Hazare Vs. Pawar. The Saint and His Sinner.

India’s split psyche is witnessing a mighty clash between Her personalities. Two colossal Maharastrian bhoomi putras. Hazare the son of the soil and Pawar who seems to own each and every last crumb of it. A man defined by austerity, on a fast unto the death, against a blimp, defined by unbridled greed.

This historical smack down began with the Government watering down the Lokpal Bill(Citizen Ombudsman Bill) draft to an unrecognizable concoction of itself. This molestation of the spirit of the Bill has been in process for the 42 years that the Bill has been pending. The original draft was designed to bring the corrupt to an expedited justice on a complaint of the common man.

This is in the spirit of the Right To Information Act that Hazare was so terribly instrumental in. An act that empowers any lunatic, who can bang up a letter, unprecedented access to Government files which leads to exposure of bureaucratic misdeeds. Previously this was the privilege of nephews of forgettable MLA’s and life members of the Gymkhana Club.

A memorable reported case was of a disheveled gentlemen dressed in a lungi and bathroom slippers given VIP treatment by his local ration shop administrators. Previously they had refused to supply him a ration card with a large dose of contempt. The chap had availed the RTI Act and these bullies, who had been pulled up by their superiors, supplied the card and asked for forgiveness.

The promise of this poetic justice cannot be compromised. But a cancerously corrupt Congress Government not only has redrafted the proposed bill to only allow the Speaker of the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha Chairman to refer cases of alleged graft but they also formed a Group Of Ministers to draft the bill led by none other than the perfect embodiment of corruption, Sharad Pawar. The equivalent of installing Tiger Woods as the Principal of Lady Shri Ram College.

I can imagine Hazare laughing heartedly to this comical absurdity then experiencing an intense contempt for another obscene molestation by Pawar on his country. Hazare has risen to lead this national movement out of sheer bloody mindedness. With a God like strength of character that feeds the energy needed to treat a cancer that most us see as inoperable.

That character has been formed by a hard life. Hazare hails from Ralegan Siddhi in Maharastra. The village was parched half dead by drought, alcoholism being the only thirst satiated with copious amounts of local grog. Her inhabitants in a life sucking feudal quicksand.

Returning to Ralegan Siddhi and fired by the teachings of the Mahatma, which he read quietly in his spare time whilst an Indian Army driver, he first tackled the alcoholism that crippled the villagers.

He then implemented a water collection and conservation system that made, for the first time, irrigation possible. A resurrecting, baptism of hope.

Then with community labour he built a school for the newly inspired village youth.

Constructive victories that made Ralegan Siddhi a pilot village for Indian rural development. A guiding light that saw untold thousands achieve a self reliance, allowing them to enjoy an undreamt of human dignity.

Pawar shares these developmental instincts. However, it is no secret that his ‘village’ population consists entirely of his close relatives. Who have enjoyed a long golden age of prosperity.

His criminal intelligence is colossal. If it had been applied to the betterment of India there is no telling where She would stand. There is no doubt his legacy would have shone a great shine. But now in the increasingly dim twilight of his life he is perceived as a pathologically greedy old man who has the gall to declare he is worth 3.6 crore to the Election Commission.

Pawar’s mantra of ‘greed is good’ is as fashionable as Hazare’s Gandhian beliefs are unfashionable. Hazare’s gospel of an India of self-reliant villages has long been pigeon holed in the looney file. But he has made a spiritual connection with a young middle class that aspire to internationalism and whose closest experience to rural India is Hauz Khaas village. Young adults who use mobile phones, the 21^st century’s Kalashnikov, indiscriminality.

Blissfully, with this genteel uprising Pawar has already resigned from the drafting of the Bill. Can the movement keep up this momentum? Can India find a peace between the two warring impulses instilled in Her DNA? The sulking tactics of utopian non-violence and shamelessly exploitative feudal politics. The rustic pureness of Khadi pressed against a comfortable Raymond suit.

I pray the final equilibrium finds an India that is not a fiefdom of fractured personalities. It needs to be home to the Lokpal Bill and sizeable prisons, well stocked with Pawar’s extended family.

Arab Spring Uprising In India?

New Delhi: Earlier today the Arab Spring uprisings spread to New Delhi where one million protesters congregated at Rajpath. The rally was generally peaceful until pandemonium broke out later in the day. Delhi Police believe 23 are dead with several hundred injured.

The protest was initially organised by student leader, Amit Das from the Communist Party aligned All India Students Association “The mobile phone is the 21^st century’s Kalashnikov!” he told this reporter. “We got all our comrades to get online and rally our troops!”.

Amit was angrily interrupted by Ajay Goel leader of the ABVP, the BJP aligned student union, ‘ Arrey yaar, these Bengali duffers tried to do this but they don’t own a computer bhai! My Father owns a mobile shop only’.

Amit Das tried to respond but was enthusiastically interrupted by the Muslim Students Union and the powerful National Students Union and an emerging union from Panipat, with a membership of two. It did not escape this reporters observation that many of the student leaders were in their late forties, early fifties and that many of their children were in attendance as it was University study leave.

Deejay from the Congress aligned NSUI, finally managed to be heard. ‘We were appalled that these Unions were campaigning for the down throw of our glorious leader. Soniaji Zindabaad! So we started giving away mobile phones if people promised not to attend. The ABVP then irresponsibly promised, with the help of their seditious BJP masters, a 38” plasma television with every busload that came to the rally. We naturally responded by offering a 42” plasma television with a built in coffee machine and promptly had Ajaj Goel arrested.’

The NSUI also took very strong exception that Mrs. Gandhi, the President of the Congress, had not been invited as head speaker at such an important rally. Regardless that it was focused towards the down throw of her own Government.

