MB Lal's article-1

MINIMUM WAGES ACT A NON-STARTER

BULK OF WORK FORCE LIVES ON STARVATION WAGE –––

AN OPEN INVITATION TO EXTREMISM

By M.B. Lal

Over the past few weeks I have discovered that the government's Minimum Wages Act has proved to be a total non-starter. This condemns the bulk 0f the "unorganized sector" which constitutes 94% of the work force to a starvation wage.

Leave alone the business community; my survey has revealed that even the so-called enlightened and highly educated classes are dead set against implementing this Act in their posh housing societies, luxury clubs, cultural and academic institutions, among others, even when they are flush with funds.

Through this denial of the minimum wage, every month the average worker in most establishments is being denied Rs 2,000 to Rs 4,000 of his legitimate salary which to him has the same value that a sum of Rs 30,000 or one lakh has for us. This is robbery in broad daylight about which he can do nothing Members of our nouveau riche middle class have lost the capacity to feel the joy a little extra money can bring to a poor man's life. Like us, he also has a family to support. He loves his children as dearly as we love ours. We often suspect these workers of causing thefts in our homes and keep our valuables at a safe distance from them, little knowing that all the while it is we who have been wrongfully robbing them of their rightful dues. Clearly, the boot is on the other leg.

After much investigation and deliberation I have come to the conclusion that resistance to this Act is so great that it can never be implemented unless the government makes it's violation a serious cognizable offense under the criminal law for any organization employing more than six persons (including regular workers supplied by a security agency or contractor).  It should be directly actionable by the police as a case of theft or robbery. In the absence of such harsh measures to enforce it and give due protection to the working class, workers will have no option but to turn for support to extremist parties who encourage and sponsor social change through violence.

I broached this subject with residents and managers of a few upper and upper middle class colonies where every other house has two cars and many have three. Almost all of them gave me a cold shoulder. A key official of a colony said he would sooner resign than yield to such a demand "I do not want to make a laughing stock of myself in the colony".. I later realized that he was right in judging the mood of the community that inhabits these elitist colonies.

Housing societies constitute only a minuscule part of the violators of the Minimum Wages Act. Ask any delivery boy (from shops stocked with goods worth crores) his salary and he will tell you he works 12 to 14 hours from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. for anything from Rs 2,500 to Rs 4,000 a month, while the minimum wage fixed by the government for unskilled labour for an eight-hour shift is Rs 6,422 a month and for the semi-skilled Rs 7,098.

The concept of an eight hour shift has all but vanished from almost the entire "unorganized sector". These days 12 hours are the norm and that too at half the statutory minimum wage. Some employers do not even give their workers a weekly off.  While the Government and political parties submit to all kinds of pressures from the organized unionized sector they care two hoots for the far more numerous unorganized sectors, not knowing they are sitting on a time bomb ticking under their seats.

The scenario   is the same, in air conditioned  malls, cinema halls, nursing homes, elite clubs, restaurants, transport companies, motor workshops and among rickshaw pullers and construction workers and so on. Like many cooperative housing societies where the minimum price of a flat is Rs two crores, none of them is short of money. It is just that they have got used to flouting the law because they know that they can get away with any thing they do.

As prices of all essential commodities rise, government and big business houses promptly raise the salaries of their staff which further adds to the inflationary spiral. Workers in the unorganized sector who have  to bear the shock of this upheaval are left high and dry, without any protection or support, the Minimum Wages Act being totally defunct for them. Sector-wise, one of the worst culprits of this phenomenon are the shooting real estate prices which are leaving the worker in the unorganized sector virtually roofless, or forcing him to commute anything  between 20 and 50 kilometers to his work place and back home at exorbitant costs  in time and money. His living conditions are worse  than those of bonded labour. Nurses in private nursing homes live four to six to a room and are paid around Rs 3,000 a month while their diplomas are retained by their employers.

Workers in the unorganized sector, social activists and intellectuals who support their cause are often accused of being anarchists or even Maoist. But I ask those high brow critics "to whom else should we turn for support?"  The  present system offers us only two options: coalitions led by the Congress or BJP. Both compete with each other in framing labour friendly laws but they do so only after ensuring that those laws will never be implemented.

The more the violations the better for them, for then they can claim immunity from taking any action at all, the offence being too widely rampant and beyond their control. To cap it all they have appointed inspectors many of whom have allegedly paid lakhs in bribes to politicians and officers for appointing them. They have to recover that money from us and more.

The Hindu

March 19, 2012

ENFORCE MINIMUM WAGES ACT

The Hindu has done a great service to the millions of homeless in the country by reporting the seminar on homelessness organized by the Indo-Global Social Service Society. Allow me to point out the two factors that are primarily responsible for urban homelessness:

The first is that urban housing has become a safe haven for Black Money with the result that in the last 60 years land prices have shot up 100,00 to 300,000 times in posh colonies and at least  2,000 to 10,000 times in the unauthorized slums. Slowly but surely the poorest of the poor are being driven to living in the streets.

But the second and more important reason for the growing destitution and homelessness of the working class in the urban unorganized sector is the refusal of our middle and upper middle classes to implement the Minimum Wages Act. Ask any messenger delivering goods worth thousands per day from a nearby store about his salary and he will tell you he is paid just about Rs 2000 to Rs 4,000  per month for working from 8 am to 10 p.m. against the Rs 6,422 fixed for an eight-hour day in the Minimum Wages Act.

The story is the same of workers in all establishments, be it posh housing societies where the minimum price of a small flat is two crores, big restaurants, clubs or private educational institutions. While according to an Indian Census report published in The Hindu Delhiites are the richest people in the country, the story of the vast working class is entirely different though Delhi's richness rests on their shoulders. The IGSSS seminar reported by your paper was fully justified in highlighting the callous attitude of the middle class elite towards the working class which is thus forced to live on a "starvation wage".

About the Government's complete indifference to the open violation of the laws against Black Money and non-payment of the minimum wage to labour, the less said the better.

M.B.Lal

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THE MIRACLE OF HIGH MINIMUM WAGES

(A synopsis of a proposed larger study by M.B. Lal)

Like it or not consumerism is here to stay. It has gripped the hearts and minds of humanity as no other creed, ideology or religion. Capitalism, communism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam are mere names of only one phenomenon, Consumerism, which the whole of humanity is pursuing single-mindedly.  If India wishes to achieve an economic miracle in the shortest possible time-frame it has only to widen its consumer base from a small fraction of its population to the majority. This is how it can be done.

In this unique study the author shows how the notorious Indian caste system is responsible for India’s black money hordes in Swiss banks which exceed the combined black money deposits of the rest of the world. He points out that Black Money in India is largely the accumulated unpaid wages that should have legitimately been given to the working classes. The workers are not paid their due wages because they belong to the lower castes whose services have been guaranteed for thousands of years virtually free. Instead the upper caste masters horde that money by buying property in the black market or, if it is a large sum, putting it secretly in foreign banks. If you add the vast majority of Muslims and Christians who are equally exploited by the Hindu upper caste you will find 90% of the nation's wealth concentrated in the hands of about 10% of the population constituted almost entirely of upper caste Hindus.

           

The author of this study is of the view that socialism or communism will not solve  India’s problems since parties that follow those ideologies are also controlled  by upper caste Hindus. What the common man needs is an assured national minimum wage which is at least 33% of the per Capita income of the country and 66% in metropolitan towns where house and transport consume the bulk of the pay. A beginning can be made with big megalopolitan cities where the minimum wage should be rigorously enforced.

The author’s central theme and thesis is that if you want to develop India rapidly you have to increase the purchasing power of the people. This can be best done by enforcing a rigorous minimum wages act. The bogey that it will reduce employment is false. In fact as we have said above it will generate more employment by increasing the demand for light and mass produced consumer goods. No employer can afford not to hire people. Even now the stingy Indian employer hires the minimum number and makes them work 12 hours a day.

        The essence of this economic philosophy is that the larger the consumers base the faster the progress of a country. In countries like India, Mexico, Russia, Ukraine, South Africa and others where workers live on a starvation wage and money is hoarded by a few employers unemployment and under employment is 20 to 40% of the work force whereas in developed countries with high minimum wages unemployment is only 4 to 12% of the work force. (See statistics of World Economy 2012 in my blog " www.blackmoney-caste.blogspot.com ")

The irony of the situation is the fact that the majority of upper caste people are also poor.  It is the cream of the upper caste that has grabbed all the wealth of the country with their cunning and muscle power. Members of the lower castes among the rich would not account for more than five percent of their numbers. if that. And nearly all of them would be politicians who control the vote banks of their respective castes. India practices a peculiar type of feudal capitalism where the only law that operates is that of  "might is right”. Writing in TIME magazine of May 7 Rana Faroohar put the problem succinctly quoting a big UK retailer. "In China ", he said "you might pay 20 cents on a dollar to get your project done, and it will get done quickly. In India it is 40 cents (to the dollar as bribe) and it will get done in a few years. In Russia it is 80 cents --- and you may get shot before it is done".

The attitude of the upper castes Hindus to the rest of the population is identical to that of the Whites towards the Blacks in America. The only difference between the two nations is that whereas the Blacks in America are protected by a strictly enforced Minimum Wages Act, the lower castes and minorities in India enjoy no such safeguard and are entirely at the mercy of their overlords who have been accustomed for centuries to treating them as slaves and availing their services virtually free.

   This is why countries with large amounts of black money are generally those where workers’ wages are low. Property prices in such countries, specially in their metro cities, have risen astronomically in the last ten years while they have fallen in countries which have high minimum wages for workers. Why this contrast? In India by not paying his due wages the employer hordes his money and turns it into black money by fudging his accounts. In developed capitalist countries, on the other hand, the same money is distributed among the workers in the form of statutory minimum wages. This naturally means that the employer is left with less money to horde than his Indian counterpart. He has no black money to put in properties and Swiss banks or other tax havens.

The most important effect of this contrast between India and the developed world is that in advanced countries it vastly expands the consumer class. Every worker becomes a consumer. This has a chain effect on production, generation of wealth and employment. More intermediate goods of mass use are produced while the production of luxury items remains restricted. This is proved by the explosion of a vast new consumer market in electronic and IT products which everybody uses.

According to the Financial Express of May 6 Economic intelligence agencies have informed the Finance Ministry that a major chunk of illegal funds and black money is being generated and routed in the real estate sector of the country. Special departments like the Central Economic Intelligence Bureau (CEIB), Income Tax (Intelligence) and the Directorate General of Excise Intelligence have alerted enforcement agencies like the Enforcement Directorate and I-T (Investigations) to conduct special operations and keep a tight vigil on the funds moving in this sector.  Published figures in the weekly property supplement of a national daily show that land  prices have shot up 100,000 to 300,000 times in the last  60  years in Delhi, upsetting the entire economy of the average   household and virtually driving the entire lower middle class to the slums and the lower classes virtually to living in the streets.

It is to be noted that while the rate of inflation in developed countries with high minimum wages is one to four percent per year, in India it is 12% per year, which is obviously the result of black money of the affluent sections of society pouring into the market and making life increasingly difficult for the poorer classes.

The first step in the author’s opinion is the creation of an awareness among the working classes, nearly all of whom belong to the lower castes that (a) a statutory minimum wage is their birthright and (b) any segregatory discrimination against them on the basis of their nature of employment, (which effectively manifests the age-old caste prejudices) are crimes to be reported to the police and against which the victims must seek legal remedy.   

            An interesting  study by Esther Duflo of the famous American MIT reported by the Economist (London) from a lecture she delivered at Harvard under the title "Hope Springs a  Trap" shows how injection of a little extra money over and above the starvation wages they were accustomed to changed the life of a whole community  in West Bengal from one of utter despair to one of hopr. Even after the aid was stopped they now earn more, eat more and aspire for a better life.

"The results were far more dramatic. Well after the financial help and hand-holding had stopped, the families of those who had been randomly chosen for the Bandhan programme were eating 15% more, earning 20% more each month and skipping fewer meals than people in a comparison group. They were also saving a lot" says the report.  It is my considered view that rigid enforcement of the Minimum Wages Act across the  country can bring about just that miracle  in India. It will  create a consumer class of at least half a billion people, cut down black money transactions to near zero, bring house prices and rents to affordable levels and usher in a new era of prosperity for the whole nation.  Economists should examine this layman's theory with unprejudiced eyes.  For more information on this subject visit www.black money-caste.blogspot.com, a purely personal and private archive of the author.

