Seventeen Confounding Questions About India

There is an old saying that the key to understanding is asking the right questions. I came across a book recently, via the Marginal Revolution blog, that asks some good questions about Jamaica. The Confounding Island, by the American sociologist Orlando Patterson, asks (and attempts to answer) a series of excellent questions about the island where he was born. Examples: Why are Jamaicans the fastest runners in the world? Why has Jamaica trailed Barbados on the path to sustained growth? Why is Democratic Jamaica so violent? And so on.

That got me to thinking about similar questions about India that confound me, even though I have lived here all my life and been an opinion columnist for many years. I don’t count questions like ‘Why is India poor?’, as the answers to that are straightforward. Instead, I bring to you a bunch of questions about India that genuinely puzzle me. I have no clear answers to any of them – although I will include my speculations – but I’d argue that just the process of thinking about them has broadened my mind.

I crowdsourced this list of questions with the help of some friends on a discussion group I run called Lucretius. I’ve included hat tips at the end.

One caveat: the qualities mentioned here are not necessarily unique to India, and the answers may thus have as much to do with human nature as with our specific nation-state.

1. Why Do Indians Have Such Faith In Government?

The state in India is dysfunctional. For most of us, there is no rule of law, and government does not do any of the things it is supposed to, besides meddling in areas where it has no business existing. Why, then, do we instinctively turn to government as the solution to every problem? If there is something we do not like about the state of the world, we look to the government for answers, and demand it intervene and pass a law or suchlike.

An example of this is corruption. Everyone agrees that corruption is a problem. It is evident that it is a problem caused by too much government. (Give too much discretion to government servants and corruption is inevitable, because power corrupts.) And yet, in the popular imagination, the solution to corruption is not less government but more, in the form of lok pals etc. Why this dissonance?

2. Why Is Our Government So Weak?

This seems to contradict the premise of the last question, but hold on a bit. India has both a big government and a small government. In the words of Devesh Kapur (quoted in Milan Vaishnav’s brilliant book When Crime Pays), “India has far too much procedure and far too few personnel.” In other words, the state puts procedural barriers to society solving its own problems, and is unable to carry out its own core functions. We are a weak state that does many things badly, instead of being a strong one that does a few things well.

The reason for this is state capacity. We don’t have enough police, enough judges, enough health workers, and so on. Why is this? Surely citizens want a stronger state in these areas, and given that we are a democracy, you would assume that our politicians would respond to this demand of the political marketplace. And yet, it doesn’t. Why?

Police officials relocate prisoners from the flooded district jail in Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, on Sept. 30, 2019. (Photograph: PTI)

3. Why Are We Always Out To Exploit Others?

An American businessman friend of mine recently told me that many Indian businessmen he comes across seem more keen to make a fast buck than build a sustainable business. This might be a generalisation, but it is a common lament. The economist Jagdish Bhagwati, in fact, is said to have commented that while people in China have a profit-seeking mentality, people in India have a rent-seeking mentality. Let me explain what that means.

Every voluntary transaction leaves both parties better off, and the win-win nature of this means that the only way to make an honest profit is to make someone better off. Profit = Philanthropy. So a profit-seeking mentality is a good thing. Rent-seeking, on the other hand, amounts to using some kind of power – usually the power of the state, as in granting licenses – to make money. These are exploitative, and are zero-sum games rather than win-win.

If it is true that Indians are more rent-seeking, and would rather exploit or fool others than make an honest living by serving them, then the question is, why? Is it some deep-rooted cultural reason? Is it a result of the institutions that came up during our socialist decades, when rent-seeking was the only way to get rich? If so, why are we still this way?

4. Why Do We Crave Government Jobs?

Speak to any Indian who is not a member of the English-speaking elite – i.e., speak to most Indians – and a government job is far more d than a job in the private sector. An illustration of this came a year ago, when news broke of 19 million people applying for 62,000 low-level government jobs. At the same time, the Uttar Pradesh Police advertised for 62 jobs requiring a fifth-standard pass, and the applicants included “50,000 graduates, 28,000 post-graduates and 3,700 PhD holders.”

