Secularism and shit

Have we exhausted all options that political parties are fighting over who spoke about sanitary facilities first? If this is a necessity, then go and build those toilets instead of throwing up nonsense.

In his now familiar style of useless rhetoric, Narendra Modi told a group of 7000 students in Delhi:

"My image is that of Hindutva but I'll tell you my real thinking. I have said in my state: pehle shauchalaya, phir devalaya (toilets first, temples later)."

It is not his image that is the problem, but his fake attempts to wipe that image when and where it suits him. Addressing a young audience in the capital is different from repeating these words before the RSS, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and his own party, the BJP.

Will Modi say this in Ayodhya? Will he say this while talking to the sadhus who blessed him at the Maha Kumbh? Will he make this into an electoral issue and expunge any reference to temples? Will he be able to sell this idea at the woo-the-minority rallies and add other places of worship too?

It is not only Hindutvawadis who need to use the facilities.

He further stated:

"I define secularism as nation first, India first. Justice to all, appeasement to none. No votebank politics - a poor man is a poor man, where he prays is immaterial."

Why is this only about the poor? The majority that lives in the rural areas have figured out how to use waste as manure. He knows that the poor do not vote if they are promised toilets. They first need something to eat before they can digest it. They need water, they need jobs, they need healthcare, they need electricity, they need roads. They are not looking for a special place to take a dump. Not until their other needs are fulfilled.

And they really do not spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about where they can pray. They just raise their hands when they want rains, and they fall to the ground when they want the earth to sustain them. They do not need temples or mosques or churches.

Justice is not only about toilets. Modi should know that.

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Not to be left behind, the Congress has joined in to claim credit for the toilet idea.

Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh is on surer ground here, though. He had said this last year, and now recalls:

"When I spoke, Rajiv Pratap Rudy said I should respect the fine line between faith and religion. Then he went on to say that the BJP maintains that one should not get into the debate of whether a temple or toilet is more important. Prakash Javadekar also attacked me. Activists of the RSS and VHP came to my house and left bottles of urine. I wonder where they are now when Mr Modi has suddenly discovered the value of toilets. I still believe we need more toilets than temples. I wish Modi had discovered this 20 years ago, then we would not have had the Babri Masjid episode."

The point is, has the Congress done anything about those toilets? Talk is cheap.

After the demolition of the Babri Masjid, there were many ideas floated by Indian citizens, not politicians. Among those that suggested building hospitals and schools, some even mentioned toilets.

I personally think this is reductionism. Nobody is really interested in these non-controversial issues unless they are used to promote 'development'. Imagine a basic facility being touted as development. Worse, it is not the ones who are supposed to benefit making the demand, but those with all the amenities. They start the fire and then use the smoke. A stinky smokescreen for secularism again.

© Farzana Versey

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Images: GujaratIndia & New York Times

Fighting Shit

Everybody needs to use the toilet. Every day. But in India, we exaggerate it. By doing so we do not give it importance; we merely magnify it in the lab under a microscope. More appropriately, we bring awareness to people who probably have a bidet, use perfumed toilet paper, and have a warm jet of water to clean up with.

National award-winning actress Vidya Balan is now the brand ambassador for the sanitation drive. This is the brainwave of Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh, who said:

"It is going to be a two year programme. She's had a dirty picture in reel life, but this will be a clean picture in real life. I think she will help in making sanitation a national obsession."

This is a silly comment, the transposition of dirty and clean. It is also a cheap gimmick. Ms.Balan’s giggle act and repetitious references to the film was bad enough, now a central minister wants to ride on it. There are people who have to shit in the open, in fields, in dug-up holes, and sewage even from hotels near water sources floats into our rivers and seas. Those people would have liked to have such facilities long ago. What does the minister mean by saying she will make it into a national obsession? The film became a publicity-geared obsession only for those involved. The others bought tickets, whistled, got off and moved on.

Using public facilities is a basic need. What is obsessive about it?

For Vidya Balan it is just one more satellite benefit for The Dirty Picture. She does not have to say it. Instead, the words are typically managed:

“It's an honour for me to be the brand ambassador for the sanitation drive and like Mr Ramesh just said, it needs to become a national obsession and I am going to do everything in my capacity to make sure that the message is taken across to every person.”

What will the ads tell people living in slums or in the interiors? It is the job of the government to provide public toilets and ensure that women do not have to hide their faces behind umbrellas as they sit alongside drains on roads to empty their bowels. Have you seen such scenes? Do you know how heartbreaking it is? Do you know how young women have to take someone along because there are predators waiting? Do you know that many cannot afford even the two rupees to use the public loos? Do you know that the cloth they use during their periods has to be washed in dirty water because there isn’t enough of it? Do you know that they stand for hours to fill buckets to use the water for drinking and cooking and recycle what is left? Do you know that children squat for hours only to see their malnourished droppings taken over by flies?

We look away, hold up our noses. Vidya Balan is doing it out of “conviction”, she says. Every Indian she reaches out to will remember her as she lectures on sanitation. They will probably have an inauguration in some cleaned up poor locality. After that, there will be clips on what to do and how to keep your environment free of disease on television.

The municipalities and panchayats should be regularly visiting these places. They ought to involve key workers from those areas, people who belong there, have suffered. I know that with Ms. Balan it is possible to get some industrial houses to shell out money. Yet, it won’t really reach out unless the infrastructure is in place.

I am waiting for someone to compare her to Mahatma Gandhi the minute she holds up a broom in her hand. It’s been over six decades when he started it. Has it made any difference? It did not then. It will not now. Except to honour the celebrities for their sanitised concern and conviction.