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The Right to Privacy In A Public Place

By M.B. Lal

            The sacking of three Karnataka Ministers for watching pornography on their mobile phones in the State Assembly has made me a futurist. My neuroscientist friend in America tells me that thought reading machines are coming. Once they read your thoughts an animation film maker can easily convert them into their video version. Already machines are being invented that could photograph pictures forming in your mind.

            This outreach of technology into the most intimate recesses of our private lives has made the Supreme Court of America sit up and declare that the citizen is entitled to some private space from prying eyes –– even of the law enforcement agencies –– in a public place. According to TIME magazine, on January 23 this year the court decided that the FBI violated the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure when it used the global positioning systems (GPS) signals to track a suspected drug dealer even though the cops monitored only “where the suspect went on public streets.” In a story titled “Privacy in Public” the magazine says: “Thanks to that decision for the first time in American history there is now a legal right to privacy in public.” Meanwhile, Senator Al Franken has introduced a bill based on his view that “People have a fundamental right to control their private information.”

            The fast developing science of “mind reading” –– a part of neuro science –– over which the US defense department is spending several hundred million dollars, has made the issue more complicated and urgent. According to The Economist (London) “it is now possible to scan someone’s brain and get a reasonable idea of what is going through his mind.” This will ultimately lead to remote sensing cameras to scan people’s brains. Unscrupulous TV Channels could use such devices to telecast perverse or ‘immoral’ images forming in a person’s mind to defame him. Private detectives could use them to ferret out secrets of their clients’ enemies. The Government could deploy them to detect suspected terrorists.

            I contacted a neuro scientist working at Harvard University. He referred me to literature which showed various ways of getting inside a person’s brain. It seemed to me the simplest of these would be the decoding of the movements inside and outside the body of a ‘subject’ while he is thinking. We are all aware of our physical symptoms when we are angry, afraid, amorous or just happy. But these broad patterns have micro-elements covering every conceivable thought in our minds which can be read or converted into a video film by merely recording the electrical signals issuing from the brain. In short nothing is beyond the research of digital electronics. Already, by monitoring the brain activity of people while they watched Hollywood movie trailers, researchers were able to recreate a moving picture similar to the real footage being played.

            The question is no longer one of the sanctity of the place where a person is trapped doing what is morally or legally wrong, but one of clearly defining what part of a person’s life is “public” and what is his purely “private” information. The article on “Perils of untrammeled freedom of Expression” by Mr. B.G. Verghese in the January issue of Vidura and the demand by Justice Katju for bringing electronic media under a regulatory authority raise issues that are worthy of a nation-wide debate on the rights and wrongs of such sting operations.

According to Reuters news agency the European Union has just finalized proposals for “new data privacy rules”, putting greater responsibility on companies such as Face book to protect users’ information, and threatening those who breach the code with hefty fines, which in the case of Google could amount to $800 million. TV Channels and newspapers would automatically come under these laws. We have already witnessed the disaster that overtook the Murdoch Empire (threatening even the British Prime Minister’s future for complicity with the media mogul) for eavesdropping on the private lives of ordinary people by hacking their phone calls.

Global positioning systems (GPS) have made it possible to track every citizen to his precise location every moment. Video positioning could be just a step away. We have already started the process of creating a digital identity of each Indian. Linking it to GPS could be the next move. It is naive to expect that the use of such systems can be confined only to the Government, though that would be bad too. Cyber piracy is routinely practised by unscrupulous businesses, including private detective agencies, through facilities offered by Google, You Tube, Yahoo and Face book. No place is sacred or beyond reach for prying eyes. The Governor of an Indian state lost his job when a sting operator managed to plant an invisible eye in his bedroom in his physically impenetrable fortress, the Raj Bhawan. Proceedings of Parliament and State legislatures are routinely telecast. An unscrupulous camera man can use this opportunity to take side views of the seamy side of individual members and Ministers. Today no place is strictly private where a seeing or hearing device cannot reach. NASA’s communications network was hacked thirteen times by its own “hackers”, whose job it is to test the invulnerability of their system. Add to this the new science of mind reading and you have a truly mind boggling picture of what lies in store for you in your private life unless there are strict laws that clearly define areas of your life which should never, never be brought in the public domain, nor encroached upon by snoopers.

India is a very complex country. What was immoral and illegal till yesterday may become completely acceptable today. The other day there was news of a boy and a girl being expelled from a college in Tamil Nadu for travelling together in a bus whereas in the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi girls can visit their boyfriends in their hostel rooms and are allowed to stay with them till 10 p.m. (officially). Anna Hazare’s Chief protagonist and a former Union Law Minister, Mr. Shanti Bhushan, has pleaded for legalizing live-in-relationships. Homosexuality is yet another illustration that comes to mind. To some people it may still be a bigger offence than watching pornography. But, all the same, it is now accepted in most parts of the world, including India, as a perfectly moral and natural activity. In this changing scenario would it not be better not to confuse a person’s competence in his official work with his strictly private inclinations?

I do not wish to burden this article with statistics which the reader can download any moment from the internet to show how widely prevalent watching pornography is in India. Possessing porn material is a serious crime under the law but watching it is not.

Speaking in a lighter vein, let me say at the outset that the panic reaction to the episode concerning the three Ministers displayed by most of the concerned parties was largely misplaced. I mean no disrespect to either Karnataka or Punjab when I say that had the same incident happened in Punjab Assembly, some people would have frowned upon it, others would have laughed it away but I can assert with fair amount of certainty that the Ministers concerned would not have lost their jobs. I was posted in Chandigarh for four years from 1969 to 1973 as Statesman’s special correspondent for Punjab and Haryana. Even in those conservative times Punjab was different in many ways. The first story I sent to my paper, after a week’s settling in period, in May 1969 was, titled “Kitchen Revolution in Chandigarh.” While looking out for a cook I had found that almost every other home in the city was employing Harijan women (who would be treated as untouchables elsewhere) as cooks. The story was quite a sensation. Not only did I get a favourable comment from my Editor, the India correspondent of a British daily called me from New Delhi to get more details to send the story to his paper.

One might ask where is the link between watching pornography inside the state assembly today and employing Harijan women to cook in homes of the upper castes, including Brahmins, in the Nineteen Sixties. The answer is that perhaps Punjab is the only state in India where the totally hypocritical “moral police”, which runs a parallel government throughout the country, has very little impact. Punjab is our window to the West. Even in those archaic decades one or two Punjab Ministers freely toured the state with their mistresses and shared the dais with them at public gatherings. And, even today, in neighbouring Haryana Khap panchayats rule the roost with powers to order lynching of inter-caste lovers, despite condemnation of their very existence by the Supreme Court.

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You cannot Shackle Information Anymore 
The world is heading towards the Age of 
Transparency or Total Dictatorship  


By M.B.Lal  

Much water has flown down the Brahmputra river since the beating and molestation of a young girl by a mob of youth outside a Guwahayi pub on July 9. This happened only ten days after a similar mob had beaten up a woman MLA of Assam in a Guwahati  hotel. A few weeks later the state was rocked by mass burning of villages of alleged immigrants and their shifting in lakhs to nearby refugee camps guarded by the Assam police. As if by clock work, a campaign against people from the North East on the social media led to panic among them in most of South India and countless thousands of them left for their homes in a hurry. 

            In all these momentous events the media was accused of not only over-stating and sensationalizing the unfortunate happenings but even instigating them. In the case of the molestation of a young girl at Guwahati the critics went so far as to suggest that the whole drama was staged by the owner of a TV channel to denigrate the image of the Chief Minister. Eventually the TV reporter who covered the story and his editor were not only made to resign but had criminal cases slapped against them. 

            Paradoxically, the emergence of the so called “social media”, which triggered the exodus of the Assamese from South India has both complicated and cleared the picture. For the first time the alleged enemies of the nation have managed to spread misinformation and create panic in a whole community and forcing it to stage a mass return migration to their homes. Also, for the first time the common people have a weapon to thwart any attempt by the authorities to stop  the flow of information amongst them. 

According to Wikepedia and scores of other exprt studies "Arab Spring which shhok the world was really  a social media revolution". The rebels used all the tools of internet including Facebook, Yutube, mass mailing to create a network of underground and overt operatives to achieve their objective. According  to MIT Technology Review,  theorists at the Comlex Systems Institute ar Cambridge have predicted global food riots next year. They are another  group  of  social media enthusiasts who believe that worldwide networks of rioters can be built up quickly through internet.            Julian  Assange  is another example of the same phenomenon: one man arraigned against the mightiest nation on earth. His only weapon: state secrets on a colossal scale which no one can stop him from spreading across the world. At last our Prime Minister,  Mr. Man Mohan Singh, has acknowledged this fact when he said recently that the damage done by “social media” can only be undone by counter propaganda against it and not by controls alone. 

            These and similar other developments have proved that rebel groups do not have to depend on traditional media, both print and electronic,  to spread their message. In the West the appeal of the print media is declining and even TV is losing its luster. Smart phones have made it possible for the common man to carry the world in his pocket. 

            The mass exodus of people from the North East from the southern States due to a panic caused by messages allegedly emanating from Pakistan goes to show that electronic media is no longer bound  by national boundaries. At present it is still possible to block such messages at their source with the cooperation of the concerned government by issuing appropriate  directions to service providers. But the day is not far when technology will do away with service providers and give every mobile phone or TV set direct access to a satellite. In fact new technology is seeming to make even TV an outdated product.  The new devices will enable you to get all the news and entertainment you want on your smart phone screen and, if you wish, beam it on a larger screen on a wall or table. You will be your own selector and editor and see what you want and not what the editor of TV channel or newspaper would like you to see. You can select information from diverse sources. A person like Julian Asange is capable of feeding you with spicy news from across the world, with a  skeleton staff  of reporters, almost single-handed. 

            An important point which both the government and media houses should remember is that the more you suppress vital information from going to the public, either voluntarily or by state diktat, the more wings you add to the social media to take off and be the dominant media in its own right. 

            The time is fast approaching when no state controls will be able to prevent information from reaching the people, almost instantly. China is an example of the helplessness of its great Communist Party,  that rules the nation   with an iron hand, in controlling demonstration triggered largely by social media. If the Supreme Court of India bans the publication of a hearing or judgement it cannot stop its documents  from being secretly purloined and beamed from another country. In course of time Indians will get used to getting their information through such sources. Already, vital information about India which the Indian media, both print and TV, is voluntarily suppressing is freely reaching the country through American and British newspapers whose correspondents here have no such qualms of conscience to paint  the dark side of this country in the same manner which they apply to describing similar situations in their own countries. Indian intelligentsia now has free access to these reports through various channels. These papers have a good circulation in India and they offer facilities of transmitting individual articles to friends on internet. Indians abroad regularly transmit such stories  to friends in India. Time is not far when an enterprising journalist based in India or abroad, would make a daily or weekly digest of such reports and circulate it on internet amongst millions of people on a small charge. 

            All-in-all we seem to be heading towards an era of total transparency or total dictatorship. In the West already much of politics is being fought in the form of cyber wars. As digital technology advances and its products become cheaper it will be well nigh impossible for governments to exercise any controls on the flow of information unless the whole world is turned into a single dictatorship where a commoner handling any information tool is put in jail for life. While advances  in information technology  are making it difficult for the central and state governments to prevent information about the true state of affairs from reaching the people, three parallel developments have emerged to increase the complexities facing the community of journalists. The three factors are: crime, corruption and intolerance. Official statistics clearly show a sharp increase in all kinds of crime in India. On corruption, judging by media reports, both foreign and Indian, the country is floating on a sea of corruption. All this has naturally made the authorities intolerant of any criticism of their failure to control these two intimately connected  evils. The brunt of all this has to be borne by the media, specially those who report such events. 

