What Bholu tells us

This SBI advertisement mocks the helplessness of the underclass

Norms cannot be applied to the world of advertisements, except perhaps the most obvious ones pertaining to obscenity and such things. The use of children to advertise products like instant noodles or chocolates is fairly innocuous. But it is another matter when a little girl comes on to the screen to describe 8220;My daddy8217;s BIG car8221;. Or the little boy whose father picked him up from school on report card day but forgot to scold him for getting low marks in math, because 8220;Dad8217;s always in a good mood when he8217;s driving8221;. Ads like these make one cringe, but then one just shrugs and turns away.

Recently, however, one has seen an advertisement on one of the news channels which pretty much took one8217;s breath away. The image is that of a manual worker, whose work chiefly comprises hauling unspeakably heavy loads all the time. The man appears to be the quintessential 8220;daily wage labourer8221;: bare-bodied, sweating, dark-skinned; at the end of his labours, he is shown to be sulkily chewing a piece of dry roti. Then comes the punchline, he is Bholu, the ex-pickpocket, who now has no option other than live by the sweat of his brow, because SBI credit cards have taken the place of cash.

These are not times when one expounds upon ideologies. Still, the advertisement using Bholu perhaps needs some comment if only because it is about a product of a public sector bank. Of course, there is hardly any scope to idealise nationalised banks. It is in the logic of things that the whole concept of social banking has disappeared. But the SBI advertisement highlights several issues. First, a large public sector agency blatantly uses the contrasting imagery of poverty/helplessness and of affluence for who, in a poor country, except the well-heeled can use credit cards?. Here, in a single act, so to speak, the social contract 8212; which has been steadily changing 8212; has been unashamedly rewritten.

No one can claim that the pre-liberalisation Indian state did great things for the poor. Nevertheless, there was a climate of attempted inclusion. The shift from a state-oriented model of development to one that is largely driven by a competitive market is one that is well-chronicled. What is far less chronicled is the question: how far does this shift measure as a shift in social commitments, in the ideas and institutions underlying social responsibility? There is never a straightforward answer to this, particularly in a country where the largest number of votes have to come from those who are outside of the economic mainstream. But, unwittingly, the SBI has provided a well-scripted answer.

It has not hesitated to portray several things of which a public sector agency, particularly one with a social profile, could arguably be ashamed: the fact that manual labour still exists in its most grotesque forms; that Bholu is probably paid below the minimum wage otherwise why would he prefer to be a pickpocket, and take to work as a last resort; that he is unclothed and underfed; that he must steal in order to keep himself; he chews on a dry roti while looking on blankly at a process that is, the introduction of credit cards into the Indian market that has robbed him of an easier livelihood pickpocketing.

Bholu, clearly, is the ultimate script in powerlessness. Of course, Bholu may be just plain lazy, preferring stealing to work. But the point is that we still have a system of employment and labour which, as personified by Bholu, is miserable and unjust. It feeds on existing social discrimination such as denial of opportunities for education, and is supported by an economic system where the wages of abundant unskilled labour dip to the bottom, unprotected by minimum wage or social insurance. And the SBI is not reluctant to advertise this. It is not hesitant to mock Bholu for his helplessness. It is not hesitant to flaunt the affluence of the other side, and the misery of the underclass.

In fact in this frank acknowledgement of the two sides, by a leading agency of the state, one could say that the ideological shift of the Indian state from welfare/redistribution to competition/accumulation has finally come of age.

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The writer is associate professor,Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, supriyaisec.ac.in