India My Land Archives - RAMA BIJAPURKAR

PM Modi must push for a self-confident Bharat, not a self-reliant one

admin — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 08:58:00 +0000

PM Modi should use his considerable pivoting skills and turn Atmanirbhar to Atma Vishwasi Bharat (AVB) or self-confident Bharat.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi

The Prime Minister usually hits bull’s eye with the branding and messaging of his ideas. But he has had a miss with “Atmanirbhar Bharat”, stepping into the culturally loaded minefield of “self-reliance” —a noble word turned ignoble after 1991. Instead, he should have given a clarion call for “Atma Vishwasi Bharat”. His colleagues and acolytes would not have had such a hard time, splitting hairs, reinterpreting Atmanirbhar to mean self-sufficiency not self-reliance and arguing that the old xenophobic meaning of the word is consistent with the idea of globalisation.

He should use his considerable pivoting skills and turn Atmanirbhar to Atma Vishwasi Bharat (AVB) or self-confident Bharat. Signalling “yes we can” will work well with those sections of society eager to claw their way up the social status and income ladder (euphemistically called “aspiring India”) and with businesses and young Indians who strive to be global citizens in a world that, as all of us Indians know, is not inclusive, has never really liked us very much and gives us our due with great reluctance.

So far, our under-confident discourse has been all about “Can we really?” It has a parallel track: “Look at us, see how wonderful our heritage is”. But the latter is more of a defensive justification than a statement of intrinsic belief in ourselves. The pre-liberalisation Indian, still the ruling age cohort, has some degree of diffidence with respect to the rest of the world. Liberalisation’s children do better, many of them especially in the upper class have had student or work-related contact overseas and have had a chance to benchmark themselves. The generation born after 2000 has a lot less baggage, but all of them will go much further in the world with the tailwind of atmavishwas.

In AVB, “Make in India” would translate into not feeling paralysed that China dominates manufacturing for the world, but in believing that we can get our own small share of the pie, and working towards it by setting our own targets, devising our own strategy and making it happen our own way.

Instead of atmavishwas about being the pharma factory to the world and building it even bigger, we spook ourselves by saying we are hollow, we source active ingredients from China. The fact is that we used to make them ourselves until Chinese undercut us. We have the know-how and the manufacturing capacity to do it again, so we have the power to make or buy as needed. We enviously note that western countries are already giving the vaccine and stockpiling it, but when it comes to our own vaccine availability, we comment on approvals with not enough data, instead of giving it a mighty push. People who interact with the government for business approvals say that atmavishwas has to start with the executive establishment, whose first comment is: “Do we trust your data? How did you manage to do it?”

Unlike most countries, including China, we have a totally interoperable digital payments system that removes the power of closed loop groups and is a public utility with the capability to handle enormous volume at a very low price. We have created an IT services hub for the world, but we still say “Oh why do we not have products?” AVB would invest to create real global brands, not be content with exporting products around the world with name labels sold to faceless dealers, without visibility of actual user demand. In AVB, SMEs would force banks to find more appropriate methods to credit appraise them instead of saying “you have nothing to collateralise” and offering high risk pricing. AVB would make an effort to capture its own domestic demand instead of trying to sell the idea of our demand to lure reluctant FDI or let China dump in our markets because we say we can’t compete. AVB would celebrate that we have Indianised Amazon and our small producers are getting market access. AVB would also rap MNCs for violation of rules, when necessary, and not be swayed by cries of “If you do this, no one will invest in us”. AVB would use the worlds’ businesses to further its own cause, not complain about globalisation making us vulnerable. As a layperson, I believe that AVB is what we are seeing, at last, in our foreign policy.

Large swathes of India’s elite, including political parties, do not prefer an AVB. It will decrease the power distance between the masses and the classes; it may jeopardise their hard-earned positions on the global stage to be spokespersons for India.

AVB will solve India’s problems with (to borrow from C K Prahalad) “next practice” (new and better, leading the world) not “best practice” and will not dismiss the considerable Indian innovation in this direction as jugaad until foreigners bless it. AVB business schools will focus on creating a new body of management experience and research emanating from India that makes the world take note (and we have plenty to show there), and not focus on doing less relevant research that Western peer-reviewed journals will publish.

Yes, the line between self-confidence and smoking your own dope is thin, but we have so much to show already. Forget Atmanirbharta. Let’s take it up several notches.

This article first appeared in the print edition on January 20, 2021, under the title “Yes, India can”. The writer is a market strategy consultant

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‘Migrant’ has become a label that declares someone a perpetual outsider

admin — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 21:29:00 +0000

Passengers wait for their train at New Delhi Railway Station.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, “migrant” and “migration” were emotionally-neutral words used to describe Indians who have moved their residence from one part of the country to another, temporarily or permanently. Now, with due respect to the media and to the wise people who speak on behalf of them, the word “migrant” has acquired an emotional charge, value judgement and social stereotyping, and a new slice of society called “the migrants” has been consecrated.

“The migrants” is now shorthand for a people who are poor, homeless, hungry, neglected by the states and Centre, usually from two or three of the poorest states and, most of all, who do not qualify for belonging to the city where they work. No one thinks of software folks who come from all over the country to the electronic city in Bengaluru in search of work as migrants, even though they too qualify for the “migrant” label. By the way, what do we call an upper-class person who visits parents and siblings in Andhra Pradesh for a few months of the year, lives mostly in Maharashtra and goes to Gujarat for work at certain times of the year? That’s me, but no one has referred to me as “one of the migrants”.

In today’s context, “migrant” has become a label that declares someone as a perpetual outsider, despite having crossed no national boundaries, and despite Indians having the right to live wherever they want without any need for any permission or registration. The government of Kerala, in a move much lauded by many, has called them “guest workers”. Guests are those who come to my house and will stay or go at my pleasure and enjoy privileges based on my levels of hospitality. How can an Indian state government classify Indians from other states as guests?

Some of us may remember the ugliness of the 1960s and ’70s when the Shiv Sena said that South Indians didn’t belong in Maharashtra. With our new, thoughtless use of the collective noun, “the migrants”, to describe people who leave Mumbai — when in trouble — to return to their immediate or extended families, we are rekindling that same flame again: The risky “insider-outsider” narrative for Indians within India.

Of course, many of us have a “home state”. It defines, often not always, my ethnic and cultural identity (not the same as my national identity), what I eat, what my mother tongue is, how I drape my sari, my religious and social customs. But it does not define my limits of belonging to any part of the country I choose.

