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ShareNo matter how symbolic or, sometimes, how cosmetic and fleeting the gesture is, the sight of many of our leaders -- Rahul Gandhi, Yeddyurappa now and Kumaraswamy before him -- sharing a meal with impoverished villagers in nondescript hamlets is actually a good thing.
It somehow brings into focus the sharp inequities that exist in society and the need to address these issues in the long run. Of course, it appears there is a competitive spirit and the fear of loss of votes that compels leaders to spend a night in a weavers' hutment, or partake a meal with a family that otherwise cannot afford to entertain guests, no matter how high and mighty such guests may be.
The former chief minister HD Kumaraswamy was criticised quite often for staging such events and there were stories about how much money was spent by the state to make such efforts at camaraderie possible. Toilets had to be built at these humble dwellings, which also received a fresh coat of paint. Fans and beds had to be hurriedly ferried for the chief minister to sleep in comfort for a few hours.
It is quite possible that those families did not benefit from such brief brushes with the powerful. For many of them, a meal with the chief minister is a one-off experience, just as it is for school kids with clean steel plates and a bottle of mineral water in front of them sitting alongside Yeddyurappa to partake of a Diwali feast in flood-ravaged northern Karnataka.
While, on that score, it is easy to criticise the chief minister, the real intent behind that gesture goes a long way; not in making life any better for those kids in the immediate future but in reminding decision-makers that life for most people they govern are quite different on a daily basis. To know that poverty exists is one thing, but to experience it briefly is another.
So, even if Rahul Gandhi chooses harijan hutments for his nightstay and Yeddyurappa does so more to show that he is concerned about the plight of people whose life support has been washed away, and even if both of them are doing that to consolidate popular support, it is not a bad thing at all because it is politics of the positive kind. The more one does that, the more one actually gets involved with 'real India'.
There is another spin-off. Even if such inter-class dining does not break caste and class barriers, it tends to soften inequities and instil in the minds of the disadvantaged a feeling of upward mobility in social hierarchy -- even though, in actual fact, it may not be so.
The sense of empowerment that the poor felt in this country in the early 70s, when Mrs Indira Gandhi identified herself with the have-nots, could actually be seen and felt, just as around the same time, members of backward classes in Karnataka could be seen walking around with puffed-up chests during the tenure of Devaraj Urs as chief minister. The flood relief operations have led to a subtle change in the ruling dispensation in the state. By focussing across the region on the people who suffered, Yeddyurappa seems to have, unwittingly or otherwise, corrected the impression that his party is the party of the major castes.
So far, there have been no complaint of politics in offering relief. One might argue that it is not necessary for the CM to be running up and down devastated areas, thereby putting pressure on the administration on hosting him rather than engaging in the primary task of offering relief. To an extent that may be true, but by being there Yeddyurappa has been able to see how inadequate the efforts of his administration are in some parts of the northern districts.
By all accounts, it is evident that relief has not reached the needy at the speed at which it was supposed to and it is equally evident that what has been provided is inadequate. In some cases, Gadag district for instance, the bureaucracy was lax in dealing with the situation.
An angry Yeddyurappa ordered the transfer of the deputy commissioner because he was convinced the administration was not doing its best. If that was meant to be an example for others, it would be fine but bureaucracy has the tendency to do what it wants to rather than what is called for.
Take the case of government servants as a class. When there was a suggestion that everyone in government should put in an extra hour or two in this crisis, the gargantuan official machinery refused to budge -- so much so that the CM had to quietly back down.
That, simply put, is the power of the bureaucracy. You can shout at them and, if you are chief minister, transfer them from one post to another. That is all that is possible. Forget corruption, even getting them to work means them doing it on their terms -- not yours and not what the situation demands.
