Narendra Modi’s toilet revolution reminded me of the gem of a letter a man called Okhil Chandra Sen sent to the Sahibganj divisional railway office in 1909. Some readers must already be familiar with it.
“I am arrive by passenger train Ahmedpur station and my belly is too much swelling with jackfruit” Sen wrote. “I am, therefore, went to privy. Just I doing the nuisance that guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running with lotah in one hand and dhoti in the next when I am fall over and expose all my shocking to man and female women on platform. I am got leaved at Ahmedpur station. This too much bad, if passenger go to make dung that dam guard not wait train five minutes for him. I am, therefore, pray your honor to make big fine on that guard for public sake. Otherwise, I am making big report to papers.”
Sen’s complaint showed him to be as much a revolutionary as any swadesi neta. His anguish led to toilets in trains. Apparently, his historic letter is displayed in New Delhi’s Railway Museum. It also appeared in the “Travelers’ Tales” feature of the old Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong.
I, too, have known his agony not always because there were no toilets but because they were so often unusably filthy. This happened in the very week of Modi’s Red Fort address in – believe it or not – what is probably one of Kolkata’s most expensive privately-run nursing homes. There was no waste bin in the toilet, and the wet floor all round the washbasin was littered with the remnants of lint bandages and cotton wool stained with blood and medicine that patients had been ordered to discard.
A visit to a Central government institution (also in Kolkata) the next day was equally revealing about our lack of hygiene. I didn’t brave the building’s toilet after seeing the dirty, discoloured and rubbish-strewn public corridors awash with foul water, the remnants of broken furniture and, outside, heaps of rusty twisted metal that were once cars. When my hosts proudly told me that David Cameron had visited the place during his whirlwind tour of the city last November, I hoped Britain’s prime minister wasn’t obliged to use the loo after “the hot, spicy lentil cakes in a Calcutta market” he “loved”. A dose of Bengal belly would have been fatal.
The revolution Sen launched in 1909 was going strong in 2008 when my old crusading friend Kalpana Sharma wrote from the ancient battleground of Kurukshetra, “Toilets, sanitation, sanitary napkins, defecation — these are not things we like to talk about. Yet, this is such a fundamental issue that affects all our lives — especially if we happen to be poor and women. Half of India defecates in the open. The government hopes to get all these 600 million people to start using toilets by 2012. That’s a lot of toilets to build in just four years.” That was another government in another age but I wonder how many toilets were built.
Modi has set an even more ambitious target for the Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana. No one can possibly disagree with his claim that “if we want to develop India, we need to develop villages.” But I wouldn’t bet my bottom rupee on every MP transforming at least one village into an ideal village by 2016, leave alone achieving at least five such miracles in five years. I would first want to know how the Members of Parliament Local Area Development (MPLAD) Scheme is now faring.
I am not talking of accidental parliamentarians such as Rekha and Sachin Tendulkar who have reportedly not spent a single paise out of their MPLAD allocation. Each now has a nice little kitty of Rs 10 crore since the unspent annual Rs 5 crore is added to the current entitlement. I am talking of the 793 run-of-the-mill MPs and wonder if the nearly Rs 4,000 crore they are allowed (to say nothing of other entitlements and emoluments) in the sacred name of development has made much difference to the people they supposedly serve.
Some MPs do, perhaps, spend more than 100 per cent of their budgets, as they claim. But what do they spend it on? How close and careful is the audit to which the people’s representatives are subject?
The point is that the prime minister’s seemingly homely exhortations from the ramparts of the Red Fort sought to recast the national character and lay the foundations of a new civilisation. He is demanding a New Indian, someone who will go to work at the proper time without any urging, and is not prey to any of the lusts of the flesh.
Never mind, if even ethnic Indians in the West have become notorious for trying to guess at the unborn child’s sex and finding excuses to get rid of female foetuses. The New Indian sees no difference between a boy and girl. He treats his son and daughter to the same rigorous discipline and being as clean of body as of mind, he will not tolerate a speck of dirt around him. He insists on sparkling sanitary toilets, and, being patriotic, not only demands desi products but enthusiastically makes them at home.
The elected legislator is the lynchpin of this brave new world. That’s why the new scheme to change the face of India by revitalising the countryside is named not after an individual but after the temple of democracy. Surprisingly however, Modi’s peroration said nothing about education. Without sound schooling – especially of future mothers – the New Indian of his dreams will be stillborn.
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