The creation of a new class called the migrants makes us forget that they are people and all rules that apply to people, apply to them as well. Many ask, “Why are the migrants leaving? Why can’t they be persuaded to stay? Surely, they would stay if food was actually being provided?” and so on. The fact is, they are going to their other home for pretty much the same reason many upper-class kids are back from their colleges abroad to be with their families, or, why company executives may choose to relocate to their parents’ homes if they lose their jobs in Mumbai or Delhi and find the rents prohibitive. Because life at the other home may be safer and better than in a city where work has dried up, the living conditions are abysmal, and the risk of dying high.

So let’s replace the label starting now. “Casual-wage-labour” or “multi-state residents” would be a less dangerous, more specific label — a category, rather than a class or caste. Diaspora is a better collective noun than migrants.

But Hindi serves the purpose so much better — shramik means workers, labour or “the working class”. While this categorisation does signal socioeconomic-occupational hierarchy, it doesn’t signal “insider-outsider”. If we must use the migration word, “pravasi” is better: It has been infused with dignity and glory thanks to “pravasi bharatiya divas”. Or, even OCI (other state citizen of India) will do.

This article first appeared in print edition on June 5 under the title “Names And Labels”. Bijapurkar is the author of We Are Like That Only and A Never-before World: Tracking the evolution of Consumer India.

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Only half of India’s household consumption will come through post covid

admin — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:31:00 +0000

The so-called middle class, which is actually India’s richest 20% of households, accounts for 36% of consumption expenditure.

India’s household consumer demand is vulnerable and skittish because of dismal occupation demographics, lowly paid and uncertain livelihoods for most
Low food inflation and protection of urban salaried jobs may make it better, a spoilt agricultural season may make it worse

The ongoing discussion on the prognosis for consumer demand is currently based on extrapolations from supply-side data and macro-economic variables. This column aims to supplement it by providing household-level data on consumption, a “people-view” of those who cause this demand to happen.

India’s household consumer demand, the jewel in its gross domestic product (GDP) crown, is vulnerable and skittish because of dismal occupation demographics, lowly paid and uncertain livelihoods for most; and because most Indian households have very little “surplus income”, money remaining after covering their routine expenditure, leave alone their non-routine requirements and emergencies. Consumer demand commentators have been generally reluctant to link the dismal occupation demographics to consumer demand, beyond monsoon-dependent agriculture and, after demonetization, small business owners and their employees.

The covid-19 pandemic has forced us to acknowledge the universe of migrant—daily-wage workers—individual service providers who hunt for their daily bread, 32% of Indian households who contribute about 24% to India’s household expenditure. By contrast, the so-called middle class, which is actually India’s richest 20% of households, accounts for 36% of consumption expenditure.

The accompanying tables provide a map of consumption expenditure based on the share of household consumption expenditure contributed by different occupation groups further divided into the income level they belong to. Some occupation categories with similar earning vulnerabilities due to the present problems have been clubbed. The income levels have been so defined because our data shows that the bottom 40% of households have virtually no surplus income, the top 20% of households are discontinuously better earners and spenders (actually they are the so-called middle class that dominates our discourse on consumption) and the 40% in the middle are what we call the aspirational Indians in terms of consumption behaviour—spending more in good times and hunkering down in bad. The data comes from pan-Indian ICE 360° India household surveys (2014, 2016) and thinsamples of 2018, on how Indian households earn, spend, save, live, think and access public goods, done by our think tank and fact tank People Research on India’s Consumer Economy. Our aim here is to provide a people-based frame by which to construct reasonable risk maps for consumer demand, adjusted as policy initiatives unfold and depending on a business’s consumer profile. First, a look at rural India’s consumer demand risk map. Rural households account for 57% of all India household consumption expenditure (and 54% of India’s household income).

Table 1 shows the share of rural household expenditure (number in each square) contributed by households in each occupation x income category, and our reading of risk levels of each one’s expenditure holding in this environment.

Since our hopes are riding on a good harvest, a bit more detail on agriculture dependence of rural households: 22% of rural households are dependent entirely on agricultural business income, another 5% on agricultural labour income; 28% are dependent mainly on agricultural business income (all those in Row 1, Table 1) and 9% on agricultural labour. We have combined the last one with all casual labour (Row 5, Table 1). Another 30 %of rural households (some parts of those in Row 2,3,5,Table 1) have some dependence on farm income but since it is a minor component of their income and of total farm income, we have not segregated them.

A good harvest safeguards 30% of rural expenditure (Row 1, Table 1). Given lockdowns and their after-effects on the large spending segment of casual labour and on the micro businesses, and the drying up of remittance from urban Indian migrants, about 34% of rural expenditure will be severely stressed ( Row 4,5, Table 1). The salaried in rural India (Row 3, Table 1) are safer than the salaried in urban India because they are relatively more formally employed, so another 18% of rural expenditure is ‘safe’. Overall, we believe about 62% of rural spends will come through if agricultural activity can get done on time (‘safe’ expenditure plus half of the partially at risk expenditure). The hope also is that some part of the 29% of expenditure contributed by casual labour may be salvaged as it also gets used for agriculture.

Turning now to urban consumption, which accounts for 43% of total consumption, and is more lucrative because of higher income salaried households, but very geographically scattered. We expect that for the largest chunk of urban consumption—the salaried class—job security will be an issue, especially since urban salaried occupations unlike rural tend to be of all kinds, and less formal. Twenty percent of urban expenditure accounted for by the high-income salaried group is totally safe (Row 1, Table 2). This segment has surplus income, is also the darling of banks, and is not only earning during the lockdown, but has also been abstaining from consumption this last month—no beauty parlour visits, no eating out, no conveyance expenditure, no shopping sprees, a condition that is likely to last for quite some time. They can and will spend if suppliers who can address them make an effort at persuasion. For the rest of the salaried class (we expect job losses and restructuring and we expect only 8-9% of the 23% of consumption they account for to remain,

Of the small businessmen, micro entrepreneurs and solo service providers (Row 2, Table 2), we expect half of their consumption worth to materialize —15% of urban consumption lost or at high risk. Even if they do have surplus income from the past, the present jerk on their revenues will make them very cautious spenders; besides, all of them carry debt.

Another 9% of safe consumption is from agriculture income dependent families and those who live off investments, pensions, rent and remittances (Row 4,5 Table 2). So totally, we expect about 52% of urban consumption to hold (safe expenditure plus half of partially stressed expenditure).

Taken together, we assess that 58% household consumption will come through, contributed 61% by rural and 39% by urban India. Low food inflation and protection of urban salaried jobs may make it better, a spoilt agricultural season may make it worse. We would also like to point out that the salvaged potential expenditure, even after removing half of it, is still by far larger than the top lines of most large consumer companies—so this is not the time to give up and say the tide has gone out, but to continue to grow with targeted strategies to grab a share of the wallet.

