Will demonetisation drive reap what PM Modi is sowing for India's poor?

I wonder what our political pundits and parties would have done, if the poor were not there to serve as excuses and pretexts for everything that, otherwise, would be indefensible.

Wonder if you have figured out this riddle. Every political party stands and fights for the poor. They profess to be willing to suffer and die for the poor. (You’re right, no one has so died yet; but you never know!) Whatever is done in this country is all, without exception, only for the poor. Day after day we are urged to believe so.

But the plight of the poor only gets worse day by day. It is as if our stability stands on their impotence and helplessness. How would the present, clumsy demonetisation drive have been justified, but for the poor? The only justification is that the common man is willing to suffer! So it must be right! The only thing to do is to salute their happy, involuntary nobility. 

When Indira Gandhi nationalised banks, we were told it would be a shot in the arm for the poor. Poverty would survive only in our archives. We were given a soul-stirring slogan: Garibi hatao. Eradicate poverty!

Sanjay Gandhi got into the act, getting the message a trifle wrong. He launched the Delhi beautification drive by expelling the garib from Delhi. They were packed off to the infamous re-settlement colonies, with hardly any facilities, in the bitter chill of winter.

As many of them died then out of shock as their counterparts today die standing in our demonetisation queues. To that extent, their garibi was eradicated. Death, after all, as Hitler knew, solves all problems, especially garibi.

I remember the media then showcasing the excitement of rickshaw-pullers in Delhi at the prospect of bank nationalisation improving their lot overnight. They shouted slogans. They took out processions. They went wild with expectation. They faded away and were forgotten like the withered autumnal leaves that the wind blows away to oblivion. 

Now cut to the common man’s patient endurance of the nearly apocalyptic inconvenience, as he stands in interminable queues, for hours and days. I feel uncontrollable anger when their patience is misinterpreted smugly and stupidly.

When oily mouths sit on sets and praise the mellowness of the poor to the skies, one cannot help asking, “Why are you not found, my friend, waiting in queues? Why are you sitting here and not standing there? Are you not poetising patience only because you don’t know what it means?”

They are patient and hopeful, only because they are helpless and utterly desperate. Do they have any choice? What else can they do, other than being patient? What, except hope, do they have to clutch and clasp?

If your next meal depends on getting a few hundred rupees from the bank, you will stand patiently, very patiently, in queues. Don’t insult the poor by calling it patience. Call it by what it really is: utter desperation. 

Why is it forgotten that it is the hopeless that hold on to hopes, hoping against hope? The rich and the privileged, in contrast, abandon hope at the very first scratch of discomfort. 

We mock the poor by giving to their helplessness spins that insensitively distort the truth. It is incredible how those, who live at a maximum distance from the poor, the squalour and the destitution to which they are sunk, are so cocksure about how they feel and what their sentiments mean.

The logic seems to be: the less I know them, the better I understand their feelings. The safer I am from them, the more I can empathise with them!

No one - absolutely no one - enjoys standing in a queue for hours and days without even being sure if and when this waiting would yield any relief. Only those who have not waited in queues would think otherwise.

I stand in queues.

My legs begin to hurt in 20 minutes.

The blood vessels on my shanks begin to swell.

My nerves tingle.

My knees buckle.

My self-respect sinks.

I feel degraded. Because I know that only certain sections of the society are condemned to stand and suffer in queues.

Those who defend demonetisation and those who damn it are divided by their common hysterical love for the poor! Both sides want the monopoly over living and dying for the poor.

So, where is the problem? Why should there be this unseemly public wrangling? Why not sit together and come to some agreement on how best to serve the poor?

If the political parties feel so much for the poor, why can’t they, one wonders, embrace austerity for a change? Why can’t the thousands of crores wasted in politics-as-industry be re-directed towards the mitigation of the suffering and degradation our countrymen?

I admire Narendra Modi. He is arguably the most charismatic political leader in India at the moment. I know he can be effective, if and wherever he wants to. Just think of this. In the first three days of demonetisation, Modi was away from India.

During this period, governance at the Centre was like a rudderless ship adrift on a sea of impotence. The moment Modi landed in India, there was a tsunamic release of energy. A mammoth system, sleeping for days, woke up like in a fairytale. No further proof is required for what Modi can do, and the difference he can make. 

But this could also go against Modi. It robs him of all excuses for not doing enough to alleviate the misery of the poor and to honour the trust they have reposed in him. Have no doubt, it is the poor who voted Modi to power. The rich funded the campaign. But it was the poor that voted him in.

The question that puzzles me is this: why should Modi wait, as he now says he will, till 2019 to do something that may "cheer the poor"? Doesn’t that sound a bit specious? Can he hold out such a promise to the rich? Would they not laugh him out of court?

Suppose you say you are selling your goat in order to buy medicines for your ailing child. You deserve to be lauded for it. But then, if you say, in the very next breath, that you will buy medicines three years from now, when the next lamb becomes old enough to sell, it changes the complexion of the situation altogether.

The rich can afford to wait; but they won’t. Nor would you dare to keep them waiting.

The poor cannot afford to wait. Their problems - food, water, shelter, education, healthcare, livelihood, freedom from aggression and exploitation - are too pressing to admit procrastination. But you will keep them waiting. Generations have waited and perished. Now, how long more?

When the PM speaks, I find it difficult - nay, impossible- to even suspect that his heart does not beat for the poor. Such impassioned rhetoric as rains from his tongue cannot issue from mere theatrics. The problem, it seems to be, is that he is free to love the poor only from the podium. As he dismounts, the compulsions of realpolitik take over and his heart begins to beat, apparently, to a different rhythm.

Time could prove that I was entirely wrong. That the PM is playing the watch-and-wait game to strike a genuine blow on behalf of the poor at the most opportune moment.

How I wish I would be proved utterly and perversely wrong in the apprehensions I have expressed otherwise. And that, for the sake of the millions of my sisters and brothers who are sunk in abject, dehumanising poverty.

For, who am I? Am I too not the son of a woman who, at the age of 47, died a premature death because we were too poor to afford even painkillers? 

Didn’t I - all of 17 years of age - watch her life ebb out as I sat, her head in my lap, the only painkiller we could afford, on the second consecutive day without stirring, my tender heart muttering prayer after prayer that her life may be spared?

There are times, my political masters, when not even God listens to our prayers for no other reason than that we are poor.

Modi can improve on God’s track-record. I beg of him to do so. Take care of the poor. They will stand by you, faithfully, gratefully, forever. No one else will.

The Congress committed harakiri by disowning the poor. The core disease of the Congress was not corruption. Corruption is always a by-product. Disowning the poor is the disease. Corruption is its symptom.

The only genuine proof that you are anti-corruption is not sabre-rattling against this denomination or that of the currency. It is a genuine commitment to the poor and the determination to mitigate their suffering. Poverty will remain, till the end of history, the touchstone for testing the professions and pretensions of the political class.

And the testing time could come sooner than presumed.

Also read: 9 Indians who should not have spoken about demonetisation