President Bush took a two-day trip to India last week. The view of the nation that he got was undoubtedly different than the view I saw as part of a 2003 travel seminar sponsored by Eden Theological Seminary. Our group spent over three weeks visiting urban and rural centers in southern India. The prevailing view that economic globalization has been good for India is one that many disagree with - including many leading Indian Christians. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Sunday:
Among India's poor, survival is still won by acts of despair and cunning. It's a daily quest whose reward is a plate of rice or a simple medication.
Farmers in Maharasthra hang banners offering their kidneys for sale; overworked medics in Gorakhpur fashion tubes from paper to deliver oxygen to the diseased; hungry parents in the barren fields of Orissa sell their children for the price of a bag of grain.
Millions roam the country in pursuit of work, trading the want of the village for the indignity of bonded labor. At outdoor kilns dotting the scorched terrain of Andhra Pradesh, parents and children toil side by side mixing and molding bricks from dawn till midnight. By doing this, a family of six earns about $5.50 per week, enough for one evening meal of unripe tomatoes and broken rice, reject kernels used normally as chicken feed.
The workers bathe in the stagnant mud pits used to mix the bricks and sleep in mattress-size hovels no taller than a man's belly button, which contain their entire estate: some tattered clothes, a hand broom, a few dinged-up pots.
"We were born in the mud, we've spent our lives in the mud, and we'll die in the mud," says Bansi Dhar Bag, 43, his skin blackened by a lifetime of kiln work. "We have to lead our lives like this. We suffer a lot, but we have to survive. We have to suffer."
Such is the burden of poverty for more than a quarter of India's 1.1 billion people. It's the nation with the largest number of poor people in the world. Although their ragged slums cram the roadsides and river banks of capital New Delhi, they almost certainly did not cross the gaze of President Bush, who arrived here Wednesday for a two-day visit during his first trip to India.
India has sought to portray a very different image to the outside world, one of a global leader. In conjunction with Bush's trip, the United States gave a nod of approval to that aim, inking a nuclear energy agreement that effectively normalizes India's furtive nuclear status. Many feel that a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council is inevitable.
India's rise to prominence began with domestic market reforms in 1991 that broke the dam of globalization and sent the country's economy soaring -- growing at an average of 6.8 percent since 1994. In just a decade, the land of lepers and snake charmers was supplanted by one of tech tycoons and MTV veejays.
Contrary to government claims however, the liberated economy -- commonly portrayed as an antidote to poverty among global financial institutions -- has done little for India's poor, say several leading economists, including Jean Dreze, Martin Ravallion and Raghbendra Jha. The most notable outcome of reforms, they say, has been to make inequality and even wider chasm.
Many Christians in India speak out against the negative effects of economic globalization and in support of those - particularly the Dalit people - who remained oppressed by economic factors and the caste system.
The Rev. Dr. Konrad Raiser, the then-secretary general of the World Council of Churches, said in a 2003 address at Gurukul Lutheran Theological College, that:
God's own Solidarity, with human beings is expressed in the reality of the servant Christ who humbled himself to take up human form, who was born into poverty, who accepted the path of rejection and who finally met his death on the cross. The vicarious suffering of Christ is the supreme manifestation of God's love. God in Christ took upon himself the whole burden of human sin and weakness. ... Suffering, however, is not the goal: beyond the cross is the resurrection. ... The victory of Christ therefore brings a tangible and deepened hope to those engaged in actual struggles against oppression and dominance. Moreover, his victory promises that the vicious circle in which injustice breeds more injustice and one form of oppression gives way to another form is being broken."
Dr. Raiser's views give voice to my own theological assumptions about what it means to be Christian in a world filled with poverty and suffering.
Gurukul Lutheran Theological College, one of the seminaries my group spent a week studying at, has been a particularly important voice in efforts to address poverty in India.
I wish the president had taken the opportunity to visit the people of Gurukul and to see some of the other sites that I witnessed while there. Maybe his own faith and vision would have been challenged.
A few pictures from my trip are in the posts below:
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