Kanika Datta: Bridging the perception gap

SWOT

Way back in the mid-eighties when Assam started roiling, Prafulla Mahanta, then a rising political aspirant, built a tremendous amount of moral capital by reminding Assamese that their state was a victim of exploitation.

The primary targets of this "drain of wealth" grievance were the tea conglomerates that accounted for the bulk of domestic production and exports.

Most industry executives dismissed Mahanta's statement as the populist rantings of an ambitious politician. After all, weren't the public sector oil companies pumping wealth out of the state as well, they reasoned?

Only Tata satrap Darbari Seth was shrewd enough to acknowledge the compulsions behind Mahanta's statement. Mahanta was completely right, he soothingly pointed out in an interview to Kolkata journalists at the time, little of the bounty from tea was enjoyed by the citizens of the state and yes, it was time to give something back.

Of course, he could not have added that these exclusionary perceptions stemmed from the fact that the management and labour for the tea business came from outside the state""the former mostly drawn from the playing fields of Doon School and Mayo College and the latter from Bihar and the lower reaches of the Terai.

Seth was being politically correct in the (ultimately vain) hope of defusing a crisis that was rapidly spiralling out of control. Yet surprisingly, few tea barons read the signals correctly.

They were content instead to reiterate the long-held view that it was difficult to find educated Assamese to manage their plantations and the locals were reluctant to do menial labour such as plucking tea and working as factory hands.

Now, there might well have been a kernel of truth in their assertions. But they would have been better off asking themselves why the tea business in the state was singled out and has since become the focus of kidnappings, ransoms and all manner of local terror"" far more, in fact, than the oil industry.

At the cost of sounding tiresomely leftist, much of the resentment had to do with the conspicuously luxurious lifestyle that tea garden life came to represent.

To a state starved of investment and, therefore, job opportunities for its young men and women, the tea industry unwittingly became the symbol of inequality and exploitation.

However unfair this depiction of the industry might be, it remains in many ways a live example of the great inequality debate that is currently exercising policy wonks and government.

But no, this column is not about to turn into a diatribe about the evils of that most human of impulses, conspicuous consumption. And, unlike the cover story in the latest issue of Time, I am not about to highlight the contrasts between Parameshwar Godrej's faux-Greek mansion and the hovels of the poor.

A dose of realism first. Contrasts like the Godrej mansion or the Vijay Mallya lifestyle and the Mumbai slums have always existed. Inequality, whether it grows or shrinks, begins to matter when access to opportunity and wealth is constrained""through lack of access to education, employment and opportunity.

The reason Mumbai didn't have a law and order problem up until very recently was that it was always considered a city of opportunity. So if a Mallya could acquire his extravagance on the back of an inherited liquor business, the owner of a juice stall (Gulshan Kumar) could as well become a music industry baron.

It is significant that recent academic research has linked the recent communal riots in India to faulty economic policy.

It would be no exaggeration to say that both Mumbai and Gujarat have paid the price for a textile policy in the eighties that squeezed employment opportunities""thanks in no small part to Datta Samant's cynical trade unionism""even as it has harmed India's global competitiveness in the long term.

Similarly, the fact that the tea industry became a focus of terrorism in Assam was a symptom of a broader economic malaise of restrictive economic policies""at both the state and central levels""that economic reform has clearly not addressed adequately.

True, the poverty-reducing impact of faster economic growth is now evident but Barbara Harris-White argues that economic liberalisation has not helped India escape controls, it has only changed the character of those controls (India Working: Essays on Society and Economy, Cambridge University Press).

Which is why, even as India pours money into social infrastructure, it is still to loosen many of the constraints on growth and entrepreneurship to provide a truly enabling environment so that, say, the good life can be considered an attainable aspiration rather than an object of opprobrium for everyone. The solution to social unrest lies here.