Rama Bijapurkar and Dr Rajesh Shukla are co-founders of think tank People Research on India’s Consumer Economy

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Loss of income; ground-up assessment of recovery support to households

admin — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 15:02:00 +0000

Based on household-level data on occupation and income, a calculation for helping citizens get to their feet

A labourer carries vegetables in sacks at a vegetables market during the nationwide lockdown imposed to contain the spread of the COVID-19, in Chennai, Monday, April 6, 2020. (PTI Photo)

This column offers a ‘people view’ — household-level data — of Indian households to feed into the ongoing macro-level discussion about the right level of financial support needed to help citizens get to their feet following the loss of income caused by the lockdown, and where it should be deployed..

Presented here is a ground-up calculation based on what categories of jobs and job arrangements mainly contribute to the income of households, and what that actual income level is.

Macro-level discussions are based on a broadbrush understanding of occupation — large swathes of informality, agriculture dependence and migrants. We base our assessment on a more specific map of occupation and income level by town class for urban, and district development level for rural areas.

The data comes from our pan-Indian study, the ICE 360 database, 2016 and 2018, on how Indian households earn, spend, save, live, and access public goods.

Occupations & vulnerability

In the accompanying table, occupation categories are described and arranged in decreasing order of vulnerability based on the nature of work and income level; the table shows how large, how dominant, and how vulnerable or “at risk” each occupation category is, separately for urban and rural India.

We measure vulnerability by what percentage of households in each category fall into the bottom 40% of income earners, separately for urban/rural.

We chose 40% to define the vulnerable instead of the conventional definition of bottom 20% because our work shows that this entire group has very little cushion between income and expenditure even in good times; it’s always touch-and-go for them.

The poorest 20% don’t manage to meet even their routine expenditure required for day-to-day living, while the 20% above them have a slim margin in good times often destroyed by health or social emergencies or inflation.

Row 1 of the table shows the most vulnerable group by far of 91 million households, dependent on casual labour, a quarter of all urban Indian and a third of all rural Indian households, largely low-income.

Two months of income support at the lower end of the group’s earning level of Rs 10,000 in tier 3 and tier 4 towns, and Rs 8,500 in the less developed districts of rural, adds up to Rs 1.62 lakh crore – 0.85% of GDP.

Next most vulnerable are petty trader (hawkers, street vendors) households (row 2 of table), for whom one month’s income support can also fund inventory, which they can start rotating.

This group earns about as much or as little as casual labour with no U-R difference, and will require Rs 10,500 crore.

Next are the individual service provider households (row 3 of table) who are reasonably well off. Many have the skills for which pent-up demand already exists (beauticians and electricians for instance).

There is, however, a 30% segment within this occupation category that classifies as low-income, earns only slightly more than labour or petty traders, and needs support. One month of income support to them needs Rs 5,000 crore.

The support bill

The total support bill of Rs 1.78 lakh crore for this core vulnerable group of 10.6 crore households is about 0.92% of GDP. This group is only about one fourth of the Jan Dhan household base of 38.3 crore. There is another large group of 45 million salaried work-dependent households, mostly in the informal sector (row 4 of the table), but attached to an employer of sorts.

If the Prime Minister could repeat his plea to the employers of this group to please share and pay full salaries through the lockdown period, it would secure this group – the “India 2” that shapes our cities, and is a big enabler of “India 1”.

Most of them are fairly well off in large towns and rural areas, but with a small lower income segment equally distributed between small town urban and less developed rural. One month’s income support to this segment at the casual labour rate amounts to Rs 8,250 crore.

In our assessment, all told, the total one-time income support bill, assuming lifting of the lockdown as planned, amounts to about Rs 1.86 lakh crore, or about 1% of GDP.

What of small shop and micro business owners (row 5 of the table), who are hurting with no revenue, and who have fixed expenses?

They are better aided through business concessions or directed small ticket ‘working capital’ lending at rates far lower than what NBFCs would charge for unsecured lending. As rows 6 and 7 of the table show, the secure formally employed salaried group are very small relative to the others and financially well off, more secure, and have a savings cushion. Yet, they get a larger than warranted share of concern as all the talk of job losses and layoffs shows! Perhaps a change in our vocabulary to replace the word ‘jobs’ with ‘livelihoods’ would help us be more in tune with the reality of India.

(Rama Bijapurkar and Dr Rajesh Shukla areco-founders of think tank and fact tank People Research on India’s Consumer Economy)

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The brands of politics

admin — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 13:45:00 +0000

If brand-speak represents popular culture, we have less to worry about than some of us might think.

Image credit: Siddhant Jumde

The good news is that Indian brands unequivocally live in the world of customers and the people of India, and not in the world of politicians. They speak to people, mindful of commercial good sense, by tapping into popular culture; adding to the good news is that they still see popular culture as being quite far removed from the patriotic jingoism of today’s politics.

Every Independence Day and Republic Day, brands in India do special campaigns—citizen brands talking to citizen consumers—and the conversation is quite revealing of the way business thinks about the state of the nation.

We haven’t yet seen what the brand-speak for Independence Day 2019 will be, but it is a very safe bet, based on recent trends, that most will neither echo nor argue against the present political discourse on patriotism.

The politics of patriotism that we saw during the recent elections was distressingly centre stage, and has been carried over into the post-election political space too. The BJP portrayed itself as standing for a very muscular and authoritarian patriotism, with aggressive images of military and disciplinarian force.

It chastised those who asked questions or expressed dissent, with labels of ‘disrespectful to the country’, ‘anti-national’, ‘pessimist’ and more. There has been no alternative sketch of patriotism offered by any other contestant in the political space, except for noisy quibbles about the use of military images in political campaigns and questioning the officially declared numbers of casualties during the cross-border surgical strikes conducted on terrorist camps.

Media brands quickly dove in to take positions on the level of patriotism of those referred to in the election campaign as the ‘tukde tukde gang’, the ‘Khan Market gang’ and the ‘JNU gang’, and also on the patriotism—or lack of it—of the ‘kitne aadmi thhe (how many men were there)?’ question, straight out of the movie Sholay, some political parties had asked.

In this fraught atmosphere, non-media brands have thankfully decided to stay out of this arena and this tonality.

No commercial brand can be authoritarian and survive in this new age of customer power, liberalisation and female empowerment. But is there no payoff for commercial brands that take a stand on societal and political issues? Recent research in more developed markets shows that customers want brands that share their beliefs.

Are there any brands in India that are taking a stand and pushing back against this version of patriotism?

Among the established brands that made a clear statement pushing back against the new politics of patriotism was one of the big four of India’s business conglomerates.

Last year, for Independence Day, it ran a campaign showing India through the eyes of truck drivers. After talking of the varied sights, sounds and foods that they came across in their travels, one of the drivers says, “yeh jo ghar mein baithe television mein dikhate hain, usse bilkul alag hai mera desh (my country is different from what they show on TV).”

