Skip to main content

The Dark Side of Development


The more notorious a criminal you are, the more respected you are in Tihar, says Kobad Ghandy in his Indian Express column.  The petty thieves and other little criminals vie with one another to join the notorious ones.  Your very survival, let alone success, depends on how close you are to the great guns.  Virtue will undo you.  Principles will turn into knots round your neck. 

Kobad Ghandy knows what he is speaking about.  He has spent seven years in Tihar.  Seven years in Tihar is enough to dehumanise anyone, writes Ghandy.

Is this true only of Tihar?  Isn’t it true for the entire country?  Where do you find virtue and principles in the public life of the country?  Criminals and murderers occupy eminent seats in the parliament and state assemblies.  Mafia dons and land grabbers masquerade as godmen.  The poor become poorer and end their lives on knots that descend in various shapes from above. 

The rich are given more and more.  What little the poor have is taken away from them.  The forests of the Adivasis are snatched and given generously to the rich miners and real estate developers who hobnob with the political leaders.  The whole country is being taken for a ride in the name of development. 

Kerala is one of the states going to elections soon.  The total debts of the state amount to Rs 135,440.4 crore during the UDF regime according to the Legislative Assembly Reports published by Malayala Manorama on 10 Feb 2016.   If we assume that an average family in Kerala has four members, then the debt of every family in Kerala is Rs. 159,340.  Many farmers in the country committed suicide because of an amount smaller than that.  Should the people of Kerala start committing suicide because of the developmental projects on which the State government spent huge amounts of money?  [e.g. Adani got thousands of crores of rupees from both the State and the Central governments for the Vizhinjam Transit Harbour.]

Source
Development is a mantra that has been chanted for a couple of years in the country.  Is the country being converted into another Tihar jail while it is pursuing development?  The question may sound farfetched.  But if we open our eyes a little more and look beyond the miasma of developmental illusion that has enveloped us, the question will find its concrete reflection in some very familiar images: the potbelly of the politician who meets you once every five years begging for your vote, the squint in the eye of the yogi who teaches you yoga and culture on a popular TV channel, the facelessness of the industrialist whose sky-high edifices stymie your very shadow...


Indian Bloggers


Labels:

Comments

  1. Roma Gupta SinhaApril 22, 2016 at 4:17 PM

    This is such an eye opener post ! definitely worth a share...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Abhijit RayApril 22, 2016 at 7:17 PM

    Society is made of all kind of people. Good people should take charge and lead.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 22, 2016 at 8:25 PM

      Totally agree with you. As of now, good people are rendered helpless by the bad ones. That's why I made the comparison between the country and Tihar jail.

      Delete
  3. Online JournalistApril 22, 2016 at 10:00 PM

    Excellent post.
    The country may soon need many more vast jails to accommodate the growing number of criminals.
    As criminals and murderers are elected to make laws, they may take care to increase the facilities in jails in future as they and tother prominent personalities are to occupy the jails.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 23, 2016 at 6:56 AM

      For the great goons the jail is also as good as a five star hotel. That's how the system is now. Actually the original title of this post was 'Country of Criminals'. I mellowed it. But the truth is that the Mahatma's land has become criminals' country.

      Delete
  4. Yogi SaraswatApril 23, 2016 at 2:37 PM

    Criminals and murderers occupy eminent seats in the parliament and state assemblies. Mafia dons and land grabbers masquerade as godmen. The poor become poorer and end their lives on knots that descend in various shapes from above. You and me rarely agree but this time I totally agree with your words and unfortunately nothing is being better in this present scenario .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 23, 2016 at 3:33 PM

      A time will come when you will agree with me in more things.

      Delete
  5. Confused SoulApril 23, 2016 at 7:43 PM

    This is such a powerful post, almost hits you in the face of reality.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 23, 2016 at 8:08 PM

      The reality is hard-hitting for the majority. But who cares?

      Delete
  6. UnknownApril 25, 2016 at 9:50 AM

    Matheikal, I can't help feeling that graft, as they call it nowadays, has permeated everywhere. It's not just in India but world over. I fear this is tantamount to a plague and should be designated as an epidemic that MUST be addressed if anyone is to believe in stated lofty goals of poverty alleviation and income equality

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 25, 2016 at 2:35 PM

      Who is interested in poverty alleviation and equality, Lata? Our politicians know how to increase their salary at regular intervals and they have other sources of income which will seek out offshore investment schemes from where they will bring back black money to our accounts in our dreams...

      Those who can't look after themselves are doomed. The country can only boast of Bharat Mata and other symbols.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some
8 comments
Read more