On The spot
Tavleen Singh
On a rainy morning in Delhi last week I decided to go and have a coffee in the Taj Hotel. The coffee shop, Machaan, is one of my favorites and I have known it well from when it first opened in the late seventies. This morning as I sipped my mug of hot, freshly brewed coffee I found myself puzzling over the small army of security personnel and lowly officials I had encountered in the lobby on the way in. A few discreet inquiries was all it took to discover that they were part of the entourage that a regional political leader had brought with him from one of our southern states. This information put me in a reflective sort of mood and I found myself wondering if they had all flown to Delhi? Even if they came by train who would have paid for their tickets? And, the political leader himself, who would have paid for him and his family to stay in exactly the sort of five star hostelry that our political leaders love to rant against in public?
These days our ‘socialist’ political leaders have become so open about their hypocritical ways that it is almost impossible to go to the Taj hotel in Delhi and not encounter those whose hearts bleed so publicly for ‘the poor’. That rainy morning I spotted a group of young Congress ministers eating in the Wasabi. Later while wandering about the lobby I ran into a close associate of the very socialist chief minister of Bihar and discovered that a meeting of the board of the proposed new Nalanda University was being held in one of the hotel’s meeting rooms. Why not in the humbler rooms of Bihar Bhawan?
Do not get me wrong. I am not a leftist of any kind. I want in my lifetime to see an India in which more and more people can afford to live well so it pleases me that even ‘socialist’ chief ministers do not hesitate these days to patronize five star hotels. What bothers me is their hypocrisy. Why do they not admit openly that they quite like five star hotels instead of raving against ‘five star culture’ in their public speeches? The reason why I am writing about the fraudulence of our political leaders this week is because while I was sipping my coffee reflectively that morning in the Taj coffee shop I had an epiphany. I suddenly realized that hypocrisy (fraudulence?) has been the leitmotif of the Sonia-Manmohan Government in the past nine years.
It has come to so define even those who are close to this Government, like the venerable Amartya Sen, that they no longer try to hide their hypocrisy in public. So last week we heard this Nobel prize winning economist announce that ‘as an Indian citizen’ he was uncomfortable with Narendra Modi becoming prime minister because he did not think his secular credentials were up to scratch. This prompted me to ask on Twitter if Dr. Sen ever had any problems with Rajiv Gandhi for exactly the same reasons and I can happily report that I was inundated with tweets that mostly shared my concern.
Had Dr. Sen’s hypocrisy been limited to his political opinions he would have done less harm. Unfortunately, he and his comrade, Jean Dreze, have proffered to the Sonia-Manmohan Government some pretty hypocritical economic advice and it has been acted upon doing serious damage to the Indian economy. Whenever the advice of these two Marxist economists has been questioned or criticized they have responded by saying that it is only when it comes to schemes that help the poor that people (like your columnist) start complaining. The truth is that the reason why expensive, centralized welfare schemes are criticized by people like me is because they do not work. The reason why we know that they do not work is because they were tried in the socialist seventies and eighties and failed abysmally. Dr. Sen and Comrade Dreze bring nothing new to the table. They have simply copied the vast, unwieldy schemes of Indira Gandhi’s socialist days and pretended that they are new ideas.
It is our bad luck that Sonia Gandhi has surrounded herself with people of their ilk who have in the name of the poor come up with ideas that have done almost nothing to help the poor. What saddens me particularly is that if the thousands of crore rupees we have spent on MNREGA had been spent on improving schools, hospitals and roads in the villages we would have done a real service to those who live in rural India. A horrible tragedy like the one that just occurred in Chhapra in which children died from eating a midday meal in a government school would not have been possible if the school had minimum standards of hygiene or education. It is improving those standards that have to be India’s priority not handing out cheap food grain and dole. If Dr. Sen does not know this then perhaps it is time that he took a short motoring trip through rural India. Actually, he need not even go that far. In the slums of Mumbai he could discover that free kitchens run by reliable NGO’s like Akshay Patra can do more than expensive Government schemes to reduce malnutrition in children.
Meanwhile, let me take you back to that rainy morning in Delhi last week when I found myself in reflective mood in the coffee shop of the Taj Mahal hotel. The regional leader whose entourage filled the lobby descended from his suite, accompanied by his bejeweled wife and young son, while I was still drinking my coffee. His servitors leapt to attention and there was a huge hullabaloo as they rushed about trying to make themselves visible to the leader, trying to be of service in any way possible. Watching quietly from my window table in the coffee shop I found myself wondering if there could have been more fuss over a Maharajah, in times of yore when the princes were the main Indian clientele of the original Taj Hotel in Mumbai. I doubt it very much. Our socialist maharajahs live in much grander style than rulers have lived in Delhi since a Moghul Emperor ruled from the Red Fort, or at least since the times when a Viceroy lived in that sandstone palace on Raisina Hill. Nehruvian socialism has done well by our hypocritical ruling elite. Not so well by democracy.
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