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The only free food is on a hook. From Fishy Proverbs
My first
impression of London, driving in on the air terminal bus in the
mid-Sixties, wide-eyed and expectant was that the houses are tiny,
uniform and antiseptic like a film set rather dm a city. In a few
hours I was in the centre of the town and the terraces had given
way to Imperial architecture and Victorian vanities and the
bewilderment passed.
Through all my years of living in Britain I have never grown used
to its ironic provinciality. A person dies of food poisoning in
Scotland and it's national news. A man drowns, a child is lost, a
seal is trapped in a loch, and the cameras and columns get active.
Britain wants to know.
One may feel that such news touchingly preserves a human scale and
perspective. Life is not all war and the ululation of conquering
armies as they ride into Kinshasa in convoy. It isn't all empires
that fall, it's also the shadows cast by leaves upon the wall.
Yet to me, the one man drowned, the incidence of influenza in Much
Binding On The Marsh, the outbreak of phyhoxera in
Weston-Super-Mare, bring a sardonic smile. It's probably because I
carry the baggage of an Indian memory, of Indian contemporaneity,
in which flood, famine, disease and unexplained madness still loom
like four horsemen of an apocalypse.
With stories of disaster and death one may argue that quantifies
are irrelevant, that God weeps at the fall of a sparrow, that one
death through amoebic infection in Glasgow is as lamentable as two
thousand swept into the sea in Bangladesh, sorrow is a cup that may
as well be filled by tears for the one as for the many. With
political stories the same rule seems to apply. Britain entertains
the two rupee scandal, the five anna scam, whereas India only goes
for, or doesn't go for, the two billion one.
Take for instance the case of Mr Neil Hamilton. He was a Tory MP in
the last Parliament who was accused in the public newssheets of
taking sums of money amounting to a couple of thousand pounds a
throw for asking questions in Parliament on behalf of an Arab
potentate called Mr Al Fayed. Now Mr Al Fayed doesn't sell Bofors
guns or fodder with which to save the agriculture of Britain or any
part of it. He sells an innocuous range of products in a world
famous shop called Harrods.
I haven't been blessed with a curiosity for detail in such matters
and so don't know what it is that Neil Hamilton was supposed to ask
the House of Commons for his cash delivered, it is alleged, in
plain brown paper envelopes placed in plastic carrier bags. The
government's intentions on taxing golf clubs or pinstriped suits,
perhaps - it's a long time since I've been in Harrods.
Mr Hamilton said he did nothing wrong and the affair was up for
enquiry by a parliamentary commission when the general election was
called. Neil Hamilton announced that he was standing as the
official Tory candidate and was allowed to so do. The Labour and
Liberal Democrat candidates who had announced their intention to
contest the seat stood down and allowed an independent, a Mr Martin
Bell who is a well-known war journalist and newscaster, to stand as
an anti-corruption candidate. They gave him a clear run against
Hamilton.
During the campaign Mr and Mrs Hamilton turned up at Mr Bell's
press conference and spoke to him face to face. Mrs Hamilton in
her best gambit asked him if he believed that a man was innocent
until proven guilty. Her husband had not actually been to court
and found guilty of anything illegal, but he had been politically
tainted. Mrs Hamilton tried to confound the two levels of guilt -
one, an offence in the criminal code, the second, a reason why you
should not be trusted with public elected office.
Whatever Mr Bell's reply, and it was a sort of wager, he won the
election and Hamilton lost.
At the same general election in Glasgow Gowan, the Labour Party put
forward an Asian candidate called Mohammed Sarwar. The candidacy
was a troubled one. A sitting MP from a neighbouring constituency,
Mike Watson, had represented Labour in Parliament for years and had
had his boundaries changed. He tried to move in to the new
territory of Glasgow Gowan and found Mr Sarwar waiting for him as
Pandar waited for Menelaus.
