benami angst

this has been in news for the last few days in andhra pradesh: white ration card holders owning liquor shop licenses. only below poverty line (bpl) families are given white ration cards in the state. this news report says:103 liquor shops owned by white ration card holders.that's more than one third of all liquor shops in that district.

how can any 'below poverty line' household manage to buy a liquor license (to run a liquor store) worth crores?

bpl families owning one third of all liquor stores in one district. and it's not just one district, news coming in from across the state indicate that nearly 30-40% of liquor stores in all districts are owned by 'bpl' families. it's obvious that many of those crorepati poor families don't actually own those stores. in fact, many of those 'owners' are not even aware that they own those stores. and many others actually work as wage earners in those stores which they are supposed to 'own'. who actually owns those stores? other people, real crorepatis and power-wielders.

so i had to dig up this old post i'd first started working on ages ago:  

and some more sputtering of prejudices provoked by uid:

Educated Indians will not accept being told that that they have “no identity” as it questions their parentage and legitimacy of birth. Aadhaar is tantamount to bastardisation of the poor and branding the poor for life, institutionalising poverty.  

read that iitian mind: educated indians are not stupid, they will not accept this gaali. but the poor might. the poor are stupid enough to accept all gaalis. people without honour....

the writer's benami indignation on behalf of the poor hides so many prejudices. the distinction he makes, between educated and poor indians (and not educated and uneducated indians), seems premised on the belief that poverty and stupidity go together. the poor are stupid. the ba^%$#ds are poor because they're stupid. the poor are poor because they're people without honour. illegitimate #$$%&^5.....

but that's the way of the meritocratic iits: we're here because we're meritorious, not because of caste or wealth. they can't get in here because they're poor, not because of caste. and if some of them do get in here, it is because of wealth and caste, not because of merit.   

you might think stupid is a better antonym of meritorious. but no, here too, 'poor' is used as a stand-in for the politically incorrect 'stupid'. you could call it a whole way of life: this endless pursuit of benamidars to bear the burden of all the greed, ambitions, fears, passions and anxieties of the brahminized classes. look at the iits themselves, a prime example of nehru's 'temples of modern india', and also the best examples of benami institutions. in name, all indians owned them, but in reality, only the brahminized classes enjoyed the privilege of studying there.

the brahminized indian always speaks through benami identities. he was a 'nationalist' when he wanted to grab power from the colonial rulers, a 'socialist' when he wanted to move from the agrarian economy to industrial jobs (and a maoist when he couldn't), a 'hindu nationalist' when he wanted to divert the focus of the mandalized bahujans away from his excessive privileges (and a 'secularist' when he couldn't). he flaunts an 'indian' identity to challenge a caste census and becomes a 'moving republic' when he wants global recognition...

one main reason why he doesn't like the uid is that it could shake the material foundations of his benami world a little. this news report says:

Industry experts say the real-estate markets in Delhi, Mumbai and Ahmedabad see the most benami deals. Typically, in land, about 50% deals are benami, while in constructed premises, 20% are benami.

the experts are being coy. with so much land being cornered by a few, who would be wealthy enough to buy the rest (of land) at prices so artificially high? more rich indians using more clever benami identities.or another benami class of indians: indians who don't even live in india. or yet another benami class of indians: indians who live in india but don't work in india, in a way. like quite a few in the it/ites sector.. and so on. how much of india is left to indians who don't fall in any of those benami categories? very little, you could say.

you could also say the practice is more widespread, and not just geographically. all spectacular stock market scams/frauds since harshad mehta have involved hundreds if not thousands of benami identities and entities.. the number of pan cards in india is many times the number of individuals filing income tax returns: how are those excess cards being used?

the use of benami cards in the stock market is a worry. two years ago, when the 'educated' indians hadn't fully woken upto how the uid could affect their 'parentage and legitimacy of birth', lawmakers in india were contemplating how they could use uid to curb fraud in the stock market:

Large-scale fraudulent deals mostly involve entities that are financially sound and often enjoy political patronage. These entities include promoters and stakeholders of large-cap companies who do hold PAN and, hence, such deals are often consummated using accounts held in fictitious names, or benami accounts. 

“UID will help in tracking benami account holders and the transaction done through such accounts,” said an income-tax official, who did not want to be named as he is not authorized to interact with the media. 

 “For instance, even if an individual does not provide a PAN, a bank account or any transaction account can be created today just by submitting Form 16 of income tax.

Besides, many have multiple PAN cards, which can be misused. 

If UID is assigned to every individual and if it is mandatory to quote for every transaction, the account can be easily traced to the owner,” the tax official added.

that would have helped, a little, any stray lawman, if he were so inclined, to attempt to get a little closer to pulling down many benami facades hiding ill-gotten wealth. if he were so inclined. and so were his bosses.

so when the brahminized indian talks of opposing the uid because it invades his 'privacy' and questions his 'parentage' and honour, understand that he uses those terms as benami identities to hide his real concerns about 'property' and 'privilege'.

what does the u.n., know about excellence or quality?

