Which is your class?

A typical scene on roads in any Indian city. Peak hours of either morning or evening. Heavy rush of vehicles going to offices or back to homes. There are heavyweights like Mercedes, BMW, medium weights like Honda, Volkswagen and lightweights like two wheelers, right up to people travelling in public transport. The lowest in the hierarchy are pedestrians though they may be walking only short distances.

So, we have smaller roads but large number of private vehicles blocking the traffic. Why don’t these people travel in public transport? This can reduce the traffic problem to a great extent. May be because the public transport is not that efficient. Another important reason is, people do not want to use public transport as it ranks among the lowest in the class hierarchy. They want to distance themselves from ‘cheap’ people using public transport and protect their class. The entire transport system suffers due to this.

Consider another case. An upscale locality in an Indian city where basic facilities like water, electricity, etc. are amply available. A lower middle class locality in the same city. Probably outside the corporation limits. They have to face all sorts of load shading, water cuts and sanitation problems. If you ask a young one in the middle class locality about his ambition, it will be mostly about owning a house in a posh locality in the city or owning a luxury car, etc. It becomes either an ambitious goal for him or remains a distant unachievable dream.

There is nothing unusual in existence of different grades of people in a society. In fact, that is the most natural thing. There can also be variations in facilities these people get since rich people pay for whatever they get. The point is about total absence of basic facilities to a class of people in a city while continuance of abundant supply of the same facilities to rich people in the same city (I am talking only about basic needs here and not luxuries of life). It is also a matter of concern how rich people waste these resources carelessly as if they are unaware of unavailability of these basic wants to common people.

It is said that all people are not equal. Every person is different. But when we live in a society, we need to find some commonality among us to bind us together. The problem with us is that we assume just our class to constitute the entire society and totally ignore or underestimate the other classes. Want an example? Just remember how we react when the government gives benefits in annual budget to farmers while increasing taxes on middle class people.

Recently, there was news of youths in a Dalit family being attacked by villagers in rural parts of Uttar Pradesh on they getting admission to IIT. Why? Are Dalits not Indian citizens? Can they not appear for IIT Entrance examination and do they not have a right to get admission even if they are intelligent and have scored well in the Entrance test?

Where does this classism come from? Why does it exist in our society? We have caste system in our country from ancient times and we were never a united society. The kind of inferior and inhuman treatment given to people in the so called lower castes is widely known.

We were the richest country in the world for thousands of years. But only rich class people controlled this enormous wealth. Ordinary people still lived in poverty and misery.

We were invaded several times because we were a rich country. But we could not protect ourselves from these invaders because of only one reason. These invaders, right from Muslims invading India in olden times till British ruling India recently, precisely identified that we are divided and a divided society cannot protect itself. British rulers exploited this divided mindset fully to strengthen their empire in India. There were loots, there were conversions of people to other religions and what did we do? We boycotted the converted people from our religion so that they could easily embrace their new religion. Instead, we could have reconverted them to our religion by following some simple rites. But where does this question arise when we did not even consider them our people in the first place!

Can you imagine today, the richest country like America being invaded by barbaric savages and those savages ruling them by defeating their democratic government in a war? Not just that, looting them to their entirety and making it a bankrupt country? However outrageous and senseless it may sound, it did happen with us when we were like America for thousands of years just because of our impractical religious concepts, divided mindset and apathy to modern technology.

I am not advocating equality of all classes. It exists nowhere in the world. Communism attempted that but it has failed. Also, evils that exist in our society for thousands of years are not going to vanish overnight. But we can reduce their impact by changing our way of looking at them. What we need is not absolute equality, but equitability. While accepting existence of different classes, we need to understand that all of us are part of a larger system and have to depend on each other for our various needs. For example, if the farmer doesn’t survive, we will not get food, so we need to be sensitive to his needs also. If a company doesn’t run profitably, employees may not get their salaries, so they should not be over-demanding from the management.

Once we treat certain classes as lower, they also get habituated to behave in the same way. That’s why we have people spitting on roads, making dirt, dumping garbage in public places and spreading diseases.

Many times we witness a pitiable scene on Indian roads. Luxury cars like Mercedes, BMW, etc run on bad roads with number of ditches, dirt lying on the roadside and so on; they even get muddy at times and lose their sheen. Can there be a worse example of unity in diversity than this? You can hardly find a clean and decent area in our country however posh or plush it may be. Why can’t we be more responsible and maintain cleanliness in public places while all having access to basic necessities of life?

