If intelligently implemented, BOOBZ could change the face of the government, that is, if sensible economizing is at all one of our objectives. It ought to be one, since we are closer to bankruptcy than we’ve ever been before.
It was only natural, Dr Kapila felt, that the DGP had expressed the anxieties characteristic of those feudal lords who fear most the diminishing of their fiefdoms. That BOOBZ concerned itself not with the balance of power between Departments but with planning would never enter his head. The police forces, he would assert, have always welcomed organizational innovation and new man management techniques (as long as they didn’t touch either manpower or budget). Under the mantle of V∞IP security, Dr Kapila knew that the government protected scores of vague persons whom nobody even knew the existence of and whom only the nation’s taxpayers might want to get rid of once they found out how their money was being wasted. At the same time, two of the country’s last four Prime Ministers and three regional Chief Ministers had been, in the preceding decade, either mowed down or blown up. Thus, one, notched up Dr Kapila, they spent more and more on Security every year. They were at 303 crores that year from the previous budget’s 292. Two: Their Endangered List continued to grow even more steadily than their population. Recent additions included the Minister of State for Handlooms, Women and Child Development and the Chairman of the Committee to Celebrate the Completion of Forty-Four Years of the Nation’s Federal Polity. Three: They could not protect the very few that they needed to.
Dr Kapila sighed and looked out of his ninth-floor Secretariat window at the world’s largest slum and the grey sea beyond. The air above Bhayankar still looked smoky from the fires of the hellish election riots of the preceding week. They hadn’t yet finished identifying the dead. He was abruptly reminded of his last trip to the northern states.
He’d been sent there as a Central observer for the previous elections some months ago. On the road somewhere just outside Yugandhar City, eleven-ish in the morning it had been, a straight, unremarkable stretch of State Highway with wheat fields on either side, their white Ambassador had been merrily staggering along when, all of a sudden, the skies’d been overwhelmed by a squeal of sirens that had frighteningly grown louder every second. Shuddering with dread, their car had pulled up on the shoulder of the road and breathless, they’d all gaped at a hillock of dust rushing up the road towards them, like the elements signalling the approach of Robur the Conqueror in one of his futuristic, amphibious vehicles. In a second, it had resolved itself into a convoy—an open jeep, two off-white Ambassadors, a closed jeep. Lights flashing, sirens now earsplitting, it—the convoy—had shot past them with the roar and whoosh of a jet plane. The two jeeps and the second Ambassador had been stuffed with—had oozed, as it were—Black Guard commandoes and policemen in various coloured uniforms. With some kind of small cannon, a sort of Rambo erect beside the driver in the first jeep, rigged out in regulation khaki beret, sunglasses and moustache, had waved pedestrians and terrified cyclists away from the convoy. Whatever from? Dr Kapila had wondered. From karate-chopping the vehicles as they passed? Or kicking the tyres? Perhaps from piddling on the ferociously winking lights on the roofs of the cars? The first Ambassador had been black-glassed, secretive and ludicrously menacing, like a rapist/blackguard in an F-grade cheap-thrills film. The windows of the second had been down perforce, or else the dozen or so commandoes in it would’ve asphyxiated. It—the second car—looked as though it’d just careened out of a farcically violent comic strip—Asterix, perhaps; a dozen determinedly baleful mugs under black berets hanging out of the windows, an occasional hand clutching a reputedly ammunition-less automatic weapon (ammunition-less because of one of the routine Economy Drives. Bullets were expensive and of course the police knew that not everybody on the Endangered List needed all the paraphernalia—five cars, fine, but bullets in the guns of their guards? Oh no no. Reputedly ammunition-less because bullets was a Security subject, and Security had always been hidden in billowing clouds of unknowing, like a masked rioter behind the exploding smoke bomb, exploiting the camouflage to do his own thing).
What could be the purpose of such a convoy? To irritate and scare traffic and the citizenry? To amuse and depress the inmates of other vehicles? ‘That must be two dying Prime Ministers being rushed to Intensive Care,’ Dr Kapila had murmured.