            I would like to look at recent  events with eyes of a person who has done nothing but reporting for the national Press for more than half-a-century. Let me  say at once that in the girl molestation case in Gawhati my sympathies go out to the TV reporter who first reported the event. Had be not been there all the culprits would have gone scot free. As a reporter myself I cannot believe any body would commit a crime at the behest of a newsman armed with a camera to report it, knowing fully that the outcome of  such an action would be jail for the culprit caught by the camera. It is like a madman walking into a lion’s cage –– a tragedy I actually saw happening while on a morning walk in the Lucknow Zoo in 1974. The Gawhati youths who attacked the girl might as well have walked directly  into jail, if they were doing the act on the prompting of a TV channel

Justice Markandey Katju, Chairman, Press Council of India, who has, in most of the recent controversies involving the media, championed the cause of the journalist, has suggested that TV networks should also be brought under the purview of the Council. The proposal has been vehemently opposed by representative bodies of both, print and electronic media. I would like to submit that print and electronic media are entirely separate entities. Each has its own norms and requires a special expertise which the other does not possess. 

            Here I would like to give an example of the difference between the two. On the night of October 11, 2007, the widely watched Indian subsidiary of a well known international TV network and equipped with the best expertise in this country was to telecast at 8.30 p.m. a program with which I was associated. We had arranged with a studio to make a copy on a disk. At 6.30 p.m. it was like hell let loose in the news room of this channel. Its vigilant reporters at the site started beaning pictures of a fire  caused by a bomb blast inside Dargah Ajmer Sharif , the holiest shrine of Indian Muslims. For the full half-hour devoted to prime time news, the channel swept aside all other items and kept telecasting the same scene of a single bomb blast from different angles while, to keep viewer interest alive, the news reader kept harping on related developments in and around Ajmer Sharif. Next morning I looked up the newspapers expecting this to be the lead story. It turned out to be a small single column item on an inside page in most newspapers. 

            Be it the molestation of girl in Assam, Anna Hazare or Baba Ram Dev going on fast or a riot in any part of the country, TV channels do it in style. They not only report the event  repeatedly, they also organize heated group discussion and conferences  amongst well known personalities  to thrash out various aspects of the issues at stake. Each speaker tries to outbid the others in projecting his point of view. 

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IS BUSINESS MORE IMPORTANT THAN PEOPLE’S TRUST?
Let’s wake up to the
perils of self-regulation
The demand is growing for restrictions to be placed on the
media by a regulatory body to rescue it from its excessive
trivialisation, obsenity and commercialisation. Justice Katju,
B.G. Verghese and many others have expressed their disgust
at the puerile content of the newspapers, magazines and TV
shows that is served to the public. The media moguls, on
the other hand, have hit back with their swan song that any
restriction on their activities would end the freedom of the
press guaranteed in the Constitution. They have suggested
“self-regulation” by the media itself as a via media. But there
is a snag here
In 1967, Andrew Yule and Company, British owners of The Statesman,
decided to hand over the newspaper to a consortium of Indian
companies headed by the Tatas who took 13 per cent shares in the new
firm. Under the terms of the transfer were created a Board of Directors,
headed by N.A. Palkhiwala and a Board of Trustees, chaired by M.C
Setalvad. The trustees were to guard the editorial independence of the
paper. Both men were leading jurists of international repute. C.R Irani was
appointed the managing director and Pran Chopra the editor.
Within less than a year, the Government of India under Indira Gandhi
dismissed the Communist Ministry in West Bengal. Chopra wrote an
editorial attacking Indira Gandhi's decision as an encroachment on the
federal rights of the states. Irani thought otherwise. He also perhaps
thought that on such crucial issues, the MD should also be consulted.
The matter went to the trustees who upheld the editor. This provoked
the board of directors to abolish and dismiss the board of trustees and
remove the editor. The drastic action of the directors sent shock waves
throughout The Statesman and the media in general.
The Statesman developments attracted the attention of the world press.
Besides being a full-time special correspondent of the paper, I was also
correspondent of The Times, London. Its Delhi Bureau chief being away,
its foreign news editor asked me to file a detailed story on the episode
and keep a close watch on it. However, Chopra advised me in my own
interest to stay away from the story to avoid possible victimisation by the
new management if I wrote any thing against it. I solved the dilemma by
walking into the office of Reuters in Delhi and told its chief, an Englishman,
that The Times wanted the story. He was only too glad to oblige. I advised
the foreign news editor to take the report from Reuters instead.
The epilogue to the whole drama came when in June 1975 Indira Gandhi
declared the Emergency and imposed censorship on the press. Irani was
a brave man. He took a bold stand against it. The owners of The Statesman
who included big names such as the Tatas and Mafatlals developed cold
feet and dissociated themselves from the paper by proxy sales of their
The writer, after an M.A in English
from Allahabad University in 1951,
joined the Nagpur Times as staff
reporter the following year. In 1955,
he moved to The Tribune as special
staff reporter. In 1957, he joined
The Statesman where he would
spend 31 years, serving the paper as
staff reporter, special correspondent,
chief-of-bureau, development
correspondent and assistant editor.
His studies of various aspects of the
Indian economy first appeared in
The Statesman.
July-September 2012 VIDURA 9
Illustration: Arun Ramkumar
shares to senior members of the
staff. Had the trustees remained
in place they would have acted as
a buffer between the government
and the owners and the latter
would not have had to wash their
hands off from the prestigious
daily.
I have dwelt at length on the
event, now little remembered,
because I would like media
authorities to consider the
introduction of a board of trustees
as a method of self-regulation of
both print and electronic media,
to be appointed by the owners
themselves to guard the editorial
independence and integrity of the
paper or channel. Demanding the
creation of a regulatory authority
over the media, Justice Markandey
Katju has made a very valuable
contribution to the current debate
on the role of media in our
everyday life, by suggesting that
it should be an “agent of change”
to take India from the feudal to
the industrial culture as the press
had done in Europe since the
eighteenth century In those days
in Europe, writing was a mission,
not a profession.
We have seen similar
transformation in our own
country in the past hundred years
or so. The early 20th century
in India saw the emergence of a
defiant press, defiant not only of
foreign rule, but of social customs
such as sati, dowry, untouchability
and a host of superstitions. Printed
on a small machine, Gandhiji’s
Harijan brought about a social
revolution in people’s minds.
Two Parsi writers, R.K. Karanjia
and D.F. Karaka, launched two
rival papers, Blitz and Current,
in Bombay during the war years.
They put in very little resources and
for their staff it was more a labour
of love than the money it brought
them. To Blitz goes the distinction
of producing a great columnist in
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas. His Last
Page every week was a real treat
as well as a bombshell.
Likewise, magazines sprang
up in different languages all over
the country. Caravan, Sarita, Maya
and Manohar Kahaniya and Kalyan
(which rose to be the largest
circulated paper in India in
1950), were all started by small
men with little means. But all
the papers had a tremendous
impact on the minds of men. The
Tribune in Lahore, Hitavada and
Nagpur Times in Nagpur, National
Herald in Lucknow and The Leader
in Allahabad were by and large
one-man shows, which had great
impact in their respective areas.
Their editors made a name in
Indian history for their forceful
writing. The editorials of Kalidas
Ray in the Tribune, Chalapati
Rao in National Herald and C.Y.
Chintamnai in The Leader of
Allahabad and the satires of late
Shankar in Shankar’s Weekly still
ring true in the ears of old timers.
What they wrote was not just for
the day of publication but for all
times. Similar papers, largely
one-man shows, sprang up in
English and regional languages
all over the country. Bengal
and the Madras and Bombay
Presidencies were swarming
with such publications, which
transformed the minds of men
and ushered India into the modern
would. The role of the press
in India in the late 19th and first
half of the 20th century deserves
to be written in letters of gold.
Often driven by his mission, the
editor was his own proof reader
and distributor. The small papers
starting from a circulation of a few
hundred and going up to a few
thousand, changed the thinking
of men and women in a quiet
manner. You would find a postal
subscriber of an apparently nondescript
newspaper or magazine
in a remote village or small town.
He would stick to it like the Bible
and narrate its contents to his
companions. Besides giving the
news of the day, the publications
carried articles on social customs
and attitudes, health tips and
general knowledge. One genre
that was a very popular agent of
social change was the short story
which has virtually become extinct
worldwide in today’s print media.
I can state all this with
confidence because in 1948 as an
undergraduate in the Allahabad
10 VIDURA July-September 2012
<
University I launched a magazine
called AU Weekly, an eight-page
half-tabloid, financed it with
ads from local shopkeepers and
staffed it with a team of about
a dozen hostel correspondents,
photographers and deputy
editors, all working for free. It
was distributed free in all the
nearly 1500 hostel rooms in
the university which had 2500
students. After it had run for two
years, the editor of the annual
university magazine, a professor
of English, started funding it from
his allocations and I stopped going
to the market for ads. Today, such
one-man media ventures, without
funding from any source, would
be impossible. The experience
convinced me that the small man
could have his voice heard only
through small papers serving
small areas. It has a ripple effect
which travels far and wide. It
gives the common man a chance to
spread his special skills and ideas
among like-minded people in his
neighborhood. In the interest
of democracy, the government
should do all it can to encourage
such ventures.
By contrast, we are now in an era
of gigantism. All over the media
world the big fish is swallowing
the small. Once such a great
force in that country’s life, county
newspapers in America have all
but disappeared. In India, the
English press is a monopoly of a
few newspapers with a readership
of several hundred thousand each.
The fate of the language press is
similar. Modern technology has
made it possible to compose and
edit a large newspaper in a small
office and print it simultaneously
from a dozen or more locations.
Powerful marketing techniques
are employed to capture the local
market. Colourful supplements
with titillating pictures,
sensationalising the personal
lives of Bollywood and TV
stars, politicians and cricketers
constitute more than half the
fare served to the reader. At least
70 per cent of the rest consists of
advertisements.
Simultaneously, as they grow
big, newspaper owners have
diversified to other industries. One
of the most powerful newspaper
proprietors of Madhya Pradesh
has launched big power projects of
several hundred megawatts. They
use the leverage of their media
empire to curry favours with the
political masters of the day. In such
an environment of give and take
between media barons and the
government, the biggest casualty
is public interest. The measures
suggested by Justice Katju and
others will at best curb obscenity
in the media to some extent. But
what about things that the media
simply refuses to publicise. For
instance, I have written to all
the major English newspapers
in Delhi pointing out that land
prices in Delhi have shot up by
100000 to 300000 times in the last
60 years, throwing the middleclass
into the slums and the slum
dweller on to the streets. Except
The Hindu, no newspaper has
published my letter. There is no
question of any major newspaper
doing a story of its own on the
way black money is pouring into
the property market, making life
miserable for the common man.
The reasons for the media looking
the other way over this racket are
obvious. Property developers are
the biggest advertisers. Besides,
owners of newspapers themselves
find the value of their own property
rising sky high, giving them more
profit than their newspapers.
Likewise, no newspaper seems
willing to publish the fact that the
Minimum Wages Act is a non-starter.
None of the state governments
is interested in implementing it.
One can go on in this vein, reeling
off a long list of issues of public
interest in which the media is just
not interested. While the outside
world, including several Nobel
laureates in economics, is raising
alarm on the growing inequality
everywhere, more so in India,
you will rarely find a line about
it in the leading English dailies
in this country. By and large, the
influential part of the Indian Press
has the image of being anti-poor,
anti-working class and ant-farmer.
This should change. The trustees
suggested by me should have at
least one representative of the
working class belonging to the
lower castes (for in India class and
caste are inextricably inter-mixed)
or the minorities.
These are not ideological
issues but developments that no
civilized society can tolerate. The
USA, the citadel of our globalised
capitalist society, has to its credit
a record number of convictions
of VIPs caught committing the
slightest economic offence or
misdemeanour. The media in
Europe and America is conscious
that democracy cannot succeed
anywhere unless the common
man’s vital interests are protected.
This consciousness is missing
completely in the Indian media. It
is in this context that I would like to
suggest that each major newspaper
or TV group should appoint its
own board of trustees consisting
of eminent intellectuals. The board
should observe transparency and
see whether matters of public
interest which affect the every day
life of the common man are really
finding adequate exposure in its
publications or TV channels. Like
water and electric supply, media is
a utility, not just a business, though
it must make profit to survive and
retain its independence. People’s
faith and trust are its biggest
assets.

____________________________________________

The New Maharajas

1

People of Mysore and nearby areas still nostalgically reenact what their ancestors called the halcyon days of the Maharajas. The magnificent palace, broad shining streets, small shops standing unobtrusively along the side-walks and glittering with their merchandise –– mostly the products of local artisans –– lent to the princely capital an aura of exclusiveness to which the hustle and bustle of today’s big cities would be as repugnant as jazz music in an academy of classical dancing. The atmosphere of openness was enhanced, by way of contrast, by the occasional appearance on the city’s highways of stately elephants and horse-drawn carriages of the elite of the town. These provided something to watch to the seemingly idle populace.

