Ali is a pavement vendor. He and his family wake at dawn every morning to cook massive amounts of idli-sambhar, dosas and poori-bhaji which he then transports in spotlessly clean steel containers to Marine Drive to sell. It is his only way of feeding his family. Not long ago the Mumbai police decided he was a nuisance to the public and arrested him. The grounds they gave were that street children gathered around his little stall to be fed by morning walkers good enough to feed them. Ali would have probably remained in jail, and dragged off to court, if it had not been for the kindness of a senior police officer who ordered his release on compassionate grounds. Every city in India has hundreds of thousands of Alis who get arrested routinely for the crime of daring to earn a living in a country that is unable to offer them employment of any kind. Surely, it is the police and not the desperate pavement vendors who should be charged with criminal behaviour but this does not happen because there are not enough people who speak for people like Ali. Us political pundit types are too busy pondering over weightier matters and our political leaders, even those who spend their entire time banging on about the ‘‘poorest of the poor’’ are really not interested either because the poorest of the poor matter only at election time. The only political leader, oddly enough, who did try do something about the stupidity of municipal laws that prevent people like Ali from earning a living was the Prime Minister. A couple of years ago, largely because of the efforts of Madhu Kishwar, the Prime Minister ordered his office to personally draw up a plan that would make it legal for pavement vendors to earn a living. What happened? Nothing. The police and municipal officials make too much money out of the poorest of the poor to allow them the right to livelihood so life for them goes on pretty much as it did before the Prime Minister’s intervention.Why do I raise the subject of Ali this week? Well, partly because I had a run-in last week with a Left-wing editor of a prominent Marathi newspaper and the jargon he spouted made me realise that he had not noticed how discredited his ideology had lately become. And, partly because when I read what the RSS had to say about the forthcoming WTO meeting I realised that the leftist leftover from our socialist days continues to infect even those who are considered right wing. More than ten years of economic liberalisation have done almost nothing to change either our mindset or our officials. If it had we should by now have seen some trickle down effect for people like Ali, and you and I would have realised that the licence-permit-quota raj that we passed off all these years as ‘‘socialism’’ victimised the poorest of the poor more than anyone else. On a daily basis I meet middle class, educated Indians who tell me that they believe that Nehruvian socialism was better than the ‘‘consumerism’’ of today because ‘‘in a poor country like India’’ we have to think of the poor. They appear to have not noticed even that the poorest of the poor do not even have the right to livelihood. Or that despite all those years of socialism it is the poorest of the poor who have no access to education, healthcare, shelter or employment. Surely, if socialism had worked even slightly there would not be such a desperate shortage of these basic necessities?For the mindset of our officials and political leaders to change we need our own mindset to change and you only need to read the opinion columns in your daily newspaper to know that most of our opinion makers continue to share the views of the Leftist editor I had a spat with. So rigid is the belief that Left is right that Mulayam Singh Yadav can invite the richest businessmen in India as special guests to his swearing in and we continue to regard him as socialist. And, even if the RSS takes a totally leftist view on economic matters it continues to be regarded as right wing?The whole world has changed but us Indians remain stubbornly trapped in the jargon of our past. Only when we accept the need to change our own mindset will we learn to accept that socialism did not benefit anyone and least of all the poorest of the poor. If anyone benefited it was our officials and politicians who looted public funds in the name of helping the poor.Meanwhile, could we begin by at the very least insisting that the Prime Minister’s plan for pavement vendors be implemented in all our towns and cities and that municipal officials and policemen who prevent people like Ali from earning a living be severely reprimanded. Perhaps, another intervention from the Prime Minister’s office is needed and this time it should take the form of a direct order to our municipalities instead of merely a recommendation. With a general election approaching it would be a good move anyway since unemployment will, as usual, be one of the main issues. If employment cannot be provided by the state, or our supposedly liberalised economy, then at the very least people should not be prevented from trying to earn their own living. Ali’s tragedy and the tragedy of the poorest of the poor is that they do not even know that the licence-quota-permit raj is supposed to have ended a long time ago. Write to the author at tavleensingh@expressindia.com
