Pride
Without Prejudice
By A.J. Philip
Tribune
India
31 December, 2003
At
a supermarket in Cologne, the two hair dryers looked almost the same
and they had identical specifications. Yet, the salesman quoted a higher
price for one of them. Why? He did not bat his eyelid before pointing
out the "Made in Germany" tag. I could even detect a sparkle
of pride in his eyes. I wondered how long we would take to take pride
in "Made in India" goods.
In November last,
after all my efforts to buy a particular brand of grinder in Chandigarh
failed, I decided to try my luck in New Delhi. A friend of mine took
me to a shop in Karol Bagh. On the way, he told me about his friend
in the West, who on his yearly visits to India bought this particular
brand of grinder as a souvenir and gift to his friends and relatives
back home. He himself had been using this particular grinder for a decade
without any complaint. Like the Cologne salesman, I was, for once, proud
of an Indian product.
Even after my relocation
to Chandigarh, I visit New Delhi at least once a month. On every such
visit, my pride in being an Indian gets a boost. The man responsible
for this feeling is a fellow Malayali, who long after his superannuation,
leads from the front what is easily one of the greatest construction
ventures this country has ever undertaken. Of course, there is nothing
new about a metro rail; Paris and London Metros are one and a half centuries
old. Even in India, the metro has been functional in Kolkata for at
least two decades.
What makes E. Sreedharans accomplishment noteworthy is that he
manages it despite Delhi being a congested city with little space for
manoeuvrability. Yet, his team has been building Delhi Metro with the
least dislocation to traffic. As Sreedharan and his team move ahead
constructing underground tunnels and laying overhead rails ahead of
schedule, nobody has seen any mud or dirt ever accumulating at the work
sites.
In sharp contrast,
I vividly recall the huge mounds of earth I once saw on a Kolkata road
when the metro construction was in full swing and how I nearly missed
a train because of a terrible traffic jam caused by the metro project.
Sreedharans
team proves that India is not a "land of snake charmers",
though we have Central ministers who take pride in demonstrating to
the gullible their "supernatural abilities" to walk on red-hot
coal and wear cobras round their necks and promoting esoteric subjects
like astrology and voodoo. "You are brainy people", I once
heard a white American complimenting Indians in the context of the giant
strides Indian IT professionals have made in the USA.
Apart from the "brain",
what gave Indians a head-start in IT is their command of the English
language. It is a matter of pride for every Indian that the latest Oxford
Dictionary released this year has no less than 7,000 words of Indian
origin.
In a bid to catch
up with India in the software sector, where alone it has been lagging
behind, China has been promoting the teaching of English, "on the
beaches and on the streets" as a recent visitor to China put it.
But our Uma Bharatis and Murli Manohar Joshis have been frittering away
their energy in promoting Sanskrit as a spoken language when 200 years
ago Raja Rammohan Roy had in a written memorandum to the government
suggested that no money be wasted on its promotion because it is "difficult
to learn".
Forget such distortions,
Finance Minister Jaswant Singh was not alone when he proudly announced
to the world that Indias foreign exchange reserves stood at an
all-time high of $100 billion. That humiliating incident in the early
nineties when our gold reserves were pledged to borrow a World Bank
loan is now just a blip on the national memory radar. The landmark achievement,
though humbler to tiny Taiwans, will, hopefully, lead to bolder
economic reforms, investment and growth.
In any case, the
economy has been on the upswing with Indian IT companies reaching commanding
heights and one of them Infosys, which has been plagued by a
sexual harassment case in the US even acquiring an Australian
firm. Aiding the economic recovery has been the rain god, who has been
particularly benevolent as is manifest in the overflowing silos. Ironically,
this has not prevented millions of people in states like Orissa and
Bihar from tightening their belts for want of purchasing power. Even
the subsidised price of grain is beyond their means while the nation
is yet to evolve a system that genuinely addresses their food problem.
