La agenda noticiosa y el interés común en la cobertura informativa

of middiddle India.le India.

15 February 2003

15 February 2003

While so many state governments rush to add chapters in their school textbooks on her heroic life and the Shiv Sena threatens to rename Valentine’s Day after her, does anybody know just who Kalpana Chawla was? Where she came from and, finally, where she belonged: among people like us, or people like them?

You at least know the school she went to, Tagore Bal Niketan in Karnal, cradled in Haryana’s basmati heartland. Even the town she came from is as nondescript as her school.

Twenty-five miles to the north, along the Grand Trunk Road, is the smaller but better known Kurukshetra of the Mahabharata. Twenty miles to the south, along the same highway, lies Panipat, another famous battleground.

Until the rise and then the heroic demise of Kalpana,* who knew if Karnal existed twenty or so miles adrift of Kurukshetra and Panipat? Who, indeed, also realised that a modern, successful, creative India was surging beyond the charmed circle of its exclusive institutions, distinguished families, power elites?

In so many ways Kalpana, Karnal and her Tagore Bal Niketan represent the new, once-nowhere India that is now striding on to the centre stage. The medium of instruction in Tagore Bal Niketan is probably English. But having been brought up in those parts in schools not very different from this, I

can safely suggest it won’t qualify to be an elitist school of the kind you’d flaunt on your CV. The rise of Kalpana, therefore, is one more example of the arrival of this new, small-town, modestly brought up but ambitious, hard-as-nails Indian to the forefront.

For want of another label, let’s call this Indian the Hindi Medium Type (HMT, in short). The label is not to be taken literally. It doesn’t necessarily mean that this Indian should have gone only to a Hindi-medium school.

It is also synonymous with small-town India, thedehati, local or desi, anybody who would have been considered an outsider in the upper-crust power structure till the other day. Not people like us.

Kalpana counts not only because she was so exceptional in her talent and courage but also because as a middle Indian in our headlines she is no longer an exception. Our cricket team has already been taken over by HMTs.

How many of your younger cricketers can answer a Tony Greig question in English the way a Ganguly or Dravid would, or a Pataudi or Gavaskar would have?

Virender Sehwag, Harbhajan Singh, Mohammad Kaif and Dinesh Mongia are not people with engineering degrees or MBAs, nor do they have blue blood or connections with the elite schools, at

least of cricket. Not even a Shardashram of Mumbai.

They are tough, ambitious, talented boys from middle India, the ‘rurbanised’ Bharat, who are happy to fight for their place in the post-reform sun. And most remarkably, the system is letting them succeed.

Kapil Dev was our first HMT star of what was always an English-medium game. When he arrived a quarter of a century ago, there were endless jokes about his English diction, grammar and syntax.

But you couldn’t question his ability to unleash the outswinger at will. Or his track record as captain of our first World Cup winning team, though we often doubted his ability to get his over counts right towards the end of an innings.

Now, see how many members of this team actually sound worse than Kapil when they speak English. And if you look at the next ten probables, you would know in which language they’d be comfortable answering questions in years to come.

What’s true of Kalpana and cricket is also beginning to work in that last bastion of elitism, the corporate world. The two most prominent stars of Indian business, the Ambani brothers, started out at a modest, HMT school near the chawl where their parents lived.

So ordinary was the school that it has since ceased to exist. Similarly, Google the educational details on Silicon Valley stars and if you notice that the first elite institution most of them list on their CVs is an IIT, you would know where they are from.

The Ambanis and the Narayana Murthys have risen where scions of so many former A-list families of corporate India are supporting their lifestyles merely by scavenging on the properties left behind by their parents, partying and collecting Versaces, their businesses all in a shambles, the

shareholders, employees and bankers vacuum-cleaned.

And if you want to see who is powering Indian manufacturing along with the Ambanis in energy and the Narayana Murthys in technology, check where the Munjals, who created the Hero Group, came from. Little Ludhiana in Punjab’s doab that produced grain, hosiery and may have only boasted of a few tiny foundries by way of industry.

Pawan Munjal is a graduate of Regional Engineering College, Kurukshetra, next door to Kalpana’s Karnal. Sunil Mittal, now battling the Ambanis in the telecom marketplace, is a product not of St Stephen’s but of New High School and Arya College, Ludhiana.

Even the world of politics is at a unique turning point. Not one senior political leader in any party (including the Congress whose chief is more Italian than elite) now boasts privileged or even English-medium schooling except, perhaps, L.K. Advani and Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh,

ho must be the only Dosco among the power elites today.

In any case, the only Dosco to have made news lately is Raja Bhaiyya’s father, Uday Pratap Singh. Even the nattiest dressers in our politics today are HMTs. Contrast this even with the days of the freedom struggle when so many of the key leaders were from privileged families and educated abroad.

Nowhere is the change more visible than in the armed forces. If you’ve been to an army mess two decades back, do so again now. Or just go to the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun and see how many officers now come from middle and rural India.

They are the sons of former jawans and JCOs, lower-rung bureaucracy, even the medium-sized, post-green revolution farmers, the very heartbeat of middle India, very modest, very HMT, salt of the

earth.

Any group photo of a Doon School or Lawrence old boys reunion will include a bunch of former generals and air marshals. But check the pedigree of your Kargil heroes and you will not trace more than the odd soldier to Doon or a school of that kind. The closest that some of the young officers who fought in Kargil came to an elite upbringing was Delhi’s Army Public School. The reversal of fortunes in the media has been even more spectacular. Though it’s best to avoid naming names now.

You can’t be judgemental about people hailing from one class or another. Reverse snobbery is no answer to the tyranny of upper crust, Doon–St Stephen’s–Mayo–Sanawar–Lovedale–Loyola domination.

Also, please do not celebrate the rise of the HMTs in a fit of boulder-on-the-shoulder liberal piety or as a revenge of the Bharatiya underclass on Macaulay.

Celebrate it for the larger message it brings, that the system of upper-class patronage that the British built, and institutions left behind by them, is now unravelling under this assault of middle India.

Further, it is being broken not by legislation, executive order, ideological Indianisation, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi’s end-of-history textbooks or any constitutional amendments. It is happening because of forces beyond our control.

Forces of free market, globalisation of our minds, worldwide competition and worldwide opportunity, access to the finest universities, the best employers in the world who do not care about

hich school you went to or your English diction, as long as your SAT scores were better than that of the others.

Nor who your father or your uncle was. It is not a perfectly fair situation yet—it never is, even in the most free economies. But the process is natural, inevitable, has a momentum of its own and is very much part of the larger medley of change: decentralisation of power, rise of the new rich, urbanisation and access to opportunity far beyond the charmed circle somebody’s parents gifted him.

In her deeds and her death, Kalpana personalised this remarkable transformation powered by the market, new ideas, growth of the media, globalisation of our minds. Her middle India will power our future now, underlining how stupid it was to believe that we could become a first-class nation merely by dipping into a talent pool that excluded 99 per cent of our population.

The rise of this former underclass will create the impetus to further expand this pool, which in turn ill create popular pressure for better educational infrastructure across the country.

Why do our children—even those with so-called elite schooling—slog for months on their SAT scores and GREs? It is the belief that you are dealing with a system that is viciously competitive but equally fair, where your ability matters more than how well your parents may have done in life. And

here performance takes precedence over pedigree. Just as well that the key to that future now lies in the hands of us HMTs.