All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” said British philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke. In India, the situation is worse: it is not only the good people, but even those who are duty-bound to combat unconscionable practices do nothing. The phenomenon of milk adulteration – which is nothing but mass murder – has been spreading in the country, especially in north India, since the early 1990s. It has been reported by the media in considerable detail — yet, few (least of all those in the government) are bothered.
So, a public interest litigation (PIL) had to be filed to make our netas and babus move. In response to the PIL filed by a group of citizens, led by an Uttarakhand-based pontiff, the Supreme Court recently issued notices to the Centre and Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan and Haryana governments.
In February this year, the Food Safety Standards Authority of India had stated that at the national level “68.4 per cent of the samples were not found to be conforming to the FSS [Food Safety Standards] Regulations”. Moreover, “14 per cent of the samples were found to be non-conforming because of the presence of traces of detergent”.
It is depressing that a writ of mandamus is needed to make the administration do what it should have been doing on its own to check this menace, for the criminality and sinfulness of making and selling synthetic milk is beyond reasonable doubt. Milkmen in our country have been mixing water with milk since time immemorial, but this traditional adulteration is nothing compared to the hideous innovation called synthetic milk. While the milk mixed with water is less nutritious, synthetic milk is actually no milk; it is a lethal concoction of vegetable refined oil, detergents, urea, fertilisers and other inedible substances.
The Indian Council for Medical Research and medical experts have warned of the hazardous health effects of consuming such milk. These include food poisoning, other gastrointestinal complications, liver damage, kidney impairment, heart problems, cancer or even death. They have also pointed out that the effect on children would be more severe. There are no studies or estimates available as to how many people have died because of synthetic milk and how many have suffered. But why have governments not done anything to eradicate the evil?
One reason is corruption. According to a 2010 estimate, while one litre of pure milk usually sold for Rs 30, synthetic milk fetched Rs 20 per litre. However, the cost of the latter was just Rs 2. With such huge margins, the people involved in the business are left with enough money to share with local authorities and police. It is normal.
The situation brings to the mind the phrase “banality of evil,” which was coined by Hannah Arendt. Her 1963 work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, asserts that ordinary people, rather than some monstrous Dr No or Mogambo, are responsible for great evils like the Holocaust. And they carry out unspeakable atrocities under the assumption that such activities are normal.
This brings us to the second and more important reason for the menace: in the Indian context, it is not some totalitarian state that has occasioned the mass murder; it is the total abdication of essential duties by the state that is responsible for the crime. A political class consumed by the ideology of entitlements has little patience for such matters. This ideology reduces statecraft to an exercise in selling dreams to stay in power. Unsurprisingly, the conventional duties of the government like administration and law and order get short shrift.
It is instructive to note that the term “law and order” does not appear in the 2009 manifestoes of the country’s two largest parties — the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. It is difficult to remember a time when a serious, informed and meaningful political debate took place over issues like law and order and administrative, police and judicial reforms. From politicians’ perspective, these issues are not sexy; entitlements are. Politicians don’t realise that governance precedes welfarism, that the essential duties of the state cannot be efficaciously replaced with poverty alleviation or job generation schemes, that populism is no substitute for administration. In fact, the success of these schemes presupposed the existence of functional administration — for a welfare state is still a state; and a failed state cannot become a welfare state.
The things that were thought to exist in the realms of startling philosophical theses and the pages of history have come to haunt us — and that too as normal. The normal has become frightening. That politicians and bureaucrats would build fortunes is a truism; that the job of police is to provide security to VIPs, serve the interests of the ruling party and collect hafta is an accepted and tolerated practice.
Such being the postulates of our polity, it is not surprising that a basic goal of liberal democracy – harmonising liberty with order – has been forgotten.
In Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, a character says something to the effect that “without God… all things are lawful…” I don’t know whether or not God exists, but one thing is indubitable: in the absence of state, or when the state does not carry out its essential duties, everything becomes permissible. Even synthetic milk.
The author is a freelance journalist
