Independence Day musings

For poor and rich,just another day!

There are fond memories that we cherish and nurse, often recalling them to relive memorable moments of our past. And there are bad memories that remind us of events we wish had never occurred, memories that we want to erase from our minds but more often than not are unable to do so. Then there are haunting memories, graphic audio-visual images that keep on surfacing every now and then, often at the most unexpected moments, disorienting us and leaving us feeling melancholic. No matter how hard we try to erase those images, those voices, from the past, they just don’t fade away. They recede, only to surface time and again.

There are many fond memories of summer holidays spent at my grandmother’s house in the suburbs of Kolkata that I cherish and have lovingly nursed for nearly two score and ten years. But there’s one memory I would rather not carry in the crevices of my mind; yet, no matter how hard I try to erase it, the black-and-white image of a young woman in a tattered sari, carrying a rickety child, and a little girl with large eyes in a torn frock clutching to her mother’s rags with one hand and holding a battered and bruised aluminium bowl in another, remains indelible. It keeps on popping up just when I think I have been able to wipe it out forever, often when I am settling down for a meal at a table laden with food.

There was a dining table at my grandmother’s house which was kept in a sort of half open room next to the kitchen that led to the garden and the narrow, black-painted iron gate, which was closed and locked only after nightfall, and the lane into which it opened. If memory serves me right it was the summer of 1972 and my cousins and I had just sat down for lunch — a sumptuous meal of bhaat, daal, begun bhaaja and maachher jhol — with my grandmother hovering over us and my aunts piling our plates high with food. Children were supposed to eat till they couldn’t swallow another morsel without throwing up.

Suddenly there was this woman at the gate, with the starving child and the little girl with large eyes. “Ma, fan daao ma!” It was a pitiful cry, not for food but for the starchy water that is poured out after boiling rice and thrown away. Those were hard days of PL480 when food was rationed and there was never anything extra in the pot to be given away. The poor and the starving knew it was no use begging for food, so they asked for fan. All this I gathered much later, but on that afternoon I was stunned by the sight of such stark poverty. Back home in Jamshedpur, which was a small, very small, town those days, life was lived out in an orderly fashion; nobody was rich, but everybody lived well and hunger was unheard of, leave alone seen in such a stark manner.

My grandmother, a kind soul, I learned that afternoon, would keep the fan aside in a large brass bowl, to be given away to anybody who came asking for it. One of my aunts poured the fan into the aluminium bowl which the girl held out, clutching it with both hands so that it would not slip and fall. Another aunt asked the woman to come in and sit in the shade of the guava tree. I watched, strangely fascinated, unable to take my eyes away, as the woman fed the girl and the child, by turn, and then with great care wiped the bowl with her fingers and licked them hungrily. The remnants were her meal.

I couldn’t eat a morsel that day. Not at lunch, nor at dinner. At night, as I tossed and turned in the sweltering summer heat — power cuts in West Bengal of the 1970s stretched for hours together — my grandmother tried to calm me with one of her stories about the life she had left behind in East Bengal. It didn’t work.

You could well ask why am I recounting this apparently irrelevant incident that dates back to when I was 11 years old. There is no real reason to do so, but it’s an image from the past that I have seen again and again, and continue to do so as this wondrous land of ours celebrates its 64th Independence Day. Freedom is something we the privileged take for granted. But for many it means nothing: August 15 is just another day in their pathetic lives lived out in gut-wrenching poverty.

We who flaunt near double-digit GDP growth as evidence of India’s ‘progress’ and get excited by the findings of the National Council of Applied Economic Research that show the number of high-income households has exceeded the number of low-income households, can never quite imagine how the other half lives — and dies — because we have willed ourselves into disowning the poor and the wretched of the land. To talk of poverty is considered unfashionable in an India aglitter with chrome-and-glass shopping malls, a country which sees no shame in the continuous loot of public funds as is happening in Delhi at the moment where thousands of crores are being skimmed off in the guise of hosting this year’s Commonwealth Games, which, we are told, are a matter of ‘national pride’. Nor does our conscience bother us that thousands of tonnes of foodgrains are allowed to rot in Government godowns so that they can be sold at a pittance to liquor manufacturers while millions go to bed hungry.

