The Pseudo-Indians : The Indian 'baboos'-Guilty as charged.
Hey Ramesh: Any opinion on the matter????
Book Review-Khuswant Singh
Title:The Great Indian Middle Class
Author:Pavan Verma [Penguin]
Source: The Hindustan Times
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With Malice Towards One And All...
(By Khushwant Singh)
Sitting on a time bomb -- You live in a large bungalow surrounded by a spacious garden full of fruit and flowers. You have colour TVs, refrigerators, air-conditioners, servants.
You entertain your rich friends with Scotch, Champagne, kababs, biryani, puddings and ice-cream. All around your fancy bungalow are jhuggi-jhonpri slums crammed with undernourished, underemployed, illiterate people who can't get one square meal a day. You ignore their existence. You raise the height of your boundary walls, put sharp pieces of broken glass on them, put up huge iron gates and employ a couple of 'durbans' armed with guns to guard your home. Whenever you drive out of your bungalow in your air-conditioned Maruti or Mercedes Benz, you put up your tinted glass windows to prevent beggars who accost you at every road crossing from stretching their hands inside your car.
Then it is time you should know this can't go on for too long. One day some of the jhuggi-jhonpri gang may kidnap one of your children and make you cough up a ransom of several lakhs.
Some day when they find an excuse they will break into your bungalow and take away all they can. The police will not come to your help because policemen's sympathies are with them: Both come from the same background. They are the deprived, have-nots. The haves are sitting on a time bomb which is ticking away and may explode any time.
This is the theme of Pavan Verma's latest book 'The Great Indian Middle Class' (Viking Penguin). It is not easy to define or enumerate the Indian 'bhadralok': At a rough guess, it comprises around 10 per cent of the population. They are educated, live in reasonable comfort and are largely to be found in big towns and cities. A good yardstick is that all Indians who can speak English are middle class. And though they form barely a tenth of the population, they matter more than the remaining 90 per cent.
It had never occurred to me till I read Verma's book that when delivering the most momentous oration on achieving independence, the famous tryst with destiny speech, Pandit Nehru spoke in English which 98 per cent of his countrymen could not understand. Apparently he felt that the 2 per cent who understood him were of greater consequence than the 98 per cent who did not. Lord Macaulay had indeed succeeded in breeding "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect." This was 1835. We had a splendid example in the great reformer, Raja Ram Mohun Roy. He maintained two houses: "One in which everything was western except Roy and another in which everything was Indian except Roy."
Only 40 years after Macaulay's dispensation, the eminent Bengali novelist, Bankim Chandra Chatterji wrote of the anglicised Indians: "The 'baboos' will be indefatigable in their talk, experts in a particular foreign language and hostile to their mother tongue... Some highly intelligent baboos will be born who will be unable to converse in their mother tongue... Like Vishnu they will have ten incarnations, namely clerk, teacher, accountant, doctor, lawyer magistrate, landlord, editor and unemployed... Babus will consume water at home, alcohol at their friends', abuses at the prostitutes and humiliation at the employers?"
Sarat Babu neatly summed up the constituents of the 'bhadralok' middle class Indians.
In the Constituent Assembly debates in 1946 all the Indians save one spoke in English: That was the Pathan leader Abdul Gaffar Khan who spoke in Hindustani.
The tragedy of India is that the middle class which has held the reins of power in its hands in most of the 50 years we have been independent has lost its moorings and its moral values and become unfit to rule. As long as the influence of Bapu Gandhi and Pandit Nehru lasted, it had some standards by which to gauge the rightness or wrongness of its actions. With the disappearance of Gandhi-Nehru (Pandit) values, erosion of religion, joint family norms of conduct began a frenetic race to acquire wealth and gadgets no matter how they were got, by use of black money, maintaining illegal accounts in Swiss banks, bribery, double dealing. The gap between the haves and have-nots became wider. Politics became a cesspool of corruption. MLAs and MPs were up for sale as Aya Rams Gaya Rams.
In this cesspool, V. P. Singh dropped the time bomb of Mandal Commission's recommendations. They had been gathering dust till V. P. decided to implement them in 1990. Hitherto deprived castes came into the political arena: Yadavs, Kurmis, Karunas, Reddis, Vanyaars, Nadars - and many others. In the race for supremacy they raised private armies: Ranvir Sena, Bhumi Sena, Lorit Sena, all armed to the teeth. Criminals with gory records of murder, robbery and rape became MLAs, MPs and Ministers.
How long can this chaotic state of affairs last? Unless the privileged middle class actively involves itself in ameliorating the living conditions of the impoverished, the hungry millions will surely rise against them and overwhelm them. Verma gives some instances of corporations and non-govemmental organisations which have engaged themselves in non-profit making enterprises.
Among big business houses are Tatas, Birlas, Godrejs, Bajajs, Ranbaxy, Nandas, Thapars and perhaps a few others. Then there is SEWA in Ahmedabad, AWARE in Hyderabad and a dozen others. But not enough. It has to be multiplied a thousand times if the rising resentment of those deprived is to be contained and the time bomb defused.
Verma's thesis is very disturbing and for that one reason among many others deserves serious consideration of all those concerned with the future of the country.
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Raja Ram Mohun Roy- The king of the 'baboos'<gg>
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