“Growth and Inequality in India”
Courtesy of The Sandpiper, Tuesday, July 20, 2004; Volume XLIIIBy Brad Howe
“Growth and Inequality in India”
Presentation by Katharine Sreedhar
(Director, Unitarian Universalist Holdeen India Program)
at the Star Island
International Affairs July 2004 Conference
Katharine Sreedhar is:
- Organized;
- Pragmatic; and
- Passionate.
The first two of these qualities were on ample display during the first hour of today’s presentation in Newton Center. Those of you who opted for the newspaper, the porch, or the tennis court during the second hour, however, missed much of the passion, which also was on ample display.
In his introduction of Kathy, Ken MacLean briefly described the genesis of the Holdeen Project, which was established in 1984 by the UUA [Unitarian Universalist Association] with funds provided from the legacy of Jonathan Holdeen, a Philadelphia lawyer. He mentioned that Kathy, an early Peace Corps Volunteer in India, had developed an abiding interest in the problems of the marginalized, lower caste peoples there. Among all of the proposals solicited by the UUA for applying the $500,000/year in endowment funds, Kathy’s alone focused on helping these people by enabling and empowering indigenous organizations, which were already there and making a difference. Kathy was named the first and, to date, only director, celebrating her 20th year in that position this past spring.
Ken, who has visited India five time with her, went on to say that Kathy uniquely has gained trust and confidence among the leaders of the most effective of these grass-roots groups which she has the unusual insight to identify, and the real gift to develop. From Ken’s vantage point as a long-time UU [Unitarian Universalist] minister and activist, Holdeen may be the single most significant thing that the UUA is doing to impact people’s lives.
As background to her presentation, Kathy distributed both a fact sheet and a summary of the impressive history, organization and success of the Holdeen Program (UU-HIP). The facts stand for themselves: 79.9% of the population earns less than $2/day; only 6.6% of Dalit households have electricity and drinking water; 2.8 million Indians are bonded laborers in the agricultural sector alone; etc. The impact on the individual is more elusive, or at least it was until Kathy described the life of her friend Deuben, who was the 24-year-old mother of five daughters when Kathy met her in 1988. Unexceptional by Indian standards—“there are more than 100,000,000 Deubens in India, and their lives haven’t changed for hundreds of years”—Deuben’s story totally engaged the I.A. audience for the fifteen minutes that it took Kathy to provide the context for her testimony about the process of significant change that she and Holdeen have created.
Kathy described, as well, the ordinary beginning and extraordinary ends of Martin Macwan and his organization, Navsarjan, as well as Elaben Bhatt, founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA). Both of these people have received extensive international recognition and major awards for their work, and it was clear that Kathy and Holdeen, as the primary enablers of these two, are equally worthy.
Overcoming the cultural and institutional barriers that impede the progress of the lower castes in general, and women in particular, is one thing. Dealing with the politics, the bureaucracies, and the entrenched interests of upper caste, upper class white privilege is something else again. It was here that Kathy shared her passion with those of us of (mostly) upper caste, upper class, white male and female privileged in the U.S. She has deep concerns about the rise of militant Hindu fundamentalism—the effort to transform a secular government to a religious-based one, a movement which is undermining the rights of minorities by projecting through the BJP the Hindutva policies and agenda.
This platform was effectively described in “POTA,” the Prevention of Terrorists Act, which was passed in October 2001 in response to the events of September 11th. Over the opposition of the Congress Party, the Act redefined many “ordinary” crimes as acts of terrorism, eliminated the rights of the accused in many cases, allowed detention without formal charges—essentially targeting and neutralizing political opponents of the government party, the BJP, along with religious minorities. Arrests of lower-caste political organizers and Muslims (from age 12 to 81) on spurious charges have been abetted not only by some state governments and police but also by Hindu Dalits and “tribals” responding to right-wing Hindu rhetoric.
To the surprise of many government policy-makers and bureaucrats in Washington as well as throughout India, 400 million Indians decided in May of this year that it was time for a regime change. Despite spending more than $100 million to promote the party and to engage the media, the BJP was defeated both nationally and in a number of states, much to the delight of the Holdeen Program and its partners, “who are watching India, just as the world is watching us.”
If you left at this point for coffee and never returned, you missed the following comments and observations by Kathy:
On living in two worlds: “It’s very difficult to work, live, and love in two worlds, especially two that don’t have much to do with each other. People in each place don’t know much about the other place, although through TV Indians have a better sense of America than Americans do of India.”
On the challenge of evaluating the “cultural values” that Holdeen is transmitting: “What we try to do is to pick those leaders and groups whose whole lives are dedicated to changing the power structure…Everyone we work with is a UU; they just don’t know it…Our value is ‘the inherent worth and dignity of every human being’…We don’t do any project work—they set the agenda and the priorities, we support them with a budget designed to be flexible and responsive.”
On dealing with day-to-day corruption: “When you live in conditions that involve the basic elements of survival under the threat of constant oppression, it’s very difficult to maintain a concern for ethical values…Those few people who can promote it under these conditions are truly exceptional. The criminals have become politicians—an enormous percentage of them have criminal records. They’ve found it easier and more profitable to go into government and accept bribes.”
On the trickle-down effect of progressive government policies and laws: “India is like Cuba and the former Soviet Union in having a constitution that’s great in theory, but people in power do not want to implement any laws infringing on their own power, wealth, or status. So even though strong affirmative action may get passed, little is passing through the system.”
On India’s image in Washington as a democracy that protects human rights: “The Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society led the South Asia Task Force to determine over two years what the policy should be. [The Task Force] included approximately 96 men and 4 women—[thus] mostly upper caste, upper class white men, none of whom had been exposed to India at a grass roots level. Their interest was business, and the mandate by [President] Bush was to connect politicians and bureaucrats around three primary issues affecting business: military relations, India’s booming economy, and Kashmir…There was no mention of human rights, [so] I refused to sign the report, but they put my name on it anyway. In reality, the report was designed to determine what Americans could do to benefit from [the range of] U.S. interests in India versus any determination of what’s going on in India itself.”
On the outcome of India’s election: “I wasn’t surprised. I knew that they were going to throw them out—that’s all you heard in advance in the villages…But Tom Friedman doesn’t go into the villages. For the real information, read Sainath on the web, and read his book Everybody Loves A Good Drought…No question that 10% - the middle class—is booming, but for the rest ‘Shining India’ isn’t quite shining.
On making a difference by strengthening the organization rather than just supporting projects: “We invest in the practical—we buy a Jeep, we provide health care for the employees of one of our affiliate organizations, we find a meeting place, we rent an office…all of which facilitates the growth of their influence.”
On microloans: “Studies have determined [as we have] that even the most famous of microenterprise centers, in Bangladesh, has not been more than a minor economic tool. [These loans] are useful only to the extent that women have the power to make decisions on how to use them. Too many are taken on behalf of the husbands…How many loans can you give for small village shops [that sell variations on the same thing]? SEWA finds that 50% of loans are for personal consumption, but at least that’s better than going to the money lenders. In second place is housing, and [a distant] third is businesses.”
On her institutional affiliation: “Only UUs would do something like this [the work of the Holdeen Program]. No one else would take this kind of chance against these kinds of odds.”
Last updated on Friday, April 18, 2008.