Elsewhere in the lanes and bylanes housing the gentry and laity, life moved placidly in the firm belief that nothing could go wrong while His Highness was there on his throne. The Maharaja’s pictures adorned the walls of every house along with those of the family deities. Some ardent devotees of royalty would make it part of their morning walk to stop by the palace gates and bow with folded hands in reverence as they did in front of a temple. In a reserved green part of the city, lush with trees and gardens, lay the bungalows of the elite who included the King’s Ministers, courtiers, judges and other high functionaries. Though they never saw him, except on rare ceremonial occasions, the citizens of the city felt honoured by their proximity to their monarch.

No Mysorean would be worth his salt if, while on visit to another part of the country, he or she did not spend the first half-hour of the conversation with a stranger singing paeans in praise of the King and the royal family and extolling the grandeur of the city and its surroundings.

It is perhaps due to the people’s fondness for royalty that Maharajas have returned to the state under a new garb. Its new capital city of Bangalore could now boast of at least a dozen luminaries of international fame who could outdo the former ruler of Mysore in every respect, be it wealth, authority, luxury, fame or sheer sense of personal power. They enjoy comforts the princes of old could have never dreamt of. They are the new Maharajas of India. Just below them would be a few hundred others who, for want of a more appropriate name, could be styled as ‘rajas’. Their reach is global and the wealth of each of them runs to hundreds of crores of rupees. Next in line are the multitude of millionaires, each of whom owns property and other assets exceeding the magic figure of ten lakh rupees. On a conservative estimate their number in Karnataka would be anywhere between a million and two million. The figure could be larger still. One of the new Maharajas ­­–– the owner of a software empire that has sprung up from nowhere in the last fifteen years –– proudly claimed a few years ago that even his peons were millionaires.

We thus have within the state of Karnataka a “super-state” of these over two million people who are law unto themselves. They are the “new face of Karnataka”, and indeed of the whole country. In the years to come they hope to convert Bangalore into India’s Shanghai. America is the model of their new life-style. They can splurge money on modern luxuries in casinos, glitzy malls and discos. This new life has opened before the lucky two million avenues of sexual enjoyment that have given a sensual dimension to their lives even as it has shocked the sensibilities of their elders. They couldn’t care less about what the old fogies thought of their new life. The world was with them. Proportionate to their numbers, their purchasing power for the goodies of life, be it property, garments, rich food or sex, equals that of any modern metropolis like Paris, Dubai, Singapore or even New York. In fact their affluence has encouraged hundreds, if not thousands of Indians settled in America, to return to this mini-America in India.

Politicians of all hues have jumped on their bandwagon. Here in one compact lot they have found what makes the wildly swaying see-saw of politics worthwhile. In one place they have everything, money, power and women. Their children and grandchildren revel in night-long orgies of dining drinking, dancing, gambling and all that goes with it, hailing the dawn of the “New Age” in India. Leaders of the state and country have opened the gates of government treasuries and financial institutions to pander to the extravagant demands of this mini-America which, so they believe, has fallen in their lap as manna from heaven. One can go on and on endlessly to describe this metamorphosis in Bangalore and several other pockets in Karnataka and the rest of India.

This process of ‘modernization’ of Karnataka, as a fore-runner of what is going to happen to the rest of India, is being pushed through at top speed. Soon a whole belt between Bangalore and Mysore will become a special Economic Zone where this model of growth is to expand with a new dimension of international tourism added to it, which will bring with it a first class airport, hundreds of hotels, highways, speedways, fly-overs and malls to cater to the needs of an additional two million or more new members of the “super-state”.

2

What about the remaining fifty million or so of the fifty-three million people of Karnataka? The official line, propagated by politicians, more as protagonists of the new “super-state” than as leaders of the masses who have elected them to power, is that this “super-state” is the “engine of growth” which will instill new vigour into the entire economy of the state. It is supposed to galvanise the people into a new revolution of growth.

And now to facts. Let us first take a look at what Karnataka has already accomplished during the last fifteen years of the Information Technology revolution making it one of the world leaders in the field.

As one looks at the statistical charts of India, the first thing that strikes the mind is that despite the heavy investments made by the Centre and state governments, foreign companies and other agencies, in per capita incomes Karnataka slippled from the 10th to the 13th position among the states of India between the years 1991 and 2003. Apparently the benefits of the ‘revolution’, though computed in the incomes of the people, could not compensate for losses suffered during the same period in other sectors. A startling fact to be noted in this connexion is that factory employment in Karnataka declined from 752,00 workers in 1990 to 370,000 in 2003. Apparently Karnataka has had to pay a heavy price in other sectors to earn global fame in the IT Sector.

Some other economic data relating to the state is equally depressing. It occupies the fourteenth rank in the country in per hectare food grain output, one fourth of what Punjab produces and the lowest among the four Southern States. Notwithstanding all the hoopla about its technological miracle, in per capita gross industrial output Karnataka ranks sixth in the country. In per capita terms Gujarat produces three times as much industrial goods as Karnataka. Not surprisingly, its per capita consumption of domestic power, a sure indicator of living standards, is among the lowest in the country and the lowest in Southern India. In female employment in the work force, taken as a measure of poverty levels, Karnataka shares the top honours with Madhya Pradesh at around 33%.

What is the contribution of the New Maharajas, Rajas and their two million millionaire lackeys to the rise and fall of Karnataka, rise in the glittering arena of servicing the software needs of Western countries, chiefly America, and fall in the incomes of the fifty million common people in relation to their counterparts in other states? It stands to reason that if, despite the IT boom, the overall growth of the state has been slower than the national average and if, it has still spawned a “Super-state” of two million luxury loving rich people, it could do so only by apportioning them a larger slice of the common cake, leading to further deprivation of the masses. Karnataka has taken a conscious decision to continue this trend believing it to be the best model of growth to lift a backward state from the bullock cart to the jet age.

3

Is there an alternative?

In my humble opinion the best way to deal with this question is to consider an alternative model. The case of Punjab comes to mind. In 1947 when India was partitioned the part of Punjab that came to India’s share was a poor cousin of the Western half which went to Pakistan. Its southern part was largely a dry desert – an extension of Rajasthan –– and the rest low-yield agricultural hinterland. The flood of millions of refuges from Pakistan placed a heavy burden on this poor region. But soon, within a matter of a few years, things changed.

Out of nowhere, small workshops sprang up along the highways of the new state as a byproduct of the rehabilitation of such a large population. The skills needed to build new townships and colonies were provided by the refugees. They included masons, drivers, mechanics, blacksmiths and craftsmen of all sorts. Women took to knitting woolens on a large scale to cope with the severe northern winter.

By 1955, when I toured the state extensively, the small roadside workshops were producing almost every thing, from needless to bicycle parts, tools, farm implements and even automobile parts, besides building construction equipment.

How did this miracle come about? Somewhere along the line between 1947 and 1955 these small technicians, working from loosely fabricated shacks, discovered that given an electric lathe and drilling and welding machines, you could make or fabricate almost anything under the Sun, even a motor car minus its engine.

Within a few more years these sturdy, semi-literate and grimy mechanics were making their own dies and die – casting machines as well as lathes, drills and welding equipment.

The list of items they produced with these basic tools in mind-boggling. They were perhaps the first in the country to replicate a variety of handy foreign gadgets whose import was banned to conserve foreign exchange. These included house-hold accessories like mixies, electric cookers, ovens and so on.

Soon they were making bicycles, sewing machines, farm threshers, Persian wheels, spindles and looms for the upcoming hosiery industry, small radio sets, fans and almost everything for which there existed a good demand.

Next came precision equipment like car dynamos whose rotor has to be calibrated with an accuracy which until then could only be achieved by highly sophisticated imported machines. These rustic sons of the soil, often sporting big beards, were able to accomplish the same result with their large oily hands which looked more like tiger paws.

Often the workshop was their home. They slept on large rope spun cots with their families outside their unit during summer and huddled inside it in winter. Their women worked with them while the children walked or bicycled long distances to attend school.

Miracle 2:. Simultaneously with this technology wave, another silent hosiery revolution was taking place during the same years in Punjab, concentrated mainly in Ludhiana, then the least  significant among the cities of the state along the Grand Trunk road. If the small workshops could be classed as small industry, this new upsurge sprang up almost entirely as a cottage industry.

Starting purely as an answer to the need for cheap winter covering as the poor man’s substitute for costly woolen textiles, within two decades it had made Ludhiana the hosiery capital of the world. Almost every single house in this sleepy city became a small factory making something or the other for this industry, be it knitting, spinning, weaving, making spindles, looms, dies and doing a hundred other jobs connected with this sector. The whole city became one giant assembly line of this gigantic enterprise, though each house was an independent unit without being controlled by any central authority of an industrialist or a government. Tucked away in a corner of fancy knitted sweaters, pullovers, jerseys babies’ and women’s dresses that people brought from America or Hong Kong as gifts for relatives in India was the label “Made in India”, or “Made in Ludhiana”. How this miracle was wrought in this small city and how it spread to the rest of Punjab is a long story.

While Ludhiana was thriving in hosiery the city of Jullunder took to producing sports goods for global needs. Amritsar plunged into carpets and textiles.

The saga is never ending.

Miracle 3. Again within the same period the small and medium farmer of Punjab increased his farm yields ten times by dint of hard labour, helped by timely supplies of inputs and finances by government agencies.

Its own food grain needs being limited, by the Nineteen Seventies Punjab had become the granary of India and Ludhiana one of the country’s richest districts if not the richest.

      By the Nineteen Seventies electricity and roads had reached every village in Punjab. Farming was mechanized throughout the state. What with the roar of tractors and rice mills, big and small, and humming of winnowing and thrashing machines, among others, the whole countryside of the state resembled a factory. Instead of bullock carts tractor-trailors became the principal mode of transport of goods and people in rural Punjab.

Miracle 4. In accomplishing this economic miracle Punjab was not alone. An altogether different model of growth was taking shape, with great success, in Maharashtra and Gujarat. Quite suddenly the two states of Western India found themselves wafted on the high tide a cooperative movement the like of which had never been seen in the world. The two states together looked like a giant cooperative conglomerate. The cooperative sector soared to heights of achievement in practically every sector of rural activity. Unlike Punjab the peasant here was too poor, illiterate and unskilled to act on his own steam like his counterpart in the Northern state. But he had one gift which was unique in the country. He could ‘cooperate’ and submit to the discipline of collective interest of the community.

The result was that one by one all spheres of rural production and distribution came under the sweep of cooperatives. Gujarat began with milk, the mainstay of the poorest members of the community, the shepherd and small farmer. Then it went on to cover cotton, oilseeds and sugar, besides banking and credit.

Likewise, the cooperative movement in Maharashtra concentrated on sugar to begin with and, within a short period, from being a virtual non-producer, the State emerged as the country’s largest producer of sugar, depriving UP of the title. Simultaneously it took over cotton in which again miracles were achieved.

Any student of the growth of Indian economy during the past fifty years will agree that if Maharashtra and Gujarat are among the four front-line states it is entirely because of their cooperative miracle.

But perhaps one of the biggest achievement of Maharashtra was the success of its irrigation cooperatives. It was something unheard of in the text books of any ideology that the proud small land-owner would willingly surrender his traditional claims on irrigation water in the common interest. Yet they did it, practicing great honesty and tolerance among themselves, since it is impossible for any outside agency to superwise such a widely distributed network from field to field. Under this system, called “bara-bari”, the farmer at the head of a water channel got the same share as the man at its tail. Great was the enthusiasm of Maharashtrian peasantry to act collectively during the period.

During a tour of the country in the famine year 1964-65. I was thrilled to find in a hilly village in Yeotmal district, men women and children, old and young, carrying water from a stream in pitchers and even in cooking pans and bowls to water small vegetable plots of their village, a rough climb of over one hundred feet, in the night in dim lantern light.

Leaders of the state had plunged themselves into the movement with gusto. During the same tour I met V.P. Naik, the then Chief Minister of Maharashtra, in Nagpur. In the midst of severe drought he was bursting with confidence. “Hang me if I fail. I promise you that within two years I shall make Maharashtra fully self-sufficient in foodgrains.” Sure enough he succeeded, because the entire peasantry was behind him.

