In the film `Gandhi', Kasturba has a dialogue which goes something like this, ``Our people are starving because we are wearing clothes made by foreigners.'' Mahatma Gandhi then makes the historical exhortation sparking a bonfire of Lancashire mill cloth that could supposedly be seen right up to England.
Even as we continue to debate the relevance of the epostle of peace and non-violence in these post-modern times of high-value stress and complex economics, this statement has a certain currency that's hard to ignore. There is a sense of anticipation about this side of India. The GDP is seriously looking at a euphoric 10 per cent, much like the sensex (till the day before); the economists and the world have approved of us-- our increasingly globalised environment in which Monsanto has a field day, supermarkets and malls stock only MNC brands, movies in multiplexes are out of reach for the lower middle class, and a consumerist lifestyle propped up on loans and the strengthened rupee to give us a leg up on the social ladder.
Sure, we need to be bullish -- our industrial performance is glowing, we have given the world Nano (after the zero), the gross personal wealth (no pun intended) of the Ambani bros spurs many on to similar marathons, the sundry takeovers of foreign companies achieved and planned but never dreamed, the no-end-in-sight BPO boom, and so on.
But there is another India we have lost sight of, which is not with us or within sighting distance. They are still grappling with bread-and-butter issues, even as we bake cakes by the dozen.For the past ten years, more are more of Them are being driven to suicide. The scene in the countryside is grim: rotting onions, poor yields due to scarcity of power and water, private loans that grow into an endless debt trap and the inevitable albatross of a daughter's wedding.
The fact is that we have doggedly refused to look right and left and perhaps, behind us. It doesn't matter to us that, in the anxiety to impress the world outside, we have rode roughshod over our own. We have not paused to see whether we are all moving together.
Our incomprehensible approach to growth is one of the reasons Gandhiji is so, so relevant today. In one of his initial speeches at an INC meeting, he had pointed out, after Mohammed Ali Jinnah made a stirring speech demanding direct action, that we need to identify with the farmer, the villager and see what he wants. A bunch of people sitting on towns and cities cannot decide India's future, he had argued.
He could well have been making the point today, except that few would bother to hear him out. We have as agriculture minister a man better known as the president of the Board for Control of Cricket in India. Each time a cricketer or cricket is in crises, or egos are being rubbed, Sharad Pawar materialises, either on the right side or the wrong, either making a point or never getting at it, but always, feverishly, on the job. His job as a minister doesn't actually take a back-seat, it is simply never on the horizon. If he could, he would probably ask all farmers to stop worrying and play cricket, a la Marie Antoinette.
As for the governments, they don't even give a farmer the freedom to call his suicide a suicide. Government norms make it almost impossible for a hapless farmer's death to qualify for a `suicide' status.
The intellectuals of the world will froth forever over the topicality of the Mahatma but to those who can see the disconnect, we never needed him more than now-- as early as yesterday.