It is unlikely that a single UN resolution will radically change the landscape of social realities in India. Perhaps even the UNHRC is aware of this fact. Can its declaration be a tool to harass India then? Is it a clever ploy to keep the ambitious country on a leash in view of its abysmal human-rights record? The idea could be to push India to be answerable for discrimination based on work, descent and gender.

now the whole world seems to have come to the erroneous conclusion that there seems to be something called caste based discrimination in india. but the funniest part of the news report is when it says:

Some good has already come out of the UNHRC exercise, albeit indirectly. Rahul Gandhi, the architect of the ruling Congress Party's general election victory in May, has launched a recent drive to uplift Dalits. He is visiting Dalit homes across Uttar Pradesh and has ordered his party members to recalibrate their welfare programs in favor of Dalits. However, many see the Gandhi scion's move as a larger political game plan to erode Mayawati's base in Uttar Pradesh.

rahul gandhi has launched a drive to uplift dalits? digging up again what he had said (i'd commented on it in this post):

On his stay with Dalit families in Uttar Pradesh, Rahul said for him it was only a matter of trying to know the problems of the poorest of poor. "The press sees me as staying with a Dalit. I don't see myself as staying with a Dalit. This distinction (of Dalit and others) occurs only in the media. It does not occur in my mind,'' he explained.

somebody tell the u.n. the caste system doesn't exist. and if it thinks it does it needs to explain its stand with relevant data and also its understanding of how caste operates and what exactly the manusmriti says.

how can they say something that they don't even understand exists? there seem to be too many unmeritorious people in the world body. get someone from the national knowledge commission or the jnu to tell the u.n., about how to improve its quality. teach them about excellence.

it's not caste?

it's not caste, it's nepotism. malnutrition in india is worse than in sub-saharan africa: it's poverty, not caste? incomes in india, per capita, are better than in a majority of african nations. it's the population, not caste? china has a bigger population and lower malnutrition rates. it's democracy of course, not caste.

it's not caste? take a closer look before you rush to defend it. and why do you have to defend it so strongly?

daughter of south mumbai

“Do you know Mumbai contributes 33 per cent of income tax collections, 60 per cent of customs duty collections, 20 per cent of central excise tax collections, 40 per cent of India’s foreign trade and a significant quantum to corporate taxes? For such a prosperous city, how can we be content with a withering transport system and lagging public amenities?” she questions. Like any good banker, she obviously keeps her numbers handy.

meera sanyal isn't contesting the mumbai municipal elections. what can she do about mumbai's withering transport system and lagging public amenities, that she talks about, in the lok sabha? there'd be very few occasions on which she could raise those issues at a forum where primarily national or international issues are discussed.

Like a million other Mumbaikars, Meera Sanyal too watched the horror of 26/11 unfold on her television screen — all within the confines of her safe haven at Malabar Hill. But unlike a million other Mumbaikars who went back to work after those horrifying few days, Sanyal could not shake off the feeling of being cheated.

The 47-year-old, who heads ABN-Amro Bank in India, was up against difficult choices: “Either I could sit back and blame the politicians and move on or I could pull up my sleeves and get on the ground to do something about it,” she says.

security. she can get on the ground to do something about it. how?

she can raise questions: the first hour of each day in the lok sabha is devoted to questions.

It is during the Question Hour that the members can ask questions on every aspect of administration and Governmental activity. Government policies in national as well as international spheres come into sharp focus as the members try to elicit pertinent information during the Question Hour.

all the other 540 odd members too have the same right to raise questions. so one has to queue up. but the lok sabha worked for just 46 days last year. it usually works a little more, but the number has been falling since the first parliament. so ms.sanyal would have to share those 50 odd question hours with 540 odd other members, many of who, as we have seen in the last two-three lok sabhas would rather raise slogans and placards during the question hour than questions. so many question hours might pass before ms.sanyal actually gets to ask any questions.

by which time, the taj mahal in mumbai might be attacked again. if such an unfortunate event does happen again, and when a lok sabha is in session, ms.sanyal might get lucky and be able to call attention of the home minister of that matter of urgent public importance and request him to make a statement by giving a notice to the Secretary General, Lok Sabha, first. would that help prevent the next attack on mumbai?

perhaps she could raise the issue of mumbai's security through an adjournment motion by giving notice to the speaker and the minister concerned, to get answers faster because they are taken up for discussion on the same day. but a lot of adjournment motions are brought in every day, and only one member gets to be lucky, if at all, provided he manages to convince the speaker that the purpose of the motion is to initiate discussion on a definite matter of urgent public importance. and security in mumbai, or anywhere for that matter, is a definite matter of urgent public importance, but something bal thackeray said, a day earlier, or m.f.hussain painted, decades earlier might crowd the urgency out of that matter of public importance. other members who had issued notices too might sit in the well of the house and create pandemonium forcing the speaker to adjourn the house.

