HVK Archives: 1947-1997: who got the cream?
1947-1997: who got the cream? - The Financial Express
R Vijayaraghavan
()
3 July 1997
Title: 1947-1997: who got the cream?
Author: R Vijayaraghavan
Publication: The Financial Express
Date: July 3, 1997
We all know the answer to that question. But, since we are going to
celebrate 50 years of freedom with a big. bang in less than two months from
now, it is surely essential to pose the question and repeat the answers.
It will probably be only a ritual: but, who knows, sense may suddenly
descend on us, just as freedom did 50 years ago, and in the next 50 years
every Indian may become as prosperous as the Chinese are today.
Let us begin by going back a little more than five years and looking at the
Supreme Court judgment in the reservation case. The Supreme Court said:
"The 'advanced sections' of the socially backward classes -- the creamy
layer -- cannot be given the benefit of reservation because they no longer
belong to the socially and economically backward classes".
We must be eternally grateful to the Supreme Court for giving us the
concept of denying more goodies to the creamy layer. The court, of course.
used the term in a limited context but we need to tell ourselves that the
concept has universal application.
Here is something I wrote soon after the judgment was delivered. "The
creamy layer exists in not just the economically and socially backward
classes. It is there above the hundreds of millions of people of all
classes who constitute the poor in this country. It floats up there
frothily but pressing down like a smothering blanket on the amorphous mass
that has never tasted cream, has a vague idea that there is something
called cake and survives on bits and pieces of bajra roti".
This creamylayer is not of course unique to independent India. There has
always been cream for the fat cats in the ancient civilisations, in the
democracy of Athens and the dictatorship of Sparta. in the Roman empire and
the British Empire, in the USA since the 13 States declared independence
and in the USSR of Stalin, Brezhnev and Gorbachev. in the Russia of Yeltsin
and the China of Mao and Deng. In India the creamy layer became fatter with
every year of independence, adding ice-cream, souffle and badam kheer to
its diet. The layer became grosser even as public protestations of concern
for the poor became louder with each passing year. Let the rich get richer:
it is an immutable law of human society. But should not the poor become
less poor at the same time?
How has the rest of the world progressed in these 50 years? There is no
point in comparing ourselves with small countries like Korea. Taiwan, Japan
Malaysia or even Indonesia. We are too big. The only country which can be
used as a yardstick to judge our progress is China.
The creamy layer in China is thin and the common people are materially much
better off than in India. It Is not only the bleeding heart socialists who
say this. Most industrialists who have been to China say the same thing.
Many industrialists have told me that every citizen of China is well-fed.
well-clothed and well-housed. The economic status of the common man in
China is degrees of magnitude superior to that of the common Indian. "And
the children are the healthiest I have seen anywhere in the world", one
very big Indian industrialist once told me.
What is more -- or what is worse for the common Indian - the upper middle
class and the elite in India are far richer than their counterparts in
China. ]'his same industrialist gave me one example. The general manager
of big factory in China goes to work on a bicycle, just as the lowest
apprentice worker. Maybe the general manager in China is healthier than
his counterparts here because he goes to work on a cycle. Our executives
would be less prone to ulcers, blood pressure. tension and heart attacks if
they too cycled to work.
So what are we going to do? Is there any hope that all Indians will one
day become part of the creamy layer? Prime Ministers and finance ministers
since independence have each given their answers to this question. But
none of these have worked. I firmly believe that none of them have worked
solely because all of us Indians have lived by one credo in the past 50 years.
Our motto has been: Do unto others before they do it unto to you.
What I have said may sound Gandhian to cynical minds. In fact it is
Gandhian. And we must remember that the 50th anniversary of Gandhiji's
assassination went by on January 30 this year, unnoticed and unsung.
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