THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS
A silenced Prime Minister’s free fall. A reluctant prince’s desperate makeover. Veteran India correspondent John Elliott describes Congress’s descent into chaos.
John Elliott is an old India hand who belongs to that delightful breed of Englishmen for whom India became home without any obvious forethought or design. “I didn’t stay, I just never left. There is a difference,” Elliott is quick to emphasise. He’s reported on India for 25 years—in two different stints, first for the Financial Times (1983-88), then returning in 1995 after a few years away in Hong Kong. Over the decades he has covered the tenures of three prime ministers—Rajiv Gandhi, P.V. Narasimha Rao, and A.B. Vajpayee—and can be credited with bringing the terms Gross National Happiness and Privatisation into the common lexicon.
Like all foreign journalists who have worked in India for any length of time Elliott says he had always wanted to write a book about a country he calls “an amazing story”. But it was only after he started a blog, Riding The Elephant, in 2007, that he found he had enough material to proceed.
Much like its subject itself, Implosion is a large, sprawling book, an excellent primer of sorts for anyone interested in learning why India has come to this impasse. Elliott goes to great lengths to examine how and why the nation has squandered its massive potential and fallen prey to greed, wastage and arrogant displays of wealth. Implosion is a refreshingly clear-eyed look at a society ridden by corruption and made ineffectual by an overwhelming dependence on the “national approach” of jugaad and a chalta hai attitude. “I didn’t set out to write a negative book. It grew into one. India was a country which greatly appealed to me in the 1980s when I first came here. I once thought of it as a country that would only get better with time,” Elliott says. But then it didn’t. Next up, Elliott is looking forward to the General Elections and is curious to see who makes it to the prime minister’s chair. Whatever the outcome, Elliott will find he has more than enough material to add a chapter or two to Implosion’s paperback edition.