‘Ha ha sir.’ His driver, a local, had then explained in Punjabi, ‘But that isn’t so. That was the Superintendent of Police of the district, sir, going to office.’
Dr Kapila sighed and returned to his dictation charged with an obscure missionary zeal. He must stop the rot, guide the drifters, stem the tide; he had all the ideas, but how to convince the people who called the shots? Should he buy time on Zee TV? Because nobody read any more—even electronically-typed, double-spaced English notes. Perhaps he could seat the Cabinet in front of the TV for half-an-hour of prime time and have a toothy, nubile thing emcee a show called The Boobz of the Welfare State. Some good citizens to sing Hindi film songs before a studio audience, a few film clips, a couple of risqué jokes, a fistful of social issues and every now and then, a Hindi film personage, preferably female, to chat about the benefits of the Boobz programme. Perhaps then the Cabinet would listen.
Ah well, until then, the show must go on. ‘Please continue . . . BOOBZ is one method by which we can halt the enormous wastage of financial and manpower resources that has become a fundamental characteristic of all our activities . . . Since this is a Secret note, it will not be out of place to describe in some detail here a typical example of how the Welfare State allocates its resources . . .’ With a bitter half-smile, Dr Kapila at this point balked. How to choose from a million? Without losing objectivity, without becoming near-hysterical, how to lead up to the instance of Bhanwar Virbhim at the golf club?
Golf was a social thing for Dr Kapila, Manila and all that, the right people. He’d been rudely surprised one Sunday morning to spy on the course a handful of Black Guard commandoes scanning the surroundings with eagle eye while bumping into one another, hideously conspicuous against the green, an invasion of aliens. When he’d spotted in their midst the golf-ball-like figure of his ex-Chief Minister and present Central Minister, Bhanwar Virbhim, he’d felt as unsettled as a schoolboy catching sight of his formidable class teacher meekly standing in a long line to buy kerosene at the local market—however could he be here? With the Minister, teaching him the rudiments of the game, had been his loyal sidekick, the reputed sharer of his mistress, squat, safari-suited Bhupen Raghupati.
The sight had needled all of Dr Kapila’s caste and class prejudices. The Golf Club was for the select—for speakers of grammatically-correct, correctly-accented English, for those who occasionally holidayed in Europe, for that sort; so how come this local from some horrendously obscure small town, who still wore (Dr Kapila was certain) string drawers instead of (the damn uncomfortable) VIP Frenchie undies, and who still didn’t know that one didn’t burp in public, how come he now loved his game of golf? Had we come a long way, baby, sir. Bhanwar Virbhim on the green had indeed looked like the Revolution. Dr Kapila had disapproved. Where would one be if people began to rise in society at the speed with which they rose in politics?
Ranga the Club Secretary, an ex-Finance Service man who favoured checked trousers and who had a bald dome and grey, shoulder-length hair, had not approved either. ‘You see, these fellows—’ stabbing with his pencil in the direction of the commandoes, ‘—wear studded boots the size of suitcases. We might as well simply dig up the turf. I’ll have to speak to the DGP.’
He did. The Director General of Police then sent a secret note to the Private Secretary to Bhanwar Virbhim pointing out that in the opinion of Security, for a sniper, an Endangered Listee waddling about in the vast open spaces of a golf course was a dream come true. ‘The Minister is strongly advised to give up learning the game till such time that he remains on the E list.’
Bhanwar Virbhim would not have risen thus far had he ever wilted under a
routine caste-and-class offensive of this kind. He asked his Private Secretary to write a Secret Note to the Private Secretary to the Home Minister to suggest that the Black Guard Commandoes ordered to protect him, Bhanwar Virbhim, should be instructed to walk barefoot as and when the occasion demanded.
The note billiard-balled its way down to the DGP, who wrote on it that he found the proposal of the Private Secretary unrealistic. Are the Black Guards supposed to protect the Target every second of the period that they are on duty, or not? That is the question. What if—Heaven forbid—something were to happen to the Target at the very moment when the heads of the Commandoes are down and their hands and minds are busy with their shoelaces? Whose head will then roll in the fallout to compensate for the Target’s?
