The Mammaries of the Welfare State (32 page)

Amongst his wearunders, safari suits and bottles of anti-flatulence pills, Bhanwar Virbhim carried with him to Madagascar an impressive array of cassette tapes on both Northern and Southern classical music. Some were gifts for his host Ministers in Antananarivo, the others were for his own listening pleasure. As Culture and Heritage Minister, he needed to know at least something about the musical traditions of his country. Ditto for literature, painting, the fine arts, the works. Thus within a week of his taking over the post, Bhupen Raghupati had suggested to him that his, the Minister’s, day should begin, be filled, and end, with appropriate music. CD players, tape recorders, discs and cassettes were bought. Peons crept into Bhanwar Saab’s bedroom on tiptoe at five in the morning to switch on an apt bhajan. They were transferred to places far far away if the tapes had been incorrectly cued and if, as a result, the
Minister had to suffer some notes of music inappropriate to—and therefore inauspicious for—the hour and day of the week. What good, Raghupati would thunder at his staff, is the Ministry of Culture, Heritage, Education and Welfare if it can’t even provide its Minister the music of his choice at the hour of his choice? Remember that he doesn’t have time for music and yet he needs to hear it, to imbibe it—therefore the right kind of music, and always in the background.

While in the foreground? Politics, need one ask? The politics, for example, of an appropriate past, both personal and public. An example of the new personal past, from the opening paragraph of Virbhim’s speech at the annual convocation of the National Academy for the Performing Arts—Bhanwar Virbhim as created by Bhupen Raghupati: ‘
In
my college days, my father would give me a certain amount of money every week for my bus fare. I saved that money by walking to and from college. With the money saved, twice a month, I’d buy tickets to local Kathak concerts and ghazal evenings . . . Once
(chuckle chuckle) . . .’ Such fictions are perfectly natural and harmless, and come even more easily when no records exist of the persona of the reminiscences having ever set foot inside any college anywhere in the country, unless it be in some police file for harassing a female student, smashing chairs and windowpanes, and making bonfires out of the property of others.

And the new public past. As Heritage, Upbringing and Resource Investment Minister, alive to the sense of history, in the very first month of his tenure, Bhanwar Virbhim commissioned a set of social scientists to write, in phases, the—as it were—memoirs of the nation. The standard texts were outdated (he minuted in Hindi in the file on the subject) and completely colonial in their approach. They didn’t do justice to—in fact, didn’t even mention—the pivotal roles played by certain subaltern political movements, social classes and most significantly, less prominent castes—for
example, Bhanwarji’s own—in any of the significant developments in the country in the last two hundred years. The best way to inform our fellow citizens, surely, was to provide them some A-one reading matter. The work of the new social scientists would be supervised by a Committee of Experts comprising, in the main, retired bureaucrats with just-published, flatulent memoirs. The books would be written in English and, after the texts were approved, translated into the eighteen official languages recognized by the Constitution. In all, there were to be twelve tomes that would cover the history, geography, sociology, anthropology, geology, biophysics, environment, botany, zoology, religion, language and culture of the country and its peoples. The entire project was to cost the Welfare State seventy crores over a period of five years. Out of the panel of names of suitable savants submitted to him, Bhanwar Virbhim rejected seven and added eleven new characters out of his own pocket. Those recommended by him were all either from his part of the country or his caste or both.

The intelligentsia of the Ministry of Heritage, Upbringing and Resource Investment was quite appalled and too spineless and devious to fight back directly. In its routine manner, it diffused the word. Thus two Sundays later, for instance, the
Weekend Today,
that claimed a readership of over two million, ran an eight-page article, an extract from a longer work entitled
The Magic of the Aflatoons.
It was written by a Dr Srinivas Chakki, an entomologist by profession and a Thinker on the side.

. . .
How does one enter the record books? One way is to act so as to be worthy of them, so that history, as it were, will remember one. Another, far easier, way is simply to rewrite the record book and include oneself in it. Do not merely devote all the space of the book to the also rans, but also analyse the motives and
performances of the never-rans. History as determined by the would’ve-liked-to-runs . . .’