Mamta Banerjee took an even stronger offence. But on questioning couldn’t say why she was offended but insisted she was very angry indeed and couldn’t stop shouting.(Without taking a single breath).

Despite the divisions the rally was a historic display of democracy in play. A sea of humanity demanding the reclamation of her beloved India. Columns of smoke from burnt buses punctuated the horizon. Jats, with beautifully constructed homemade deadly weapons, repeatedly pierced the night sky with a 1000 spears in appreciation of the charismatic speakers from every party and every faith. Whilst the middle classes made a herculean effort by not panicking when the network was jammed and they couldn’t get in touch with their drivers.

After a fiery speech by a leader of the BJP the crowd started to proceed to 10 Janpath with a taste for blood. It was Cairo all over again. The power of the unstoppable crowd was simply terrifying.

Then Mrs. Gandhi took the podium and the less intelligent looked dumbstruck. How could she be in two places at the same time?

Mrs. Gandhi, in impeccable Hindi-Italian, charmed the crowd to a murmur and said that the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi dictated violence was completely unjustifiable but if the million strong crowd felt it was unavoidable they should attack the BJP headquarters which was just round the corner, ‘..past the second set of lights.’

In any case she said, '..inflation, corruption and no basic services is an incredibly clever CIA plot!'

This is when a glorious movement lost it’s way. Mr. Diwan, a tailor from Bengali Market tells us his story.

‘I was minding my own business, sewing a shirt with a tricky rainbow design ,when there was an almighty noise outside my shop. I stupidly opened the shutters to find a mob shouting for a tape measure. I took a quick look at my bottle of Old Monk to see if I had taken one too many pegs because I saw at least 10,000 people start to measure a dozen plasma televisions. When they found they were 36” instead of 38” all hell broke loose!'

On this reporter asking what happened next, searching for details of how Connaught Place was reduced to rubble, he admitted he didn’t know as he had just regained consciousness.

Globalisation Brings Equality And Environmental Disaster

14 Years ago, newly married, I very proudly showed off Mangere Bridge to Mitu, my Indian wife. Her reaction has stayed with me. Expecting glowing praise for the lack of crazed bus drivers and unpopulated nature strips she solemnly said, ’It’s just not fair’. It was the first time in her life she saw, first hand, the gross inequalities in the distribution of the world’s resources.

Chandran Nair is the founder of the Global Institute For Tomorrow and author of Consumptionomics. He has insightfully highlighted how that inequality could not only be an injustice but could bring consumer capitalism to it’s knees.

Globalisation has been an important driver of developed nation’s economies. Automobile manufacturing joint ventures in India, Japanese plasma televisions in Liberia. Literally, mountainsides of Australian and New Zealand coal shipped to Asian steel furnaces.

The West sees gob smacking potential in markets like India where car ownership is 30 per 1000 citizens compared to 750 per thousand in the OECD. They feel justified when they see China become the world’s largest car consumer at only 150 cars per 1000.

This is Nair’s point. The 20^th century’s watermark of success was indiscriminate consumption. India and China, deprived of Lycra cycling shorts and iPads, are making quantum leaps in consumerism. Hungry tigers pouncing about after being freed from the chains of homebred Stalinism. This he believes has to be vanquished for if the developing world continues to affectionately adopt this model the world will perish.

If China and India were to have a comparable consumption of cars of 750 per 1000 there simply wouldn’t be enough oil to power 1.5 billion cars.

Nair makes the unsettling claim that Americans consume 9 billion chickens a year and that Asia consumes 16 billion. But here’s the thing. Asia is 13 times the population of the United States and if they were to consume at American levels by 2050 they would be impossibly consuming 120 billion birds.

Nair projects this vision of increasing environmental disaster that could, ironically, eventuate with a more equal world.

I greatly enjoy Nair’s take on this startling paradox but what is acutely disappointing is his proposed solution.

He believes that Asia should almost solely bear the responsibility of reducing consumption of it’s citizens. Strong Government intervention, with various environment taxes, to ensure that Mr. Singh or Mr. Lee don’t aspire to Mr. Smith’s open plan townhouse. To settle for less than the West, for the greater good.

Last year my eyes welled up thinking what a great humanitarian I was. I went with my Father-in-laws servant, affectionately called Hero, to buy him a mobile phone. Being a tightfisted humanitarian I purchased the cheapest model. I pompously handed it to Hero, who looks like a Somali pirate, waiting for the flow of tears and great touching of feet. He took one look at the phone, screwed his face up like he had taken poison and threw it back across the counter. ‘Touch wallah chaiye!’ (I want the one with the touch screen!).

Hero is illiterate and comes from one of the poorest districts of West Bengal but he would dutifully see the advertisements for local rip-offs of the iphone in the Times Of India.

The heart of India is now host to the strongest consumerism. They will not take second best even if it kills the planet. Why should they?

Isn’t it absurd to expect India to punish her citizens if they aspire to their western counterpart’s level of environmental destruction?

A draft of this article was shown to friends and I was surprised at the number who insisted that India must further decrease it’s carbon footprint. Possibly exacerbated by Gillard backtracking on her election promise to not implement a carbon tax.

Grudgingly, on long careful reflection I feel this has genuine merit. If this planet is to see it’s next century without it’s populace choking on Chinese car exhaust and drowning in apopylytic floods from Russian forest fires, India must equally bear the yoke.

Assuming there are one billion people in the developed world, quick math gives us the equation. If the third world was to equally share the burden of nursing our planet back to health they would have to increase their consumption, per capita, by 50 fold and the First World would have to consume a 6th of current levels.

The West has molested Mother Nature single handed, whilst excluding India from 150 years of industrial progress, and alone must pay penance.