A few years later while India was still in the throes of a severe food crisis, I asked the veteran socialist leader, Asoka Mehta, who was then Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, why the miracle of Maharashtra and Gujarat could not be replicated in backward U.P. and Bihar. He replied, “my friend, I have wasted half my political career trying to inculcate the cooperative spirit among the peasantry in East UP and Bihar. I must confess I have failed miserably. You can transplant a system from one place to another but not the spirit that drives it.”

4

The two models of growth explained above present a complete contrast to the latest model adopted by Karnataka. It is this author’s confirmed view that if the Bangalorean model spreads throughout India, which seems very likely from the Central government’s plan to create Special Economic Zones, it will be a national disaster.

The reasons are obvious :

1.   While it professes to be working for the ‘greatest good of the greatest number’ of people, our government’s SEZ scheme is clearly directed at serving the greatest good of the smallest number. The direct result of such policies pursued world-wide by the rulers of the day is that half the total wealth of the six billion people on planet earth is owned by less than three hundred individuals. The SEZs are clearly aimed at concentrating national wealth in a few hands through the tried and tested mechanism of the stock market and real estate.

Not even ten percent of the big boom in the IT industry can be attributed to its own efforts by way of production and sales. Most of it is public money illegitimately pumped into the industry via the stock market by manipulating government’s financing policies. These malpractices include the printing of paper currency, which pushes up prices of goods of the common man’s daily use, and acquiring and gifting away to the IT tycoons poor farmers’ fields at a hundreth, and at times a thousandth, of the price the beneficiaries reap by converting the landholdings into real estate.

2.   As can be clearly seen from the falling figures of the organised sector’s workforce during the last few years, such diversions of most of the nation’s productive capital only leads to negative employment, that is, increased unemployment.

3.   The alternative models of Punjab, Maharashtra and Gujarat presented by me involve the entire population of these states, not just a band of engineers, most of whom are from outside the state and not sons of the soil.

4.   In the earlier models growth begins from below. Its first beneficiaries are the poorest class of small farmers, shepherds, unskilled and semi-skilled technicians and a whole variety of odd jobs men. There is hardly any one in the rural and semi-urban population of the covered area, which includes almost the entire state, who does not derive direct benefit from it.

5.   The hub of activity in the Punjab-Gujarat-Maharashtra models is the village. Almost every village or cluster of villages has a center where people gather, discuss plans and problems, organise innovations in the development of their human resources through schools, medical facilities and cheap entertainment. Small road-side markets spring up, some of which later grow into big bazaars. The list is endless.

6.   All this happens through local initiative and investment without involving the government or financial institutions.

7.   In this model income always exceeds investment. One does not sink massive amounts of public money in the elusive hope of long term returns.

8.   Lo and behold! Miracle of Miracles! All this spectacular growth in Punjab, Gujarat has Maharashtra has been achieved without involving a single MBA, IITian or American trained scientist. It is India’s good fortune that this new class of greedy Americanized Indians was not born when this silent revolution was taking place. On a modest estimate a member of this new elite group would require one hundred to one thousand times the wage packet of the rustic professional of the country-bred revolution conceived, manned and directed entirely by sons of the soil, in contrast with the Bangalore model which is an exclusive enterprise of, by and for the Western companies and their chosen Indian protégés. Add to it the thousands of crores squandered on the training of this elite class.

While these heaven-born supermen draw unconscionable salaries in millions a year, experienced post graduate college lecturers can still be hired in the city of Bangalore on nine –month contracts of Rs.3000 to Rs.5000 per month.

Dear reader, please compare this with the pay package of One crore and twelve lakh rupees per annum, that is nearly ten lakh rupees per month, offered this year to a fresh IIM graduate at the time of leaving college. To the “FREE MARKET” economy, which guides our destinies, his worth is three hundred times that of a learned professor.

At this rate, if of two brothers with the same background one joins an IIM and the other opts for teaching in a college, the latter will have to slog for his entire working career of thirty years, till retirement, to earn what his brother will rake in within the first month of leaving the management institute. So now we know the true meanings of the magic words “FREE ENTERPRISE”.

If this does not prick your conscience nothing ever will. And if you have tears of shame to shed over the tragic devaluation and demise of true learning and scholarship in this country, and indeed of the entire gamut of basic human values, you can shed them now.

Also, according to published reports, the same “FREE MARKET” allows a mere actor to walk away with a pay packet of two crores and thirty-three lakh rupees as his wage for anchoring a single episode of an hour-long TV programme, making a total earning of two hundred and eighty seven crores for just 120 episodes.

9.   The indigenous models cited here require very little or no investment on infrastructure by way modern international airports, five-star hotels, luxury cars and buses, six-lane highways, fly-overs, grand shopping malls, casinos, night-clubs, sex-parlours and all the other paraphernalia needed to build a mini-America in India, entirely at the expense of the poor peasant and small man of the cities, who is thereby squeezed into further poverty. No MacDonalds’ burgers or Coca Cola to cheer the workers!

10. These models do not require the creation of a ‘super-state’ of Maharajas and Rajas and their millions of millionaire minions.

11. They check large-scale migration of people from villages to the cities by bringing prosperity directly to the villager in his home.

12. Perhaps one of the most serious arguments against the Bangalore model is that its benefits accrue almost entirely to Western countries through their multi-nationals. India gets nothing from it except a handful of jobs for a specially recruited class of Westernized Indian cronies of these companies. Instead, the country pays heavy financial and social costs by creating a wasteful infrastructure for this new class, in gross violation of the egalitarian social objectives with which all Indians fought shoulder to shoulder for the nation’s freedom.

13. The indigenous systems leave no room for capitalist tycoons to siphon off the benefits as their private loot.

14. In short, the protagonists of the Bangalore model who champion the so-called ‘free-market’ revolution, refuse to accept that India belongs equally to all Indians. They are hell-bent upon creating two Indias, one of the rich consisting of no more than ten percent of the population, and the other of the remaining ninety percent poor, most of whom must necessarily lead a life of semi-starvation and unemployment, and bear all the indignities and dehumanization that go with it.

5

The spectacular achievements of the Punjab-Gujarat-Mahrashtra experiments have been deliberately pushed under the carpet by both the Right and the Left in this country because small and cottage industry and the cooperative system do not fit the rule book of either of them. The Western champions of globalisation and their Indian stooges are out to wipe out all grass-roots activity, in any sector whatsoever––from retail to big marketing to distribution to production––and reduce the poor man to the status of an unemployed beggar.  Any commonsense look at the economy can prove this point.

Except in West Bengal, the left tends to concentrate on trade unions which do not cover even one percent of the country’s work force of four hundred and fifty million. They end up by pampering the creamy layer of teachers, bank clerks and the like who would think nothing of spending Rs ten lakhs on a daughter’s dowry.

The vacuum created by this high neglect is an open invitation to the Naxalites to fill it. Already they are believed to be calling the shots in more than a third of the country. Citigroup Inc, an international financial services company with some 200 million customers in more than 100 countries, has said in its report on ‘India in 2007’ that the Naxalite movement “has spread to 165 districts in 14 states covering close to 40 per cent of the country’s geographical area and affecting 35 per cent of the population”.

Ridiculing our tall claims to super-power status, Cait Murphy, Assistant Managing Editor of ‘FORTUNE’ magazine describes India as the “world leader in hunger, stunting and HIV” since “half the world’s hungry live in India.”

Quoting UN statistics she writes:

·    47 percent of Indian children under the age of five are either malnourished or stunted.

·    The adult literacy rate is 61 percent (behind Rwanda and barely ahead of Sudan). Even this is probably overstated, as people are deemed literate who can do little more than sign their name.

·    Only 10 percent of the entire Indian labor force works in the formal economy; of these fewer than half are in the private sector.

·    The enrollment of six-to-15-year-olds in school has actually declined in the last year. About 40 million children who are supposed to be in school are not.

·    About a fifth of the population is chronically hungry; about half of the world’s hungry live in India.

·    More than a quarter of the India population lives on less than a dollar a day.

·    India has more people with HIV than any other country.

The ‘FORTUNE’ article further points out that the 2006 UN Human Development Report, which ranks countries according to a variety of measures of human health and welfare, placed India 126th out of 177 countries.

In the midst of the euphoria over their feigned achievements our leaders should take time off to study how the world looks at us.

Clearly, no society or government has the right to call itself “Civilized”, if it permits the manufacture, sale and consumption of luxury items of life of any description, and in any manner, within its territory, until the minimum needs of the whole population for food, water, shelter, medicine and education are met and there is no case of starvation and malnutrition, more particularly among children. In a just dispensation every citizen should receive his equitable share in the total resources of the nation. No extenuating circumstances can be cited to defend violation of this cardinal principle of social justice.

That the poorest country in the world, with half its population of over a billion living at near starvation level, should flaunt the largest number of billionaires in Asia, including two trillionaires, is an eloquent testimony to the spurious quality of Indian democracy. It throws open the question whether democracy, as we have practiced it over the last sixty years, can ever represent the wishes and aspirations of our people.

Says New York’s WALL STREET JOURNAL in a front page article by Peter Wonacott:

“Few countries, however, can match India’s numbers (of criminals in Parliament and state assemblies). Following the 2004 election, almost a quarter of the 535 elected members of India’s national parliament have criminal charges registered against them or pending in court, according to the Public Affairs Center, an Indian elections watchdog. Half of those with charges pending against them face prison terms of at least five years if convicted…”

“Prior to the elections (in UP), slightly more than half of the 403 legislative assembly members, faced criminal charges. In the first six phases of the elections, there were 48 constituencies offering four or more candidates with criminal cases pending against them…”

“Many of India’s legislators in legal trouble faced criminal charges well before their political careers began, according to I.C. Dwivedi, former director of police for Uttar Pradesh and now the state’s head of Election Watch, an NGO. “They were criminals first and politicians later,” he says”...

“Last year, the Congress Party lost a key ally, Coal Minister Shibu Soren from the regional Jharkhand Mukti Morcha party, who was convicted of the 1994 kidnapping and murder of his former personal secretary”….

The World Bank, which has approved about $3 billion in loans for Indian projects, is among the increasingly anxious foreign backers. “It is easy to be optimistic about India’s economic prospects,” the bank stated in a 2006 India Development Policy Review. “But there is growing concern that the basic institutions, organization and structure for public sector action are failing –– especially for those at the bottom…”

“The latest family health survey, conducted by India’s Ministry of Health, showed child malnutrition levels even higher than in Sub-Saharan Africa. According to the survey, 46% of children under 3 in India are underweight. (Unicef figures show that 28% of Sub-Saharan children under 5 are underweight.) Anemia, linked to poor nutrition, is prevalent in 79% of India’s children aged 6-35 months, up from 74% seven years ago…”

It is a sad reflection on the myopic state of India’s rulers, intellectuals and politicians that even from so close they cannot read the writing on the wall. Umpteen instances can be cited, besides the riots in Bangalore triggered by actor Raj Kumar’s death, to show that people’s patience is running out. The flash point may be reached any time when they may be forced to take things in their own hands. In large parts of the country we are sitting on a tinder box that can blow up any moment. But, blinded by the razzle-dazzle of the “Market”, we see it not.

“Seeds of Despair”

In a study of the Indian Economy, titled “Seeds of Despair”, by Simon Robinson, the American magazine TIME says:

“The income disparity in the new India is massive: there are now 36 billionaires in India---and some 800 million people living on less than $2 a day. In the most desperate pockets of rural India, a confluence of factors, from poor rainfall to the new availability of consumer goods, has driven some farmers into crushing debt.

“The financial hardships are so extreme that thousands commit suicide every year. Far from benefiting from the country’s new prosperity, whole villages of India’s rural poor are being left adrift, eager to join in the boom but unable to afford it.- - - -  More than 1,250 farmers committed suicide in Vidarbha’s six central districts alone in 2006, up from 248 in 2004.”

One can safely assert without fear of contradiction that in the prevalence of inequality between the rich and poor, by any yardstick India not only tops the list, it has practically no rivals, so wide is the gap between the two classes. This unique distinction for the land of Gandhi, the ‘naked fakir’, is in part the legacy of our deeply embedded caste system which gives us a divine license to be insensitive to the sufferings of the poor (‘castes’) whom, so the average Hindu seems to believe, God has made as substitutes for animals to carry the proverbial beast’s burden for the upper castes.

