Rise of a Salesman and A Manager of Skaters: Two Indian stories

Two extraordinary stories of ordinary Indian villagers whose lives were transformed in the past twenty years:

Story 1:

“Twenty years ago, he was a salesman in Pallapatti village in Salem district, knocking at doors to sell sarees on 10 instalments. Later, he sold radios and tape recorders. Unable to make ends meet, he migrated to Perambalur, where he met AIADMK’s Varathur Arunachalam. This was his stroke of luck, his key to fame and fortune. Arunachalam introduced him to Raja, a small-time DMK politician. Both were ambitious and ready to take risks. It was Raja who told him to venture into real estate. With small investments on both sides, they grew together. Today Batcha’s real estate empire is worth more than Rs. 2,000 crore.”

Story 2:

“He discovered his inferiority at school, noticing that the Jaiswals and Agarwals and Guptas, the children of merchants and shopkeepers, bought 2-rupee ice creams at recess, while his mohalla friends bought the 50-paise kind. He realized that when guest speakers came to the school, the children of daily-wages people were rarely chosen to introduce them. He noticed that at the wedding of a big man in Bhiwapur, he had to wait until the “guests” had eaten. “You come afterward,” he remembered being scolded. He used to watch his classmates roar into the schoolyard on the backs of their parents’ motorcycles. He did not even have the two modes of transportation below motorcycles on the Indian staircase of affluence: the bicycle and shoes. He wore no footwear until ninth grade. “Whenever I saw other people wearing expensive shoes and socks and slippers, I used to get very angry, and I felt very bad,” he said. “Why am I not getting all these things? Why only I don’t have all these things? And at that time I decided that I will earn great money, and I will remove my poverty. I considered poverty as a disease.”

….

I began to see self-invention as a theme of India’s unfolding drama. Misal, the shoeless son of a porter, was the manager of an Indian roller-skating team, was going to Hong Kong, was teaching at six colleges and was building a house.”

The first story is depressingly familiar: in a corrupt society like India, those with access to scum like A Raja (who in turn thrive because of their access to the likes of Kanimozhi or Karunanidhi) are more likely to make it big – you might be a humble saree-salesman in a remote hamlet in India, but with evil on your side, there’s nothing to hold you back – I am sure Sadiq Batcha will only consolidate his empire and one day, take the natural leap from crime/business to politics, and one day be a lawmaker.

The second story fills me with hope: it shows that if you continue to back yourselves and tap the opportunities that a liberalizing India has begun to present, you might rise. You won’t be a business tycoon like Sadiq Batcha, for sure, nor enter lucrative businesses like being a people’s representative, but you could still live a life of dignity and ambition. And own the first motor vehicle in the history of your family.

“On his 21st birthday, in September 2002, he [Misal, the protagonist of the second story] bought a motorcycle. It was the first motorized vehicle owned in the history of his family. He drove it from the showroom to his home and took his mother for a spin around the village. “She didn’t say anything,” he recalled. “She just cried. And she said, ‘Take care of the bike.’ ”

It's our turn to eat

Writer Sanjeev Sanyal states that India’s elite have lost their credibility:

"Almost anyone in a position of power in India, including well-known print and television journalists, is now viewed with suspicion. This is occurring at a time when economic growth is pulling a young and upwardly mobile population into the urban middle class. This new middle class is no longer constrained by the patronage systems of the village, but it also does not enjoy the cozy relationship that links the old middle class with the elite. Could this crisis of the elite trigger India’s own Tiananmen Square moment?"

Mr. Sanyal notes examples from various societies, like Britain in 1880 and US in 1880-1890,  which were characterized by greed and corruption, and wonders whether India is headed for a similar turn-around:

"Even adjusted for purchasing power, India’s middle class today probably totals no more than 70 million (far smaller than is generally assumed). But, in the coming decade, today’s established middle class will be swamped by newcomers working their way up from the country’s slums, small towns, and villages.

..

It is impossible to predict when the shift will happen or what form it will take. Given India’s democratic traditions, it is likely that the change will be peaceful. One possibility is that it will take place province by province – the previously ungovernable state of Bihar being a prime example."

While I hope this happens, I am not so sure: the Indian elite have already changed, and barring notable exceptions, the successors have been worse. The politicians gaining center stage post the Mandal reforms of the early 1990s, such as Lalu Prasad Yadav and the tainted chief minister of Karanakata, BS Yeddyurappa , have further muddled the waters. The corporates gaining prominence post the economic reforms of 1991 have crony capitalization to thank for their rise. Moreover, the Reddy mafia in Karnataka have demonstrated how easy it is to blend New Money with a new style of electoral politics. And the celebration of having a Dalit as the Chief Justice of India for the first time  (Balakrishnan) has been replaced by dismay over corruption allegations that stagger the mind.

India’s elite might thus be democratized: social groups previously kept away from power, money and prestige now assert their rights, but in doing so, seem to be eager to outdo the excesses and crimes of the previous generation. We are thus close to enacting the scenario described by Michela Wrong in her book It’s Our Turn To Eat, where the three major Kenyan tribes take their turns to ravage whatever little has been left of the Kenyan economy: India seems to be producing an assembly line of elite that are corrupt, discredited and unreliable.

Wikibribes

One reason for the astonishing success of Wikileaks has been its reliance on (mostly anonymous) sources for its content: anyone can upload a discriminating document/evidence. The document, if it passes the scrutiny of a group of reviewers, is posted at the website. The site, like other social media outlets, thus relies on crowdsourcing: its fundamental task (of reporting) is outsourced to a task.

