In a society in which the excesses of the politician-bureaucrat kleptocracy have become legendary, there is no reason to disbelieve the report of a nameless American diplomat in India outed by ‘Wikileaks’ whistle-blower Julian Assange to the effect that circa October 23, 2008, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati had sent an empty airplane from Lucknow to Mumbai to pick up a favourite brand of sandals for her royal self. Ever since India’s more regal, even if perhaps not as extravagant, prime minister Indira Gandhi mooted the idea of a “committed bureaucracy”, the 5,000-strong, steel frame IAS (Indian Administrative Service), which effectively governs the country at the behest of the light-fingered political class, has supinely accepted the latter’s worst excesses. It took a foreign diplomat to regard this incident as an act of rank extravagance.
Nor are such excesses of India’s new royalty unusual. I have information from an unimpeachable source that when he was chief minister of Maharashtra in the 1980s, the late S.B. Chavan (1920-2004) while on a visit to the drought-stricken district of Aurangabad, sent a Boeing jet back to Bombay (as it then was) to pick up his lunch. On another occasion while touring the earthquake devastated district of Latur in 1993, Ramdas Athavle, a Dalit leader and minister in the Maharashtra state government at the time, deployed a dozen people to look for komdi (chicken) for his beer lunch.
Such Bourbon style extravagance and insensitivity is the defining characteristic of post-independence India’s socialist political class whose net worth as political analyst P. Sainath details (The Hindu, September 21), is multiplying in inverse proportion to the accelerating impoverishment of the poor majority. According to Sainath, in 2009 the declared assets of Union minister Praful Patel aggregated Rs.79 crore; last month they were self-declared at Rs.122 crore. Minister of state for communications and IT, Milind Deora’s self-declared assets swelled from Rs.17 crore to Rs.33 crore during the same period and of Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy — son of the late Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy — from Rs.72 crore to over Rs.357 crore in the past 24 months, a rate of wealth accretion Sainath calculates at an average of Rs.50 lakh per day.
All this might seem unconnected with despatching jet planes cross-country for small errands. But dig deeper and you’ll find the connection.
Touched by greatness
The untimely death on September 22 of former India test cricket captain Mansur Ali Khan (‘Tiger’) Pataudi opened up the sluice gates of your editor’s memory and brought back memorable moments with this natural leader of men on cricket greens. I can’t claim friendship with the late cricket legend, but I was an acquaintance and often his team mate in the Bombay Gymkhana side.
As one who regards cricket as a participative rather than spectator sport, I never had the opportunity to watch Tiger in full flow in a test match. But when on the field with him, I had sufficient occasion to experience that he was an inspiring leader who led from the front and brought out the best in his players. I distinctly recall a cool Saturday afternoon match at the Bombay Gym when I walked out to the middle to bat at No. 8 with Tiger at the other end. The Bombay Gym side was in dire straits with the club’s ‘jeering section’ in the pavilion led by current CNN-IBN television anchor Rajdeep Sardesai in full cry. But a quiet word of encouragement by Tiger prompted me to screw up courage and play a memorable innings to win the day. Later a squeeze of the shoulder with a laconic “well done” — he was a man of few words — created a Proustean moment. I was touched by greatness.
On another occasion when a Ranji Trophy star was repeatedly stealing singles off me at midoff, as he walked to the top of his bowling run-up Tiger asked me to let him field the next one. As soon as the batsman tapped it to short midoff and ran, Tiger was on the ball, and in one swift motion picked it up, swiveled around and knocked down the stumps at the bowler’s end to record one of the finest run-outs in cricket history. Yes indeed: a great cricketer and leader who led by example. God broke the mould in which he was fashioned.
Unfair & unlovely
For the nation of shop-keepers who less than a century ago accidently established one of the largest colonial empires in world history, old habits die hard. Especially if it’s in pursuit of profit. A case in point is the former Lever Bros renamed Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL), the Mumbai-based FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) heavyweight which dominates the home and personal care products market (sales revenue: Rs.19,400 crore in 2010-11) in the subcontinent. Despite the ban on advertising and promotion of skin whitening lotions and creams in most developed countries including the UK for being demeaning and racist, for over four decades HUL has been marketing a skin whitening cream branded Fair & Lovely, which reportedly contributes 15 percent of the company’s annual revenue. All scientific reports suggesting that repeated use of skin whiteners and particularly Fair & Lovely cause skin disorders and possibly skin cancer, have been suppressed by HUL and other companies in this insidious trade.
Yet, not content with having brainwashed the country’s bovine middle class that fair is synonymous with lovely despite considerable evidence to the contrary, HUL’s comprador managers have now focused their attention upon small-town India. According to a press release (September 19), the HUL-promoted Fair & Lovely Foundation (sic) has instituted scholarship awards of Rs.1 lakh each for “many poor girls wanting to pursue their dream careers”, which have received 14,000 applications countrywide. Of them 96 women students from Andhra Pradesh aspiring to complete their graduate, postgrad or doctoral programmes were short-listed for “final screening” by a high-powered panel of academics, who seem only too willing to associate with this sales promotion schema clothed in altruism.
Because the plain truth is that the great majority of the “poor girls” of Andhra Pradesh are lovely in their own way, and acceptance of Fair & Lovely scholarships will necessitate their accepting the value premise that only fair is lovely, transforming them into life-long customers with a permanent inferiority complex. But perhaps that’s too complicated an argument for the white masters of HUL and their simpleton compradors in Mumbai.