Or else how can one explain the disappearance, at the hands of professional kidnappers, of nearly 2,500 children of the poor from Bangalore streets every year, and every body sleeping over it as if nothing had happened?

The poor parents have to run from pillar to post and move heaven and hell to persuade the almighty city police to condescend to merely record the case of a lost child in their register. Its being pursued and investigated is out of the question.

By contrast, take the recent case of a top executive of Abode, a software multi-national company, in Delhi. The kidnapping of his eight-year-old son became an international media sensation, a prestige issue for the government. Official money in lakhs of rupees was spent by the Centre, UP and Delhi to trace the child who was ultimately recovered after his father had coughed up Rs.50 lakhs to the kidnappers.

In its report on the kidnappings THE TIMES OF INDIA said quoting a source “we only hope there is not a repeat in Karnataka of the gruesome Nithari” (a Delhi subarb where children were butchered to satisfy the appetite of a few gentlemen cannibals for human flesh).

The only parallel I can think of to such callous indifference towards the anguish of the poor, which has been a typical feature of our Aryan culture for thousands of years, is the treatment of the Black African slaves in America before Abraham Lincoln----one of the greatest men of all times----abolished slavery in that land.                                                                         

M.B. LAL

________________________________________

Glamour of the New Urban Colonialism

            We were all very happy when in July 2011 Rekha, daughter of our neighbour’s maid, Nandi, got admitted to a Delhi University college where the “cut-off” point is above 80% marks in the CBSE exam. A few days ago in the first week of November, she came home donning plaited bobbed hair, her pony tails cut off by the ladies barber who changed her hair style to make her look more modern and attractive. Ever since that day Nandi has got seriously busy to look for a suitable boy and get Rekha married off to him as fast as possible, thus ending her further education.

Nandi is a divorcee with three daughters to support. She cannot take any chances of her eldest daughter going astray. “All day her mobile phone keeps ringing with calls from boys and girls of her college”, she complains about Rekha and adds “she can compete with them in marks but she cannot compete in other things. Some of them come in a chauffer driven cars. Most of the boys have motor-bikes, the girls wear fancy dresses to look like English Mem Sahebs. All of them have computers and all kinds of machines we cannot afford. They buy costly snacks with Pepsi-Coke bottles, go to expensive movies and so on. How can we ever be equal to them in these things? Together with the Rs.3000 I get as alimony from my ex-husband I make Rs.8000 to Rs.10,000 in a month and am always under a loan to the madams I serve.”

            Nandi is fortunate to own room ten foot long and ten feet wide in a slum adjoining our colony with a bathroom which is shared by four families. If she had to live in a rented room Rekha would have had to work like her mother as a house maid to earn the extra Rs.4,000 needed to rent such a room. Several girls who have passed their CBSE 12^th class examination and are working as maids like their mothers in our colony. They like doing these jobs because it gives them some extra money to indulge in luxuries like buying beauty aids.

            Rekha’s case reminded me of Bholu, son of our family cook Bishen Mishra back in 1938. Bishen was paid nine rupees per month and lived with his wife and son in a servant room at the back of our house. Bholu attended the same school with me. It was a mile away and we both walked to it, wore shirts and shorts and had no pocket allowance whatsoever. In those days you could busy a leaf bowl of spicy “chaat” for just one paisa, but that paisa was never given to me. Bholu passed high school and fulfilled his father’s ambition by becoming a clerk. In those days matriculation was the equivalent of today’s graduation.

            I am relating these two examples because Bishen Mishra and his son Bholu were more comfortable on a salary of nine rupees per month than Nandi and Rekha are on an income of nine thousand rupees. Has Independence of India brought any real benefits to the poor classes or has it made their lives even more miserable than they were seventy years ago? Nandi and Rekha are typical examples of their class in urban India. They are living on razor’s edge, always struggling, always pining, hardly ever getting peaceful sleep. Bishen and Bholu had no such tensions in their lives.

            Bishen, being a Brahmin used to preside over the daily afternoon gossips of the servants of two or three houses in our lane, each smoking his own hookah and sharing it only with members of his caste. Occasionally I would drop in at these gossip sessions.

            Bholu played in the street with his friends and had no worries about the future. If not a Babu he could always become a peon in an office and that would be fine too. He could still make both ends meet and live comfortably.

            What has 65 years of independence brought to the poor classes?

            In the first place we should not mix up the issue of poverty with women’s emancipation which is a historic social development that would be inevitable in India under any economic system. The seeds of this had been sown during British days and it was only a matter of time for women to take their rightful place in society. In the old days a divorced woman like Nandi and her three daughters would have spent their entire life like beggars. Today, in their own circle of the poor classes, they enjoy a respectable position.

            On the economic front, however, opinions clash. Proponents of the “trickle down effect” theory would argue that the large scale development projects, including the urban sprawl of huge dimensions, has created a variety of jobs for the poor who would have been otherwise rotting in villages without hope and without even food. So far so good. Nobody denies this elementary fact. But let us not forget that this is not a new phenomenon. This has been the way of all feudal and imperialist civilizations throughout history. The Aryans created an elite of Brahmins and Kshtriyas and also created a two-tier service class of Vaishyas and Shudras with no rights of citizenship. The Greek, Roman and Egyptian empires of Pre-historic times captured or brought willing slaves from Black Africa. The British Empire adopted the Aryan two-tier practice and took Indian doctors traders, teachers, babus and also ordinary menial labour in very large numbers from India to its numerous colonies around the world. The White settlers of North and South America bought from Arab slave traders African slaves in millions to work on the numerous development projects with practically no wages and make the Americas what they are today.

            In India, the mother of this well structured system of ‘Slave labour’ since the days of the Aryans, we needed no tutoring to adopt this barbaric practice of treating ordinary human beings as mere beasts of burden. What is interesting to observe and study, however, is the manner in which this pernicious system of mass exploitation of humanity has been modernized to extract the maximum output from the helpless wage earners with the minimum actual compensation to them, by the use of all devious devices of new economic theories and modern technology. In India this feat is being accomplished step by step and the last extreme steps are yet to come unless they are prevented by a social upheaval.

            How do these maids spend their salary which, as I said above, is a thousand times that of their counterparts in the Nineteen Thirties? Nearly half of it willy-nilly goes on house, transport and fuel. These are products of modern civilization whose chief beneficiaries are builders, contractors, manufacturers of cement, concrete, steel and other materials that go into the building of a great city. They include manufacturers of whole plants and distribution networks for power and water supply, bus and car makers, traders who run movie houses, hotels, restaurants and other expensive “necessities” of city life like fuel gas cylinders. It is to be noted that the real beneficiaries of creating all these facilities are the rich. Life in the cities is like a railway train in which the poor can travel only on its roof at their own risk, without bars or railings to save them from falling off the train or any warning signs to make them duck their heads before passing under a bridge or tunnel. With each new “facility” added to the city the burden of the rich on the poor increases. A whole new mass of elite springs up overnight claiming a large share of whatever is left, squeezing the poor into a still tighter corner, or pushing them out of city limits to some remote slum and forcing them to spend more money on transport and also more time and energy travelling in crowded buses, which they could have spent otherwise on productive work.

            Believe it or not, despite all these hardships these maids, and also their male counterparts, spend at least one-fourth of their incomes on aping the rich. There is no maid in my colony in the below 30 age group who does not visit a beautician once a week. My own full time maid keeps in the bathroom fancy cosmetics, advertised on TV, which visitors to our house often mistake to be the property of a female member of the family. A year back she spent her two months’ salary to get her front teeth pushed back and properly set by an expensive dentist. She spurns home food on her days off and must dine with her friends in a restaurant.

            Most of the maids regularly visit tailors to get their dresses in proper shape. They abhor free government schools and put their children in private schools which have mushroomed in response to the public demand. The children, in turn, demand cokes, bottled water, chocolates, ice-creams and packaged foods like pizza and nodules. Higher college education has been privatized and placed beyond the reach of the poor classes.

            When some one falls sick, and this happens quite often because of the polluted environment and their living conditions, many of them avoid the government dispensary and go to a private doctor. They all watch TV ads and buy whatever they can afford among the advertised products.

            One fact that no one sees in this whole phenomenon of massive urbanization is the hidden arm of the multi-nationals who thus force the poor to spend whatever they earn on the products of their companies and work for them for free. They or their Indian subsidiaries and collaborators are the manufacturers of all the items that go into the making of a city. Whatever is notionally believed to be the job of the government or the public sector is in fact a task outsoured to specialized firms in the private sector.

            The more a city grows the greater is the hold on it of the upper class which spreads out in every direction, flaunting its wealth. You have shopping malls in every quarter which sell every thing from a match box to sugar to salt to flour in retail stores run by big chains owned by the likes of Birlas and Ambanis. Slowly but steadily the big companies are taking over the small man’s job of not only vending everyday needs but also of making them. A multi-national has recently taken over one of India’s biggest manufacturer of sweets and salted snacks. They have already ventured into agriculture and horticulture to produce grain, fruit and vegetables. Even the small man in the city prefers these products because of their nice packaging and neat looks.

The small trader, farmer and industrialist is being slowly pushed out and with him what used to be the middle class which has no place left to hide its head under a roof but the slums. Can you believe it? The price of housing plots in Delhi has shot up 1,00,000 (one lakh) times in 50 years. Plots which were being sold in fully developed colonies by big developers for Rs.10 per square meter are today selling for Rs. 10 lakh per square metre or even higher. We are consciously creating a society in which only the rich will have the right to live. The mass of the poor will work for them like the “shudras” of olden times with no rights and prospects whatsoever, notwithstanding what the constitution and our democratic laws may say.

__________________________________________

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/article2442485.ece

The Hindu

September 10, 2011

How our British rulers “legalised”bribery

M. B. Lal

The year was 1943 when World War II was at its peak. The place, Kanpur, then one of the premier industrial cities of India. I was living in a college dorm and visiting an elderly relative who was posted in the city as one of the engineers building the well-known Hallet Hospital, named after the British Governor of the province, who had earned notoriety for ruthlessly crushing Gandhiji's ‘Quit India' movement in 1942.

The hospital project had been given to a construction company floated by a former chief engineer, who had been awarded the title of “Raja” by His Majesty for his distinguished services to the Empire. My relative was living with his family in houses built in advance for doctors. We were all taken by surprise when Raja Saheb walked into the engineer's house and made this proposition to him: “I know normally a contractor pays five per cent as commission to the engineer supervising his work but this is a big project and it is difficult to calculate each engineer's share. You being the seniormost among them, I shall bring you on the first of every month a packet containing an amount equal to twice the salary of each member of the engineering staff here and you can distribute it among them.” After consultations with his colleagues, the engineer conveyed their acceptance of his proposal.

The fact is that in 1943 a government officer accepting money for favours rendered in his official capacity was as legal as the unwritten British Constitution, regardless of the stringent punishment provided against it in the written law.

When marrying off a daughter to a government employee the parents always enquired openly about the “outside income” of the prospective bridegroom. Historians specialising in British rule in India are aware of how East India Company agents worked their way into the hearts and minds of Moghul kings and other sovereign potentates throughout the country by liberally bribing the courtiers.

When His Majesty's government took over the reins of the government from the Company, it applied the same principle to its own Indian staff through whom it ruled this huge (then undivided) nation from Peshawar to Dhaka to Kanyakumari. “Keep the officers and men happy to win their loyalty” was their motto. What is called bribe today was then called a “fee” or “commission”, and was given openly across the table and not, as now, under it.

This policy proved a boon to the British Government during critical times like the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and again during World War II. In the 1840s, my great-grandfather was a supervisor under a British engineer during the construction of the historic dam on the Ganga above Haridwar. Every few months he would trudge about 30 miles through dense jungles carrying on his head a large wicker basket packed with one-rupee notes and concealed in grazing grass to escape being waylaid by robbers.

Those days two rupees was the monthly salary of a labourer was two rupees. What my ancestor carried was presumably money earned by making fictitious muster rolls. Despite this, he was a favourite of the British engineer. My ancestor gave ample proof of his loyalty to the Englishman by concealing him in a secret place during the Mutiny and thus saving his life.