After a couple of paragraphs of this style of attack, Dr Chakki hadn’t been able to resist broadening his target to include—indeed, aiming way off the original mark at—
all
Members of Parliament and of the Legislative Assemblies.

It had been hoped when we became independent that in pursuit of an ideal of the trusteeship of the national wealth, the leaders of the State would set examples in austerity and take no more than five hundred rupees each per month as salary. It is noteworthy that several decades on, our legislators have not belied that hope in the letter, but as for its spirit, as the French would exclaim, oo la la! Our guiding lights, forty years after Freedom, still vote themselves a monthly pay of five hundred rupees (that is to say, roughly the equivalent of a few packets of Rothmans Twenties), but over the years, have invented a wide variety of devices for augmenting that income on the sly. They of course routinely give themselves free housing
—
four-bedroom-villas plumb in the heart of Lutyens’s City
—
free cooking gas and water, free telephones and transport, and a multitude of other benefits. They also take care that at all times, their basic salary of five hundred
—
which is all that they reveal to the taxman
—
remains below the taxable income. One notes of course in contrast that their perks, when received by you and me, are madly taxable, thanks to them. After all, they make the laws. That’s what they’re being paid those Rothmans for. Yet they decided
—
in passing, as it were
—
that they needed an incentive to attend office, to come to work. So they provided themselves a daily allowance
—
non- taxable, of course
—
for being present in the House. Attentive readers of this paper will recall that several
years ago, it’d been the first to point out that our guiding lights, like errant college students, were in the habit both of cutting the House after roll call and of noting their attendance even for the days on which they were absent. Ah, the power of the pen! For, after a spate of such articles had held them up to ridicule, and accused them of continuing in Parliament the fine traditions of their college days, the signatures were dropped but alas, the per diem remained. They still earn it for the entire duration of the session and, for good measure, for the three days preceding and succeeding each of their sittings. Acknowledging their own need to form a little capital on the side, they allow themselves to sanction cooking gas connections and allot ten telephones per annum to their nominees, no questions asked.

It has been calculated that were our guiding lights to be regarded as ordinary mortal citizens liable to taxes, their current emoluments, for each one of them, on the average would work out to about twenty lakh rupees per annum (not counting their guns, of course). Other things being equal, as our economists say, how many of them would command such a figure in the open market is not a question that need detain us here.

What we could however pause to discuss is their credibility. Leadership in general involves setting an example. It is only the captain of our national cricket team who leads with the bum. The question is: is a leader expected to do anything after he’s emitted all the right noises? ‘Roll up your sleeves . . . tighten your belts . . . remove poverty (better still, remove the poor) . . . pull up your socks . . . and shed a tear for the downtrodden . . .’

To help you to shed that tear at the right time, at the right place
—
here, have a car! Do my readers know that in the next couple of weeks, a proposal will be voted through in the Daanganga Assembly to provide
interest-free car loans of three lakh rupees to each of its four-hundred-plus Members? In their speechifying, the legislators to a man have lauded the ‘gracious, humanitarian, forward-looking, development-oriented, poverty-alleviating’ proposal. Apparently, they find it difficult to cover their constituencies on their own. Since they don’t own cars, to reach the people quickly and effectively they are forced to accept the proferred help of various contractors, businessmen and industrialists. This they’d rather avoid. So would the Regional Finance Department this proposal. It will cost the state more than twelve crore rupees and of course, it will be impossible to recover any of the loans, particularly from those legislators who lose their next elections or, unfortunately, die. The section of the Motor Car Advance Rules 1949 that deals with elected Members of Parliament and of the Legislative Assemblies
—
they significantly having excluded themselves from the definition of ‘public servant’
—
is notably silent on this point of recoupment. No proposal has been mooted so far to amend these Rules. Various former ministers of Daanganga, it should be recalled here, already owe the state more than four crore rupees.

