:: Kishwar Desai

Not angry enough

By Kishwar Desai

Nov 21 : On the anniversary of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks there is no better way to remember the dead than to be angry. And there is enough, just in the normal struggle to survive in India, which should make us furious. And not allow any one of us to ever forget.

Returning to Delhi is always a shock — the airport lulls you into thinking that things have improved. But once outside, you are choked. Not with emotion but by the pollution, and by the implication of a government that is not working hard enough. On every flyover there are children selling magazines or begging under them: hungry and malnourished children who should be in school. Every symbol of progress has another negative and searing one. The last one year, when we swore an end to corruption and held candlelight vigils, has only shown us our own faults in sharper and sharper focus as we voted back the same people who let us down, over and over again. This was meant to be a watershed year, but instead it has been a year where we appeared complacent and self-indulgent. Ready to be attacked, once again, perhaps?

The Delhi sky reminds me of Beijing five years ago, when we had gone there on a brief visit. There was a thick haze of pollution everywhere and the sun struggled, ever more weakly, to come out. Five years ago the chief minister of Delhi had just announced the success of the CNG buses and all of us — harkening towards asthma — could breathe the clichéd sigh of relief. Imagine — Delhi was less polluted than Beijing! What a coup! What excitement!

So we could afford to feel superior. Landing in Beijing we had muttered about how recklessly the Chinese government was indulging the middle class — allowing them unbridled access to cars, to material goods, to consumerism. There wasn’t even a ban on smoking! But didn’t the Chinese have a point? After all the aam aadmi is no longer an impoverished voiceless face in the crowd — the aam aadmi is really the newly-arrived middle class — thrown up in waves on the safe shore of government subsidies and corruption. That is the class to indulge and keep happy — because if your middle classes are content, the so-called home-grown media experts who dominate TV channels and newspapers can be easily bought over. So Beijing was, despite its glossy buildings and new found millionaires, barely visible behind the mist of pollution, and no one really cared. Because the growth rate was and is the deity we have to worship — it doesn’t matter if a few million lungs shut down forever. In a competitive global economy every decimal point counts.

And by allowing a cash-rich culture to flourish, the opium of the middle classes is no longer religion (sadly for the Bharatiya Janata Party) but mobile phones, affordable cars, and homes on EMIs.

The Indian government, alas, seems to be following the same policy — thus the linked wholehearted attempt to keep the industrywallahs happy because after all the growth rate of the country cannot be allowed to dip. If the Sensex falls how can we claim our seat at the Group of Twenty? And what about the trickle-down effect? But the suspicion is that the money is no longer trickling into the hands of the masses, or to improve our security (despite the budgetary allocations) — it is instead going into the coffers of the political parties and politicians.

The real crisis of democracy is that there is a steady decline in the percentage of votes by which people are voted into power — and if you have to either entice the electorate to come out, or bribe them to stay at home, you need money. And in India there are elections all the time. For the Congress coalition, things are on a roll — as the Opposition seems to have committed mass suicide. Soon there will be little to distinguish us from our neighbours such as Pakistan or Bangladesh or even Afghanistan — because there is little debate and no anger about policy. We only seem to discuss trivia all the time.

Remember our crocodile tears at the lack of bulletproof vests for the police during the 26/11 episode? This week the sickening photographs of policemen parked near the Gateway of India sitting in the open, with little protection, ostensibly to provide security makes a mockery of all the 26/11 remembrances which are playing out on TV channels. When will we ever learn?

The recent cases of Satyam in Andhra Pradesh and the infamous Koda kaand in Jharkhand, and the impunity with which culprits vanish, are exonerated or live in luxuriously equipped jails cannot augur well. And yet, we are not angry enough — spending hours discussing Headley instead. This is a conveniently-created distraction of a man in US custody whom the Americans will not allow us to approach for questioning because they have already seen the finesse with which we have turned the Kasab trial into a year-long circus. We are still squabbling over who did what and begging Pakistan for information. The Americans understand anger, they understand patriotism. They will not allow the single death of an American to go unavenged.

The real issues accumulate and fester, and are all interconnected — pushing us further and further on a downward spiral: such as the rampant mining of valuable minerals, displacing indigenous people in tribal areas which is taking place with little regard to the environment or to the global terrorism links which are emerging from there. However, here too we find convenient distractions — how sexy it is to discuss the "stone grinding" in Mayawati’s parks, for instance. The real environmental issues are shoved aside for cheap headlines. How clever is that?

This kind of denial is simply not a good sign — we may be proud of the fact that we are the "least corrupt" in South Asia but that is hardly anything to crow about. Already the media abroad has scented blood and the feel-good stories about India are on the decline. At a recent event in the UK a politician rued that India was squandering away its goodwill. A government which has been voted in with a decisive mandate (no matter how slim) needs to be more pro-active. And we need to be much more angry.

The writer can be contacted at kishwardesai@yahoo.com