MILLIONAIRES IN SLUMS

COMMENTARY ARCHIVES, 17 Feb 2009

Vithal Rajan

At the end of February 2009, the outcome of two events dominate the minds of the Indian middleclass, though both to any rational person would appear trivial and of no consequence.

The first is the question whether Slumdog Millionaire, after sweeping the Golden Globes and the Bafta Awards, would secure Oscars for India. It doesn’t seem to matter that it is really a British film; the middleclass Indian with his fragile ego would love to bolster his self-confidence with such vicarious glory.

It doesn’t matter to him that the film depicts the terrible lives children lead in Dharavi, the great slum of Mumbai, the largest and perhaps the most terrible in the Third World.  There is a Bollywood happy ending in the film, and that assuages guilt.

The second event is the coming national election. Who will win? Would it be the carcass of the Congress Party, which two generations ago was composed of honourable freedom fighters led by Mahatma Gandhi? Or will it be the right-wing BJP, which encourages unemployed Hindu youths to kill Muslims and Christians in well-planned sporadic acts of violence under the openly avowed slogan of  creating ‘One People, One Country, One Culture?’

Have Europeans heard something like this before – ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer?’ Yes, exactly, some of the Hindu Right’s ideologues once did admire Hitler. Or will it be the tired Left which recently took land away from poor peasants to give it to the Tatas, India’s oldest corporate house, to make a middleclass car? Or will it be a coalition of petty regional groups as corrupt as the larger parties? Does anyone in her right mind really care?

But in a way, there is a sub-textual connection between the two events. The film is really about the desperately poor in India. A conservative estimate would place around 350 million souls in such a category, men, women, and children.

They might have around 70 million breadwinners, who every year plead in vain with the government to assure them just 100 days of employment, just 100 days of work a year. Every now and then public works, like building roads, are started by the government to prevent famine, and enable people to live with semi-starvation in the worst-hit areas.

Statutory minimum wages are rarely paid even by government departments, and the breadwinner is happy to receive rupees 50 – around One Euro – for a day’s hard labour. The Indian middleclass statistician would calculate that if 70 million breadwinners – many of them women – were to receive rupees 50 per day for 100 days a year, the total burden on government would come to the colossal aggregate of rupees 350,000 millions.

This is the exact amount – a 35 percent hike – by which the Indian Defence Budget has gone up  in the interim vote-on-account budget declared just now before elections. The children and their parents who live in Dharavi slum, and others in similar misery around the country, have been forgotten because some terrorists shot up upper-class people at Tata’s famous Taj Mahal Hotel, a bomb-throw away from Dharavi.

The Indian parliament heard with silent approbation that the huge hike had been occasioned by the changed security situation, following the terrorist attack in Mumbai in November 2008. None seemed to question whether an increase in the defence budget would get rid of terrorism.

While there is no linear link between poverty and terrorism, few can deny that great poverty among large masses of people in the Indian subcontinent creates a soup of misery which breeds terrorists of all political shades.

The Mumbai terror attack left one Pakistani youngster alive in the hands of the police. We know that he dropped out of school in the fourth grade of primary school, that his parents are very poor and his elder brother pulls a handcart in Lahore. The terrorist network gave him money, an identity, and a leader to respect – just as it was with the Hitler youth – of how long ago?

Now, the Indian police have arrested three trainee terrorists who have come out of a well-known Sufi order! How could the mystic Sufis – whose syncretic beliefs affirm love for all people and acceptance of all faiths – how could they have produced terrorists? Well, almost exactly as Hinduism has produced terrorists who have in recent years killed and raped Muslims and Christians.

Or the way Germany of the 1930s produced the Nazis – the same land and culture that had once produced Goethe and Schiller, Bach and Mendelsohn.  The youth who go on a rampage do not read Rumi of Tabriz, or the Shankaracharya, or Goethe. A demagogic leader gives them a cause, the humiliation of their circumstances provides them with a goad for violence.

In the old days, demagogues like Hitler got only rare chances to seize power; nowadays every hamlet produces its local demagogue, and they learn from each other and network, mimicking in an awful manner the power of the distributed programming systems of the IT virtual world.

It is true that Indian leadership has a duty to provide security for the Indian people, but such security should start with food security, security of employment, of access to education and health.

It is not so much that vast sums of money are needed but political will – if a poor Cuba – encircled by a hostile economic blockade – can give a high standard of education, public health and gender equality, surely every other country can do so as well?

When St. Thomas came to India, it became home to Christianity long before Europe; when the Romans drove the Jews out of Jerusalem, Cochin became an early home for the Jewish diaspora. An Indian king from Kerala was converted by the Prophet Mohammed himself. It is the fault of government, and the selfish rich in whose interests it works, that the roving Hindu ‘saffron brigades’ know nothing of their cultural history.

These bands – in tragic mimicry of the Taliban – humiliate Hindu women, as well, for wearing jeans, or going out with boy friends, though relishing the soft porn of Bollywood in darkened theatres. Deprived of any control over their own lives, they as a band try to control the lives of others, who are weaker or isolated. Political India has encouraged such violence, for out of violence comes fear, and out of fear they hope will come votes, and power, and profits.

If the slumdogs could reflect on their own lives as happens in the film, they would vote in patriots in the old sense of the word, who would think the glory of a people lay not in a millionaire list in Forbes, or rich IT entrepreneurs, but in a happy democratic people living in a land that sustained them all in dignity and wisdom.

And such leaders would not increase their defence budget by quantum leaps, but they would make peace with neighbours, dismantle their nuclear weapons, hold out a helping hand to the nascent democracy of Pakistan, and start learning from China instead of petulantly and ineffectually confronting the Asian giant.

But why should the Indian rich let the vast masses of the poor have a better life when they could lose so much? Yes, they would lose a lot. They would lose the fear of wildly spreading TB, and of malaria; they would lose fear of the water they drink, or the food they eat; they would lose the fear of walking on the streets, or of mixing with working people.

They would lose interest in meaningless symbols like Oscars for films made about India, they would lose their worry which corrupt politician to back, or which mafia leader to buy off. Though the iconic Taj Mahal Hotel of Mumbai is not in Dharavi, you can smell Dharavi just outside its air-conditioned doors. If the rich of India turned towards genuine democracy, they would no longer live in the shadow of slums.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 17 Feb 2009.

Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: MILLIONAIRES IN SLUMS, is included. Thank you.

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