A flood, A Rape and A Balabrooie: Tests leadership mettle

If there’s one thing that makes one’s blood boil, it’s the doublespeak that marks our political class. Do they believe that we are a nation of simple-minded fools who will take everything that is dished out, at face value?

Why, for instance, allow ‘international schools’ to operate in the city, when you know darn well that only a handful fit the bill? Why, give them a license, Mr. Department of Public Instruction, when you know as well as I do, that the school building is still going up, and our children have to pick their way through partially constructed halls, and labs, no playing fields, and no proper teaching staff? And it’s a certainty that Kannada is not the medium of instruction. Fining the school on a clause which they can get out of by paying a fine? You don’t fool me!

As for the rape of this hapless three and a half year old, does anyone seriously believe that CCTV is the answer to checking paedophilia? Even a moron knows how to avoid the camera.

What happened to good old fashioned policing, and monitoring by ever vigilant trained female staff? What happened to vetting staff, teachers, attenders, cleaners, drivers. Screening anyone and everyone who enter or exit the premises? And psychological profiling?

And now, Balabrooie, a Legislator’s Club? Isn’t the monstrosity that is the legislator’s home bad enough? They want to take this too? And don’t they have a tennis court and a gymnasium inside the legislator’s home already? Let’s be clear on one thing buildings used by ministers and their cohorts don’t belong to the government.

They belong to the people. What will Balabrooie be replaced with, if the wrecker’s ball is wielded by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, egged on by the salivating real estate mafia who must see dollar signs when they look at that expanse of green on Palace Road.

The Golf Club has already put up something incredibly ugly in the once untouched, soothing island of green.

Please leave something of the city we grew up in, untouched. Restore the façade, modernize the interiors if you must of these few holdouts from the Raj. Lease it out, let it earn its keep. But leave it well alone.

Shouldn’t I be able to tell my grandchildren how I joined the throng when Indira Gandhi once held forth from this very guest house, and how we went to gawk at Sanjay Gandhi’s wife Maneka, of the Bombay Dyeing towel ads fame at the height of the Emergency, down the road from our college?

Asking too much? Like my young Kashmiri friend, who lives in the remote reaches of Jammu and Kashmir, in a house perched precariously on a hill overlooking the border, who rang as the flood waters rose last month, and crept into the Srinagar Secretariat where his brother worked.

He knew that there was nothing anyone could do, least of all me, and that no amount of telephonic hand-holding was going to help. He just wanted to say how sad he was that he couldn’t send pashminas, and walnuts and apples from his orchard, to my daughter for her wedding. 

Villages near his home in Uri had been washed away. Roads were impassable. Stranded families needed medicines, water purifiers. Could I help?

But when he called again a few days ago, ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit, his tone was different. It was to say that Kashmiris, appalled at how completely inept Chief Minister Omar Abdullah had turned out to be, were banking on the prime minister to put Kashmir back on track. The hope in his voice was unmistakable.

He laughed and said, “even Modi wouldn’t do what Omar did, give us food packets and water that was past their expiry date.”

It may not have been all Omar Abdullah’s fault. The bureaucracy failed him even as the army didn’t. And yes, one takes much of what the Kashmiris say about India with a sack of salt; the latent hostility towards the Indian government, the clear separatist sentiment mixed with the contrarian hope that India’s economic boom would somehow rub off on them and the unspoken implication that we are an occupying force, reinforced by the army bunkers in the heart of Srinagar city, are all deeply unsettling.

But if there was an opportunity to showcase the fact that Kashmiris are treated no differently during a calamity, than the rest of India, this was it. Although, come to think of it, expired food packets and inappropriate clothes surface, every time there is a quake, a landslide, a tsunami or a flood, anywhere in the country. Kashmiris needn’t feel they are being treated any differently than the rest of us!

Seriously though, while Narendra Modi’s visit to J&K may or may not have assuaged my friend’s angst or that of the legion of India-baiters who have gleefully slammed the PM, the point is, Modi’s promise to rebuild the state must live up to the talk. Replacing old committees with new ones because they don’t quite share your political colour isn’t the answer.  

As with MGNREGA and Adhaar, the programmes that owe everything to the Manmohan Singh-Sonia Gandhi’s UPA government, and which the BJP had dismissed as sops that did nothing to boost the economy, there’s been some welcome rethinking.

More so on Adhaar than MGNREGA. (Come to think of it, there is complete radio silence from our city’s first couple, the Nilekanis, on Mr. Nilekani’s signature programme. Whatever happened to ‘win or lose, we’ll stay connected to the city’?)

Modi has probably realised that one way or another, boosting manufacturing, industry and infrastructure must go hand in hand with some welfare schemes that keep the poor from the poorhouse. One cannot be run at the expense of the other. Has that message percolated down fully to our neck of the woods?

My friends in the Congress tell me that the battle was lost in Maharashtra, even before the first poll bugle was sounded, not just because of the people’s weariness with the Congress-NCP government, but because the party manifesto was so focused on the freebies that the Congress still believes will keep its vote banks intact, that it lost sight of what the new India wanted.

Our chief minister has held his first global investor’s meet and a new industrial policy which held out the promise of investment to the tune of five lakh crores over five years as well as gainful employment for at least 15 lakh people.

One isn’t sure if that will transform Karnataka’s sputtering economy and fund the Rs 10,000 crore per year bill that Mr. Siddaramaiah’s many pro-poor schemes have run up.   

India’s energy and drive that comes from its young and their can-do, never-say-die spirit is the envy of the first world. But for young India to be able to live up to its true potential, men like Modi and Siddaramaiah should cut through the red-tape that the bureaucracy smothers and ties up everyone in, and let honest entrepreneurs flourish.   

We need education, healthcare but not schools that cut corners, and hospitals where doctors bleed us dry, and refuse to serve in the districts. Or rampant real estate development that loses sight of the fact that our cities must have a past and a future.  

The prime minister has shown his heart beats for India. The states must follow. Give my friend in Uri, and the young in Bengaluru, something to smile about.