This Mr Sarwar is a millionaire. Long before the election he and
Mike Watson accused each other of packing the local party with
their friends and supporters, new members who had bought their
cards but hadn't earned their political right to select the
candidate for the constituency. Mr Watson's supporters said that
the manoeuvres amounted to Asian manipulation and appeals to Islam
and ethnicity which had nothing to do with Labour's programme. Mr
Sarwar's supporters cried "racism."
During the selection for Labour (remember this was only a contest
within the Labour Party to see who would represent Labour and the
election) in 1996, Mr Watson won by one vote. Then Mr Sarwar
claimed that 51 of his postal votes had been erroneously
discounted. This claim was upheld and Mr Sarwar was declared
selected. It was Mr Watson's turn to go to court and he contended
that several votes were cast by people who were not legitimate
members of the Party. He lost. Sarwar won in a subsequent ballot
and went on to defeat the Scottish Nationalist candidate and
several others in the general election. He was duly proclaimed MP
for Glasgow Gowan.
This week there are allegations m the press that Mr Sarwar tried to
bribe another Asian candidate, one Badar Islam, who was standing as
Independent Labour, to soft-peddle his own campaign and to sign an
affidavit discrediting another Independent candidate. It is said
that Mr Sarwar offered him #5000 in the now-mandatory plastic
carrier bag.
No sooner was this allegation made than a second one emerged. A
third candidate who won little more dm 300 votes at the election
said he had already launched a complaint with Strathclyde Police to
say that Mr Sarwar's aides had tried to bribe him too.
Mr Sarwar strongly denies the claims and is consulting his
solicitors about suing the newspapers that made them.
The Labour Party has immediately called in the police. If their
investigations prove that Mr Sarwar was guilty of an attempted
bribery of other candidates, he'll be expelled from the Labour
Party, and if he is convicted of an electoral crime he will lose
his seat.
Mr Blair and his new government, having made a big deal of Tory
corruption, can't afford to be touched by any allegations of sleaze
- oh cursed spite that the first claim should be against the only
Muslim MP in the House!
Contrast the position of the present Indian government which has a
chief minister, a member of the same party as the Prime Minister,
under possible indictment by the Central Bureau of Investigation
for criminal involvement in a scam of magnificent proportions
conceding grain to feed cattle. In money alone, the criminal
liability of the whole fodder scam is millions of times that of any
bribe alleged to have been handed over by Mr Sarwar of Glasgow. In
moral effect it is cheating the cattle and the farmers of one of
the poorest regions in the world of subsidies which have been
granted through the machinery of parliamentary process and modem
government.
>From the statements 1 have read in the press, Mr Laloo Prasad
Yadav, the allegedly corrupt chief minister of Bihar, is defiant to
the last. The Prime Minister himself belongs to his party and Mr
Yadav has said that he will kick up a storm and the umbrella
coalition will fold up when the hard rain starts to fall.
There are parallels between the situations in the two countries.
Tony Blair and I.K. Gujral are impeccably honest politicians in
charge of parties within which there exists the alleged rogue. The
scale of misdemeanour is not here in question. Blair can act,
Gujral cannot. A further similarity in the two cases is that both
Yadav and Sarwar can in some way be said to have been propelled to
electoral victory through the manipulation of the ballotability of
a minority, in the case of Yadav a casteist formation and in the
case of Sarwar the liberal idea that an Asian Muslim should get
into Parliament.
The widest divergence in the two scenarios is the gaping fact that
Tony Blair has a party to back him and I.K. Gujral does not. Tony
Blair came to power on the back of a vague but big idea - that of
renewal and justice. I.K. Gujral did not. There may be a million
petty rationales to explain why the coalition in India cannot come
up with a big idea and weld itself into a movement if not a party,
though there is no overwhelming theoretical reason to stop it from
doing so. Indira Gandhi had at least one big idea and rode it hard.
The originating fathers of Congress did and J.P. Narayan helped
put a fragmented Opposition into power with his. The only force on
the horizon with the ghost of such a programme is the Bharatiya
Janata Party. We must pray.
Farrukh Dhondy is commissioning editor for Channel 4
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