i hope ms.sanyal has an actionable business plan.

i don't find arundhati roy disgusting

far from it. i like the impassioned plea she makes for justice at the end of her latest article on the mumbai terror attacks (i'd talked about justice too in this post). but i'm not really sure she understands injustice any better than arnab goswami. about the taj, she says:

It's an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day.

there are a few problems with her perspective. for instance, i don't think she'd find the taj an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day if the government of india owned it. this is what ms. roy had to say about the public sector company bhel, in an earlier article:

For many years, India has been more or less self sufficient in power equipment. The Indian public sector company, Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (bhel), manufactured and even exported world-class power equipment. All that’s changed now. Over the years, our own government has starved it of orders, cut off funds for research and development and more or less edged it out of a dignified existence. Today bhel is no more than a sweatshop. It is being forced into ‘joint ventures’ (one with GE and one with Siemens) where its only role is to provide cheap, unskilled labor while they provide the equipment and the technology. Why? Why does more expensive, imported foreign equipment suit our bureaucrats and politicians better? We all know why. Because graft is factored into the deal. Buying equipment from your local store is just not the same thing. It’s not surprising that almost half the officials named in the Jain Hawala scandal were officials from the power sector involved with the selection and purchase of power equipment.

replace bhel with taj and make minor changes ('world-class service' for 'world-class equipment' and so on), and discover what roy would have said if the taj were a public sector company, like the centaur which was privatized a few years ago. it's privately owned, so it's obscene? one wonders whether ms. roy's problem is with organized capital or with those who organize it? bhel is okay, even if it makes turbines that are largely used in big dams (which ms. roy opposes, of course), as long as it is in the public sector.

i'd pointed out in this post why i consider the organized public sector in this country a largely private affair and the organized private sector a largely public affair: because a great majority of employees in both are upper caste hindus, and both of them are owned by upper caste hindus- upper caste business families or the upper caste dominated bureaucracy or financial institutions. in my view, in india, the public sector-private sector debate is a spurious one, for many other reasons- that requires another post, i guess.

coming back to her latest article, the second problem:

If you were watching television you may not have heard that ordinary people too died in Mumbai.

if ms. roy's problem with establishments such as the taj is the class of people they serve, shouldn't she remember that ordinary people, work at the taj too? that ordinary people were working at the taj when the terrorists attacked?

her kind of ordinary people don't work at the taj? they don't travel in the local trains to cst to work at the taj? and the diamond merchants who travel in trains, an earlier terrorist target, and most probably visit the taj, sometimes, are ordinary people? are all the business executives who travel in trains, because they're convenient for many reasons, to work in the offices at nariman point ordinary people?

any classification, and there has been one other such attempt recently apart from roy's (i refer to gnani sankaran's analysis), that seeks to browbeat you into accepting that the cst stands for ordinary people and the taj for the rich is disingenuous. because all the street vendors, peons, drivers and other manual workers who travel to south mumbai in trains do not belong to the same class as those who trade in diamonds or work in nariman point or lunch at the taj. or to the same castes.

if there is any divide, it isn't between those who travel in trains and those who visit the taj- it is between those the government seeks to protect, on a consistent basis, and those who have to fight with all their puny lives to even catch the government's attention. if the taj were to go bankrupt tomorrow, most of india's indignant classes including the media and people like ms. roy, would stand up for the rights of those who work there and would not rest until the government nationalizes that icon of easy, obscene injustice. not that the government would require any excessive pressure to nationalize it.

on the other hand, if some thelawallahs (or say, the bargirls of mumbai) were stopped from doing business in some corner of south mumbai, they'd have to work up a truly big and spectacular protest to catch the consistent attention of the media or of people like ms. roy. i'm sure ms. roy would be moved by their plight but...if their plot doesn't have an easily identifiable rumpelstiltskin, a villain the whole world could also throw rotten tomatoes at, i'm not sure they'd be able to hold her attention for long.

companies in the organized public and private sector seem to take decades, after they've gone insolvent, to fall. and while they're falling, oh so slowly, like the textile mills nationalized by the goi (i wonder if anyone among the ruling and indignant classes were thinking of the handloom workers across the country when they were embarking on this magnanimous project), a new generation of small unorganized businesses, like the powerlooms in bhivandi, rise and fall, more than a couple of times. and while this is happening, the children of the textile mill workers have moved over to new professions and new age industries. like the children, as this website points out (the internet is such a great forum for celebrating camaraderie of the obscurest kinds!) of those who joined the bhel workforce a few decades ago:

Children of most BHEL employees are currently living overseas, many of them have moved to US and Australia.

