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.

Rip Van Winkles wake up to Bhopal

Everybody was sleeping for 26 years!

It’s extremely unflattering for media, especially the so-called national television news channels, that after a fortnight of sustained hyper-coverage of events related to the 1984 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal and outpouring of anger over nobody being punished for the horrific death of 15,342 people, there appears to have been little, if any, impact on the masses that populate this country. Just because the politically correct in media have suddenly woken up to a gruesome mass murder that occurred 26 years ago and decided to make common cause with perpetually aggrieved jholawallahs — it has helped fill column space and air time during Delhi’s silly season — does not mean everybody else is equally energised.

The popular Gujarati newspaper Sandesh had an interesting story about aspiring journalists who appeared for this year’s entrance test for the media course offered by Saurashtra University. I have no idea about the quality of the course, but it would be safe to presume that those who applied for admission are from average middle-class families, representatives of what political parties, particularly the Congress, refer to as aam admi — the common man, average Indian, or whatever term you may want to use for the masses. The answer scripts have revealed that among the applicants are those who believe Warren Anderson is a Hollywood superstar and (though not connected with the Bhopal tragedy) Teesta Setalvad is a Bollywood actress.

Cruel and uncaring as it may sound, the fact is that most people do not really care about whether Warren Anderson, who was chairman of Union Carbide Corp, the US-based parent company of Union Carbide India Ltd when lethal gas leaked from the company’s ill-maintained pesticides factory with virtually no plant safety system in place on the intervening night of December 2-3, 1984, was allowed safe passage by the then Congress Government at the Centre headed by Rajiv Gandhi under American pressure or for reasons that, if stated in print, could invite charges of libel and defamation. It’s not only cynicism that prevents a mass upsurge bordering on rebellion against a ‘system’ that allows criminals to walk free but also certain unsavoury facts that cannot be wished away.

In a country with appalling poverty levels — we are yet to figure out how many millions of families live below the poverty line — there is little or no appreciation of the value of human life. Those of us who are beneficiaries of an unregulated market economy allow ourselves to be persuaded by glib talk of India as an emerging global power and are impressed by GDP figures that by no means reflect gross domestic well-being. For us, India is shining. Those who struggle to make ends meet, and they do not necessarily belong to the underclasses, know claims of prosperity are bunkum. For them, life is a drudge, an unexciting passage of days, weeks, months and years in the hope that things will improve, which, of course, won’t happen in their lifetime. Incremental betterment, when it happens, is wiped out by inflation which the Prime Minister wants the people to grin and bear, as if it’s their bounden duty to silently suffer his indifference and incompetence.

The political resolution adopted at the BJP’s National Executive last weekend had a revealing paragraph which should provide the thinking classes with some food for thought: According to the Planning Commission, 27.3 per cent of rural households are below the poverty line. The NC Saxena Experts Group, basing its estimates on calory intake, says 50 per cent of rural households are below the poverty line. The Arjun Sengupta Commission has found that 77 per cent of the population lives on less than Rs 20 a day and said this should be the basis for determining poverty levels. The Suresh Tendulkar Committee, on the other hand, has concluded that 37.2 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line.

So, nobody really knows either the extent of poverty in India or the number of people who are barely able to keep body and soul together. Just as nobody really knows how many people actually died and were injured in the Bhopal disaster even 26 years after the ghastly incident. Nor do the authorities have any comprehensive statistics on compensation paid to victims over the years and their rehabilitation.

I had asked our bureau chief in Bhopal to access relevant details from the officials handling relief and rehabilitation. And here is what he could ferret out. More than 11,000 people affected by the disaster are still waiting for the compensation awarded to them simply because there’s no way of contacting them, or so we are told. This despite the elaborate bureaucratic machinery that was set up to deal with compensation claims. Mr Bharat Bhushan Shrivastava, one of the officials involved with disbursing compensation, told this newspaper that he and his colleagues are still waiting for 11,735 people who have been awarded compensation in different categories to turn up and collect their money. “We have sent several notices to them at their addresses, provided lists of such claimants to voluntary organisations and widely circulated their names, but to no avail.”

Who are these claimants? Are they real people without real addresses as most poor people in this country are? Were they migrant workers who lived in the shanties that were allowed to proliferate in the vicinity of the hazardous factory? Did they move to industrial slums with open drains carrying toxic wastes in other cities after the disaster? Or are they ghost claimants whose names were submitted by racketeers who are now unable to produce people whose identities match those recorded on paper? Or is this part of the elaborate charade mounted by jholawallahs, ironically funded by foreign donors, who have made Bhopal’s tragedy into a prosperous enterprise? Why is it that media has never bothered to seek answers to these questions over the past 26 years? Why has no RTI been filed as yet?

It’s easy to wax eloquent on the plight of Union Carbide’s victims and berate America. But shouldn’t we also look within? Do we really care for the poor for whom we now feign treacly concern? Do we really want them to rise above poverty levels through higher wages? What would that do to profit margins, India as a favoured destination for investors looking for cheap labour, and stock prices? Or is the outrage we read about in newspapers and hear on television just so much poppycock and no more? A reality game show by another name? Little wonder that in Saurashtra youngsters believe Warren Anderson is a Hollywood superstar and Congress spokesman Manish Tewari condescendingly declares that anybody pointing a finger at Rajiv Gandhi is being “unpatriotic”. We do live in a wondrous land.