The economic growth
has not made any dent on the unemployment problem with the result that
the sight of a Bihari youth appearing for a competitive test in Guwahati
or Mumbai is a cause for massacres of the kind Nellie witnessed in the
early eighties. When more and more people compete for lesser and lesser
jobs, violence becomes inevitable. If reservation was once seen as a
panacea for the ills of unemployment, nobody cares a hoot when a state
government like that of Rajasthan announces a quota system for the economically
marginalised among the upper castes. The question that is heard is,
"where are the jobs?"
The problem of unemployment
threatens over 300 ministers who would lose their jobs once the President
gives his assent to the much-awaited Bill limiting the size of ministries
at the Centre and in the states. The vivisection of ministries has been
such that there are many ministers who are virtually jobless. As for
Mamata Banerjee, the year brought her back to the Union Cabinet but
her wish for a dream portfolio remains unfulfilled as we say requiem
to the year.
The nation had indeed
reason to be proud when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee flagged
off the Vigyan Rail that showcases Indias achievements in science
and technology. If all goes well, the year 2008 will mark the first
Indian landing on the moon from an Indian space vehicle launched from
Indias equivalent of the American NASA . While flagging off the
train, Vajpayee paid handsome tributes to Jawaharlal Nehru, who was
scientific to the core. But the Prime Minister appears out of sync when
grateful women chief ministers present baby elephants to temples or
tonsure their heads at holy precincts when they win elections or court
battles.
After the eyeball-to-eyeball
confrontation on the Indo-Pakistan border, it required quite a measure
of magnanimity on the Indian side to bring the troops back to their
original position and talk of peace. Vajpayees Srinagar speech
extending a hand of friendship saw dramatic changes that brought about
ceasefire on the border and restoration of diplomatic ties and air routes.
That there are no
borders in the minds of the people living on both sides of the border
was brought home when the entire country prayed for the success of the
operation on Noor Fatima, a Pakistani infant who suffered from a congenital
heart ailment, at a private hospital in Bangalore. Small wonder that
when a young Pakistani Ahmadiya girl fell in love with an Indian boy,
their marriage was solemnised at Qadiyan in Punjab in an atmosphere
of transnational bonhomie.
Transnationals were
at the receiving end when companies like Coca Cola and Pepsi were found
not maintaining their standards of manufacture in India. They learnt,
to their utter dismay, that if they did not live up to their promises,
the consumers in India had the liberty to boycott their goods as they
did when a study found that their products contained higher levels of
pesticides than could be tolerated. Those advocating swadeshi could
not have hoped for a better shot in the arm than this finding. All the
certificates of "good conduct" the multinational companies
obtained from a willing minister at the Centre did not wash the pesticides
off their drinks. It even forced Cadburys to introduce a special, costly
foolproof packaging for its chocolates in India. Cadburys knows only
too well that one billion people constitute a huge market, they can
only ill-afford to ignore.
When market magicians
take over, newspapers become a commodity and Harry Potter books are
sold by the millions. It is not because the stories are intrinsically
better than Alibaba and 40 Thieves or The Gift of the Magi but because
they are produced and marketed efficiently, if not aesthetically.
After all, form,
not substance, is what matters. Complicated solutions are often found
to simpler problems. When Tamil Nadu and Karnataka were unable to settle
their dispute over the sharing of Cauvery waters, the idea of linking
all the north Indian rivers with South Indian ones was thought of, little
realising that when the rivers in the North are in spate the rivers
in the South too are in spate. And that it goes against natures
scheme of things is wholly overlooked. But the Prime Ministers
Golden Quadrilateral road project is far more ambitious than the one
attempted by Sher Shah Suri in the 16th century, though the killing
of a whistleblower in Bihar has caused irreparable damage to the credibility
of the Prime Ministers Office and the road project.
Never before in
history have so many women chief ministers come to power at the same
time. The ascent of Uma Bharati is spectacular. It is no less than that
of Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati, who too comes from humble situations.
Unfortunately, Mayawati could not live up to the peoples expectations.
The Taj Corridor controversy revealed that she was more interested in
lining the pockets of her kurta than ameliorating the condition of the
constituents she represented.