Another truck driver, from the northeast, says, “Kabhi kabhi bataana padta hai ki main yahaan ka hoon, par chalta hai, jaan boojh ke nahin poochhte hain (sometimes I have to tell people that I am from India, but that’s ok, they aren’t asking to offend).”

Yet another declares that “kuchh log ke chhote soch se desh chhota nahin hota (the small-mindedness of a few people doesn’t make the country small)”. The ad ends celebrating the truck drivers’ perspective, and suggests that we emulate their way of thinking.

Change in India comes slowly, one drop at a time, until the tipping point of a pushback against the prevailing political discourse is reached. Recently, a food service delivery publicly denounced a customer’s request for a Hindu delivery boy—there has also been a similar request and a not-so-public pushback from a cab service.

Perhaps this will give courage to younger, millennial andGen Z brands to stand up and say “we disagree with and disapprove of such talk”.

How do Indian brands express patriotism, and how has this changed over time?

The safe, popular and uncomplicated space that many have chosen includes admiration for the country’s achievements, recaps of past and recent milestones and salutes to the great scientists (while staying away from politically charged figures). An evergreen theme that many brands use to signal their identification with, and love for, the country is that of celebrating and recognising her unity in diversity.

Varieties of food, customs, traditions, festivals, sights, attire and musical instruments have been used compellingly. Interestingly, this used to be the official political discourse as well till not long ago, best captured in the wonderful, heart-warming, government-sponsored Doordarshan film Mile sur mera tumhaara (1988), involving leading musicians from around the country all singing differently but in harmony.

The film’s predecessor, Spread the Light of Freedom, made around the same time, had sportsmen and women from across the country carrying a torch in relay-again, meant to celebrate diversity and honour achievement in sports.

There haven’t been similar campaigns from the government since 1991, when the focus shifted from building society to building the nation’s economy. ‘Jai Jawan (hail the soldier)’, saluting the armed forces is another popular theme that still prevails, perhaps the only area where political discourse and brand discourse overlap.

Post 1991, for the next two decades, as India went from strength to strength, the theme of ‘nation building’ became a favourite. Electrical brands, food brands, bank brands, business conglomerates and large companies all vied with each other to present their nation-building credentials.

The very old companies chronicled their contribution from Independence onward, while the new ones talked of their scope and scale and their recent achievements. Market leaders in every category tried to make themselves synonymous with India and to suggest that they fuelled the flame of India’s diversity—’the taste of India’, ‘banker to every Indian’, ‘the nation’s history is our history’ and of course the most beloved ‘buland Bharat ki buland tasveer (a bold image of bold India)’.

With the generational shift in companies and communicators, how does young India think about such things? Are we seeing changes in the way brands approach patriotism, their role as Indian citizens, or their Independence and Republic Day ads?

One segment of it—a large one—merely sees these ‘special country days’ as a marketing opportunity. A hotel room aggregator exhorts people to take advantage of the long Independence Day weekend and travel to various parts of the country; another lot announces mega sales; yet another segment takes ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ literally, promising freedom from cuts and scratchy beards and slippery tyres and the like.

If we grant these businesses their perception of consumerism as the highest altar at which to worship, there is still a clear segment of others who are not content with a mere chronicling and celebration of diversity, but are using their brand platform to ‘help build a better India’-taking the nation-building theme to the next level.

If earlier the theme translated into ‘built factories, introduced new products, provided jobs, worked with all segments of society’, it is now beginning to be interpreted as ‘promoting desirable behaviours of a nation with a progressive society’.

There are ads around ‘soch badalna hoga (ways of thinking need to change)’, ‘opportunity for everyone to rise’, ‘what has education done for you’ and so on. Women’s independence, safety and freedom from social restraints is a popular theme; environmental protection (not ‘Swachh Bharat’ slogans) and freedom from plastic is another; inclusion or the general ‘freedom to be’ and equal rights for under-privileged sections is another; and a gentle and positive comment on the move to a ‘no bribery and corruption/fast transactions’ environment from a digital payment brand are all welcome indicators of what we will see more of in the future.

Recent WhatsApp messages doing the rounds talk of ‘swadeshi-videshi (domestic-foreign)’ brands, bemoaning how the behemoths among US and Chinese brands are taking over the Indian market and blaming the government for not enabling the rise of Indian brands.

The Bombay Club of 1991 thinking back again? No, that ship of patriotism has sailed. The new theme around swadeshi-videshi is to get our fair share of our own market by competing fair and square and doing what China is doing—creating local beaters of global champs.

Nirma, and now Patanjali, rose on an anti-MNC platform. However, it is not patriotism but fair pricing that is their proposition. The ‘made in country X or Y’ national branding is now beginning to lose all its previous perceptions as supply chains have gone global. Orders from a website in Asia go to a US address; the shipping is from Europe, while the tag says ‘Made in India’.

If brand-speak represents popular culture, we have less to worry about than some of us might think! The days when brands kowtowed to politicians are over. The days when they push back and take a stand if needed are yet to come, but there are definitely green shoots on the horizon.

Rama Bijapurkar is a leading Indian consultant on market strategy and consumer behaviour

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Opinion | Diary of an airport anthropologist

admin — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 13:47:00 +0000

There’s no place like large city airports to get a sharp yet nuanced sense of what India today is all about. In cities with two terminals, this is especially true of “low cost” terminals rather than the newer “global” ones, which are great to experience, but lack an Indian soul—just like those very upmarket shopping malls. Some would argue that this is exactly what these airports are, only with an airstrip or two attached.

On a bus ride to the aircraft at Ahmedabad airport was a group of four loud and excited Gujarati-speaking men with a 10-year-old boy in tow, clearly from small-town Gujarat. Remember the bygone days when people wore suits and ties to get on a plane? They wore traditional weave kurtas and shawls with narrow pants, embroidered mojris and ear studs with great confidence, not self-consciously trying to become invisible in a sea of Western attired men. The child had a fashionably chic haircut and dispelled any doubts about the demand for or supply of latest Bollywood fashions in small-town India.

Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint

On the tarmac, as we were waiting to board, a selfie and photo op rush began among several very diverse passenger groups. Hats off to IndiGo, an airline which seems to know when to indulge its customers and when to get tough with them. Except for a few amused smiles, nobody batted an eyelid or looked embarrassed over their “uncool” behaviour.

In fact, “be yourself” without any worry of “log kya sochenge” seems to be the new cool. I guess in a society where electronic self projection is the norm across socio-economic strata, what people will think is a strange question.