One could understand this 40 years ago, when government was all-powerful and the private sector was constrained and unable to offer job security. But why now, when people can aspire to so much more?

Police baton charge teacher eligibility test pass candidates demanding government jobs, in Lucknow on Oct. 5, 2018 (Photograph: PTI)

5. Why Is There Such A Mismatch Between Education And Jobs?

India is a land where thousands of PhDs apply for clerical jobs – and don’t get in. One of the ironies exacerbating our jobs crisis is that an education in India rarely provides skills that prepare one for the job market. Yes, there aren’t enough jobs for the million youngsters who enter the workforce every month – but many of them also don’t have the skills to do whatever jobs may actually be available.

This is just crazy. Barring those children of elites who can afford to study the liberal arts, most people look to the education system because they believe it will be the route to a better life. That is a lie. Where is the point of failure?

One reason could be that markets aren’t allowed to operate in education, and the signals and incentives that normally bridge the gap between supply and demand cannot find expression. But do we, perhaps, need to rethink some fundamental assumptions about the role of education in society itself?

Children attend classes at a school being run beneath a flyover in east Delhi, on Spet. 22, 2019. (Photograph: PTI)

6. Why Are Indians So Bigoted?

India is the ultimate melange of cultures, languages, cuisines, ethnicities. (Literally a melting pot!) If there is one lesson we should have learnt from our history, it is that divided we are weak, united we are strong. Our cities are fantastic examples of how diversity leads to prosperity. And yet, we are bigoted and racist and narrow-minded, if the recent polarisation in our politics is anything to go by. What explains this dissonance between our ideology and our lived experience?

7. Why Are Indians Sexist?

It is surely not up for debate that India is deeply sexist. And yet, half of us are women. And we are a democracy where the vote of a woman is equal to the vote of a man. Why does the misogyny persist, then? Is it the case that for any individual woman, it is rational to give in and normalise the patriarchy, and this has the effect of women collectively enabling their own oppression? Can there be a tipping point in the culture where things change suddenly for the better?

8. Why Have There Been No Revolutions?

India has spent decades mired in brutal poverty, with the failure of the state having a big part to play. All we did in 1947 was replace one set of oppressors with another. And yet, there are no violent uprisings, no revolutions. This is especially weird in the context of agriculture, which more than half the country depends on, and which has been in crisis for decades. And yet, many farmers would rather off themselves instead of offing others.

Akhil Bharatiya Kisan Sabha members during their Nashik to Mumbai protest march, on Feb. 21, 2019. (Photograph: PTI)

There could be many reasons for this. Are we a fatalistic people? Do the coordination problems of organising an uprising kick in when the scale required is so immense? Is it the case that suffering grows gradually, and we normalise our previous sufferings so that increments in it seem trivial? Or should we blame what I consider the most powerful force in human affairs: inertia?

9. Why Has India’s Army Never Attempted A Coup?

It is common for former colonies, especially in the region, to be witness to coups, with the army unable to resist the temptation of seizing power. We are blessed to have escaped that in India. Are there structural or cultural reasons for it – or did we just get lucky?

10. What Explains Our Colonial Cultural Fixations?

Cricket is our national sport, and the elites who run the country today grew up loving Wodehouse, Enid Blyton and Rudyard Kipling. We learned Shakespeare in school, and we latch on to every musical trend that comes out of the West. All of these are worthy pursuits, but the question must be asked, why are so many of us far more influenced by Western culture than our own? Is it a natural result of being educated in English, which is after all an Indian language now? Is this even something we should worry about? And can it lead to the homogenisation of culture, and a loss that we do not even feel, so subtly it happens?

10. Why Are We So Filthy?

Or rather, to rephrase that, why are we so filthy in public spaces? Many Indian households are rigorous about hygiene, and it is common to be barefoot indoors so as not to get any dirt in. But outside our homes, we treat the world like a giant trashcan. There is an element of the Tragedy of the Commons here – but this also tells us something about the interplay between norms, laws and institutions. The same Indian who noisily litters all over the streets of Mumbai won’t so much as drop a pin in a Singapore boulevard. The answer cannot be only to do with culture.