The note arrived on Dr Kapila’s desk as a fat file full of comment and counter-comment. Bhupen Raghupati had mooted that on Bhanwar Saab’s golf days, his contingent of commandoes could be doubled and that the second lot could be barefoot. The DGP had approved of the doubling because it increased his fiefdom, but not of the bootlessness. Security cannot compromise on quality, on anything that will affect performance. What if—Heaven forbid—something were to happen to the Target just when a thorn or sharp object pricked the bare feet of the commandoes, and their hands and minds were occupied with the distraction? Who would then be held responsible for the tragedy? Please find out what kind of footwear is acceptable on the golf course and how much it will cost us to shod ALL our commandoes. For it is my duty to point out here that other V∞IPs on the E List might well want to emulate Bhanwar Virbhim. Please solicit the approval of Finance for the extra expenditure.
The more time Dr Kapila had spent in Finance, the more he had come to believe that very few citizens—normal people—would understand the Welfare State economy. After years of sporadic focusing on the subject, he’d honed the tumult in his head down to a few basic ideas.
For one, the amount of money that the typical civil servant in Finance could visualize, conceptualize or mentally handle at one time usually depended on the file that he was dealing with but in general, did not exceed fifty thousand rupees, that is to say, his average official monthly earnings multiplied by as far as his fingers could take the figure.
Even though this first conclusion of his sounded like one of his own poor jokes, Dr Kapila had seen it borne out time and time again by the facts. If one asked a Finance man for clearance for any sum less than fifty thousand rupees as a loan, for example, against one’s own Provident Fund account to i) buy a car, ii) marry off one’s son or iii) cardinal sin!—zip off to Mauritius on a holiday, it was a fact that, quoting his own last Economy Drive circular, he would turn one down.
Yet, when one returned to Finance with yet another harebrained proposal to spend five hundred crore rupees on a new rural water supply scheme—which was merely the fifteenth cosmetically-doctored version of the system that’d been in existence for the last forty years—Finance okayed it, principally because five hundred crore rupees was way, way beyond the comprehension of its men; about one hundred thousand times more than what they could visualize.
Dr Kapila had once believed that the civil servants of his Department would approve the new rural water supply scheme and turn down the request for a loan to buy a car with because:
i) they were wicked, loved power and adored harassing their colleagues,
ii) rural was far away from them, fortunately remote and incomprehensible. They felt sorry for it, and
iii) they felt noble okaying noble schemes.
Time had however forced him to change his opinion. Why, only two weeks ago, Public Health had sent them a proposal for an extra expenditure of forty-four thousand rupees on Additional Tetracycline for Madna District. His Deputy Secretary’d promptly shot it down, pitilessly scrawling beneath the initial note: Bad planning. PH should’ve provided a minor cushion for such eventualities in its original Firefighting Against Acts of God Subhead.
Dr Kapila’s first conclusion was his second as well. Fifty thousand rupees, he believed, was also the largest sum that the average, corrupt civil servant could look forward to as his share, and both mentally and physically handle as a bribe, per transaction per person, that is, after all the palms’d been greased in proper hierarchical order and the dust’d settled right down the line. Venality, however, was not a subject that Dr Kapila was comfortable with. Even after almost thirty years of service, it continued to shock and at times nauseate him.
When he’d been young—or rather, younger—he could swear that they hadn’t taken any bribes. Almost swear. Well, he’d never taken any. What he meant was—the lower orders, twenty years ago, might’ve taken a hundred—or a maximum of five hundred—rupees to push or lose a file, or a peon might’ve taken ten rupees off a petitioner to allow him in to meet the officer, or a constable—and there Dr Kapila’d always pause. The less said about the police, engineers and Welfare State doctors, the better. Some fixtures of life, like the Milky Way, have been there in the space around us since time immemorial.
