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Mind the gap
Updated On: 17 January, 2012 06:31 AM IST | | Fiona Fernandez
Trust respected journalist and editor Mrinal Pande to use her experience to trace the fault lines between Bharat and shining India. Her just-released title, The Other Country runs the scanner on this divide. In a freewheeling interview, she speaks of this gap, the dynamics of nation-state politics, elections, the unseen 'gormint' and why the media seems to have forgotten rural India
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Trust respected journalist and editor Mrinal Pande to use her experience to trace the fault lines between Bharat and shining India. Her just-released title, The Other Country runs the scanner on this divide. In a freewheeling interview, she speaks of this gap, the dynamics of nation-state politics, elections, the unseen 'gormint' and why the media seems to have forgotten rural India
How vast is the divide between Bharat and shining India? Will the two meet ever?
It is hard to say when, if ever, the gap between India and Bharat will disappear. At the moment what is more likely (the best case scenario), is that the gap between the rural and urban poor may narrow down at the levels of access to power and water, literacy, over all longevity, basic kind of subsistence level wages and healthcare. But the gap between the poor and the urban rich will narrow down marginally if at all.
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| According to Mrinal Pande, villages and remote towns continue to remain elusive to our mainstream English language newspapers and TV news channels, except during elections |
Also, some basic attitudinal gaps between the urban middle class and the rural agrarian cultures will remain. Up until the 1950s, urban and rural India had retained some kind of convergent, compatible rhythm.
Most families living in cities then maintained living ties with their family village through a steady stream of visitors, or the family going for regular vacationing to family homes to renew ties with the larger, extended family and caste brethren.u00a0
Today, even though modes of transport, access to villages (through improved telecommunication, roads and trains) has improved a great deal, few urbanites other than government development functionaries actually visit rural India for extended periods.
Even the academe researching rural India, will get its basic data gathering done by groups of vernacular speaking unemployed researchers from the adjacent small towns. Their reports are therefore factually and politically correct but short on warmth and human detailing. I find this worrisome.
In course of extensive investigative journalism across the country, have you noticed any other India?
During my travels I noticed that as democracy takes root the urban stage begins revolving faster but despite the fact that rulers at village level will change just as often, the pace of daily lives and thinking among even the young rural voters remains slow and their dreams are mostly of escaping to the city ASAP, not staying back to fight what bothers or inhibits them.
Because of this, at the state level, the political fulcrum rotates slowly and socio-political reflexes revealed at the time of elections are feudal and non-democratic.u00a0
By making caste and religion the decisive factors for electoral decision and policymaking, in the post-Mandal years we have strengthened caste based Panchayats and religion based personal laws even more. These could have faded out in sixty years in a non-partisan, secular democracy. But it has not happened.
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| The Other Country, Mrinal Pande, Penguin Books, Rs 350. Available at leading bookstores Read Next Story Trending StoriesLatest Photos |