Now for the food. A familiar sight at the airport is the row of kiosks with all kinds of Western and Indian food. Despite data on the broadening of the young Indian palate, the kiosks with idli, samosa, cheela chaat and masala chai are always the ones with the longest queues—eat your heart out, sandwich bars! It’s the same on aeroplanes too. The box of almonds now has a stiff fight with the box of makhanas, and it’s a toss-up between Maggi Masala and upma for the preferred light snack of the “just add hot water, wait a bit and eat” variety. Green tea, though, seems to have busted out of the foreign food box and is now a full-fledged biological sibling of masala chai.

India is a young country and we see that from the crowds at the airport. Add the young population and early-to-bed and early-to-rise culture of Tamil Nadu, and you can see the result in the long queues to enter the airport even at 5 am.

All of us SoBo—i.e. South Bombay—types also need to notice that bright children and well-informed parents still talk to each other in the vernacular despite ubiquitous English medium education and the topics of discussion are the same as those we hear in English-speaking families: Whose picture is that on the wall? Why is it here? How does this plane fly? Why are we in a bus?

Airport security affirms what we always suspected—that we haven’t yet figured what being “gender friendly” actually entails. So, yes, separate security channels that have female security officers do make it more comfortable for female passengers.

But the body screening booth has a curtain that needs to be manually opened and closed each time a passenger enters. Female security officers end up doing a far more physically (and needlessly) demanding job than their male counterparts. I have asked female officers why they don’t ask for better designed booths so that this curtain opening and closing activity is eliminated, and they all had the same answer: that they asked their supervisors, who are men, and they didn’t do anything about it.

Interestingly, the number of female pilots is on the rise, and today, no one on a plane registers any surprise when passengers are told that it is an all-woman crew or when a female voice from the cockpit tells them to fasten seat belts in scary weather conditions. Aren’t we Indians confused about gender equality?

What I find most interesting is how you can tell the character of cities apart based on the traveller profile at the boarding gate. My favourite is Coimbatore. South saris, twinkling diamond nose rings and veshtis as expected, and many people whom you would expect to see at a National Centre for Performing Arts play or literature festival, going to an Isha Foundation event or to their second homes in the Nilgiris.

You also see foreign businessmen (not the corporate suit-wearing kind) on their way to Tiruppur, and vacationing middle-class families and groups from all over India speaking a medley of languages, travelling to Ooty.

Also visible in full force is young India, slogging late nights and early mornings on their mobile phones, all so comfortable with global business phrases delivered in varying accents.

And we do seem to have become a weekend culture. With our airports jammed with young people on Friday nights and Monday mornings, I guess long-distant relationships are on the rise.

Flying business class can now help you short-circuit the security check queue, which was earlier only the prerogative of government or political big shots.

The market economy is indeed here in all its avatars.

Rama Bijapurkar is a Consumer India watcher and author of ‘We Are Like That Only’ and ‘A Never-Before World’.

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New residents in search of the new city

admin — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 03:57:00 +0000

An even more disheartening statistic is that, in the top 53 cities, about 16 per cent of the population lives in slums.

Indian cities once used to have distinctive characteristics. There was beavering Mumbai, epitomised by the hordes milling in and out of train stations, and cabbies who would not bother to give up precious billable hours to molest a passenger, and the rich and famous living discreetly. In contrast, there was middle-class, government Delhi and powerful, political Delhi, where everyone understood their place in life and how best to signal it loudly.

Kolkata was the bastion of genteel poverty and good manners, as seen from its decaying buildings and the way it cared for its women. Unlike Delhi, where women were traumatised with male harassment, in Kolkata, women were offered seats in crowded mini-buses and were treated like everybody’s mothers and sisters on the street. I once got into a taxi at Kolkata airport and said “Sonagachi ke paas,” and the driver clucked and said, “It isn’t a good place for you to go, can I take you somewhere else?” If I had said to a Mumbai cabbie “Kamathipura”, he would have taken me without even the slightest interest, except perhaps “Chutta hai na?” (I hope you have change?) In Delhi, there would have been a gleam in the eye if I said “G.B. Road”, and the likely questions: “And how long will you be there? Shall I wait for you to take you back?”

Hyderabad and Bangalore were the non-identical twins, not in a hurry to get anywhere. One the garden city of retirees and of those who wanted good quality, reasonably priced living, and were willing to give up the fast pace for it. The other had a naturally laid-back pace from another zamaana. I remember cycle- and auto-rickshaws with curtains to make them zenana and movie theatres with a zenana balcony section. Chennai was conservative in food, dress, art, everything – a city where, we used to joke, you had to go to sleep at 9pm so that you could wake up at 5am, when everyone was at their most energetic, noisiest best. There were seven or eight mini-metros as we called them, whose inhabitants believed they were small towners and liked it that way. Jaipur was different from Ahmedabad from Chandigarh from Pune.

But the last two decades have seen a flattening out of these differences, and a uniform, sad sameness has crept in. We now think of city differences in terms of traffic intensity, pollution levels, rape numbers, top-end residential real estate prices, the number of migrants and slums, and the lack of parks for children. Just to get a perspective on our celebrated new urbanisation, “urban India” is a bewildering concoction of a few big cities and a large number of mostly faceless small towns and overgrown villages, which are classified as urban but are not so, the creation of a census definition that says villages must have most of their men employed in agriculture. The largest 18 towns have 30 per cent of urban India’s population, the largest 53 have about 43 per cent. The remaining 57 per cent is almost equally divided between 418 small towns and 7,467 tiny towns, about half declared urban and the other half being in that twilight zone of neither rural nor urban, charmingly called “Census Towns”. An even more disheartening statistic is that, in the top 53 cities, about 16 per cent of the population lives in slums.

But in all this squalor and chaos, there is a wonderful new phenomenon that has emerged and is growing by leaps and bounds in all towns. It is the rise of entrepreneurial ventures – even the smallest town very quickly gets its path lab, nursing home, Indianised foreign food restaurant, a jazzed-up local-food eatery, some version of a mall, a multiplex and, of course, beauty parlours. Even more heartening is the rise of micro-entrepreneurs, who provide a variety of services to people in the city, and women are as active as men here.

What takes your breath away is the entrepreneurial energy, especially the intellectual energy, they bring to their work. Every day, they try to go up the value chain, add some bell or whistle or home delivery version, or use the internet to increase revenue. The amount of learning that happens here is very impressive. The tailor who makes your curtains and upholstery will nudge you –do you want “normal” or blinds or (pulling out a tattered book) Victorian drapes, and do you want fabric blinds, or maybe imported bamboo or roller blinds? He has learnt from other places, other people, and it is staggering how uptodate he is in a continuously changing world, and how confident, too, of his new abilities.

