Knowing your onions

“Liberty is man’s birthright. However, to give the rein of government to Indians at this juncture is to hand over the destiny of millions into the hands of rogues and freebooters. Not a bottle of water or a loaf of bread shall escape taxation. Only the air will be free and the blood of those hungry millions will be on the head of Mr Atlee (British Prime Minister then). India will be lost in political squabbles. It will take a thousand years for them to enter the periphery of politics. Today we hand over the rein of government to men of straw of whom no trace will be found after a few years.”

That was Winston Churchill in the House of Commons on a Bill granting independence to India. Churchill was right, and wrong. The greatest achievement of Indian democracy is that it has survived, may be fractured, for 66 years. People who revile against the perversions of Indian democracy should realise it is nothing short of a miracle that we have managed to retain the basic features of a democratic system in fairly good shape. The credit goes to the good sense of the mass of people who, by and large, have shown a capacity for political judgement that has baffled time and again the pollsters and the professional politicians.

Well, Churchill’s statement is still mocking at us. It is a pity that in recent years politics has attracted criminals and mafia and a set of unethical and wayward people. A major setback for India’s political anarchy is to have too much government and too little governance, too many laws and too little justice, too many public servants and too little public service, too many controls and too little welfare. Corruption at all places and redtape at all levels! As Churchill had predicted, India is one of the highly taxed countries in the world.

If someone had invented a mechanism, the people would have been moving around with a device / meter on their nose to measure the polluted air they breathe in so that the government could tax even the air. Everything else, including water, is taxed. We pay service tax even if there is no service. With great difficulty one gets a job and he is forced to pay not only income tax but also a profession tax and even an education cess to help those who do not want to be educated! Your salary is paid after deducting the taxes. You are penalised if the tax is not paid, but there is no way to get a refund in case your tax is cut in excess by mistake.

Unfortunately, vote bank politics and our self-serving agenda of greed and self-centredness have often polarised us and stirred up communal, caste, regional and linguistic passions. As a result, from time to time, we witness the flaring up of intolerance against minorities and the vulnerable. Very often we get irritated and frustrated by the many things that are absent or that don’t work in India – poor infrastructure, woeful civic sense, alarming acceptance of glaring social injustice and corruption, illiteracy, persistent poverty and malnutrition in the middle of growing affluence.

India has celebrated the 67th Independence Day on Thursday amidst bomb blasts in Assam and Manipur and several places across the country on separate states and other trivial issues. The country witnessed the Prime Minister (his last probably) addressing the nation from the ramparts of Red Fort, an annual ritual since independence. Does his speech mean anything to the common man? Onions are sold for Rs 70-80 a kg in the national capital and if reports are to be believed the price may touch Rs 100 by next week. This is much more than the national per capita income ($1.25) per day for a family above poverty line fixed by the government. Even in Hyderabad prices range from Rs 50 to 60 a kg. Potato and tomato also cost around Rs 50 per kg. How will the common man survive when prices of essential food items shoot up making them unaffordable.

“Buy tyres, get onions free” is the deal from an auto shop in Jharkhand, a reflection of the massive jump in prices of the humble onion, yet vital, in the country. Almost every Indian dish requires onion, and for the hundreds of millions of families living on subsistence incomes, a jump in the onion price has made the vegetable unaffordable, and cooking nearly impossible. It is not that prices of other vegetables have not increased, but onion’s political charisma is unmatchable. It can instantly make a government’s fortunes upside down. Onion prices in 1980 helped Indira Gandhi to topple India’s first non-Congress government. The sweeping nationalism in the aftermath of five nuclear blasts could not help the BJP retain power in Delhi and Rajasthan because of the highest ever onion price in 1998.

The BJP seems to be determined to pay the Congress in its own coin and topple the Congress governments in Delhi and Rajasthan which are going to polls in November this year. The UPA government is moving heaven and earth to get the Food Security Bill passed in parliament. The Bill enables 67 per cent of the people to get 7 kg of grains every month -- rice at Rs 3, wheat at Rs 2 and coarse cereals at Re 1 per kg. People cannot live by rice alone. They need onion, dal and potato and other vegetables to go with it. Where is the food security if dal and onions cost Rs 80-100 per kg? In 1998, Sonia won loud cheers when she told a crowd, “Our sisters cannot run their households.” Now will she include onion also under food security?

P N V Nair