Pride without prejudice
A.J. Philip

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. Sreedharan’s 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.

Sreedharan’s 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. The astronomical royalty advances authors like Raj Kamal Jha and Jhumpa Lahiri receive is a measure of the coming of age of the Indian writer.

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 India’s 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 Taiwan’s, 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. The economic reforms initiated by the P.V. Narasimha Rao government have been making an impact despite the hiccups they suffered when the apex court ruled against the immediate privatisation of the oil sector majors. 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 India’s 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 India’s 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. Vajpayee’s 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 nature’s scheme of things is wholly overlooked. But the Prime Minister’s 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 Minister’s 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 people’s 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 Bharati’s 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 man’s 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 court’s 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 women’s doubles at Wimbledon, Anju Bobby George’s triumph in world athletics, India’s 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 Hussein’s 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.

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