A K Bhattacharya: Why Lalu alone is not guilty

NEW DELHI DIARY

In the 1960s, the market in India had a very few packaged tea brands. One of them was Tosh's Tea. It was a popular brand of blended Darjeeling tea. The company which produced and marketed this brand was known as A Tosh & Sons.

It was widely believed that contrary to the general perception, A Tosh & Sons was not a foreign company. Nor did the brand belong to a foreigner. It was very much a desi affair.

According to one story, the gentleman who owned and ran the company was Ashutosh. But to make a special place in the hearts of foreign brand-loving Indian consumers, Ashutosh had decided to break his name into two words.

So, Ashutosh became Ashu Tosh. And to achieve the desired effect, he got his company registered as A Tosh & Sons and the brand became Tosh's Tea.

Imagine what would have happened to the company if it had anything to do with the Indian Railways today under the ministership of Lalu Prasad. Tosh's Tea would have been declared a foreign brand and a new policy put in place to give preference to the sale and use of home-grown desi tea over "foreign" brands like Tosh's Tea.

Isn't this precisely what has happened to A H Wheeler, the company that runs about 260 book stalls in various railway stations in India? The company was set up by a French gentleman in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He had decided to name it after his British friend (Arthur Henry Wheeler).

One of the partners of the firm was a Bengali gentleman called Tinkadi Bandyopadhyay. A few years before India gained independence, the French gentleman decided to hand over the entire business to the Bandyopadhyay family and returned to France. The company's name has remained unchanged since then, but it continues to be run by the Bandyopadhyay family as a wholly-owned Indian firm.

Yet, Lalu Prasad decided to attack A H Wheeler in his Railway Budget speech as a foreign company. While announcing his new policy of reserving 25 per cent of book stalls in railway stations, he wondered why Wheeler stalls should still be seen in so many railway stations, particularly since the British had left the country long ago.

Prasad was obviously not briefed correctly either on the history of A H Wheeler or on the magnitude of its presence in Indian railway stations.

There are more than 10,000 railway stations in India. But A H Wheeler has about 260 book stalls ""almost all of them in railway stations located in North India. If you go South, you will see no trace of A H Wheeler.

In fact, the most popular book stalls in railway stations in south India are run by Higgin Bothams. This too is now owned and controlled by a well-established Indian family-owned business group. Why didn't Lalu Prasad talk about Higgin Bothams? Probably because he is not very much aware of what is happening in the south of the Vindhyas.

So, it was easy for Lalu Prasad to target A H Wheeler, dub it as a symbol of the British raj and announce with fanfare a policy that would deal a body blow to what he sees as a symbol of the British raj. Facts are neither important, nor irrelevant in this game of pure politics of populism.

Why blame only Lalu Prasad? What did Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi do during the last assembly election campaign in his state? He decided to raise the bogey of foreigners at the helm of the Congress party.

And since the then chief election commissioner, J M Lyngdoh, had raised some objections to the manner in which the state administration had behaved during the run-up to the elections, Mr Modi decided to use Mr Lyngdoh's name and project him also as some sort of a foreigner.

At a different level, even the Left parties have not refrained from using such cheap populist tactics to score political points. In a bid to establish its credentials as a party against the British raj, the Left Front government decided to rename the Ochterlony monument (a tall structure built by a British general to remember those who died in a pestilence) as Shaheed Minar. One of the ministers in that West Bengal government had even got the dome of the monument painted in red.

In Delhi, most roads with names of British viceroys were renamed by both the Congress and the BJP rulers. Was there any need to change Curzon Road to Kasturba Gandhi Marg? In what way was the role of Lord Curzon in the building of modern India less significant than what Kasturba Gandhi did for this country? The short point is that foreigners and foreign products are an easy target for most politicians. That may be an acceptable strategy.

But the least one expects from our politicians is that they should at least check out the facts before they launch a campaign.

akb@business-standard.com