The chap who walks a bunch of dogs leverages his customer-base to go into pet grooming (even the vocabulary is regularly refreshed), telling you exactly what kind of extra tuition your spoilt pet needs to behave. The vegetable vendor now stocks parsley and thyme and tells you how to cook some of these foreign vegetables, such as zucchini. He has learnt from customers whose share of increased spend he lost to the supermarket across the road.Mine said to me, “I keep rocket leaves also” (earlier it was just salad ka patta, now he has learnt to differentiate between them), and then, instead of packaged leaves, he took out a loose bundle, weighed and gave it to me at a better price. He had managed to trace the source of this product and compete quite well! Tailors have learnt as well from the big shops and widened their offerings and advice. Even the humble resizing tailor has learnt how to work with ever-changing fashions, as memsahibs give away newer clothes and the recipients are young and fastidious about the fit.

Food is an area where micro-entrepreneurs thrive – they supply everything you can think of, cooked in every way, to shops and individuals. If you work late, someone is ready to send you late dinner; if you are on a specific diet, that’s no problem; and shops are increasingly stocking ready-to-eat food, coming from some smart lady’s kitchen. And yes, she too is ceaselessly experimenting and thinking about what would add value to the customer and make her pay more.

This learning energy is displayed by domestic help, too. They embrace gadgets and learn how to use them with alacrity, as do drivers who have learnt to use GPS or to adapt to new cars with new features all the time. Even the maalish waali bai is now a spa therapist and can tell you about “points” (acupressure) and exfoliation, without missing a beat. And it is only in large cities that you see heartening examples all the time of upward mobility. The tailor’s daughter who is in final-year CA, the domestic help’s son who repairs laptops, and many more such examples. When our city infrastructure catches up with this new world of high-energy micro-entrepreneurship, watch the dazzle of smiles and the jingle of more money in more pockets!

Bijapurkar is the author of A Never-Before World: Tracking the Evolution of Consumer India

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The brave new world

admin — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 04:05:00 +0000

Not so long ago, a woman who needed to be out at a late hour would use a recommended cab company, her employer’s car and driver, or most likely, the reliable neighbourhood taxi stand. If not, someone in the family would come and pick her up.

Today, there is a swelling tide of women in the workforce, but their safety is as precarious as ever. The alleged Uber rape in Delhi reveals that now, in this new world of contract work and “aggregators”, no cab company is safe. You pay a premium not for guaranteed safety, but for efficiency and comfort and travel at your own risk. The BPO bus drivers are no better. Companies who hire security for their women are still offering unknown, unverified contract workers.

A world of opportunity has opened up in the last 15 years. Rising education levels and the chance to earn more and lead a more enjoyable life has brought countless women out of their homes and into the workplace. For proof, just look at matrimonial ads. While lower income and rural women have always worked outside the home, now, even in middle- and upper-income urban families, which have traditionally kept their daughters on a short leash, the default option is “doing a job” between studies and getting married or having children.

The nature of work has changed too. We now have a more modern economy – although, regrettably, still an un-modern society. The log kya kahenge censure has also weakened as everyone knows that long commutes and late working hours are par for the course if good money is to be earned. Also, today if you work late, you can get rewarded like never before, whether as a BPO worker, an investment banker, a domestic worker, nurse, beautician, electrician or anything else.

Public transport and policing, though, have not kept pace with the new reality of spread-out cities, a swelling workforce and late hours. In the 1980s and 1990s, we were not a bubbling cauldron of social frustrations, defined by the gap between what we saw and wanted and what we couldn’t get. Today we are an angry and frustrated society, especially if you are a migrant worker in a slum with no family to absorb some of the frustration, a contract worker or self-employed wage earner with no ties to any social organisation at work or home.

In the ’80s and ’90s, women were at home after dark. Today they aren’t, especially the younger women. Families have loosened up. Mobile phones have taken the edge off the worry. “Why do you work so late, does your husband get upset with you?”, I asked the young domestic help who works evenings and travels for more than an hour to come and work in two houses, where she is paid well above market rates because in one case she multitasks when the other household help is away, and in the other she works for two college-going boys whose mother lives in another city and worries about their health. She said this way the loan is paid faster (for the room with running water and attached toilet), and her husband can stay home with the children. She waits till the nurses in a nearby hospital finish their shift, and together they take the local train in the ladies compartment. After the train ride, she still needs to travel for half an hour by an autorickshaw, but her “mister” does the last-mile escorting. Another young lady in a professional service firm says that saying “no, I can’t work late” is a career-limiting option, so she just sleeps over in the office or waits till some obliging soul finishes work and is willing to drop her home.

Another young lady got an amazing opportunity to intern with a large newspaper in Delhi, her dream had come true. Her family was also excited about it, but soon found that the late hours she had to keep were a problem; her father lived too far away and could not pick her up every day. She gave up her job. I felt as sad that day as I had felt indignant in my days, when a friend did the same, saying “my parents don’t allow me to come home so late every day, they say I will get a bad reputation and ruin my marriage prospects”. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Earlier it was log kya kahenge. Now it is log kya karenge (what will people do to you) that keeps women imprisoned at home.

Delhi was always a difficult city. Yet in those days we suffered in silence. We were told that it was dignified to hold your head high and walk away without letting anyone else notice what had gone on. Today, we need to encourage young women to fight back and give them the implements to do it. Men won’t change unless something makes them; the police and the government are not going beyond lip service. It is up to us women to learn to fight for ourselves and change the discourse. From Parvati to Kali is a journey that the modern Indian woman is so desperately ready to make.

Rama Bijapurkar is the author of A Never-Before World: Tracking the Evolution of Consumer India

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Taking Stock of the World of Young India

admin — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 04:16:00 +0000

Leadership is about how people behave and what values and tendencies drive such behaviour. All behaviour has psychological, social and cultural foundations; and anyone attempting to influence leadership behaviour of a cohort or understand it better needs to understand the social environment in which the cohort grew up and the challenges it faces in life at this point in time. Needless to say this is the “baggage” that they will bring into the workplace that HR professionals need to be cognizant. But first, a necessary caution that has to be heeded by anyone seeking to lead young India or prepare young India to become better leaders:

Young India is not singular and homogeneous. It is very heterogeneous and the different segments of it are quite different from each other. Yes, all of them are a singular age cohort – liberalization children; born after 1991 and now entering the work force. But just as post liberalization Indian society has sharply fragmented into the haves and have nots, the cans and cannots, the happy upwardly mobile and the angry frustrated underbelly i.e. those who can seize the boons of liberalization and those who suffer-the-banes of liberalization – so too is young India. HR professionals will encounter all segments in the work force in one form or another and need to be able to recognize which segment they are dealing with and also know that one size of solution will not fit all.