Women libbers will
be happy to see so many women as chief ministers. But how will they
react when Uma Bharatis first priority is installing a particular
idol, now in Britain, in a particular temple, and another woman chief
minister with royal lineage considers compulsory singing of Vande Mataram
as the first step to usher in Ram Rajya?
It is a mere coincidence
that the day Vasundhara Raje Scindia was sworn in as Chief Minister,
a woman in Punjab was arrested for throwing her infant daughter into
a septic tank, highlighting the aversion for female children in what
is considered a "prosperous state". However, the nation took
delight in the beatification of Mother Teresa in distant Rome and the
75th birthday celebration of the living legend, Lata Mangeshkar.
In a country, which
excels in rituals, it is a tragedy that incidents of the kind that occurred
when dozens of pilgrims were killed in a stampede at Nashik continue
to happen. Talks of a national disaster-management policy remains inconclusive
as trains derail or catch fire as at Ludhiana or MIG fighter aircraft
tumble down from the skies as at Ambala and Hoshiarpur. Indian Air Force
pilots are happy that a deal has been struck to buy jet trainer aircraft.
But their minister is persona non grata to the Opposition, which is
yet to reconcile to the fact that George Fernandes has been accommodated
in the Cabinet while the Tehelka journalists are out on the streets
looking for jobs.
But then politicians
know how to manage themselves. Look at Dilip Singh Judeo, who himself
admitted that he took money and likened money to no less than God. But
the CBI has to, first, find out whether the tapes that nailed him were
real or fake before initiating action against him. The agency took one
whole month to close in on the former minister from Chhattisgarh.
In the past, the
motives of journalists were never questioned when, for instance, they
exposed the cement scandal in Maharashtra in the eighties or the Watergate
scandal in the USA. Now the focus of inquiry is on the motive and the
methods employed, rather than on the illegal transactions that took
place.
And when the CBI
tried to give a clean chit to those accused of conspiring to demolish
the Babri Masjid, it showed that despite all its "autonomy",
it still remained a handmaiden of those in power. Its different yardsticks
for different people did not speak highly of its impartiality and adherence
to concepts like truth and justice extolled in the Constitution.
That is precisely
how the Gujarat Government dealt with the cases arising out of the Godhra
incident and its aftermath. The twin bomb blasts in Mumbai showed how
powerful uncontrolled revenge could be. If the Best Bakery verdict signalled
the low depths in judicial standards, the intervention of the National
Human Rights Commission restored the common mans faith in the
criminal justice system, which suffered a body blow when a commissioner-level
police officer was found to have been in cahoots with characters like
Abdul Karim Telgi.
The apex courts
decision to transfer corruption cases against Jayalalithaa to Karnataka
is yet another instance of judicial alertness. That the Tamil Nadu Chief
Minister is no respecter of political niceties was borne out by her
botched attempt to incarcerate her critics in The Hindu. In Punjab,
a father-son duo, accused of blatant corruption, have been manipulating
a great religious institution to their advantage while their tormentor
believes that sending them to jail is governing the state.
Notwithstanding
such aberrations, our democratic system remains as strong as ever. The
humbling of Ajit Jogi and Digvijay Singh and the return to power of
Mulayam Singh Yadav in UP proves, if anything, that democracy has taken
deep roots, something the nation can take pride in.
The year saw many
events that could really cheer up Indians. The advent of petite Sania
Mirza in womens doubles at Wimbledon, Anju Bobby Georges
triumph in world athletics, Indias Test victory against the Aussies
in Australia, the crushing defeat inflicted on the Pakistani hockey
team at Kaula Lumpur and the successful holding of the Afro-Asian Games
at Hyderabad and the confidence the Commonwealth reposed in India when
it accepted its plea to hold the Commonwealth Games were all proud moments.
That India did not
allow itself to be bullied by Uncle Sam to send its troops to Iraq and
like Pilate washed its hands off the mayhem inflicted on the Iraqis
in the name of locating Saddam Husseins weapons of mass destruction
that never existed, is something which Indians can recall with a great
sense of pride.
However, all these
achievements are nothing compared to the challenges that face the nation
when roughly the same number of people who could call themselves Indians
when India became independent are today illiterate and they are not
assured of even a square meal a day.