Please also do consider where these legislators will drive their cars to! Daanganga’s 70,464 villages have an average ten kilometres of road length for every fifteen hundred square kilometres of area. I am indebted for this confusing statistic to the National Bureau of Information, Demography and Official Data. Translated, that means for the region a total of about two thousand six hundred kilometres of road, at least a third of which would lie in some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain, namely, the Gayaladh plateau. What is quite marvellous is that even when they have their cars, the Special Allowance that they give themselves at present for not having cars will stay
—
inflation, rising prices and so on, runs the argument. That is, say, Rs 2000 per month as constituency allowance
—
presumably to cover the costs of travel between Legislative House and Constituency, you’d think
—
but wait! Because, at the same time, they enjoy unlimited free first-class train-and deluxe, air- conditioned bus-travel for three persons within the federal region per legislator, the three persons being his good self, his personal secretary and his bodyguard. Nobody wants to kill
them,
you’d argue. You’d be surprised.

There is only one argument in favour of giving our legislators soft loans for cars. They’ll all be plied as long-distance private taxis, of course
—
the New Markand-Daanganga Lake run being particularly profitable, as has been proved over the years by all our civil servants who’ve so far used
—
or availed of, as they’d say
—
the Motor Car Advance Rules 1949 to buy private cabs. Some of them’ve cogently argued that it’s the simplest way of solving the problem of public transport for the hill resort at Daanganga Lake during the peak tourist season.

Not to forget, in the midst of these meanderings, that each of our guiding lights also gets a crore of rupees for the development of his constituency. They want more
—
to speed up the process of improvement, they say, because time’s running out. Well, so will the money
—
fortunately
—
leaving us with nothing but the question: has socialism been a very good thing for anybody other than the socialists?

There had been times when Dr Chakki had thought that he would never ever finish
The Magic of the Aflatoons.
Every time—whether in Madna or back home at the Prajapati Aflatoon Transit Hostel—that he’d believed that he had the essay wrapped up, some incident had bobbed up in his
memory or in the newspapers and simply screamed to be included. The first draft had been fourteen pages long; the latest stood, vacant, incomplete, at page forty-seven. He’d even toyed with the idea of converting it into a periodical journal that would be a beacon, an icon for their troubled times, wise, statesmanly, therefore with a circulation of forty-three and steadily dwindling because too respectable, too much Nuclear Disarmament and not enough mammaries. In it, he would run a column, quite simply called
Sleight of Hand
and discuss threadbare therein the marvels of the week.

Of the previous Thursday, for instance, when HUBRIS Minister Bhanwar Virbhim in the Senate, while replying to a Starred Question, had likened the tumult in the House to the chaos of Chor Bazaar, the market for the resale of stolen goods. Dr Chakki had not found the comparison funny. Instead, he’d thought it deeply insulting to the tradesfolk of Chor Bazaar because they, unlike politicians, shriek purposefully, dispose of whatever they take up and do not cheat unreasonably, dealing in amounts befitting the poverty of their State.
Sleight of Hand
would then suggest that the Minister, in a formal statement, apologize in the House to all the shopkeepers of all the Chor Bazaars of the country. Think of their six million votes, it’d say.

The evening before, Bhanwar Virbhim had had to fly out to Navi Chipra for some urgent political skullduggery. The Welfare State paid for the three tickets, of course, on the reasoning that every second and every act in the lives of Ministers and officials is official. As is usual with our oligarchs, felt Dr Chakki in a fever of outrage, when it comes to their personal work, they truly behave as though they lead a nation on the move and going places. Thus at 5.30 p.m., the staff of the Minister ordered the booking office of National Airlines to reserve two Executive Class seats for master and mistress-sharer—Minister and Secretary—and a third Lumpen Class seat for some unidentified bag-and-golf-clubs-carrier on the
seven o’clock flight that same evening. Some lionheart, some unsung war hero at the booking office, pointed out that people had already begun checking-in for the flight, that it was jam-packed, but that through some sleight of hand, he could just about accommodate the Minister in Executive and unfortunately nobody else. Then the parleying began and lasted for a couple of hours. The flight was delayed till the Minister, Raghupati and the caddie boarded, sighed and sat back in the seats that they’d wanted, content. Almost. Of course, on Friday, it was learnt that the lionheart in the booking office would receive his orders of suspension from service that day.