[This appeared as my Sunday column, Coffee Break, in The Pioneer on June 20, 2010.]

In India's cities, poor don't matter

There's little to feel cheerful
Snooty Mumbaikars tend to look down upon Delhiites as Philistines (no offence meant to Palestinians) who may have a lot of cash but lack class. They have reason to look down on those who live in India's dust bowl. Unlike Delhi, where people believe politeness means weakness and men think that unless they are boorish to women their virility shall remain suspect, Mumbai is a cosmopolitan city where people say "please" and "thank you" and men do not paw women on the streets. It's all very genteel; even Shiv Sainiks are now a tamed lot.
It's not surprising, therefore, that Mumbaikars should feel outraged that two young women, escorted by two men, should have been molested by a mob of 'revellers' on New Year's eve outside a hotel in posh Juhu. Had the photographers of Hindustan Times, who happened to be there, not alerted the police, perhaps the women would have suffered worse. Last year, a similar incident had occurred near Gateway of India when drunkards in a 'celebratory' mood molested a foreigner. Mumbai appears to be losing its tag as a 'safe city' for women. From my perch in Delhi, I can seek some comfort in the fact that unlike in Mumbai, here cops don't drag women to police chowkis and rape them. Which does not mean Delhi is safe for women. Every time my daughter, who is a university student, goes out with her friends, I worry myself silly.
No, I am not gloating over Mumbai's decline and fall. Nor am I pointing out that despite its moral policing (remember the ban on women making an honest living by dancing at downmarket bars?) the Congress-NCP Government has not been able to halt the slide. It would be silly to suggest that a Shiv Sena-BJP Government will fare any better. Whether in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai or wherever, nothing can be more disquieting than women being harassed, assaulted or molested by lecherous men with nobody even lifting a finger in admonishment. It is possible that if our laws were tough, and I mean real tough (for instance, eve-teasers would be flogged and rapists castrated without any scope for presidential pardon) men would think twice before pouncing on women. But our laws are as weak as those whom we elect to occupy positions of power and authority: The men who molested the two hapless women outside the Juhu hotel are out on bail and are probably bragging about their exploit to awe-struck friends. In this wondrous land of ours, society neither shames nor shuns those who violate the dignity of women. Sab chalta hai, yaar!
Having said this, I must also admit that I found the "shock" and "outrage" as reported by the media rather overstated. The two victims of the incident at Juhu and their escorts, all of them non-resident Indians who live in the US, are believed to be so upset that they have decided not to visit India again. That's their choice. But what if thugs assault them in the US? People do get mugged, molested, raped and murdered in America, just as they are in any other country. Would they then leave the US?
But let's get back to the issue of feeling 'outraged' and 'shocked'. Yes, it's disgusting that men should behave in such a despicable manner and go after soft targets. Nothing can even remotely justify their misdeed or mitigate their crime, not even the fact that liquor may have disoriented them into behaving like rutting animals. Yet, we should not forget that such incidents, loathsome and abhorrent as they are, do not occur every day in every place. What occurs every day and everywhere around us, strangely, does not 'outrage' or 'shock' us, leave alone prod us into making the smallest gesture to register our concern.
Driving back home from work on New Year's eve, I had to stop at a red light in Sector 18, Noida's happening place. Urchins, some no older than seven or eight years, in tattered rags held together with strings, shivering in the biting cold, rushed to the cars waiting for the lights to change. They were not begging for money. All they wanted was to warm their freezing palms by holding them on the headlights. A young couple, dressed to kill, in the car next to mine, rolled down their windows and tried to shoo away the urchins. When that didn't work, they switched off the headlights of their car. Two little girls, one of them in pigtails, who were warming their palms on the car's headlights, looked at the couple with sad puppy eyes, and then shuffled away. The woman giggled, the man guffawed, the lights changed, he switched on the car headlights, revved the engine, and both took off for more fun and frolic. May you crash into a car being driven by one of your tribe and die, I cursed.
On Friday afternoon, I had gone to Sector 18 on an errand and, as luck would have it, had to stop at another traffic light, this time near the sprawling parking lot crammed with cars and SUVs. On the pavement a family of three -- man, woman and child -- was settling down for lunch cooked on a three-brick oven fuelled by plastic bags gathered from the nearby rubbish dump. The child, a toddler, was sucking on the claws of a chicken, which the man must have collected along with the plastic bags and the woman had boiled in a sooty pot along with other offal from the kitchens of the restaurants and restobars that make Sector 18 so hip and happening.
That's the real India out there around us, the every day India where life is nasty and a never-ending nightmare, a struggle to keep body and soul together. This is what should outrage us, shock us and make us incandescent with rage. It should upset us that for all our tall claims of a prosperous India with a booming stock market, there are millions of us who scavenge for food along with snarling stray dogs in garbage dumps in our glittering chrome-and-glass cities. In the hinterland, it's worse.
Of course, we can pretend that this India does not exist, that all is fine and ours is a land of milk and honey. But that won't make the reality disappear. If you don't believe me, keep your eyes open the next time you step out on the streets, especially if you happen to be in Mumbai.

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.