Due to this unclean atmosphere, we have a poor turnout of foreign tourists in our country despite there being numerous well known tourist places here. One can imagine how much foreign currency we lose every year due to this apathy to cleanliness. On the top of that, there are incidents of misbehavior with female tourists from foreign countries which we read in newspapers. One can imagine what message must be getting spread in the world about India after such incidents taking place.

We may be one country, but there are many countries, many societies within our country. There is a society that follows laws of the land scrupulously and behaves decently. But it is largely self centered and remains aloof from other elements in the society. There is another society that is not so honest and looks for opportunities to grab others’ share of resources to flourish. There are, then, poor class people who live on mercy of well-to-do people in our country. This is just an illustrative list and can go on expanding. All these societies live as separate countries within India, which is the most dangerous not only to its development but also to its basic safety and very existence.

Instead of living as separate societies, we need to be more interactive with other elements of the society which will make us sensitive to their needs as well. We have to respect value of each type of work, even if it is manual work.

Ever thought why so many people migrate from rural areas to cities in India? As a by-product of classism, we have stamped certain professions as disgraceful or low caliber professions and the worst sufferer is agriculture. We never allowed agriculture and other allied professions to flourish. Farmers have been perennially suffering with low image, poor income and uncertainties of life. We have accepted this as the normal situation whereas in reality, nothing can be more abnormal than this.

Take another example. We are a nation with thousands of years’ old culture. Take the case of USA. Where was it four hundred years ago? Nowhere. It simply did not exist. What is the situation today? We are dependent on USA for many of our requirements and queue up with many expectations; to get H1B visas, to get outsourcing business, to send out nominations for Oscar awards and many more. Where does our cultural richness go while standing before USA? Why can't we provide a congenial and professional atmosphere within the country to our scholars and experts so that they prefer staying here rather than going abroad to prove their excellence?

Fact is that we have made ourselves cheap and root of this cheapness lies in our classism. We pay our workers meager amounts so that they can barely survive with an indecent standard of living. This indecency has become our national character by which we are known worldwide. Consequently, we also accept indecently small amounts from our foreign customers. We have cut our image before the world as a cheap class product that can be easily afforded by western countries as compared to costly ones that they are. This cheapness is our unique selling piece (USP) and backbone of this cheapness is the poor exchange rate of Indian rupee in comparison to currencies of other countries. Here, I am not talking about software and Indian professionals working abroad which are known for better quality and superior intellect respectively.

I agree that outsourcing has created jobs for our people and given them opportunity to serve international clients; but without disturbing the existing outsourcing set up, if we reduce the gap among various classes, we can have a large and developed market within our country with more educated population which will attract both, Indian companies as well as multinationals to tap this market. This will certainly create more jobs for our people.

Does this mean we should stop exporting our products or stop outsourcing? Not at all. We should change our focus from cheapness to quality for which other countries should buy our products. We should encourage inventions and innovations, register more patents in our names and increase commercial activities domestically apart from targeting increase in exports. How long will be bank on the poor exchange rate between Indian Rupee and other currencies to promote our exports? Do we not import some of our requirements from USA despite the US Dollar being a costly currency? Not just that, for our imports from other countries also (crude oil ranks at the top and accounts for majority of our imports), we have to pay in US dollars.

Basically, if we treat our people respectfully and are ready to pay them well, this classism will disappear over a period of time (though different classes will still exist) and we all can live a quality life as compared to the cheap life full of dirt and inequality that has created our image as a third world country. There will not be much difference in quality between export class products and those for domestic consumption and our image as a cheap class country will be wiped out.

A school of thought that if our people learn and develop themselves, it will be difficult to govern them and manage such over-learned public, has dominated our national and local leadership for decades. This has made all the possible damages to our country that it can make and has caused India to remain a third world country despite all the development we made in last seven decades. Time has come to discard such harmful and self-destructive doctrines and also to do away with leaders who believe in them. A well educated and matured society itself will produce leaders will better quality that are capable of governing such people.

Lastly, unless and until we unite as a society and uplift all the segments in our country, we cannot even become a developed nation, leave apart becoming a super-power. We absolutely must be united so that whatever we achieve, achieve as a country with one society.