The crowdsourcing model, despite having attracted formidable criticism, has seen other notable successes, the obvious and well-known examples being Wikipedia and the Linux operating system. The ‘wiki’ concept can thus be successfully be applied to various fields (Wikileaks has already seen several spin-offs). It was therefore only a matter of time before a ‘Wikibribes’ appeared, and given that corruption is India’s national sport, it was logical that such a site appeared out of India. It’s also fitting that the site would originate from Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka, which the Outlook magazine called ‘India’s most corrupt state’.

We are therefore pleased to welcome India’s own ‘Wikibribes’, at ipaidabribe.com, a website created by T. Raghunandan, a retired IAS officer, where we can post incidents where we were forced to pay bribes. The site has already seen more than 2600 bribery reports – some as high as 50 lakh rupees, some as low as five rupees. The bribery reports, created by ordinary people, make for disgusting reading, and confirm how deep the rots of corruption have seeped in.

While I am skeptical about whether the site could achieve anything, given how entrenched corruption is in our DNA, I laud the intent of its founder and wish the project good luck. Don’t hope for citing of scum like A Raja or Suresh Kalmadi, but do visit the site.

(ipaidabribe reference from Jason Burke).

RTI Deaths

Jason Burke pays tribute to RTI Martyrs: social activists murdered by mafia exposed by these activists. Last year alone, there have been ten recorded RTI deaths, an occurrence India’s Law minister Veerappa Moliy brushed aside by terming them “isolated cases.”

Given the apathy, no wonder this happened.

India’s best investigative journalist…

…is CAG, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, as per this incisive essay by Vinod K. Jose on the state of India’s journalism. Mr. Jose writes:

“With television leading the way, style has definitively vanquished substance—and journalism has acquired the trappings of a glamourous profession, one that trades in images, sensationalism and sound bytes instead of analysis or investigation. Newspapers and magazines now compete to be as shallow and superficial as their TV counterparts, while young journalists angle for jobs in front of the camera. Journalism schools devote more and more time to training students on the technical business of television production at the cost of foundational courses in political science and history. Television’s emergence as the dominant news medium has transformed print media as well: reporters spent less time reporting each story, while the stories themselves get shorter and shorter. All one needs today to be a ‘success’ in print journalism is the basic capacity to write a sentence in English and a handful of contacts and official sources.

As a result, the best investigative journalist in the country today is the CAG—the Comptroller and Auditor General of India.”

The entire essay is here.

India at work

In a hard-hitting essay on infrastructure on the eastern frontier, Major General (retd) Raj Mehta draws attention to the deplorable condition of the infrastructure in the North-East:

“Our border infrastructure is as somnolent as it was in 2007. The strategic 165 km long National Highway 31-A linking Siliguri through Gangtok in Sikkim to the Indo-Chinese border at Nathu La (14,300 feet) still looks bombed out, devastated and gutted. Blocked by landslides, ridden with pot-holed patches and untidily strewn road-widening activity, a one-way journey on this Border Roads Organisation (BRO) road, Sikkim's lifeline, takes over eight backbreaking hours. NH-31A truly represents the dismal state of border infrastructure in the northeastern region, reflected accurately by the state of the equally strategic NH-31 linking Siliguri to the "seven sisters".”

What strikes me is in the piece is the national integration mainland India has achieved with its North-eastern states. We might have failed the North-east in terms of economic and human development, we might have made life miserable for them by enforcing draconian laws on them, and otherwise completely ignored them culturally save an odd nod to a choir group, but we’ve at least succeeded in replicating our national traits of apathy and callousness.

Read the entire piece. The General, who has served before in Sikkim, and has had an illustrious career in the army, has some urgent recommendations to rectify the picture – if only someone is listening.

Maharashtra tops the honors again

In the past decade, the fortunes of many Indian states have changed. Bihar seems to slowly turning a corner, Karnataka is successfully managing the contrasting twains of development(growing) and corruption (escalating), and Himachal Pradesh, if the India Today magazine’s annual surveys are to be believed, is a leading state in India. However, nothing can match the tragic decline this decade brought for Maharashtra, once (up to 1990s)  believed to be the foremost state in India. Between 2000-2010, Maharashtra had the misfortune of being led by one mediocre government after the other, cultural terrorists like the MNS and Shiv Sena destroyed whatever little remaining liberal credentials Mumbai had, and state’s image was battered by scam after scam. Mumbai, Maharashtra’s capital and once India’s foremost city, lost that honor to New Delhi: New Delhi today can reasonably claim to be India’s financial capital, and the country’s most attractive city. 2000-2010 was thus the lost decade for Maharashtra – perhaps the first of many more to come.

However, there is one list that Maharashtra has managed to top:  farmer suicides.

Dr Sen’s conviction

Dr. Binayak Sen’s conviction for sedition by a ‘ridiculous and unacceptable’ judgment further confirms the being-good penalty: if you are a tireless practitioner in the domain of public health and are committed to poor, you end up convicted for sedition, but if you hire a dubious character, allegedly a spy and a money-launderer, to fix appointments to central ministries, and then defend your actions, you get conferred with a prestigious award in the hands of the Prime Minister.  

More on the conviction: a fine article from Ramchandra Guha on Dr. Sen’s arrest, where he draws parallels between the good doctor and the revolutionary leader Shankar Guha Niyogi. Columnist Girish Shahane, has, as always, something insightful to say about the conviction here. A Mint editorial that attacks some of the attacks on the judgment is here.

PS: Speaking of Shankar Guha Niyogi, I recommend the Marathi readers of this blog an excellent, moving article/obituary on the leader by my co-blogger Vinay Hardikar in his book ‘Shraddhanjali’.