As a reward for this service, he was awarded an estate in the form of zamindari rights over scores of villages. The family never looked back. This is just one example to show that the British rulers could not have succeeded in crushing the Mutiny without the active support of their loyal Indian employees.

The strategy was applied manifold during World War II when all that the Viceroy had to do was to print currency notes in unlimited numbers and leave it to the Indians to spend them on the “War Effort.” Prices shot up by eight to 10 times during the six-year war as contractors, goods suppliers, transporters, bureaucrats, engineers, freshly created industrialists, aristocrats, traders, ration shop owners and other supporters of the regime gobbled up the money but at the same time ensured that work for the War was accomplished in full and beyond the expectations of their masters.

Indians worked day and night at breakneck speed to build aerodromes, hospitals, whole cantonments, new railway yards and a host of other facilities not only to defeat the Japanese attack on India but also to feed the war machine on the western front.

So far as the British rulers were concerned, bribery was not an issue at all. It only enabled the government to keep its employees contented with small salaries and run the administration on a low budget while allowing the employees to help themselves with extra pickings from the public as perks of their jobs.

Partition and the mass genocide that followed it opened the floodgates of corruption on a massive scale. The “war efforts” drill of the British days was revived with redoubled vigour. We were fighting on two fronts now, the war with Pakistan over Kashmir and the campaign to rehabilitate millions of refugees in the shortest possible time. This included providing temporary camps and permanent townships, cleaning vast tracts of forest land, rebuilding swathes of marshes to make them cultivable, expansion of health education, transport and other facilities. Involving oneself in refugee relief work became the shortest route to ‘netagiri' as well as becoming rich overnight. Money flowed like water. An allied field of added attraction was allocation of millions of homes and establishments left vacant by Muslims who had fled to Pakistan. If World War II bred large-scale corruption during the British rule, the aftermath of Partition institutionalised and formalised it. The same administration which had ‘delivered' results during the War came in handy for repeating and multiplying its ingenious practices.

(The writer is a retired Assistant Editor of The Statesman. His email id is saroj_lal@yahoo.com)

Keywords: corruption, India British rule

Comments:

It was good to see that M.B.Lal had taken pains to trace the history of the forefathers who implanted bribery for the first time in the country. To prove the point further, he has produced evidence & quoted legal sanctions for the unwritten law based on the 'best conventions' in vogue. Added to that the richness of a groom in a marriage market through 'extra income' by any standard for decency should be the criterion for assessing moral turpitude. Although the trick of the trade might have undergone few moderation over the years, the fundamental concept remains in stet by tenor & in spirits, excepting with a marginal variation in denominations (instead of one-rupee note)& also the wicker basket having replaced by 'leather brief case' (to suit safe handling) 

Whatever be the rationale,the 'bribe' is a bribe; thus an immoral act as well as an unholy one. And the less said the better !

from:  p.mgopalan

Posted on: Sep 12, 2011 at 03:43 IST

A well chronicled article about the genesis of corruption during the British Raj and sadly it is continuing in so called Independent India many folds over. I would blame the weak human nature of greed, methods used to stay in power to plunder more wealth are done by people who have a weak conscience or non at all.

from:  saraswati

Posted on: Sep 12, 2011 at 11:19 IST

If all the IT raids on jewelers and industrial houses were genuine the exchequer would have gained a substantial revenue. Now only the top officer conducting the raid gets his cut off and the exchequer earns a measly share. Why not follow the British system so that the officer and his team get a 10-15% share of the assessed value of the penalty and the levy? This will avoid corruption and legitimize the operations.

from:  r rajaram

Posted on: Sep 12, 2011 at 12:17 IST

I shudder to think about the deepest roots of long-established corruption in India as brought out by Mr. Lal. I think it requires many, many more Annas to carry on the fight against this social and economic cancer in our country!

from:  K.K. Raman

Posted on: Sep 12, 2011 at 19:04 IST

_____________________________________

Individuality in the Nude State

Or

Naked Individuality

This essay is not for those who have never tried to understand the spiritual meaning of the word “I”. The more clearly you understand this “I”, the more easy it will be for you to follow the meaning of this writing. You have to first identify yourself with this “I” to the exclusion of the body. This, in the other words, means that you are not a body at all but only “I” which drives on earth, even animal and insect bodies. Unless you are keenly aware of this invisible “I” as the primary driving force in all of us what I have to say will be Greek or pure gibberish to you.

The beauty of this “I” is that though it sees itself alone it is all embracing. All of us see the world as “I” and the rest. But we fail to see its universality, that it is the same One “I” in all of us. In short there are no two “I”s, leave alone our concept of there being over six billion “I”s on Earth who call themselves human beings.

Latent Power of I

            We are like the images you see in a hall whose walls and roof are tiled with splintered glass and in whose center you place a lighted candle on a table. You will see the same candle shining in each glass. That candle in our case is the “I”, which is the beginning and end of our existence. What lives is this “I”. Each of us is like those thousands of images in the splintered glass.

            Serious effort to establish contact with the elusive “I” which is our real ‘self’, leads us to the valley of intuition within us. In fact this ‘I’ is closest to us like our own eyes which we cannot see without a mirror. Even with a mirror we can see only an image of our eyes, not the eyes themselves. This “I” –– the universal “I” is our inner eye. We cannot see it except through the mirror of pure intuition which reason negates. We are now living in the valley of reason with all its wars, conflicts and torture committed in the name of science and civilization. This is our culture. The culture of intuition is entirely different. It is the culture of nature. There one sees the wholeness of things that emanate from one Centre and return to It. We are not conversant with the language of animals. We do not even know whether different species communicate with each other and if so how? Theirs is a world apart. In this hum drum world we forget this power within us and remain content to dally with the marvelous powers of science and what we call art, all of it produced with the power of “reason”. What we call Mind or Intellect has two parts. This is recognized by everybody. The so called ‘upper;’ or ‘higher’ part is called ‘intellect’ and the lower just ‘mind’. The intellect again can be divided into two, if not three, parts. The first ‘lower’ part of the intellect is ‘reason’, the ‘higher’ is intuition and the third, still higher, is called ‘spiritual’ where there is nothing but complete ‘stillness’.

            That stillness is inward silence but it has no visible outward manifestation. It is known only to the seeker who is constantly asking himself the question “Who Am I?” It is this question alone that leads him to the real ‘I’ whose other name is total stillness. To put t in other words, it is the state in which the “I” we are familiar with –– the individual ‘I’ –– disappears completely. The question “Who Am I”, when asked constantly, leads us to that goal from where there is no turning back. But how few of us can ever reach there –– certainly not this author whose current ‘I’ is too powerful to brook any rival. Its other name is ‘ego’. A little penetration into the question “Who Am I” will lead you to the conclusion that this “I” does not exist. It is like a mirage which you keep seeing even after you know it is a mirage. Mere awareness of the fact that there is one common ‘I’ in all of us does not drive away this false ‘I’. Mere awareness of a disease does not cure it. You have to apply remedies, take medicines and follow a strict regimen to get rid of it. It is the same with this universal disease of ‘ego’ or ‘I-ness’ with which we are afflicted.

            This affliction cannot go unless we know the real ‘I’ and are constantly in touch with it till complete identification with it is achieved. The ego has to merge in it and regard itself as merely a mirror image of The Truth within us. It is like diving into a Black Hole and seeing millions of galaxies buried inside it. It is the root of everything. It is like a seed which sprouts in many directions and grows into a banyan tree. Its beginning, in our terminology, is ‘non-existence’ since it has no objective existence and yet is the Mother of all that is. It may surprise you to learn that the nearest you can go to it is through the word “attention” or “dhyan” –– not in the religious or spiritual sense –– but as a matter of fact. You are what you see with your inner eye. This dhyan or attention is your inner eye. You cannot see it but it sees you. In fact it is the real you. It is the real “I”. It has no individuality, no sex or gender, no desires, no attractions or repulsions to react to. It is pure awareness. This is why philosophers loosely say that you are what you ‘think’ or ‘see’. But dhyan or attention is beyond thinking and seeing. It is our very Being, or what saints call the ‘Self’ or ‘Alma’, Soul. It is the Mother of all energies. Hence Gandhiji called it “soul force”.

            Lord Krishna has said in the Gita (Chapter X last stanza) that it was impossible to comprehend “the Vastness of this word…’I’, who am all, and made it all, abide its separate Lord.” Its counter-part or mirror image called ‘the ego’ appears to be equally powerful. Even saints cannot get rid of it, because the Truth is that “I” and “I-ness” are the same, the latter being the manifest power of the former. We can more mountains but not this “I-ness” from the limited fragmented ‘I’ that we all are. Even the talk of doing away with ego is ego. While it lasts it is a reality just as a dream is real while it lasts or the images we see in a hall with walls of fragmented glass are real while the glass is there. Scriptures give this phenomenon which causes the illusion of reality in mere images by the name of Maya. We are all “Mayawi” creatures, according to them. But Maya, as a manifestation of Reality, is Real too in its own way.

            But Truth is beyond Reality and Unreality. It is What ‘is’ and what ‘is not’. This duality is not just a matter of expression but Truth Itself. This has nothing to do with the ‘dwaitwad’ of Hinduism. It runs deeper. Relative and Absolute, Visible and Invisible, Being and non-being, existence and non-existence, spiritual and material, separation and union, object and objectless are all inseperable twins. In creation there is nothing without a counterpart. All these are aspects of the essence in us which we call “attention, dhyan or awareness”. Since it appears to be moving, for its movement it creates another pair of twins, called Time and Space. You cannot have Time without space or space without Time. Attention by itself is Absolute in its essence. There is no Time and space where it originates, no duality. Only unity, one same self-awareness or Consciousness is there. Having created Time and space with its Energy, called ‘Sakti’ in Hindu scriptures, with the same energy it creates objects and watches them, or “observes” them. But whatever it creates is bi-polar, since all Energy is bi-polar. You can also call this quality by the name of “Relative”, since the source of bipolarity is common.

            This bipolarity (or Relativity) functions on its own through us. It, and not we, is the master of all our actions. We are like pre-programmed robots charged with an energy called ‘ego’ to carry out certain motions that suits its purpose or grand design. We call these motions ‘actions’ and give them meaning and logic by our philosophy of ‘cause and effect’. But there is no cause and effect in it, just movement. As Omar Khyam said, “The moving finger writes and having writ moves on”

            This ‘moving finger’ is the ‘I’ in us –– the universal ‘I’ acting through the small ‘I’ by merely dreaming it. There is no difference between what we do in dreams and what we do in waking life. As proof of this just sit and watch your own thoughts. You will find that while you think that you have power over your thoughts, in reality you do not. Your ego directs your thoughts, this illusive non-existent ‘I’ which is like one of the myriad mirrors in the hall mentioned above in this essay. Your thoughts are constantly guided by this ‘I-ness’. You constantly think ‘I did this and I shall no do that to boost my image or to impress people, or for sheer survival of the body, or to advance the interests of members of ‘my’ family. See whether you have any power over these ‘I’-centred thoughts or whether they are automatic. At the back of your mind this ‘I’ factor sits as the driving force of your thoughts. A seeker of Truth should first examine carefully the extra-ordinary power this illusory ‘I’ holds over him.

            When this universal ‘I’ drives our thoughts through the individual ‘I’ it works as ‘Energy’ or Sakti. Energy is inherent in it. It is dormant in a state of absolute stillness where there is no creation, no trace of the universe with its diverse objects, living and non-living, and with numerous forums of energy. Ultimately, in the last analysis, the original source of this vast energy that we see in various forms is “attention” whose other name is the universal “I”. Language will always remain inadequate to describe the many ramifications of this word ‘I’ as Power or Energy thought we experience it each moment in everyone of us. We feel its force in us but cannot penetrate to its source with these eyes and senses of ours. Our “ignorance” is part of Natures grand design which we call Maya. All Energy is Maya while Truth lies in stillness.

            Movement, like Time and space, is itself an appearance of this Duality or Relativity which constitutes Maya, or ignorance. Words too are a vehicle of this movement, or ignorance. They go on automatically, whether spoken or in silence. This vast movement is essentially ‘I’ –– centered. While the myriad images in a splintered glass hall are stationery everything in this I-centred world is in constant motion. It is like a circarama in which you watch all planetary movement sitting at one place. But even that similar may not suffice, because the ‘I’ –– the witness sitting at the center –– also seems to be moving with those numerous images, though actually it does not. That seeming I-ness excites all kinds of convergence and divergence between the image like ‘I’ bodies, each thinking of itself as all-in-all.

