Palagummi Sainath, journalist

I’m not sure how many people in India know who Palagummi Sainath is. But I’m damned glad that I do. If you do, too, good for you. Sainath (P. Sainath, as he is better known) winning the Magsaysay Award last week may have something to do with it, but even that is a fine way to get acquainted. The man is a journalist’s journalist, and on any day I’m proud to be a colleague.

I don’t know Sainath personally – I’ve only met him a couple of times several years back – but I know his published work intimately. You won’t find him too often cloistered in air-conditioned workspaces lecturing India on how India ought to be run and lecturing America on how America ought to be run. He will be out there: smelling the smells, hearing the cries, hearing the lies, and getting outraged by the mockery on humanity that is our grand democracy. Sainath writes about the 900 million few give a fuck about. Like you – and Sainath – I’m part of the other 100 million that giddy tales of success are being written about. We’re the dream of our country’s and the world’s marketers. We’re the ones that fly well, eat well, live well and dream well. That isn’t a bad thing. I’m sure Sainath knows it, too.

Only he, and those like him, knows, acknowledges and insists that the Republic of India won’t get too far if it didn’t carry the other 900 million with it. It’s not a burden. It’s an absolute necessity. 1:9 is one hell of a compelling ratio. Ask China, that other socio-economic time bomb.

Sainath is different from many well-meaning folk that write. Let me give you and example: Arundhati Roy. Ms Roy wrote a darn fine book in The God of Small Things. But while her Valutha made love on the banks of Roy’s memory and pining by the backwaters of Ayemenem (and emerge as a guidebook for giddy Japanese tourists), Sainath had already begun to walk on the edge in Bihar, exposing a rotten system and utter callousness of governance and politics in Everybody Loves a Good Drought.

It wasn’t glib. His subsequent career didn’t rest on primping, showing up for photo-ops at Rajghat and Jantar Mantar and disappearing once photographers, speechmaking and fulminating using incorrect data and flowery words, and adopting pre-meditated positions designed to create maximum splash. When Sainath writes – as he has done tirelessly for the past two years – that Farmer X or Y killed himself on account of debt, drought, expensive fertiliser and bad GM cottonseeds in the Vidarbha region of Maharshtra, you can believe it. When he wrote last month about a ludicrously tragic scheme by which the government of Maharashtra, in grand style, gifted Jersey cows to suicide-hit, dirt poor families in that region, and these souls found their high-bred cows were eating more than the hapless quadrupeds brought in, you have to wonder why more people aren’t picking up guns and shooting dead the bureaucratic, lard-headed, corrupt sons of bitches in Mumbai and Nagpur – and indeed, across India.

I’ve wondered that often enough these past two years, as I’ve travelled some of these roads talking to people and watching first-hand the how and why of Maoism in India for Red Sun, a book I’ve been working on and that Penguin will publish. Maoism, like other violent movements, is a no-brainer in India. This is even as our country spawns trillionaires, and enough billionaires to even put Forbes, that benchmark of wealth, into pleasant shock. A bipolar country! No less!

Sainath’s writing tells us stuff about what makes India go around: want, need and the grand circus of corruption. Ms Roy tells us of the art of artful deception, of grammatically passionate ploy – a lesson gladly shed.

The good news is: there are more like Sainath out there, people who choose not to cheapen news and views. There is media, too (heaven knows, not nearly enough) like The Hindu, an often ridiculed paper on account of its stuffiness, but along with The Statesman – now bruised and with a limp, alas – still among a handful of liberal media spaces in this country that boasts as being among the world’s most raucous and freest media spaces. (Raucous, yes. Free, not quite. Not while there still exists a Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, an Armed Forces Special Powers Act that chains Kashmir and the Northeast, and various Public Security Acts from Andhra Pradesh to Chhattisgarh to West Bengal that permits government to gag citizens, throw them in jail and for all practical purposes, throw away the keys.)

You will hear more from Sainath. If he doesn’t do a Roy after the Magsaysay, it can only be for the greater common good.