Statistics culled by the Suresh Tendulkar Committee suggest 37.2 per cent (the Planning Commission insists it is 27.3 per cent) of India’s citizens, who are supposed to feel blessed and proud for being born in a free country, a democracy at that, live below the poverty line, which, incidentally, is variously defined and not without a purpose: The hazier the definition, the easier it is to disown discomfiting facts in ‘rising’ India. According to the Experts’ Group headed by Mr NC Saxena, which based its estimates on calorie intake, 50 per cent of rural households live below the poverty line. The National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, headed by Mr Arjun Sengupta, came to the conclusion that 77 per cent of Indians live on less than Rs 20 a day. It is now believed that the poor in eight of India’s States outnumber the poor in sub-Saharan Africa.

The bold and the beautiful of the new India, the rising India, the shining India will no doubt turn up their pretty noses and snigger at the poor and the underprivileged, the hungry and the deprived, the dying and the diseased, and blame them for being a huge drain on public funds. Life is an un-ending party for the privileged, the haves cannot be expected to bother about the have-nots. That’s the way it has been throughout history. That’s the way it shall forever be.

That, however, should not stop us from sparing a thought for those who wistfully gaze at the fluttering Tricolour and wonder what life on the other side of the divide is like. The middle-classes could do without being selfish for a day and take a look around them, if only to convince themselves that they are far better off than they believe they deserve to be. As for the rich, the top eight per cent which stands to gain the most with eight per cent and more GDP growth, we really need not bother about them. Funnily enough, Independence Day means nothing for them either: It’s just another holiday.

