Free On the Grand Trunk Road by Steve Coll Page B

aside. This has not, so far, been a stark confrontation, like that in Tiananmen Square between the Chinese middle class and the Maoist old guard, or in central Bangkok between the Thai middle class and their corrupt generals. Because India has clung stubbornly to its electoral democracy, its politicians, however mendacious or corrupt as a group, have been forced to take into account the middle class’s aspirations in order to win elections and garner campaign funds. Sometimes the middle class’s demands have seemed dangerous products of manipulation or anger or confusion, as in the Hindu revivalist movement or the Punjab insurgency. But its energy has been inescapable. And it is threatening to derail what has been the most precious, profitable creation of the old guardians of the state—the great South Asian socialist gravy train.
     

    As it happens, train stations are not a bad place to sniff the fumes of the decomposing Nehruvian state.
     
    South Asia’s railways are much romanticized by Westerners, and with reason. They certainly do better than the mobile torture chambers collectively referred to as Indian Airlines. Mark Tully, for seventeen years the British Broadcasting Corporation’s correspondent in South Asia, writes that the railways reveal a “talent for developing the modem without destroying the ancient.” The Indian railways do move many people and much freight cheaply, and they manage to earn a profit, which is a lot more than most subsections of the Nehruvian state can claim. Whether they represent an ideal marriage of the ancient and the modern is another matter. As a social enterprise and a microcosm of the state’s public hierarchy, the railways exemplify the ways the state has both failed and succeeded in India since 1947. These days, down in the bowels of the railway ministry lies an anxious culture of 1.6 million sinecured employees who suspect that their best days may be behind them.
     
    Wander through the Old Delhi station and the first thing you notice are all the signs carved in English and Hindi on polished wood, swinging neatly from their hinges, indicating the offices of the station superintendent, deputy station superintendent, ticket collector, deputy ticket collector, personal secretaries, security supervisors, and on down the line to the peons in their oil-stained T-shirts who rate no signs but seem to do much of the actual work. Once, on a thirty-six-hour ride from Delhi to Madras in the south, I brought my notebook along and talked to dozens of employees about their lives and work. It was like wandering through a living Victorian museum, but the anxiety shared by the employees arose distinctly from the pressures buffeting the South Asian state in the late twentieth century.
     
    The first man I met was Chandra Mohan Soli, a deputy station superintendent in Delhi who sat in a dim office with a concrete floor, clacking manual typewriters, and piles of carbon papers attached to forms printed on the coarse, soft paper common to the Indian bureaucracy. I asked him about his railway career. He explained the rigorous exams he had taken thirty years before and then described the benefits: subsidized housing for himself and his family in the “railway colonies” scattered across India, free medical care from the dispensary in the colony, hospitalization at the railway clinic, a pension, sick days, personal leave, holidays. If he dies in an accident on the job, the railway is required to give his son a career position as compensation. Seniority determines who gets the promotions, the larger houses, the air coolers and air conditioners in the offices. Since he was a senior employee, the system seemed fair enough to him—he had an air conditioner, at least. I asked what he thought about all this recent talk of privatization and capitalism. His answer was direct. “This is safer,” he said. “If it is privatized, then the big guy of the company can fire you any time, according to his whims