Why government's plans to make beggars sing for Modi beg for a spoof

By now, All India Bakchod's "Every Party Song" skit with the "swag" Irrfan Khan has broken the internet and the geeky monsters must have tired of it already. So here's another idea for AIB: please get creative with the latest gem from the stable of Narendra Modi, although the sub-stable is Arun Jaitley's.

Mr Jaitley, whose questionable stint as the Union finance minister, ego bruises with the RBI governor and University of Chicago's Booth School economist Raghuram Rajan, and the latest washout in the form of Parliament's ongoing monsoon session, are matters of online lore and hushed whispers in the North Block, has, however, reinvented himself as the Union minister of information and broadcasting. For the Modi government is nothing but a whole lot of (mis/dis)information and a very, very broad casting indeed.   

So what's the latest gem? You might have heard about it. The government, particularly the eminent I&B ministry, wants to train about 3,000 beggars to render musically the achievements, pet schemes and signature plans to help popularise them among the teeming multitudes of urban India. Especially, the commuter folks - you know the millions who jostle their way to work and back on the metros, local trains, trams, RVs and other some such modes of public transport in our bustling cities. They will "pilot" the "project" in Mumbai.

Beggars belief? It's true.

It is surely a question of tradition and individual talent. Such is Modi government's unwavering faith in troubadours and wandering minstrels (a motley tribe on the verge of extinction, carrying on without any help from the state to protect their livelihood choices, somehow still scrambling for survival by faking a maimed leg along with an Altaf Raja/Kailash Kherish nasal melancholia on rickety, accident-prone trains of Indian Railways) that it wants to use them to parrot the merits (and only merits) of seemingly well-meaning "schemes".

In other words, beggars, essentially that section of the below poverty line laboring force that has been duly excluded from any employment opportunity whatsoever by grinding poverty, disenfranchisement, displacement and migration, lack of skills, lack of prospects, age, gender-specific conditions like pregnancy and child-bearing (often, resulting from rape!) by single women among the urban poor, will be singing praises for jumlas like Swachh Bharat, Beti Bachachao Beti Padhao, Jan Dhan Yojana, Make In India and the latest, the Road Safety Policy Bill.

Beggars can't be choosers, but they can be crooners. In Modiland, your adages and longstanding wisdom will be twisted and turned to produce enlightenment of a different sort, one that is fuelled by gas, a lot of gas. 

Apparently, the project will be "anchored" by the I&B ministry's "song and drama division". The irony is evidently all too lost on those hell bent on executing this song and dance of an employment generation plan. All India Radio will work out the logistics, perhaps teleport beggars from assorted traffic signals of Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and other places where there are beggars. Please don't ask how the 3,000 will be chosen from the tens of thousands thronging every upwardly mobile city and its ghettoes: I am betting on a lucky draw. Or an audition/talent hunt in the style of Indian Idol, Nach Baliye, Jhalak Dikhla Jaa. Perhaps they will get Madhuri Dixit, Chetan Bhagat or Malaika Arora Khan to judge who among the begging folk have the loudest voice to shout from the train top. Perhaps, "Chhaiyya Chhaiyya" will come handy.

So long, paid media.

Exactly how do you tell a government, which has recently conducted a grisly public spectacle of a rushed-up wee-hour execution based on shaky, inconclusive evidence and despite massive protests from the civil society and some of the best legal brains, that making beggars (the most hapless, uncared for, comprising the lowest of the low in the socio-economic ladder, with no education, jobs, access to healthcare, state facilities, and most of the time, not even with any papers or documentation of any kind confirming their identity) sing paeans for the very government that is responsible for their plight, is the cruellest of all jokes. That it is the height of insensitivity to have one enrolled beggar chant "jai ho", while hundreds of others fall off from even the radar of visibility, disappear beyond the event horizon of a propaganda war against those worse off than the most aam of the aam aadmi and aam aurat.

So this "remuneration model" - of plucking a few thousand beggars out of harshest of poverty by turning them into trained singing monkeys in exchange for a paltry sum of money - is the best this government, under the able guidance of Arun Jaitley, can come up with to dazzle us with their unique socioeconomic insight. We are expected to believe that 3,000 beggars-turned-crooners-turned-irritators will "incentivise" the rest of their lot, the unchosen, unwashed, unfed millions not lucky enough to get through the roulette wheel of Modi-fied luck, to pursue singing and dancing as lucrative careers in the hope of clearing the entrance examination for this newly created government job. If not, they can line up before Bajrangi Bhaijaan's residence, in case they land the role of a blink-and-you-miss-it extra in the next Rs300-crore megaventure. Or, they can cross LoC and get lost in Pakistan, only to be rescued with fanfare by a very thankful ministry of external affairs.

This from a government which has imposed reckless bans on beef-eating and selling, online pornography, documentaries that question its justice system, books that investigate its so-called ancient Hindu glory. This from a government which has installed under-qualified, unmerited stooges in educational institutions fundamental to the nation's sociocultural ethos of secular scholarship. This from a government which has looked the other way when farmers killed themselves after crop damage from unseasonal rains and tried its best to fritter away the basic safety nets against coerced, illegal land grab.

Clearly, all the gaudy billboards and banners in every city of this country loudly proclaiming the miracles of Modi raj aren't enough. Clearly, front-pages of national dailies and magazines, homepages of websites and their pop-ups, the SMSs, the hello tunes, the Twitter DMs, the Twitter trends, the Reddit top slots aren't enough. Clearly, selfie as statecraft isn't enough. Clearly, there is no end to half truths and hokum that this government, and its ministry of information and broadcasting, can churn out, and the gimmicks they can resort to resell something that has been sold a gadzillion times already. Sold, recycled, and now, pretty much discarded.

Even though the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act, 1959, has a dual focus on both punishment and rehabilitation of the "begging offenders", the tendency has always been punitive, with very little ground reform. Without state-sanctioned identity and badges of birth, beggars are not even second class citizens, who can protest well against the systemic discrimination they have been putting up with. According to legal scholar Usha Ramanathan, "Beggary laws persist in Indian jurisprudence despite evidence of abuse and presumption of criminality among the 'ostensibly poor'". Moreover, as Amartya Sen, Joseph Raz and Martha Nussubaum have forcefully argued, actual liberty must come from "development as freedom", positive liberty, which are not merely absence of debilitating circumstances (such as being treated as perpetual potential criminals, habitual offenders, subjected to coarsest of policing and state/penal censure), but having social, economic, civic and political infrastructures of consensual integration.  

To make beggars sing praises for one of the most anti-poor governments in the history of India amounts to a macabre public sneering at their abysmal plight. I am reminded of that poignant scene from Baahubali, when eulogies in Sanskrit/elite Tamil are sung in the background exactly as corporal punishment is meted out to offenders [perhaps dissidents, tramps, beggars] in the "prosperous", "golden age" Maahismati. The theatre of absurd that is the Modi government can learn much from that one scene alone. But would it really?

No, it won't. So, AIB, start spoofing this "Farewell to Alms" farce. Please!