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A new prism to view poverty

For me, Gandhi’s third class compartment tour of India in a half-naked fakir avatar was a shrewd Baniya political masterstroke…

A new prism to view poverty

Representational Image (PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES)

For me, Gandhi’s third class compartment tour of India in a half-naked fakir avatar was a shrewd Baniya political masterstroke until I spent 37 hours in the unreserved general class of the Howrah-Yashwantpur Express in the first week of March. Those 37 hours of “cattle class” travel from Kolkata to Bangalore with migrant laborers from West Bengal, Bihar and Odisha not only changed my perception of Gandhism, but also my understanding of poverty.

How disconnected we are with the changing mindset of the poor when we mistake them gravely in the category of “beggars are no choosers” and boast of poverty alleviation through schemes such as subsidized meals, rice@1 rupee, freebees, Indira Awas Yojana, and so on. But we have probably goofed up somewhere. For sure. Otherwise Samser of Muzaffarpur, Bihar, the land of leechi, would have not “rented out” his BPL card and shifted to Koramangala to work as a house painter. 

A half-drunk old construction worker narrated how he married off his daughter to a “capable” groom working as a crane operator in Bangalore. The most satisfied and proud was Laxmi, a Telugu lady from Palasa, Andhra Pradesh, dividing her time between two sons working in Kolkata and Hyderabad. Both of her sons own homes in the slums of these cities. Why do they travel so far for work? Aren’t their state governments caring enough towards the impoverished?
“Government gives some 100 days work. Should we sit idle for rest 265 days?” – quipped a young man from Malda, West Bengal, who was venturing out for the first time in pursuit of work. “My children do not eat that substandard BPL rice, it smells,” murmured an old lady from Paralakhemundi, Odisha.  “I gifted my Indira Awas to another widowed lady of our village. She was living in a dilapidated hut with her two children. I don’t want to get stuck in a village where there is no future,” explained another who has shifted his wife and parents to a rented slum house in Immadihalli of Bangalore.

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Yes, Future! The poor are equally conscious of their future. They have ambitions too. The fact that Prasun Mondal of Bardhamaan sold his MGNREGA job card and relocated to Vijaywada for work speaks a lot. Almost 99 per cent of the migrant laborers in that compartment were hooked up to their smart phones. Great news for Digital India; even our poverty is digitalised. So poverty is no longer confined to hunger for two square meals a day, but redefined in the changing categories of hunger – hunger for better life, better future, education for children, building own house, and remarkably, hunger for being able to achieve all these through hard work.

A group of Bodo boys from Udalguri, Assam, working in a small guest house in the Majestic of Bangalore will quit their jobs at the end of this month. Why? “I am getting Rs.8,000 per month apart from free accommodation and food. But our friends in Goa get Rs.10,000 per month. We will shift to Goa”, said 26-year-old Simonsa who cleans the floor.

Ramachandra, a 64-year-old roadside tailor at Balepet circle of Bangalore is financing education of his three children. The elder son is a 8th semester engineering student whose annual fees is Rs.55,000; the second son is pursuing cost accounting and the daughter is studying B.Com. Not to be surprised, Ramachandra is all praise for the demonetisation of Narendra Modi, as he feels, “the rich have learnt a lesson”.

If economics, according to Max Hartwell, is “study of poverty”, then Indian elections are essentially the politics of poverty. Poverty has been the most dominant vote bank in Indian politics. All major political forces in India – the parties of the ‘have-nots’(Communists) to the rightist party of the ‘haves’ (BJP known for its traditional Brahmin-Baniya-Rajput support base), centrist Congress and regional satraps like MGR, NTR, Jayalalitha and Naveen Patnaik – have always used populist schemes to ensure support of the poor as the backbone of their power.

But the Congress, which first turned poverty to a vote bank through the “garibi hatao” slogan of Indira Gandhi, lost its traditional support base miserably in the 2014 general election as it failed to understand the changing definition of poverty and aspirations of the poor. All that re-enactment of the old Gandhi-Indira-Rajeev era poverty tourism – visiting the home of widowed Vidarbha farmer Kalavati Bandurkar or dining and sleeping in the tribal huts of Niyamgiri – didn’t turn into votes. Nor even the flagship MGNREGA of Sonia Gandhi led National Advisory Council.

Had half of the economically poor, socially poor (Dalits 24.4 per cent) and socio-economic-religious poor (Muslims 14 per cent) who formed the traditional loyal vote bank of Congress for decades, voted for the party, the Gandhis would have been the invincible monarchs in electoral politics. While the Congress tried to connect with the poor with an “aam aadmi ka saath” image, Modi aggressively addressed their subconscious aspirations by projecting himself as the “tea-seller’s son for Prime Minister”. The “Ache Din” dream of Modi trumped the “roti-kapda-makan” of Congress in the battle of poverty.

India, being the second most unequal country, where top 1 per cent of the population owns 58.4 per cent of the country’s total wealth and where 80 per cent of adults (voters) belong to the bottom half owning just 1 per cent collectively, the “neighbour’s envy” factor is dominant in our socio-economic psychology.

Modi wore a soft Robin Hood hat through demonetisation, perceived as a bold step to rob the rich of their ill-gotten money. This was just like the socialism card played by the late Indira Gandhi who nationalised commercial banks through a midnight ordinance in 1969  and used abolition of Privy Purses to improve the  Congress tally in Lok Sabha to 352 in 1971 from 283 with a strike rate of 79.82 per cent  compared 54.84 per cent in 1967. ‘Jealousy for the rich, but aspiration to be rich’ is a complicated psychological phenomenon of poverty which has always played a vital role in the voting behavior of the poor.  This was proved again in UP, where laptops and unemployment doles of Akhilesh, MGNREGA of Congress and Dalit identity politics of Mayawati got defeated by dream merchant Modi.

This is how our classroom and conference hall intellectualism fails to understand the changing definition of poverty, from the poor’s point of view.  It defies all official yardsticks of poverty – of Tendulkar (Rs 27 in rural, Rs 33 in urban), Rangarajan (Rs 32 in rural and Rs. 47 in urban) or World Bank ($1.90). Far beyond extreme, absolute and relative poverty, this is a phase of civilisational poverty, when the poor want to live like civilized citizens with dignity, not like pigs.  Fuelling aspirations for votes may be easy. But can the Prime Minister meet these rising expectations of his new found vote bank? Let’s hope “Achhe Din” would not meet the unexpected fate of “Bharat Uday”. 

The writer was a founder member of State Employment Mission, Govt of Odisha and now works on Zero Unemployment Model.

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