that's a random page that i found while googling for information on bhel, hyderabad. this township, a few kilometres outside hyderabad is a meticulously planned gated community, with beautiful tree lined roads, parks, playgrounds (basketball, hockey grounds etc.,) and conveniences of all kinds (auditorium, supermarket, schools, bus station etc.,). in the eighties, i remember, a friend from the township telling me why a lot of officers etc., in the company bought cars (a very rare luxury in those pre-maruti days) even when they did not need them- because they got easy, cheap loans and could pay for them by hiring out the cars as taxis. outside the township, a few kilometres from it, you'll find that life, for men and animals, has gone from bad to worse.

ms. roy's concerns for bhel (our own government has starved it of orders, cut off funds for research and development and more or less edged it out of a dignified existence) are consistent with the concerns of those who successfully protected, a couple of decades earlier, the textile mills taken over by ntc. but i wonder: did those concerns have a purity-pollution angle to them, as gopal guru points out, in another context?

In fact the checkered history of industrial capital shows that this class has followed this ‘veil of ignorance’ principle rather selectively. For example, the textile mills owners in Bombay in the 1930s did not bother to follow the modern criterion of recruiting mill workers and even managers. Relatively more unskilled upper caste mill workers barred more skilled workers from the dalit castes from working in the weaving sections of Bombay based textile mills. The upper caste workers opposed the entry of dalits, not on grounds of merit but on the line of purity-pollution.

mr. goswami and ms. roy have very different visions of what's right for india, but they're in the same room.

sharad pawar, farmers' suicides and other obscene jokes

in 2004, the upa government rode into power on dead farmers' shoulders. on the one hand, you'd sainath and other sensitive journalists who were bringing in heart-rending stories from the countryside, and on the other hand, you'd sensitive politicians like sonia gandhi actually touring villages in andhra pradesh and distributing relief to the families of the farmers who had died. and bringing up the middle and the considerable rear of the people's movement orchestrating this sudden national upsurge of indignation, wailing and matam were all kinds of political and social workers, activists, writers, journalists (and bloggers too), leaders from organizations reflecting all shades of political opinion slightly left of the vishwa hindu parishad's. you'd think they really meant it, that their indignation was genuine.

"Sharad Pawar has done nothing for farmers in Maharashtra farmers suicides still continue. He is only doing a lot for cricket. He should not forget that he is not a sports minister he is the agriculture minister of this country, " Singh said.

when amar singh, who according to most samajvadis, is an obscene joke on samajvad in the country, feels bold enough to start questioning the credentials of the u.p.a government- what's wrong with the genuine samajvadis who worked so hard to bring the u.pa., into power? why don't they notice that the emperor is running stark naked around the cricket stadia of the world?

until 2004, most of the suicides had happened in andhra pradesh and a few places in punjab, karnataka, kerala and maharashtra. since 2004, they have spread to most of the country- the numbers have actually increased in andhra pradesh (as many suicides in the last three years as in the preceding nine years), karnataka, kerala, punjab..and the contagion is fast claiming new territories: gujarat, rajasthan, chhattisgarh, bundelkhand in uttar pradesh, madhya pradesh.. and most starvation deaths in west bengal, orissa and bihar go unreported.

what has the government of the indignant been doing? it has been saving harbhajan singh from being dubbed a racist, among other things..like..um... i wrote the last line five minutes ago (and i'd scratched a considerable portion of my scalp free of dandruff during that period). what has sharad pawar been doing? what has manmohan singh been doing? what has sainath been doing? what has prakash karat been doing? what has rajasekhar reddy been doing? what has sonia gandhi been doing? what has aruna roy been doing? what has jayati ghosh been doing? what has...

agricultural credit has been increased to 2,00,000 crores a year (from around 100,000 crores), according to the government. ask the banks- most of the increase is rolling over of old credit. nrega has been introduced in over 300 hundred of the poorest districts in the country- the government's own figures say less than 3% of those who had been issued job cards until now have received employment for the promised hundred days. and people have been given the right to information- an educated applicant, backed by a powerful media baron, had to wait nearly three months to get the copy of a government order from the chief minister's office in hyderabad. and in a country where more than 60% of students in primary school drop out by the time they reach high school (which means more than 80% don't finish high school)- what kind of an obscene joke on indian democracy is this rti?

now, let me try and answer a question i had asker earlier in this post: what's wrong with the genuine samajvadis who worked so hard to bring the u.p.a., into power? why don't they notice that the emperor is running stark naked around the cricket stadia of the world?

the answer is very simple: they thrive on power too. no, don't point to the austere lifestyles of some of these folks- i'd not like to be told again about aruna roy's abstinence or sainath's penances..or sonia gandhi's sacrifices or the struggles of lakhs of ordinary activists etc. i'm talking about power that enables you to tell the ignorant masses: love me, love my rabid dog.