Sonia’s Boys Will Be Boys

Almost everyday, someone in this country is using khadi to wipe some part of their houses, some part of their person. I am quite certain they are not thinking about how they are insulting the Mahatma.


But it can happen:

Congress disapproved Union Minister Jairam Ramesh's controversial act of wiping his shoe with a garland of spun cotton given by party members while welcoming him at a public function in Rajasthan.

"In the life of a nation there are certain symbols and one should be more careful and sensitive about them," AICC General Secretary Janardhan Dwivedi said reacting to the development.

The cotton garlands were offered to Ramesh by Congress office-bearers Rameshwar Dudi and Rampyari Vishnoi at a function on Monday. When the minister was sitting on a chair at the dais, he took off the garlands and put them on a table. After some time, he took a garland and cleaned his shoe.

Reacting sharply, the state BJP criticised his act and demanded an apology saying, "The garland is a symbol of Gandhi's spinning wheel. It (the act) is an insult to Gandhi's khadi."

A few points:

• The BJP’s Gandhigiri we know about, so it is just adding to the political cacophony.

• The only insult is that the garland was offered to him as a gesture and he ought to have respected it, whether it was a garland of marigolds or of sandalwood. There is no special symbolism about khadi. It can and does clean shoes.

• People should be more concerned that this ‘humble’ fabric is sold at exorbitant rates by designer labels. In the life of a nation there is the common man, too.

• Having said this, I wonder what prompted Jairam Ramesh to become his own shoeshine boy on a public platform. Was he in fact being Gandhian and telling the party membes that you must clean your own dirt?

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Omar Abdullah declares:

“A young man was shot dead in Sopore yesterday for no apparent fault of his. Where the hell are all the irate voices??? Bloody hypocrites.”

For how many years has there been insurgency in Kashmir? How many people have been killed, by both the armed forces as well as the militants? Why this sudden looking for “irate voices”? Does the chief minister of J&K think that civilian deaths do not matter if militants kill them?


I understand that he believes that the issue of such killings by the authorities are taken up by human rights organisations, and they are silent. No, they are not. There are records of such killings. But, it must be remembered that a terrorist is not running a government or representing the country or in charge of its security. That is the big difference. People expect the security forces to not kill civilians. His comment makes one wonder whether:

• He believes that all those killed by the army are at fault.

• The fact that there are irate voices against establishment-ordered killings means that it happens and there ought to be equal vehemence in opposing it.

This is not about scoring points about decibel levels.


As for being bloody hyprocrites, how about the fact that the Centre-appointed interlocutor in Kashmir, Dileep Padgaongkar, had gone on one of Ghulam Nabi Fai’s junket conferences, and our home minister says that as this was before he became the interlocutor, it is fine? If there is criticism of Fai, then why not have a uniform response?


Mr. Fai’s links have been made much of, so where are the irate voices about the interlocutor’s role? Where is the “bloody hypocrites” declamation?

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Mani Shanker Aiyer has called the Congress a circus. Why?

"Those who have got their work done visit 10, Janpath (Congress President Sonia Gandhi's residence), while those with some hope of getting their work done visit 23, Willingdon Crescent (the residence of the Congress Chief's Political Secretary Ahmed Patel). Those who have lost all the hope and are dejected come to 24, Akbar Road (Congress' headquarters)".

I don’t think he has visited a circus in a long time. What he is describing is different phases of love. They can be encapsulated in a few phrases from a few songs, light and dark:

1. Porgee phaslee re phaslee
2. Mujhko thodi lift kara de
3. Koi hota jisko hum apna, hum apna keh lete yaaron…

Unless, of course, Mr. Aiyer meant the circus in the film Mera Naam Joker. In which case, it would be apt to address him:

kehta hai jokar saara zamaana

aadhi haqeeqat aadha fasaana

chashmaa uthaao, phir dekho yaaro

duniya nayi hai, chehra puraana

Bhool gaye kya apne din?

3 Idiots: IIT, IIM and the Minister

A distorted image of a scene from the Hindi film 3 Idiots

Since when have IITs and IIMs become shrines that everyone has to bow before them and whatever comes out of those hallowed corridors is to be considered some holy benediction?

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh and the hurt alumni and faculty of the institutes are both narrow-minded. Here is what the minister had said:

“There is hardly any worthwhile research from our IITs. The faculty in the IIT is not world class. It is the students in IITs who are world class. So the IITs and IIMs are excellent because of the quality of students not because of quality of research or faculty.”

What exactly is world-class? Don’t we have our own standards to judge? There is some pretty wimpy stuff coming out of Ivy League universities. The IITs and IIMs depend on government funding, so Mr. Ramesh has just given them an opportunity to crib about how they are short of money and shackled by government interference.

It is no wonder that reports mention the kneejerk response that this one statement has received. Typically, they have pulled up the minister, asking him to hold forth on the quality of politicians. Pretty lame. For not only is the minister a product of such an institute, there are many others, and quite a few of them in fact confirm what he says – not about the faculty, but about the students. The hierarchy is in place and those who get in assume they are better than the rest.

And what is so great about those students? Many take the first opportunity to go overseas and then after they have made it return with a cheque to donate to their alma mater. Those who remain here end up doing staid academic jobs; the more enterprising ones consider research to mean rehashing the minutiae of what they did at the institutes in columns, books and films and these are lapped up because our ‘youth segment’ is now interested in the techie/managerial route to success decoded in simplistic paneer wrap language.

Oh, before I forget, a little bit of mandatory failure along the way is seen as idealism. Idiots.

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I had written a more detailed piece on a related subject in Understanding the Rot in Academia