North vs South
Two years ago, I got into a conversation with a Chinese man I bumped
into at a shop in Singapore. In the manner of strangers everywhere who
search for nice things to say about each other, I complimented him on the
cleanliness and tourist-friendliness of Singapore. And he, in turn,
told me how much he loved Indian cinema, even though he couldn't
understand the language. He was particularly impressed, he said, by our movie
superstar. Did I think that he would enter politics? And how did one
pronounce the superstar's name, anyway?
The Amitabh Bachchan conversation (along with the Bollywood lecture) is
pretty much a staple of all contacts between Indians and friendly
foreigners. So I was about to tell him how I didn't think that Amitabh would
ever join politics again when I noticed that my new friend was
struggling to pronounce the superstar's name.
"Raj....Rudge.... Is it Rajni Kaanth?" he asked.
Rajnikant?
I was dumbfounded.
But no, the man meant Rajnikant. He had no real knowledge of Bollywood
at all. The only Indian films he knew were made in Madras. And
Rajnikant was the only star he recognised.
At the time, I put it down to the high proportion of Tamils among the
Indian population of Singapore. Of course, the man only knew South
Indian cinema, I thought to myself. That's because he lives in Singapore.
But over the last year I've begun to wonder about how much the
reference points for people who look at India from abroad are changing. In
Japan, I was astonished to discover that they too were crazy about
Rajnikant. The only Indian cinema that had a cult following was South Indian cinema.
And it isn't just films. If you go to England and talk to people about
coming to India on holiday, they won't want to see the Taj. They'll
have no interest in the palaces of Rajasthan. They'll talk about Goa. And
if they want a trendy holiday, they'll ask about Kerala.
In China, I discovered that while the Chinese - like most East Asians -
sneer at India and our achievements, they suddenly become respectful
when the subject of information technology (IT) is raised. They may have
no respect for New Delhi. But they all admire Bangalore.
Even the Bollywood craze that swept England last year (Bombay Dreams,
the Selfridges promotion etc.) had very little to do with North India.
Bollywood is neither North nor South India (as Javed Akhtar says, it is
an Indian state in its own right), but Bombay Dreams was based on the
music of A. R. Rahman and most of the tunes had first been featured in
South Indian movies.
I thought of all this on the plane to Bangalore last week. I had been
invited by Unmeelan, the cultural club at Infosys, to moderate a
discussion on the North-South divide and I wondered if the balance had now
finally changed in the South's favor.
On a previous trip to Bangalore, the Chief Financial Officer of Infosys
had shown me an astonishing statistic. If you look at the rate of
growth of the four Southern States - Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and
Andhra - he said, and compare it to the rest of Asia, you'll find that South
India actually outperforms most of the so-called South East Asian
tigers. The trouble with the same statistic for the rest of India, he
pointed out, was that the economic sluggishness of North India dragged it
down.
Clearly, he had a point. And at least some North Indians are beginning
to learn that lesson. Two weeks ago, in Chandigarh, Amarinder Singh,
the Chief Minister of Punjab, told me that the role models for North
Indian Chief Ministers needed to be people like S.M. Krishna and
Chandrababu Naidu who had recognized the importance of knowledge-based
industries. Punjab, he said, had lost out by focusing on agriculture for far too long.
Amarinder has persuaded Dr Y. S. Rajan, the scientist who is probably
best-known as President Abdul Kalam's pal, to shift to Chandigarh to make
Punjabis more techno-savvy. And Rajan, in turn, gave me another figure:
something like 80 per cent of all technical institutes of learning in
India, he said, are located south of the Vindhyas.
At the Infosys discussion, many of the same issues cropped up. The
South Indians in the audience were proud of their politicians (though this
was perhaps, less true of the Tamilians) and kept contrasting
Chandrababu and Krishna with Laloo Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav.
It was the South that was showing the way, they said. The North was
still obsessed with caste, with vote-bank politics and with cheap
populism.
This theme was echoed by one of the participants in the discussion, the
brilliant historian and essayist Ramchandra Guha, who said that
politics exemplified the difference: "Chandrababu says, 'if elected, I will
turn my state into another Singapore', but when a new Chief Minister is
elected in UP, all he says is 'I'll build a Ram Temple'."
There was anger, too, at the manner in which Hindi has been thrust on
the South. Even Javed Akhtar, perhaps the greatest scriptwriter Hindi
cinema has ever seen, said that English, not Hindi, should be India's
link language.
Overall, there was no doubt that when the South Indians in the
audience talked about North India, they meant UP and Bihar, not, say, Punjab
or Madhya Pradesh. Nobody had anything bad to say about Amarinder,
Sheila Dixit or Digvijay Singh. Equally, nobody had anything good to say
about Mayawati, Mulayam or Laloo.
This, in turn, led to questions that came up again and again: when UP
and Bihar send the largest number of MPs to the Lok Sabha, what hope is
there for Indian politics? Won't there always be a disconnect between
the professionals who are taking India forward and likes of Mayawati
who are only interested in playing the caste card? Wasn't it significant,
somebody else asked, that the Ayodhya movement had failed to generate
any excitement outside of the Hindi belt? (This is not entirely
accurate. Hindutva works well in Gujarat).
I'm not sure that there are many good answers to these questions. Over
the last decade, I've observed a growing disdain for electoral
democracy among the middle classes who complain that vote-bank politics will
always ensure that India is ruled by cow-belt politicians who frame
their appeals in terms of religion or caste. Judging by the Bangalore
discussion, this disdain is felt even more strongly in the South where
they don't care about all the issues that dominate national politics these
days: should there be a temple at Ayodhya? Can dalits get along with an
upper caste party in UP? Why should Muslims be allowed four wives?
Let's ban cow-slaughter completely. None of this interests the South.
Of course, all the claims made about the South's successful 'techies'
are not always valid. As my friend Chandan Mitra - another participant
in the discussion - pointed out, the North is not quite as backward as
the South likes to think it is. The second biggest IT center in India
after Bangalore is not Hyderabad, but the National Capital Region. Small
North Indian states like Himachal have performed remarkably well on
many parameters. And despite Javed's preference for English as a link
language, Hindi has penetrated the South.
Nor are the North and South two opposing monoliths. A large proportion
of the Infosys employees who took part in the discussion were,
themselves, North Indians who had chosen to work in Bangalore. And even when
the women who disdained the North spoke, they did so in salwar-kameezes.
But it is hard to shake the feeling that India has changed in two very
different ways over the last 15 years. On the one hand, the South has
captured the world's imagination and has had the sense and/or the good
fortune to focus on such areas as IT where India has the potential to be a global leader.
On the other hand, the North seems sometimes to have lost the plot.
After the end of the Rajiv Gandhi government, North Indian politics seems
to be less and less about the things that matter and more and more
about caste coalitions, about redressing historical wrongs, about disputes
over medieval mosques, about the perceived threat from Pakistan and
about ensuring that politicians get as rich as they can as quickly as
possible. The twin legacies of Mandal and mandir have ensured the
seemingly permanent backwardness of the North.
Sadly, it is a divide that grows with each passing day. And at this
rate, the South will soon leave the North far behind.
By Vir Sanghvi, Host of India Talk show on NDTV