            Philosophers call this body with its numerous sense, specially sight and sound, as an obstacle to self-realization. But who created this body? Is it not an outward appearance of this universal ‘I’ which dreams this body as the individual ‘I’. The body thus is an inanimate object, a dream creation of the ‘I’, the Great ‘I’ of all. Individuality, I-ness, body and even mind are names of the same Truth. But the question arises, “who is asking these questions? Are these questions also not part of the same process of sense perception which has created language. Is not this ‘I’, therefore, a complete prisoner of itself, that is the individual ‘I’-ness from which there is no getting out in this life. Call it a dream if you like. But it is there to stay and we, the mirage bodies, have to live it out.

            This dependence on sense perception, and the awareness that we are living in a sense world circumscribes us completely. This perhaps has led Christian mystics to declare “In the Beginning was the World and Word was God.”

            The word encompasses every thing, known or unknown. In fact there is nothing to be known or unknown, all is this ‘word’. You may give it any name. And yet we struggle, we assert, we grow angry, lustful, jealous and brave. For What? We have no choice. We live on this plane of ‘I’-ness. This ‘I’-the great ‘I – is the sub-stratum on which we have to operate. In fact this ‘I’ is both-the screen as well as the picture in the cinema of life. And yet we feel strongly about our own individual existence – each of us for himself or herself.

            This ‘him’ or ‘her’ seems to be the central divide of the Great ‘I’.

            We know that the sense of ‘I’-ness is common to all living thins. We infer from this, though some may disagree, that this ‘I’ in us is a single entity projected in all of us. It is the driving force of life, the primary source of the energy of life, or sense perception. But no one has seen it or can see it. The moment it moves, or projects its energy, it does so by taking millions of forms.

            The qualifying principle of this projection is sex. This projection of the great ‘I’ into trillions of ‘I’s, or the sense word, releases tremendous energy. It is like the explosion of an atom bomb. Energy, as we all know, is bi-polar. It moves in what are called ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ currents. Likewise, the principle of the Great I, that is ‘I’-ness, is always male or female. Individuality always comes with a rider, which is sex. My maleness or my female-ness is the first sign of my individuality.

            You cannot be a person without a gender. An entity in a body has to be either male or female. This applies to all species except perhaps the self-reproducing amaeba or similar forms of life, imperceptible to human senses. Physicists will describe this phenomenon of duality of life in terms of negative and positive currents. Spiritualists philosophers see this as the prime principle of “pairs of opposites”, in all fields of life, suggesting that all life is “relative” to its “opposite”, the ‘subject’ being the center in the physical world. Heat and cold, dead and alive, light and dark so on are the numerous opposites which only show the limitations of the individual. Among these pairs of opposites, sex is the primary limitation.

            From there all other limitations begin. You cannot but be tempted by the other sex. If you meditate without any preconceived notions on this phenomenon of sex attraction the whole Truth about the Sense World will unfold before you. How does this attraction come about? What is it that is tempted? Is it the Mind? Or does this sex attraction go deeper? Is it embedded in the spirit Itself? Is the Mind not playing as an instrument of the spirit and finding ways of getting tempted so that the body may act accordingly? If we accept that the Spirit is the ‘I’ in us, a universal entity that is the starting point of awareness among all species of creation, then it follows that in its manifestations this ‘I’, that is the Supreme Spirit in us, has split Itself into two parts, male and female. If, as already indicated in this essay, we look upon this manifested I as pure Energy, the two sexes become the twin currents of this energy or ‘Sakti’, the negative and positive as they are called by modern science.

            If we accept this line of thinking we find that this manifested world is pure energy of awareness which is experienced by Itself as awareness of attraction and repulsion through the agency of the senses.

Man And Nature

            From times immemorial, since the age of the cave man, to the present day, man has been pursuing his quest for three basic needs of life –– food, sex and land –– with single minded zeal. Whether acting alone or in a group, his motives and objectives have not changed. Nor, surprisingly, have his methods to attain his cherished needs. He has used the maximum wiles and violence at his command to obtain them. The only difference between man and the other species is that while all the other creations of God (or Nature) are satisfied with the minimum available at a given time, man alone stands out as the one who is never satisfied, no matter how much of these three passions of his he is able to achieve. He would rather destroy than give up.

            This is why we see so much imbalance in human society which distinguishes man from all other species. We have enough food to feed every human being many times over. Yet at least three-fourths of humanity is ever hungry. Nature has made man and woman in almost equal numbers. Yet we have rapes and murders and endless bitterness over sexual relations. No one seems fully satisfied with he or she gets by way of sex. And last, but not the least, comes land for which man’s hunger is never satisfied. The earth has a land area of 510 million square kilometers of which man occupies for his residence not more than a million square kilometers, or just 0.02% of the total land area of the earth. Yet the entire history of man is nothing but a saga of land grabbing. In primitive time, our original ancestors, the so-called “savage” races formed group, each carving out its own hunting territory. If a member of a neighbouring trible strayed into its territory he would perhaps be eaten up or chased away. Within each tribe the strongest man would assume leadership and allot each person a space in a cave or upon a tree, and also determine who he or she could mate with.

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When Floods Made News

If I was asked to name the most exciting night that I had spent during my sixty years in journalism, my mind would immediately fly back 55 years in time to an October 1956 night when I joined an intrepid team of about thirty student doctors and nurses of the Christian Medial College, Ludhiana, who were engaged in rescuing and providing relief to people in flood ravaged villages not far from the city. Army motor boats as well as smaller craft were plying over flooded fields and roads in complete darkness relieved by a petromax or lantern that could barely enable us to see each other.
The young medicos led by a professor, a man of unbounded zeal, had set up a tent on dry ground near a large open air camp the district administration had created for people who had fled their villages to escape the flood. The only luxury in the tent was a kerosene stove placed on a table where you could take tea or coffee served in a beaker. The Bhakra and Beas dams had not been built by then to contain the surplus water and all Punjab rivers and their tributaries had drowned half of Punjab. I toured the whole state without a photographer. Everyday my stories were splashed on the front page of The Tribune. My reports on the poor relief work in Amritsar which I contrasted with Ludhiana created a furore and I had to face a barrage of contradictions. It was there that I learnt that in great calamities voluntary agencies can do little unless the administration provides them with the infrastructure.
A year later I joined the Statesman at Delhi (a job I got purely on the strength of my flood reports in The Tribune). It fell to my lot to cover the floods in Rohtak town in September 1960, this time with a photographer. For about 20 days the Rohtak flood was front page news. Reporters and photographers from all English dailies of Delhi drove out to Rohtak about 70 kilometers away, and returned in the evening to file their reports. For a few days we had to take a 30 kilometer detour each way when the direct route was cut off by the flood.
From floods to communal riots was but a small step. In the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties the trauma of Partition had not died from the minds of the people. A riot between Hindus and Muslim within 150 kilometers would draw teams of reporters and photographers from all English dailies of Delhi to that city. Naming communities in a riot news report is forbidden by law. What we did was to report the atmosphere in the tension ridden town. Deserted streets, panic and fear on people’s faces, closed markets, police everywhere and the victims of the terror, dead or alive, in the hospitals. On one occasion I was led to the scene of action in the heart of Meerut city by the sound of police firing. Aligarh and its world famous Muslim university was another place I frequently visited. At times a riot spot looked no better than a war zone with streets littered with stones, police on the ready to shoot and panic stricken people looking at the scene through chinks and railings on the upper floor. There was indeed a lot to report in a riot without naming the communities involved.
But, ironically, though I have lived for more than half-a-century in Delhi, the scenes I remember most from my reporting days are mostly rural. The most memorable of these was a night visit to a village in Yeotmal district of Maharashtra. It was a hamlet of a few stone huts atop a shallow gorge about 100 feet deep. I was being taken in a jeep from Nagpur to Adilabad in Andhra for a drive through the worst famine stricken parts of Maharashtra by a rustic looking district planning officer who appeared to be every inch a farmer himself, when my attention was drawn by the sound of music in the wilderness and I asked my guide to stop for a look at the scene. With light from the headlights of the jeep we could see men, women and children trudging up and down a narrow hill track in the gorge. They were carrying water in their small pots and pans to water their cooperative vegetable farm near their houses from the narrow strip of water they called a stream. It was their only life line against hunger and thirst. They sang a folk tune as they walked. Perhaps it helped them to stick together in the dark. We were led to a small and empty panchayat ghar by a lantern and treated to tea by the villagers. We were not far from our destination, the village of the then Chief Minister. V.P. Naik, who had told me only a few hours earlier in Nagpur “Hang me if I fail. I shall make Maharashtra self-sufficient in food-grains within two years.” With such hardly and determined people at his back what Chief Minister could fail? The line quoted above was a banner headline over my story published a week later on an inside page in Calcutta and Delhi Statesman.
A few years later when he became Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, I asked the late Ashok Mehta why the cooperative experiment of Maharashtra and Gujarat could not be introduced in backward East U.P. and Bihar, “Lal, I have staked my whole political career trying to do just that and failed. You can take a horse to the water but you cannot make him drink”, he replied.
Only a year later I had occasion to visit one of the greenest parts of Tanjore, the granary of Tamil Nadu, only an hour after the police had fired in the air to disperse an angry mob of farm workers, affiliated to a Marxist group, demanding higher wages. From Sikkim to Kanyakumari to Surat to Pathankot, I have scoured the Indian countryside, time and again and written long reports of my visits in The Statesman.
But all this was just by the way. My main job was the daily grind of reporting speeches and interviewing people in Delhi. Most of the time we interviewed ordinary people. M.L. Kotru, a colleague of mine, won the Magsaysay award for his series of about 50 stories, called “The other half”. He interviewed the poor people in different vocations and wrote about their everyday life. I and a colleague did a long series of about 30 stories, titled “crime in Delhi”. It was not about murder and rape but ordinary everyday crimes in different parts of Delhi. We identified pockets where the criminals lived and the way they operated.
But our primary job as reporters was reporting speeches. In addition to covering his beat, every reporter had to attend a public speech in the evening and report it in fair detail. Amongst my reports was a speech by Dr. Rajendra Prasad, a few months before he retired as the President of India. He chose the mundane occasion of laying the foundation stone of the building of the Bar Association in the Supreme Court premises. It was a printed speech on the need to change the Constitution and give more powers to the President to over-rule the Prime Minister in certain matters and even question decisions of the Parliament which the President thought were partisan and not in the national interest. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was present at the hour long function. Leaders and intellectuals freely used such forums to make important announcements since they were sure newspapers would report them. Even Rotary club meetings were reported. Reports of similar meetings and conferences from the now extinct species of district correspondents lent variety to the paper which one misses these days.
It was the same with Parliament. When Parliament was in session two whole pages of every newspaper were reserved for its coverage. Practically every debate was covered and important MPs later interviewed for further elucidation of the points they had made. Attending Parliament was both a pleasure and privilege for a reporter. I was present in the Lok Sabha Press gallery when, in 1963, Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia threw his famous historic “three-anna challenge” at Nehru. “Panditji”, he said shouting at the top of his voice “for all your talk of progress, the average income of the Indian farmer is still three annas (nineteen paise) per day. You can ask your officials to check their figures. I shall resign my seat in Parliament if I am proved wrong”. The Government never refuted Lohia’s figure.
In fact, speech reporting and interviewing experts was the primary activity in a newspaper. All conferences, from UNCTAD to the various subject conferences like the All India History, science and Education conferences had to be covered in detail. Simple coverage was not enough. The papers competed with each other in interviewing subject specialists attending the conference and featuring their work or point of view. All interviews, small or big, were face to face and not, as now, on telephone. They often yielded big surprise stories we were not looking for. This in how I got some of my scoops, like everyone else in my line.
My eighteen year-old grand-daughter calls me “a walking encyclopedia”. With all this education imbibed from speeches and interviews, besides visits to projects, labs, factories ­­and farms –– all fully reported –– who would not become "a walking encyclopedia”? But then from the Nineteen Twenties to the Sixties, apart from its primary duty of giving the day’s news, the main role of the newspaper was that of an “educator”, and not as now, of an entertainer.

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