The last week's headlines have captured the contrasts and contradictions within India in all their starkness, and sharpness.
On the one hand, you have villagers protesting violently against the forcible takeover of their land, and getting shot for their pains. On the other, vaulting ambition rides high as multi-billion dollar mega-deals tumble out of corporate cupboards on a scale unimaginable just months ago. On the one hand, you have Naxalites mounting an impressive raid on an armed camp, demonstrating to all how little progress has been made in tackling this fundamental challenge to "inclusion" and to internal security; at the same time, dollar billionaires in India now outnumber those in every other Asian country.
To continue with the Dickensian paradoxes, you have fresh management graduates being offered Rs 10,000 a day as wages, and Indian employees as a whole scoring the highest salary increases yet again, in an inter-country comparison; on the other side of the tracks, farmers growing sugar, cotton and wheat struggle to make Rs 10,000 in a whole cropping season.
In some ways, all of the past year has been a continuous celebration of the sun shining on India -- what with 9 per cent growth and all that; but when you look at the number of families who have registered for hard, manual work for just the minimum wages that are offered under the rural employment guarantee programme, the total adds up to much more than the numbers who are supposed to be poor in the districts covered -- and tells of a degree of need in the countryside that the statistics do not speak of.
It is fair to say that the challenges from below remain mostly beneath the media's radar screen, until there is a flashpoint -- and even then, the reporting is mostly episodic, unrelated to underlying conflicts and tensions. What is much better reported is the frenetic deal-making of a fevered business atmosphere, accompanied by the roistering and roiling of the stock market.
Both everyday realities exist simultaneously in two worlds that could be in different solar systems but happen to be within the same society. It is magical, in a way, that the worlds of the rich and the poor usually continue in their different (sometimes overlapping) orbits, and do not collide. But when Nandigram and Bijapur happen on successive days, do we dismiss it as coincidental timing, or is it a wake-up call to those who don't think beyond P:E ratios?
Indeed, is the latest collision a result of the poor challenging the rich (a la Dickens), or the rich moving into the world of the poor -- through a land-grab in the name of exclusive economic zones, using the power of the state and backed by tax giveaways? In other words, who is causing the collision and asking for trouble here?
Tata Motors will point to the development that has been sparked off in Uttarakhand as a result of its investment in the state -- and the argument is valid. But when states compete for such investment, and West Bengal feels obliged to buy 1,000 acres of land and hand it over to a company for an annual lease of a crore of rupees, could there be other arguments as well? As someone said in another context, "The issues are emotional. The solutions are technical. The decisions are political."
And what might those decisions be? We already have a foretaste of what politics could throw up in pursuit of "inclusion". Reservation of jobs in the private sector for sundry deprived groupshow long will it be before the first major political party puts it formally on its agenda, and will that jolt the mood in the Confederation of Indian Industry?
More money for gigantic, government boondoggles -- the 'throw more money at the problem' solution that can be applied with greater abandon as tax revenue soars. More para-military forces to fight Maoist insurgents in dozens of districts -- imagine a repeat of Kashmir-style atrocities, fake killings and the like in the vastnesses of the heartland. These are not coherent thoughts, but do we have a coherent state, and has this been a coherent week?