There is ‘Arrived, privileged young India’ which typically comprises the children of affluent and well-placed parents, who, income or socio-economic strata wise comprise the top 30 to 40% of urban India and about 10% of rural India. These are truly liberalization’s beneficiaries, who have an abundance and variety of higher education choices and career choices, irrespective of their educational attainments. They can join their parents’ business and take it forward or in a different direction, and many of them do; or they get a job in the traditional career spaces like doctor, lawyer, company executive, fund manager and so on; or opt for one of India’s new and burgeoning career space like those described in one of the newspaper’s career pages – RJ, VJ, party planner, script writer, games tester, sound artist, fashion designer or even things like food service, travel and hospitality etc. They can also set up their ‘own business’ and be entrepreneurs. For this segment, there are no limits except in the imagination, the globe is their playground and their parents are a supportive backbone to lean on. If they run into trouble or crash land, their parents are always there for them and the basics of decent living are taken care of.

There is another group too that is less privileged and cushioned but has joined the ranks of the “arrived”. Let’s call them “Arrived with struggle young India”. There is a significant chunk of young people who come from what could be described as “ordinary backgrounds” with parents who are white and blue-collar workers in lower middle level jobs. This group has fiercely competed their way to good colleges and now there are enough role models from within such backgrounds to fuel the growth of this group – provided the prices of education and coaching do not spiral beyond their reach and the absence of collateral-free loans continues.

Does this segment of the “arriveds” blaze new trails and reinvent things and reject the environment that has nurtured them? Far from it. They do blaze new trails, but the umbilical cord to the support system that they came from or to the old ways is never cut. Students at premier business schools will get impatient with old rules on some counts but are not willing to embrace new placement paradigms that are truly free market. They want the rules to be able to chafe against them but they are not revolutionaries. They are pragmatists testing the waters and negotiating for change within the confines of the established order. And it is here that the girls fight harder than the boys for their rights.

This is the group that Corporate India employs in its management cadre. Let’s not forget that fewer than 10% of employed Indians are employed in formal sector jobs.

Within the “arrived” young India is the creamy layer, a subset from where a lot more formal corporate sector recruitment is done – the better engineer + MBA from good colleges which are hard to get into. First of all, it is depressing to see how few non-engineer MBAs we have in India. The reasons provided are many including the better quality and quantity of engineering colleges as compared to other kinds of colleges. Good law school or architecture college or even CAs don’t do their MBAs as much because now they have a lot more opportunities in their own chosen fields. But diversity of mind wiring because of educational training has become a casualty here. Why are they risk averse? Young people who have ‘made it’ in terms of good colleges for engineering and MBA or have put their lives on hold from Standard 9 onwards and the odds of getting through competitive exams are so great that you cant afford the luxury of experimental answers or experimental study procedures. They have also been nurtured carefully like hothouse flowers by their parents, given the right-controlled environment to help them cope with the pressure and the workload. Add this risk aversion to the lack of diversity emanating from left-brained engineers and you have a cocktail that makes you worry about future leadership challenges corporate India will face in a world that is famously described as VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity). And a business environment where innovation is the mantra. I would prepare future leaders by getting them to complete their incomplete education – get introduced to the world of literature and philosophy and history and social sciences. Make them rounder human beings who recognize that two plus two can be four or twenty-two or zero. Their interpersonal and social skills are quite high for the mainstream, as many of them have moved away from home at young ages and made friends and got support groups for themselves in a peer group that is immensely competitive by nature – or is it by training and conditioning at home? There is a small ill-adjusted and beleaguered group that cannot cope with the pressure of all this, which gets written about and which signals societal distress. But, by the large, this group of privileged cushioned corporate choosing young India are a curious mix of hothouse flowers in their need for good environments for them to flourish and of hardy jungle weeds with survival and social skills and high learnability and adaptability. How this cocktail is moulded for leadership that is relevant to the times ahead is for HR professionals to decide.

The entrepreneurs are an aspirational and growing lot in this group. In premium B schools, the successful entrepreneur is the role model. And the young entrepreneurs are persistent in their search for mentors. Not for them is the idea that the gen before them had known nothing about the new world. They want to access the wisdom, not the directives.

All of Young India are people in a hurry. They have put too many years of their lives on hold getting ready for the tough world, and not having much fun in their teenage or early 20s. They are not in a mood to wait and get more trained. Corporate employers realize that and are already adapting to atomise organizations and give quicker movement upwards. VCs funding young entrepreneurs are in a hurry themselves so it’s a good match with impatient entrepreneurs. It’s the family businesses that have a tougher time but many carve out a piece or facilitate a new entrepreneurship opportunity for the young people to earn their experience and make their mistakes.

This good narrative of Young India applies not just to the privileged and the well educated but also to a section of “modestly educated but have connections or drive”. They study in average institutions, they have average degrees, do some courses, but have higher degrees of social confidence. These are children of what is India 2, which serves upper class India 1. These young people have above average exposure and their family has connections with India 1 to get them an entry into a line of work or apprenticeship or a contract job that can give them an entry into the world of well-paid work.

Taking all to get to a quarter of all young people, about 65 million by my estimate. There is a bad narrative that applies to the rest. About 200 million of the 15 to 24 years olds have been described by analysts as “Unskilled, Unemployed, Angry: India tomorrow headed for disaster?” and as “a generation of functionally uneducated Indians being churned out in a fourth rate education system” (for further references to these quotes, see the chapter Generation Next angst, in my book A Never-Before World). Those among them with exceptional chutzpah or drive manage to go into some business of their own.

But for the rest of the “left behind, angry Young India”, largely poor and unskilled, struggling for contacts or sipharish, it is unemployment staring them in the face or any contract work they can get big or small. Recent data on unemployment rates of graduates speaks for itself. The newspapers are full of incidents – and I shall not recount them – of people with graduate degrees applying for peon’s jobs and, as another observer pointed out, the angry young man is back. Many of them have no role models and no authority figures at home, a significant number from the poorer populous states have absentee fathers who are migrants, and live in areas with poor law and order. All of them have aspiration and see the world of the haves around them. Leadership for them is a whole different discussion than for the educated young India, and no skilling initiative or missions are treating this problem holistically. Nor perhaps are the HR managers of the contract labour era reading their anger holistically.

There are certain circumstances that are common to all of them. Young India is the liberalization generation. Born after 1991, they have seen more change in the world around them than any Indian generation before them. They therefore know how to cope with change per se, but also know that you have to look out for yourself and not grow roots so deep into anything that you cannot uproot and move when you have to.

It is also the generation that has been told that earning more and acquiring more and aspiring to earn and acquire is good thing. But it is also a generation with vastly different job opportunities available (or not) to different segments of it to match its aspiration. It’s also the generation that has had no job security, even if it had a job. Every generation has to pay a price for something. There were the generations that paid the price for getting independence. And the generations after it who paid the price for nation building. This generation of liberalization children has paid the price of integration with the global economy and all the volatility and shocks that go with it – both economic and social.

