Hands in the cookie jar

Those of you who are old enough may remember the days when only Britanniaruled. Not the waves though, but dough. Most of the leavened, bak...

Those of you who are old enough may remember the days when only Britanniaruled. Not the waves though, but dough. Most of the leavened, baked, slicedbread was factory-produced under that brand name. There was a virtualmonopoly in many cities. In order to break that monopoly Modern Bread wasset up by the government.

Those of you who are mature enough will recall the early days of the Greenrevolution. India had just emerged out of the ship to mouth existence. Ithad just stopped importing American wheat. The foodgrains had beenaccompanied into India by the dangerous Parthenium weed which hasproliferated all over the subcontinent and is till today known as quot;Congressgrassquot; on account of its white flowers which suggested the Gandhi topi whichwas then part of the livery of many Congressmen. It was then that ModernBread was set up in the public sector, not only to celebrate the end ofIndia8217;s dependence on imported wheat but also check price rise andprofiteering in that most basic of commodities: bread.

Those of you who have memory that stretches beyond the Kargil war to the onebetween India and Pakistan in 1971, will recall Jagjiwan Ram8217;s term as foodminister. It was said that whenever that able administrator took over aportfolio, he brought his luck to it. It was Ram who as food minister gotModern Bread to make innovations in its product line. The best thing aftersliced bread which Modern Bread got to produce were ready-to-heat-and-eatchapattis, kulchas and nans. Well before the multinationals got toacknowledge that the young Indian woman was moving out of mere housewifelydrudgery to work outside the home too and would, consequently, have lesstime to cook and hence greater need for readymade foods suited to the Indianpalate, it was the public sector concern, Modern Bread that realised thepotential of catering to this segment of the market.

Its products served to add a little element to the liberation of the Indianwoman. Those of you who have recollection of the Emergency and its aftermathwill remember George Fernandes, the fiery democratic spirit, not thepathetic caricature of himself that exists today. You will not haveforgotten George, the slayer of multinational dragons, banishing IBM andCoca Cola into the outer darkness when he became Minister for Industry inthat hot summer of 1977.

You will also remember that at that time George the Intrepid promised thenation that things would go better not with the import from Atlanta, bottledby a member of the Congress crony capitalist class, but with a brand newcold drink, invented to celebrate that year when the Emergency ended. Thatcold drink, symbolising George8217;s freedom, was named 77, if you are notmistaken, by another intrepid socialist, H. V. Kamath, who collected a prizeof Rs 10,000, no mean sum in those days, for his effort. The drink becamepopular and was referred to alpha-numerically, either as Double Seven orsimply as 77. That drink was produced and marketed by Modern BreadIndustries, a public sector enterprise. That was the year when both SanjayGandhi and his mother lost the elections but that was not the reason why thead line of the company became quot;Mummy, mummy! Modern Bread!quot;

In any event, times change, and so do people. Today the same GeorgeFernandes who exiled Coca Cola and favoured Double Seven is part of thecouncil of ministers that has sold Modern Bread to Hindustan Levers Limited,proclaiming as it were that while the multinational gets the bread, thepeople can eat cake! These are clearly postmodern times when the icons ofyesterday are obviously outdated, times when the absolutes of modernity, ofnationalism, state capitalism, public good have been replaced by the rulingrelatives8217; of today. These are times when even the pretensions of the stateto provide relatively cheap bread to its citizens has turned into anightmare and even the socialists of yesteryears, like George Fernandes,have acknowledged the majesty of the market. The difference is that whileold George, or should that be George of Old?, is prepared to order inquiriesinto purchases by the government as in the case of defence deals over thelast decade and a half he has expressed no reason to probe sales of stateassets like Modern Bread.

Nor indeed has the sale of Modern Bread to Hindustan Levers occasioned muchunease. Even the employees are reported to be basking in the glory of havingnow quot;come on the rolls of a multinationalquot;. In any case, in an age whendough and bread are colloquial synonyms for money, who really cares whetherdeals are made for 30 pieces of silver or more? There is also the classicresponse of Minister for Disinvestment Arun Jaitley to the very mutedquestion of whether a better price could not have been got from Unilever forModern Bread. Silencing sceptics once and for all, the youthful andarticulate minister retorted, quot;If anyone thinks that it was possible to geta better price, then let him get it!quot; The eminent lawyer forgot that itisn8217;t anyone else8217;s privilege, prerogative or obligation to negotiate aprice; it is the duty of the minister to get that the people of India,owners of the assets that he is selling on their behalf, are notshort-changed!

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Rhetorical statements may have been Arun Jaitley8217;s stock-in-trade when hepracticed law in courts; petulant rhetoric does not become him as a ministerof state. No one has as yet cast a shadow of doubt about his actions inoffice but unless there is total transparency about the deals that theDisinvestment Minister cuts, he must remember that every silver lininghailed by the believers in the current orthodoxy has a dark cloud!

Meanwhile, quite obviously Modern Times even of the variety satirised byCharlie Chaplin are giving way to a postmodern, post-industrial age whenselling the family silver to pay for the finance minister to showcurtailment of the fiscal deficit is easier than for him to implement hispromise to curtail wasteful expenditure through cutting the bloatedbureaucracy. Thus, it is less troublesome to sell off Modern Bread or evensuch profitable enterprises as Indian Airlines than to reduce the numberof secretaries in the Government of India. And of course, it is far toodifficult to cut the numbers and privileges, pomp and pelf of ministerssworn to uphold the very Constitution that they want to re-examine. Theabsurdity and indeed the illogicality of such phenomena do not trouble thosewho live in the postmodern version of 1984 when national wrongs andideological Right merge into one continuum. These are Hard Times, whenmemory nor metaphor matter, when crying for bread, Modern or otherwise isfutile since the limelight is on those who have their hands in the cookiejar.