But nowadays! The ethics—and the stakes—stagger the mind! And People Like Me, shrieked Dr Kapila silently, with My Background! It is horrifying that they too are merrily milking away! Not some lower-caste fellow—some incompetent, barely literate Kansal Commission appointee, the holder of a sad undergraduate degree from some obscure regional college that functions out of a ghastly Public Works building that has broken windows and no electricity—one wouldn’t’ve been surprised, you know, to hear that they’re still raking it in. But members of the Golf Club, for instance! Who read Alvin Toffler and buy Music Today CDs—civil servants like that slithery Chanakya Lala who, after a decade of dedicated service, reputedly owns a couple of hills in some North Indian resort town—my God, he went to my school and my college—though, fortunately, twenty years after me—but crookedness that close to one’s skin is deeply unsettling.
And the figures that one hears are truly mindboggling! A lakh of rupees for each No Objection Certificate to pull down and rebuild a one-thousand-square-foot apartment! The rates have apparently been quite mathematically worked out and—some say—are indeed quite reasonable.
Chanakya Lala often reminds Dr Kapila of Kaa the snake in his daughter’s old Walt Disney video of The Jungle Book. Lala is tall, slim, bespectacled, with a womanish sway to his hips in his walk. He stinks of perfume; in fact, in a drawer in his office, he keeps a bottle from which he regularly bathes himself. It is his way of preparing for meetings. That scent of his—airy, pine-forest-like—Dr Kapila has come to consider one of the odours of corruption. Lala wears his gold watch on his right wrist, which Dr Kapila finds truly disgusting. He is unfailingly well-dressed and well-mannered, Suck Above, Suck Below. He invariably shares his booty with the dacoits who are his political masters and with whichever of his official superiors is willing. He has enterprise and has managed over the years to milk the most diverse Departments—Urban Housing, Rural Rationing, Education, Food and Drugs, Excise, Animal Husbandry. You see, no matter where you are, there always will be a law which you’ll interpret, one way or the other, in favour of one party. Why do it for free? Especially when your own salary’s so ridiculous that you are practically working for free. After all, don’t you owe a decent life to your children?
The above specious arguments would never’ve occurred to me, is what Dr Kapila tells himself. However did they occur to Slither? When Dr Kapila’d been Lala’s age, every morning, he’d—in a manner of speaking—get off his mother’s lap, touch her feet, seek her blessings, grab his tiffin box from his wife’s hand and go off to sweat in the car on his way to work. Was Lala then a sign of the changing times? How did he get rid of his mother and replace her with a wily dealer in foreign exchange? Or could the changing times themselves be attributed to the moral decline of the Aflatoons? The rot starts at the top? The apocalypse round the corner, time’s running out for the nation—and just look at the Joneses!
Lala of course was in the big league; the amou
nts that he supposedly gobbled up in bribes were hardly the norm. Of course, Dr Kapila had steadfastly held that those who could prove his deductions wrong were most welcome to step forward. In fact, by doing so, they would solve some of the riddles and dispel a little the fog that envelopes the economics of the Welfare State. Were he to be interrogated on the subject, he’d confess that soon after taking over as Regional Finance Secretary, he’d been so intrigued by the economics of white-collar venality that he’d felt that he must pose some questions to the experts in the field. He’d thus sent anonymous questionnaires on scented paper both to Chanakya Lala and to Bhupen Raghupati. He’d been partly inspired by some curious sheets of off-white paper that he’d received now and then in his office post, unsigned—indeed, blank, save for some large, yellowish stains on them, thick, like dried cream. Though he hadn’t signed the covering letter, he’d made it clear that the filled-in questionnaires should be posted to the office of the Regional Finance Secretary and that the information disclosed therein would of course remain totally confidential. He was disappointed that neither ever replied. He found that typically self-centred and cowardly of them. They needn’t have signed the filled-in sheets. Surreptitiously, they squeeze and suck at the dugs like crazy, but scurry away like rats when they feel the mammoth, sluggish body stir.
Dr Kapila’d been quite pleased with the acuity of his questions. Though unanswered, they summed up the disquiet of any thinking Economics man in the country.
i) Apparently, the total amount that the State loses a year in bribes is a little over ten thousand crore rupees. However did the statisticians arrive at such a figure? Have you answered such questionnaires before? If so, how come I don’t know? Who’d sent them? Have you kept a copy?
The Mammaries of the Welfare State Page 23