Words Like Freedom: The Memoirs of an Impoverished Indian Family 1947-1997, by Siddharth Dube, Harper Collins 1998, 257pp, Rs.150, 

After fifty years of independence, parliamentary democracy, constitutional commitments, economic growth, and poverty alleviation schemes, why is it that abject poverty and desperation remain the defining facts of life for the majority of Indians? In this book, journalist and scholar Siddharth Dube seeks answers to this question by tracking the history of independent India through the eyes of Ram Dass Pasi, a landless dalit, and his family.  To his credit, Dube uses an innovative method and a skillfully argued text to pose some very serious questions.  The main shortcoming is that he does not answer his own questions adequately. 

To the impoverished masses -  people like Ram Dass - who form the majority of India’s population, and  who lived under the terror of the zamindari system, it was exhilarating to be politically enfranchised and have the right to vote after independence.  Why then, asks Dube, did these votes and this political democracy not lead to economic democracy?  The number of desperately poor people in India now equals the total population at the time of independence. Why, in spite of their sheer numbers, have India’s poor failed to make parliamentary democracy work in their favour? 

Ram Dass Pasi, born in 1927 to a landless dalit family in a small rural district of eastern U.P, has witnessed the end of colonialism, and the history of independent India from Nehru through Vajpayee.  Dube skillfully weaves the experiences of Ram Dass and his family, his migration to find work in Bombay, his efforts to repay his father’s debt to the landlords, to educate his children, and climb out of poverty, within the larger historical narrative of political, economic and social developments in the country.  Under the zamindari system, some 80 percent of the rural population of U.P. were poor tenants, sharecroppers and landless labourers, living at the mercy of a few thousand zamindars, the most pro-British segment of Indian society.  Independence in that sense, kindled hopes among many that political liberation from the British would also lead to social liberation from the crushing tyranny and poverty inflicted on them by their collaborators. 

But, as Dube points out, the rhetoric of the newly independent government, stepping into the shoes of the colonial administration, was not matched by their actions.  The abolition of zamindari, for example, and land redistribution, which formed a central tenet of the Congress platform before independence, has yet to translate into reality.  Even after acts were passed in parliament to abolish zamindari, he says “of U.P.’s rural population of 50 million people, the poorest half to two-thirds were left as bereft of cultivable land as earlier.” 

In this way, he follows the life of the family through the Nehru era of the 1950s, through Gharibi hatao of the 1970s, the “poverty alleviation” schemes of the Rajiv Gandhi era, and the globalisation of the 1990s.  Baba ka Gaon, Ram Dass's village in Pragapgarh district, is a much different place in 1997 than it was in 1947.  Yet, in 1999, government data confirmed that the proportion of “absolutely poor people” in the country had stagnated, and their numbers had increased despite a decade of record economic growth. For Ram Dass’s family, “the past has been brutally harsh, the present is precarious, and the future shows no hope of being better”. 

The argument that Dube suffuses throughout the narrative is that the poor have remained poor not merely because of the failure of successive governments, or because of their policy failures (which are many) – but because the poor have been powerless to effect change.  The poor have been kept away from power, he shows, by a variety of techniques, such as the duplicity of successive Congress governments, the influence of money, the way that underdog parties such as the Samajwadi party and the Bahujan Samaj party have inevitably catered to privileged elites within the lower castes, and the way caste politics has pitted different segments of the lower castes against each other.  He also shows that especially in the case of local and panchayat elections, it is nothing less than naked violence and police intimidation are often responsible for keeping the poor silent.

But Dube is reluctant to do much beyond complaining about the iniquities of the present, and this leads him into some very pessimistic conclusions.  Although he shows how historical circumstances and the vagaries of party and caste politics have failed to create a pro-poor agenda, he is unable to separate symptoms of the malaise from its causes, and can offer little to suggest how this could be changed.  Without this, he is left to conclude (perhaps correctly so under the present political system) that the poor will never be empowered, that a pro-poor agenda can never arise, and that “India is destined to remain the land of hunger, want or suffering”. 

The strength of this book is that it explains the persistence of poverty in India in terms of the issue of political power, and on the failure of parliamentary democracy to empower the poor.  But its shortcoming is that while it points out that the system has not worked for the poor, it does not seek to analyse the mechanisms why this is the case.  As such, it remains aloof from the cutting edge of the debate in India for the past few years, which is discussing the renovation of the democratic process through new mechanisms and a new political process that can end the influence of money and muscle.