They also are children of a troubled society, struggling with new inequalities, with new power balances, with old value systems and rituals under severe questioning and the new ones not yet created. They are the children of uncertainty and negotiation.

They are the children of a country caught between a 21st century economy and a 18th century society.

They also are a generation whose ethical compass has not been strengthened by all that they see. Coalition politics of negotiation on principles and stands, absence of clearly stated ideologies and principles of those in power, rampant corruption, valuation and profit maximizing short termism from companies manifest in increasing contract workers and variable pay (you eat what you kill), no social security and high levels of exploitativeness.

And as a generation they seem to cry out for authority figures who will sort out the mess and create an enabling environment for them to flourish.

There are also certain phenomena that apply to society as a whole that applies to young India as well. The two that I would like to flag are decreasing ‘power distance’ which is the degree to which the less powerful accept that power is unequally divided and the social pressure coming from the visible increase in education, legal rights, assertiveness and power sharing by women while the men have not been conditioned or prepared to make way for that. So sexual harassment and rape laws have been strengthened, but the discourse at home on gender equality and respect has not caught up. (For a more detailed discussion on these, please see chapters on “It’s her turn”, and “society and culture”, in my new book A Never-before world.

Decreasing power distance plus the anonymity of the digital world makes the employee-employer relationship different and more complex. An IT company that prided itself on the law of omerta that it expected all employees to maintain on company matters found to its chagrin that its young work force were discussing increments and other matters affecting them on social media with peers from rival companies. They set up a “come talk the ceo” digital hangout but very few people turned up. HR was struggling to calibrate what level of upset in the real world the sharpness of comments in the anonymous digital world translated to. Decreased power distance also explains why arranged marriage requests from young people are on the rise. They know that their parents cannot force them to marry someone against their wishes. Yet most young people do believe “my parents know best”. So that seems to be their ideal – authority figure but accessible and seen to be competent and wise and “on my side”.

CONCLUSION

Young India is a large component of Indian society and is changing the way circumstances and society changes. For example a ten-year rule of a clean authoritarian regime with absolute power taking the reigns of this country and being directive will shape India’s gen y differently, both good and bad. A ten-year rule of leadership and governance of expediency and pragmatism with continuous erosion of the moral authority of institutions will shape it differently. Different kinds of affirmative action or quotas will, and already have, shaped the work force making it different from previous generations. The decrease in the government servant middle class (bank officers, civil services, armed forces, railways, etc.) whose children formed a large chunk of the corporate work force and the increase in the children of the new mercantile and business middle class will bring a new set of value systems as the mainstream ones in the work place. HR practitioners need to see the surround far more widely than perhaps they do now when building policy and strategy and perhaps need to re evaluate their entire tool kit and see how good it is for shaping and enabling leadership of all segments of the new generation. Transplanting best practice from elsewhere will not suffice. Learning from the best and creating a new body of knowledge on leadership of and for India’s next gen is how the HR community can serve the country. This is the need of the hour. Holistic ways for harnessing the abundant human potential that we have.

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New India, New Ideas

admin — Mon, 19 May 2014 04:30:00 +0000

It is hard to see why preserving the idea of India should include preserving dynasty and feudalism. (Source: AP)

The young care about achievement and opportunity, reject fear mongering.

Mani Shankar Aiyar is right when he says that the idea of India is not “Hindudom” (‘The dying light of freedom’, IE, May 17). Each of us who loves our country (and there are multitudes outside the Congress, too) must rise up in arms

and fight if it threatens to become so under Narendra Modi’s regime. Like most middle-of-the-road Indians who happen to be Hindu, I agree with him on the sacredness of the secular and inclusive idea of India. But I also know that Indira Gandhi’s wearing a rudraksha in her later years or Sonia Gandhi doing a puja before filing her nomination does not make either any more secular, and Modi’s forehead tika and Ganga aarti does not make him any more communal.

However, Aiyar, like the rest of his party, especially its leaders, needs to have a more complete understanding of what’s going on in India. The Congress must know that there are additional ideas that define the new India and they are equally embraced by Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, atheists, Dalits, Baniyas, etc. One such idea is the ability to achieve upward mobility in income and quality of living based on merit and ability, and not what your surname is or how many of your forefathers held high positions. Talk to young people and you will find that their heroes and role models are those who have made it through sheer hard work and performance, gone from modest origins to global halls of fame. The cricket heroes, IT czars, astronauts, winners of India’s Got Talent-type shows, etc. The Congress needs to expand its idea of India to include this dimension as well.

The idea of new India is also about equality of opportunity and the decline of feudalism and the “bade ghar ke beta-beti” having an exclusive, default first right of refusal on everything merely because of the accident of their birth. The new idea of global India is also about confidence in the Indian way. The next generation of minority community youth find the journey from chaiwala to prime minister a better example of inclusive India than Priyanka Gandhi’s story of her father’s almost exclusive claim to greatness and martyrdom. The minority community Gen Next would welcome education, opportunity, financial inclusion and a vibrant job market and better access to public goods over rhetoric from any quarter about the imminent danger they are in. And in the new idea of India, upward mobility will trump divisive talk and action.

At an informal meeting, one of many that Rahul Gandhi had with groups of business people, he suggested that our country would implode if Modi came to power because most Indian Muslims would feel unwanted and insecure, and wonder where they should go, and be prey to external destabilising forces. I heard this and asked a young, lower middle-income Muslim who belongs to India’s urban aspirational class, a self-employed micro-entrepreneur, if he wondered where he should go in the light of the rise of the BJP. “Why should I wonder where to go,” he asked. “This is my country”. I asked another Mumbai Muslim why he didn’t vote for the Congress. He said, “Have you seen how costly life has become, and no one did anything about it? I send my daughters to a convent school and the fee and swimming lessons are expensive. The whole family can’t afford to go to a mall and eat once a week like we used to.” So maybe there’s more on Hindu and Muslim minds than just religion.

It is difficult to see how the Congress, whipping up sentiments about about how Muslims ought to worry and panic, is not divisive or communal. It is also hard to see why preserving the idea of India should include preserving dynasty and feudalism.

In the previous Parliament, only 5.4 per cent of Lok Sabha MPs were Muslim, despite the Congress having 206 seats. In the new Parliament, despite the number of Congress seats decreasing by 162, the number of Muslims has decreased by six. This means that Muslims make up just 4.4 per cent of the 16th Lok Sabha while being 13.4 per cent of the country. And women make up just 11.2 per cent, while accounting for half of the population. Both numbers are disgraceful and indict all political parties. It is time to focus on the idea of an inclusive new India, and hang all those who are divisive, whether in their efforts to be secular or communal.

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