Final Post

India's slogan is "Incredible India" and it's apt. How do you sum up a place like India? We were only there for 5 weeks, and saw 2 states a tiny bit.

We know we were cushioned by drivers and guides and hotels from a lot of the dark side, but we caught glimpses and heard stories. Even though it is not legal, the caste system still flourishes, a social class system that determines one's opportunities, with often devastating social outcomes.

There are enormous slums in the big cities, where people live in groups in the street, or crammed into jumbled cement or metal shacks. Hygiene is not universal, with people defecating in the street, and washing their bodies and teeth and clothes from a central pump or butt of water in the street, with water from both activities merging together and flowing into open sewers. Garbage is strewn everywhere among piles of cement dust and broken machinery. And decades of plastic lies everywhere. People beg on the streets, or sell tat with persistence.

India's rivers and lakes are mostly too polluted to spend time on, and Hindu rituals means that cremated remains are tossed in as well as bodies bathed for spiritual purification, adding to the problem. The smells can be overwhelming.

And yet, people gather in the evening, men together drinking chai and talking, children playing, and women working together in productive groups, happy in their community Everyone smiles back, with an endearing little head waggle side to side, which indicates a non-threatening yes-no-recognition of a human being. Family is enormously important, and family members are very close - from siblings to cousins and uncles and aunties and beyond. There is a lot of respect for age.

Education, agriculture and health care are foci of the current regime and middle class parents spend every penny they can earn on their children's futures. School are full, and almost all children in school learn at least three languages: Hindi, their regional/state language, and English. India graduates an astonishing number of engineers and medical professionals. Working for a university or for the government are both highly esteemed, and when we say we are writers, we are admired heavily.

India must be one of the few countries that can feed and clothe itself, in fact the only thing it needs to import is fuel. Everything from bricks to mustard, pineapples to rubber, cotton to coal, and many of the most skilled textile, stone carving, jewelry making, food industry products in the world are grown, made and exported from India. Yoga and natural ayurvedic medicine originated here and India is still the source for physical and spiritual practice and healing. The rising middle class - and it is rising quickly - means more cars and motorbikes on the road, and more trucks transporting goods, which means India's overall air quality is poor. Delhi has the worst air pollution of any city in the world.

The current Prime Minister, Nahendra Modi, has pledged to invest in infrastructure and cut down on the rampant corruption of previous building projects. We saw masses of new roads being built, all over Rajasthan particularly. Many are paid for with tolls, and those that are completed were very good roads indeed. India's corruption is notorious, and it's hard to imagine how it can be removed from certain groups - the police for example.

The government has also installed rubbish bins in cities, and regular garbage pick up. It's hard to imagine for those of us who grew up in cities with public litter bins and garbage trucks that this has only been in operation here for a few years, but people readily making use of this innovation, and hopefully the littering will slow and stop in future. There is also a big campaign to remove plastic, and the entire state of Kerala, for example, has issued a ban on single use plastics. Goods are wrapped in cloth or paper. some of the hotels we stayed at had large glass bottles of water for us to use - unfortunately we still had to decant this into our plastic water bottles to use outside, but it's a start.

In fact, India is incredibly optimistic and forward-thinking, and most of the population adores their elected leader so much he was brought in for the second term easily. There is one big elephant in the room, though, that people do not want to really acknowledge, or who don't understand why it is a concern to the rest of the world. Here's the gist of it.

India's constitution was written at the time of independence and adopted in 1950. I have read this constitution and know of no other constitution I admire more. It is awesome.  It is also long - the longest constitution in the world. In it, India is defined as a sovereign, secular, socialist, democratic republic. The Indian population is very proud of its constitution and celebrates it every Republic Day (January 26).

Less than 3 months ago, in December 2019, Modi enacted the Citizen Amendment Act. This provides a path for citizenship to all illegal migrants and refugees, and it is being billed as the right thing to do for human rights. By self-registering, all minorities regardless of race or religion are able to attain full citizenship.........except Muslims.

This one exception has caused an uproar both inside and outside India, as it goes against the secular aspect of the constitution.  What about those Muslims (the largest minority in India) who have lived in India for decades, and their families for centuries? What about refugees such as the Rohingya, who are Muslim and now exposed to further exclusion to services and help, let alone ostracism and violence? What will self-registering lead to in the future - deportation?

There have been rallies in Delhi, some of them violent. Politicians have ramped up the racist rhetoric. India's reputation is at stake.  Modi's right-of-centre, nationalist beliefs threaten to undo the positive attention the rest of the world has focused on this impressive country. India's entire constitution and role as a leader in democracy can easily be undone, as it becomes yet another country that is ruled along one religion's lines.

I am optimistic of India's potential and its role in the world - it's very conceivable that it will be the world's largest economy at some point this century. But the CAA and its outcomes will have me watching carefully, and hoping saner heads prevail. The word Incredible can have many meanings and I will be interested to see which way Incredible India chooses.