Activist cites Mukesh Ambani’s example at John Hopkins University.
By Deepak Chitnis
The struggle for class equality in India has become difficult in modern times, said activist and writer Harsh Mander, in a lecture at Johns Hopkins University, on Saturday.
“[This] has been occupying my mind and heart more than anything else,” said Mander at the meet, hosted by the Association for India’s Development (AID).
During the two hour-long lecture, Mander touched upon a vast array of topics ranging from economic inequalities to hunger, women’s rights and the failings of individual state governments in India to accurately assess and attack societal problems, as well as a fundamental apathy on the part of the general public to seek a way to fix societal injustices.
Mander said that India has gone through substantial “normative changes” in recent years, and wondered if those changes are irrevocable.
“It [used to be] considered vulgar to display your wealth,” said Mander. “But today, India’s richest man [Mukesh Ambani] has built himself a 27-story house, the most expensive house in the world, in a city where 400,000 people sleep homeless on the streets.”
Mander also shared a conversation he had with the wife of Azim Premji, in which she told him how, when going to school, she would always park her car several blocks from the school building and walk the rest of the way because it would be inappropriate to display the inherent wealth of a car in front of her less-privileged schoolmates.
“There’s a convergence of three things that justify inequality in Indian society,” said Mander. “The first of them is the idea of caste, [that] where you are born should determine your life. Then you have the British class system, which adds an element of snobbishness, [of] old wealth and new wealth, [and] so on. And then you have this new idea from America [of] ‘green is good,’ that [we] should give up the socialist guilt of the past because there is nothing wrong with making money.”
One of the more thought-provoking parts of the speech involved Mander talking about his mother, who passed away last month, saying that he was fortunate to be born into a family that wasn’t poor because otherwise, they may not have lived as long as they had, insinuating that perhaps they would not even been able to have him as a child, and if they did, he certainly would not be as successful as he is today.
Mander also talked about how blanket rental is becoming a booming business in India, with blankets being rented out at just Rs. 30 a night. Yet despite the depravity of their situation, those renting the blankets always ensure that the elderly among them have blankets first before getting blankets themselves. He also mentioned a disturbing fact about how young female children often sleep without blankets because if they do get them, it increases the likelihood of them getting sexually assaulted.
“Is that an acceptable situation?” Mander asked the audience. “The level of indifference is so high that society has shunned out the thought that while we are feeding our own kids there is probably a homeless kid sleeping just one block away.”
When the Food Security Bill was first proposed, said Mander, it drew a huge outcry from the Indian populace, who didn’t see the point in spending resources feeding the homeless when those resources could go towards feeding those in the workforce, which they saw as benefitting the country far more. Instead, argued Mander, it is equally important to feed the homeless and poor in order to improve the economy.
Mander is currently the Director of India’s Centre for Equity Studies, a New Delhi-based organization dedicated to fighting the injustices within society in India. Their main areas of focus include hunger and social exclusion, mass violence, homelessness, policy advocacy, and grassroots campaigns. Mander has written several books in the vein of social advocacy, and has won awards for his work, such as the Rajiv Gandhi National Sadhbhavana Award in 2002.
AID was founded in 1991 as a US-based organization dedicated to promoting “sustainable, equitable, and just development” in India. Largely driven by volunteers, it won the Social Impact Award from the Times of India in 2011.
The full video of Mander’s talk at Johns Hopkins University can be viewed below.
[This story was updated on 10/28/13.]
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com