? That particular
burden is borne by India’s small affluent elite, for whom the last few months
have been full of painful and awkward self-reckonings. Certainly, the fear of
violence over Ayodhya was only the latest in a long line of reminders that, as
the columnist Vir Sanghvi put it, “as hard as we try to build a new India ...
old India still has the power to humiliate and embarrass us.”
Since June, a mass insurrection, resembling the Palestinian intifada, has raged
in the Indian-held Valley of Kashmir. Defying draconian curfews, large and
overwhelmingly young crowds of Kashmiri Muslims have protested human rights
abuses by the nearly 700,000 Indian security forces there. Ill-trained soldiers
have met stone-pelting protesters with gunfire, killing more than a hundred
Kashmiris, mostly teenagers, and ensuring another militant backlash that will
be exploited by radical Islamists in Pakistan.
A full-blown insurgency is already under way in central India, where guerrilla
fighters inspired by Mao Zedong’s tactics are arrayed against a government they
see as actively colluding with multinational corporations to deprive tribal
people of their mineral-rich lands. In recent months, the Maoists have attacked
the symbols of the state’s authority — railroads, armories, police stations —
seemingly at will, killing scores of people.
Yet the greatest recent blow to wealthy Indians’ delusions on the subject of
their nation’s inexorable rise has been the Commonwealth Games, for which Delhi
was given a long and painful facelift. For so many, the contest was expected to
banish India’s old ghosts of religious and class conflict, and cement its
claims to a seat at the high tables of international superpowers.
But the games turned into a fiasco well before their scheduled opening. Two
weeks ago, a huge footbridge connected to the main stadium collapsed. The
federation that runs the games has called the athletes’ housing
“uninhabitable.” The organizers have had to hire an army of vicious langur
monkeys to keep wild animals from infesting the venues. Pictures of crumbling
arenas and filthy toilets are circulating more widely than the beautiful
landscapes of the government’s “Incredible India” tourism campaign.
As the ratings agency Moody
