A red tilak on Ben Bernanke’s forehead

Hence, at a time when Ben’s beneficiaries are in festive mood, it would certainly seem blasphemous to talk about the growing rich-poor divide in our country. But if poverty hits your columnist in the face, and he chooses not to talk about the dangerous divide, he would be guilty of falsifying the truth about contemporary India. This is what happened.

Munawwar and Salim are two boys — both ‘Fifteen Going on Sixteen’, or thereabouts — working with a contractor engaged by CPWD (which, remember, is a central government agency) for repainting MPs’ bungalows in Lutyens Delhi. They are part of a team currently working at an MP’s house where I stay whenever I am in the capital. Yesterday, Munawwar was running fever. He approached me for some dawa. I gave him a tablet and some food. After he had properly rested, I asked him, “How much do you earn?” Rs 80 a day. Any medical benefits? No. Any holidays? No. “I earn nothing when I don’t work. And I cannot afford to miss a single day, because I want to take with me as much money as possible when I go home for Eid at the end of Ramadan.”

Munawwar and Salim, both school dropouts, have come from rural Uttar Pradesh. They live in Delhi without their families, in a common shed provided by the contractor for all his workers. Salim, in fact, has run away from home. Look around in any Indian city, and you will see tens of thousands of Munawwars and Salims — or, if you will, Bholanaths and Rameshwars — working in the informal sector of the economy on a paltry daily wage, without any social security and, often, without even the joy of living with their families.

Can we still say, with any honesty, that India Incorporated and India Excluded are part of the same country?

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column (‘Hamara Richistan & its secure inhabitants’, IE, September 9) in which I described how our super-rich, aping a trend started by their American counterparts, are seceding — physically, culturally, and psychologically — from the rest of India. On the afternoon of that Sunday, I had gone to the house of a wealthy but socially-committed friend of mine in Mumbai to discuss some public cause. His little daughter came to tell papa she was going out to attend a friend’s birthday party. My friend later asked me, “A builder is celebrating his daughter’s tenth birthday. Guess how much he is spending on the party? Clue: he has called entertainers from abroad.” I couldn’t guess. “Three crore rupees!”

The builder is among those who have recently had big-bang IPOs on BSE.

I doubt if our two main political parties, Congress and BJP, are even aware of what is happening in India, thanks to their lopsided economic policies. All of us know how scores of districts in eastern and central India are affected by Naxal violence. The writ of the government doesn’t even run in many places along the ‘Red Corridor’. True, Naxalism is a grave menace to India’s security, democracy and well-being. It must be countered with a heavy hand. But to think that left-wing extremism has no roots in India’s widening rich-poor divide would be a dangerous delusion. A costlier self-deception would be to assume that Naxal violence will never reach the streets of Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore.

I was with the owner of publishing house in Delhi this week. “I go to Nepal every two months for my business,” he said. “I worry that, as in Nepal, Maoist violence might come to rock our cities, too. Maoists were not in Kathmandu earlier, but they reached the capital and destabilised everything in the country. Many people supported them because of the shocking levels of disparity in Nepal.”

Isn’t there a lesson in this for us in India?