The snobbery over bandhs

The only word I hear my urban, upwardly mobile peers utter with more disdain than 'politics' is 'bandh'.

The loathing is not new. I've grown up in a Kolkata which had long been reduced to a shell of a city, much of its goodness emptied out with the spoon of Marxist propaganda, militant trade unionism, long funeral marches of dead slogans, and the great bandh, an Indian-ism for a total blockade of businesses and transport.

My parents -- the father once an ultra Leftist -- came to loathe it. And I came to loathe it too, notwithstanding the hours of exhilarating cricket or football on deserted streets.

When I escaped to Mumbai, I was delighted by the absence of bandhs. In this city, trade union strikes and workers' anger had long been dealt with, and the mills had quietly resigned to be squelched and re-arranged into bowling alleys, pubs, malls and skyscrapers.

Peace had been arrived at, and people loathed bandhs.

But what does one do when the very basic rice, pulses, milk, vegetables that one needs keep oneself alive and part of the free-market dream threatens to go beyond reach? When two cylinders of cooking gas cost nearly as much as a basic cellular phone? And when medical expenses on your parents' get higher than your monthly income?

Many economists, commentators rubbish subsidies. "Developed nations cut subsidies." But unlike India, developed nations don't let their poor, old and unemployed fend for themselves without social security or health cover either.

A 2002-'05 survey by the Indian Institute of Population Sciences on behalf of the World Health Organisation on 10,000 poor families in six states -- Maharashtra, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh -- showed that more than 16 per cent were pushed below the poverty line, while 12 per cent had to sell their assets to meet health expenses. A whopping 43.3 per cent had to borrow from outside the family to cover the costs. One can only guess the extent of helplessness now, with a far more explosive inflation raging.

Now, is that not a fit cause for mass protest? If so, how does one protest?

We justifiably abhor the destructive side of a bandh: the burning of buses and trains, damage to public property, harassment to people, the losses to business. But what we do not see is that the actual people who protest in our democracy -- the political workers -- largely come from backgrounds in which trains and buses and the mighty GDP don't really matter. They come from slums where the word 'amenity' does not feature in conversations in the long queues for water.

So, before people screw up their virtual noses on Twitter, Facebook and a hundred online forums and deride the crass, lowly bandhs and talk about alternative forms of democratic protest, they should ask themselves how many times have they participated in even the fancier forms of protest. How many times have they stood up against injustice in the real world?

Evolved forms of protest like picketing, black badges, hyper-production, radical cheerleading and protest rides on cycles and bikes happen when an educated, evolved population participate. In India, that class is sterile, silent. Largely caught up in sucking up to bosses and ducking their spouses, and vice versa.

Here, political protests are carried out by those who have limited or no access, and hence little respect, for amenities or public property. As long as the middle-class don't demonstrate other hallowed forms of protest they keep ranting about, they should shut up and keep out of harm's way when others are putting that very bad word -- bandh -- into action.

ufffd Abhijit Majumder is Executive Editor, MiD DAY