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Shashi Warrier

Pound of Flesh

Bharat Ratna Gulzarilal Nanda

One is Gulzarilal Nanda, twice caretaker prime minister who was recently awarded the Bharat Ratna. He is a century old and, as I write this, not in very good shape. He never did anything spectacular -- even if he had wanted to, he was never in power long enough -- but he is the soul of quiet decency, a quality that is increasingly conspicuous by its absence in modern-day Indian politics. Perhaps Nanda considers himself better off outside politics, since he has the freedom to avoid hobnobbing with the likes of Laloo Prasad Yadav.

Chandra Shekhar

The other is Chandra Shekhar. This gentleman has, for all his faults, acknowledged one basic perception that no other PM has had the nerve to present clearly; he admitted that India was poor. He is the only prime minister I remember who said we must cut our collective coat to meet the cloth.

He had no asinine rhetoric about meeting the 'aspirations of the people', no protestations of being 'a humble farmer', nothing about 'ruling by consensus' or 'mastering contradictions'. Instead, he had the honesty and the common sense to admit the basic truth that we cannot talk of the 'aspirations of the people' while holding out a begging bowl before the IDA, the World Bank and the Aid India Consortium.

He was the only one who remembered that the refrain we sing, nay trumpet to potential investors (India has everything you need), is so vastly different from what we mumble when we visit, hat in hand, the Aid India Consortium (India has nothing, so could we have some more please, pretty please?).

Contrast these with Narasimha Rao, whose name figures in the JMM and other scandals, or with Rajiv Gandhi, who seems to be involved in the equally notorious Bofors scandal. Or with Deve Gowda -- who used to lug his overlarge family with him when he went gallivanting -- who asked Bill Gates for money and advice during Gates' recent grip to India.

Gates left without committing himself, which is understandable. Even the sanitised version of India was enough to deter him from putting much of his money here. Perhaps the sight of cattle on the roads unnerved him, and gave him the entirely valid notion that there is more to India than he saw. I suspect he still doesn't know how lucky he is, being part of the vanishing small proportion of Western tourists who go back home without having suffered at least one draining episode of what is perhaps our most famous export, "Delhi belly".

Gates visited only one India of the three that there seem to be.

The first of them, the one that Gates visited, is growing fast. It has entrepreneurship, it has money, it has education and some form of justice by way of access to courts. Lifestyles in this India are comfortable, and attitudes western, with an increasing number of relatively emancipated women and all the gadgetry that goes with development. Rules, in this India, are meant to be bent and progress is rapid. This is the India that says, "Come, we've got it all."

A second India struggles to work every day. There is little time for anything but family and work. Lifestyles in this India enable survival and, possibly, some education beyond the minimum. But opportunities are rare and the ambition of most people in this India is to get a government job, after which they can sit back and be paid a living for doing next to nothing. Justice is a relative thing for this India: leading a quiet life is far more important. Subsistence is the watchword.

The third India is appallingly, horrifyingly poor. Here there is not enough to eat and, often, not enough water to drink. There is squalor, and filth, and disease. There is illiteracy and an utter lack of knowledge of the ropes and of the system that people in the other two Indias have. Infant mortality is high and life expectancy, low. Justice is a bad joke -- or an expensive luxury -- in this third, silent India of the dispossessed.

The first India numbers maybe 50 million, no more. The second might number 10 times that, half a billion or thereabouts. The third, the forgotten third that we are trying to shove under the carpet, numbers a third of the population.

To get this in perspective, let's look once again at the numbers. Indians below the poverty line, which itself is a pretty meagre allowance -- that's the third India I'm talking about -- number well over 300 million. The population of divided India at the time of independence was under 350 million. In this, the 50th year after independence, we have roughly the same number of oppressed that we had when the British finally left. Our poor number more than the entire population of the US.

In the midst of these horrendously vast casualties of governmental callousness, it seems to me worse than inane to celebrate 50 years of freedom the way we are doing it. Even more galling, and painful, is the commercialisation of the anniversary. The naming of the recent cricket tournament the Pepsi Independence Cup was a national shame: what did Pepsi have to do with Independence? Or are we talking of PepsiCo's freedom to sell their products in this country?

Consider Ford's advertisement of 400 special cars to commemorate Independence: consider it well in the context of Henry Ford's support of Nazism, his insistence on supplying armoured cars to Nazi forces in France well into the 1940s, and his publication of the false and terrible Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

These are events which reflect values which must be utterly abhorrent to Nanda and those few surviving people who retain the values that got us Independence in the first place. It's not in my place to lecture, but it's worthwhile considering the quality of what we are doing with our independence in context of the price that the generation that preceded us paid for it.