Hunger stares us in the face

Hungry kya? But
there’s no food
It’s been a week of disconcerting news. Events at home and abroad, along with grim predictions by those who should know, would suggest that the human race is heading for a Malthusian disaster. The ‘checks’ that the British demographer elaborated on, based on his thesis of rising subsistence levels leading to increasing population growth till the supply of food can no longer meet demand, appear to be coming true. We could, in the not so distant future, find ourselves fighting for rapidly dwindling food supplies. The catastrophic consequences defy imagination.
At home, the most worrying news about hunger and looming starvation has been emanating from two Communist-ruled States, Kerala and West Bengal. Since both are at a distance from Delhi, our so-called ‘national’ media, especially 24x7 news channels, have chosen to gloss over what’s happening in the eastern and southern hinterland. Ms Mayawati calling Mr Rahul Gandhi names and babus demanding more money for their exacting job of spinning red tape, apart from titillating details of the glittering high life of the bold and the beautiful, have been grabbing more media space and time than the spectre of hunger that is stalking vast tracts of West Bengal and Kerala.
It’s difficult to imagine verdant Kerala with its undulating paddy fields, toddy-rich palms, lagoons and backwaters teeming with fish, dazzling jewellery stores the size of shopping malls, booming real estate fuelled by millions of dollars that are dutifully sent to families back home by expatriate Malayalees, could find itself in the vice-like grip of a food crisis that’s worsening by the day. But it’s true. People in ‘God’s Own Country’ are alarmed by the prospect of returning empty-handed from grocery stories, many of which have already put up ‘Rice Not Available’ signs.
According to conservative estimates, Kerala’s annual demand for rice, the staple for Malayali meals, hovers around 30 million tonnes. The State, perched on the Malabar coast, has limited cultivable land and can at best produce up to five million tonnes of rice. The remaining has to be imported from other rice-producing States. Till last year, the bulk of the shortfall was met with imports from Andhra Pradesh, but the situation has radically changed this year.
A new law in Andhra Pradesh limits the export of rice to 25 per cent of the actual produce. This has obviously done with the purpose of increasing supplies, and thus depressing prices, within the State. There is nothing wrong with this approach; after all, the Government of Andhra Pradesh has to look after the State’s interests before it can look after those of Kerala. But the sudden fall in supplies from Andhra Pradesh has left Kerala in a jam. Two other factors have coalesced to make a bad situation worse: The Food Corporation of India has trimmed the amount of rice supplied through the public distribution system by a whopping 96,000 tonnes; and, unexpected heavy rain has destroyed one lakh tonne of processed paddy.
So, Malayalees are now forced to pay an ever-increasing price for rice that is fast disappearing from the markets. Three of the four major markets for rice – Kochi, Kollam, Kozhikode and Thrissur – have run out of stocks; stocks at Kozhikode are depleting fast. On Saturday, parboiled rice in Kerala was selling between Rs 22 and Rs 23 a kilo, way above what it was selling for a couple of months ago. The CPI(M)-led Left Front Government, loathe to admit that there is a food crisis and people, more so the economically disadvantaged, could soon face hunger, however insists that rice is selling for Rs 18.50 a kilo. For once Marxist propaganda stands exposed as fiction, even among the party faithful.
Ironically, retail stores run by Reliance, which have been at the receiving end of Marxist ire and the anger of traders dependent on small retailers, have seized upon this crisis to convert it into a publicity opportunity. Friends tell me that Reliance stores are selling rice at Rs 17.50 a kilo, which is a rupee less than the price touted by the Government and far less than the market price. But such gimmicks are unsustainable and sooner or later Reliance stores will also have to put up ‘Rice Not Available’ signs. Meanwhile, Malayalees are pinning their hopes to promises made by Orissa and Chhattisgarh to supply rice -- by when and how much is anybody’s guess.
In West Bengal, tales of hunger and starvation emanating from districts that witnessed food riots last autumn and where cereals have all but disappeared from ration shops, have a tragic sociological twist to them. Many of the men and women who are on the verge of starvation are elderly and, needless to add, indigent. Abandoned by families which have migrated to Delhi and Mumbai, they can neither work for a living nor afford the prices demanded by hoarders who also happen to be, not so coincidentally, local party bosses on whose support and ill-gotten wealth the CPI(M) is pathetically dependent for its survival in power.
The Left Front Government has opened some feeding centres, but there are reports that only those who are known to vote for the CPI(M) are being allowed access to these emergency facilities. With panchayat elections scheduled for next month, the CPI(M) has decided to cynically exploit the distress of the starving masses to ensure its hold over rural Bengal remains as firm as ever. Earlier, it was the fear of Marxist terror that would make people vote for the CPI(M). This time it is the fear of starving to death.
What is scary is that soon all of India, riding the crest of inflation, could be faced with the grim prospect of food scarcity. Our buffer stocks are not in great health. And given the reality of dwindling international supplies, importing food is no longer an easy option. Mr Jacques Diouf, Director-General of FAO, was in Delhi last week with some frightening statistics: The world’s food grain stock at the moment is just about enough to feed the global population for eight weeks.
To make it last longer till fresh supplies arrive, a whole lot of us will have to go hungry. And hunger does not necessarily kill. It also breeds irrepressible, destructive anger. Witness the food riots that are erupting in country after country.