People walk past a gutter filled with garbage in Mumbai’s Govandi area. (Photograph: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg)

12. Why Do We Not Respect Personal Boundaries?

When I meet relatives at social gatherings, it is common for them to tell me that I’ve put on weight, and to give me advice on my diet. Or they will ask me why I don’t have any children yet. (I have an excellent answer prepared for this.) This doesn’t happen in other cultures as much as it does in India. Did our culture evolve in this way because we lived in large joint families or small communities where personal boundaries had no importance? Does that also explain why we tend to be so communitarian in our thinking instead of individualistic?

13. Why Have Indians Not Attempted To Establish Royalty Again?

This is not a trivial question. One of the amusing exchanges in our pre-Independence history began when Mahatma Gandhi was asked who would hold India together once the British left. He replied that maybe the Nizam of Hyderabad could become the king of India. When Vinayak Savarkar heard this, he flew into a fury. He wanted a Hindu Rashtra, and said that the King of Nepal could be emperor of a United India.

In hindsight, we have turned out to be a stable democracy, and we take this for granted. But it wasn’t inevitable. Just the fact that we have held together and stayed united is a minor miracle in itself, isn’t it?

14. Why Do Indians Deface National Monuments?

We have such a rich heritage – and we desecrate it at every opportunity. For a country where there is such an emphasis on nationalism, it baffles me that we treat our national monuments so badly. I’m not just referring to governments not taking care of them, but citizens dumping plastic bags and human bodies in our holy rivers, and cans of diet coke on the grounds of our crumbling monuments. What is with that?

The polluted Yamuna river runs alongside the Taj Mahal in Agra, on Nov. 25, 2008. (Photographer: Pankaj Nangia/Bloomberg News)

15. Why Are We So Proud?

I am so fed up of Indians proud of being Indians. My being Indian is an accident of birth. I might just as easily have been born in Pakistan or Timbuktoo. Would I have reason to be proud of India then? Or would I have to be proud of whichever place I was born in? Are so many of our emotions to be determined by the happenstance of our birth?

There is much I love about India. There is also much I deplore, and would like to change. But I save my pride only for me and my family. India’s glories should not cause me to swell my chest up in pride, because I had nothing to do with them. I certainly should not be obnoxious about it.

16. Why Do So Few Women Work?

I would have assumed that as India progressed, more and more women would become empowered and join the workforce. But the trend is in the opposite direction. The journalist Namita Bhandare wrote an outstanding series on this, and also spoke about it on my podcast. I still believe in the inevitability of social progress, but this is one of those statistics that has made me a little less glib.

Women assemble solar lamps in Bihar. (Photographer: Ruhani Kaur/Bloomberg)

17. Why Are We So Apathetic?

While thinking through the above questions, it struck me time and again that we are an apathetic lot. Why the apathy? Why do we resign ourselves to being subjects of a dysfunctional state, instead of assertive citizens of a vibrant democracy? Is it because it is actually rational to do nothing when change is so unlikely? Is it the free-rider effect, and we would rather piggyback on the protest of others? Is it inertia? Why are we like this, yo?

Or maybe if you have read so far, we aren’t all like this.

I hope you enjoyed reading this list of questions. Do feel free to attempt your own answers or contribute your own questions. A thriving public discourse is the first step towards change. Many of these questions were crowdsourced, and I thank Keshava Guha, Ajay Shah, Shefaly Yogendra, Arun Simha, Mohit Satyanand, Nimit Kathuria, Ashutosh Jogalekar, Ashutosh Datar, Chirag Panjikar, Just Mohit, Ajay Patri, and Shubho Roy for their thoughts.

Amit Varma is a writer based in Mumbai. He has been a journalist for a decade-and-a-half, and has won the Bastiat Prize for Journalism twice. He writes the blog India Uncut and hosts the podcast The Seen and the Unseen.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.