Coffee Break / The Pioneer / April 13, 2008

Hunger in Communist Bengal

The distant thunder

Kanchan Gupta

In Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder) Satyajit Ray brought alive, with great sensitivity, the misery inflicted by the Bengal famine of 1943. The film was made three decades after that harrowing experience which returned to haunt Bengalis during the mid-1960s and became the leitmotif of the Communist movement in West Bengal. Based on Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's novel, Ray's award-winning film suggested, without recourse to crudity, how hunger stalked people amidst plentiful food stocks. Neither Bandyopadhyay nor Ray was treading new ground in making this point. After all, the famine of 1943 was a man-made disaster that claimed four million lives as the colonial Government chose to ignore its horrendous consequences.
The Bengal famine of 1943 - there were famines earlier, too, but none so devastating - has been evocatively described as the 'forgotten holocaust', a crime not recognised by history and now no more than a fading memory in the Bengali conscience. Hence the need to recall the sequence of events that led to hunger, disease and death on an unimaginable scale in rural Bengal where people pleaded for a fistful of rice but were spurned by a callous administration and corrupt hoarders; both joined hands to zealously guard overflowing godowns.
The distant thunder in Ashani Sanket referred to Japanese bombers. In real life, it was the killer cyclone of October 1942 which destroyed paddy fields along the east coast stretching from Bengal to Orissa. With no autumnal harvest, farmers, most of them landless or marginal, had no other option but to dip into emergency stocks at home which ran out by the summer of 1943. Meanwhile, sensing a scarcity, traders began to hoard whatever they could lay their hands on.
But the cyclone was only one of the contributing factors and its impact could have been mitigated if the colonial administration had not acted in the most selfish manner. Huge quantities of rice were stockpiled for British soldiers by seizing stocks meant for civilian consumption. Worse, even as the stark contours of the famine were emerging, rice was being exported to Sri Lanka for British soldiers garrisoned there.
Later, much after vultures had feasted on the dead and the dying, Britain tried to explain the crippling shortage by citing the suspension of rice imports from Burma, then occupied by Japanese forces. But Burmese rice, at best, accounted for not more than 15 per cent of Bengal's requirement. In any event, every effort was made to mop up all available rice from rural Bengal and either store it for soldiers or ship it out to what was then Ceylon. The little that escaped British appropriation was picked up by traders, nearly all of them collaborators of the civil administration, and sold at exorbitant prices. Wartime Kolkata, flush with money, did not experience the hunger of rural Bengal; tragically, Bengalis who could afford to buy rice at black market rates were deaf to the pitiful cries of starving fellow Bengalis. Latter day economists would say that market forces decided the price of rice. It would, therefore, be incorrect to blame the colonial Government alone for the colossal loss of lives.
Winston Churchill, who refused to acknowledge the famine till it became an embarrassment for the Empire, was to later slyly pretend it never happened by glossing over this dark chapter of British rule in India in his six-volume History of the Second World War. On the contrary, disdainful of natives and remorselessly untouched by their suffering, he claimed, "No great portion of the world population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the people of Hindustan. They were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small island." The four million people who died in the made-in-Britain famine of 1943 were inconsequential for the Empire's last standard-bearer.
It is unthinkable that so many lives would be lost today even in the worst possible circumstances. In food surplus India, Government often claims, there are enough provisions to ensure that nobody dies of starvation. No matter how scary the distant thunder may be, rest assured you shall not go hungry. Yet, in rural Bengal we are witnessing food riots: People are demanding their rightful share of supplies through the public distribution system but dealers are reluctant to meet their demand.
It is not that there are no supplies, but these are being diverted to the 'open market' to reap windfall profits. For instance, wheat which is sold at Rs 6.75 a kg through the public distribution system, fetches as much as Rs 13 in the 'open market'. Modern day economists will insist that there is nothing wrong with market forces deciding the price of foodgrains in rural Bengal. But that is as facetious as Churchill's claim of protecting Hindustan "from the horrors and perils of the World War".
If traders hoarded rice during the famine of 1943, accentuating the shortage and fuelling the famine, under the benign gaze of an uncaring civil administration controlled by Britain's equally unfeeling wartime Government, public distribution system dealers in districts across West Bengal - Bankura, Burdwan, Nadia, Murshidabad and Birbhum are witnessing food riots every day - have either hoarded rice and wheat or diverted supplies to the 'open market' with more than a little help from CPI(M) leaders and the hugely corrupt administration they run.
There is a difference, though: In 1943, famished men, women and children meekly surrendered to their fate, as the accompanying photograph of a peasant and his two sons shows. There was no struggle for survival: Godowns were not raided by hungry masses, traders were not attacked, administration offices were not set on fire. Today, there is no such meek surrender. Ration shop dealers, who are also card-carrying members of the CPI(M), are being beaten up and their shops and godowns are being ransacked. Local Marxist chieftains who dare intervene on behalf of the dealers-turned-hoarders are being chased, in some cases out of villages.
The Left Front Government of West Bengal claims the agitation is being stage-managed by Maoists and Jamaatis. To prove that there is no shortage of food, it points to well-fed, well-nourished Kolkata, forgetting to mention that the city was untouched by the famine of 1943 too. Such pathetic efforts to discredit the impoverished, hungry masses would convince only those who sit in the airconditioned confines of AK Gopalan Bhawan, agonising over the India-US nuclear deal even as the distant thunder rolls nearer from West Bengal.