Sunanda K Datta-Ray: The great Indian divide

WHERE MONEY TALKS

People like Zahira Sheikh get tried for perjury, those at Tamarind Court strut around.

Trust the resourceful Mulayam Singh Yadav to call "allowance" "honorarium" so that recipients can pocket the money without holding an "office of profit." Thus, will Uttar Pradesh's State Legislature (Prevention of Disqualification Amendment) Bill enable Jaya Bachchan and 78 other celebrities, including Mulayam's brother, Shiva Pal Singh Yadav, who is Power and PWD Minister, and the Samajwadi Party's ebullient Amar Singh, to eat their legislature cake and have their jobs, too. The ingenious law is retrospectively effective from January 2003.

A 19th century British civilian noted that Indians consider a "straight" man "stupid", meaning without "the wit to be crooked." There, in a nutshell, you have the difference between the aam aadmi that the Bharatiya Janata Party's Rajnath Singh accuses Congress of neglecting and the khas aadmi it supposedly favours. They are two sides of the same coin for no class system is as simple as ours. Forget caste, lineage, education or achievement. Motilal Nehru was just a muktear "" a lawyer without a degree "" but since he made pots of money, people called him an aristocrat.

As for West Bengal's former Finance Minister Ashok Mitra once insisting he was a Communist and not a gentleman, ideology doesn't come unto it. The dollars he earned working for the IMF in Washington, the foreign car he brought back and his swanky Alipore address determine class. None of the sophistication here of Britain, where other Tory politicians looked down on Michael Heseltine because his furniture was bought. The ability to buy "" goods, office, people, power, protection, patronage "" distinguishes khas from aam in India, that is Bharat, where the poor steal while the rich suffer from kleptomania.

Zahira Sheikh, only 17 when she witnessed Vadodara's Best Bakery massacre, is obviously aam. She would not otherwise have been sentenced to a year's imprisonment and a Rs 50,000 fine for perjury after being bullied or bribed into changing her story. Equally obviously, the dozens of smart people who were present in Delhi's fashionable Tamarind restaurant and bar in Qutub Colonnade on April 29, 1999 are khas. Zahira went into hiding to avoid the law. The rich and powerful brat pack who patronise the Tamarind confidently strut the social scene, maintaining they saw and heard nothing, even determinedly denying what they initially admitted to witnessing.

The police is crucial to khas well-being. The papers say that the FIR after Jessica Lal's murder did not name the prime accused. His mobile phone or SIM card were not impounded. His car was not tested for fingerprints and the murder weapon was not recovered. The police are even suspected of switching cartridges.

But who cares? If a BMW driven by a drunken man with naval connections mounts the pavement and mows down six pavement-dwellers, the lone survivor will obligingly agree that the vehicle was a truck. If a policeman's son is charged with rape and murder, he is acquitted though the judge knows, and says he knows, the man is guilty. Princelings may shoot protected black buck; similarly protected leopard and chinkara are fair game for stars.

Laws being made by men, not men by laws, socially conscious people like policemen, judges and politicians must get rid of fusty colonial laws that cramp style and stifle initiative.

This is booming boisterous India where Yaqoob Qureshi, another UP minister, offers a Rs 51-crore prize for murdering the Danish cartoonist who lampooned the Prophet. Amitabh Bachchan is officially a farmer because he could not otherwise have bought 20 acres of agricultural land near Pune. Congress luminaries make handsome "donations" to the high-flying Navin Chawla's wife's NGO. Permission to prosecute an erring minister is refused: the writing on the wall disappears if the wall is demolished.

Some of our khas aadmi combine wealth with dash such as Bihar's Rashtriya Janata Dal MP Mohammad Shahabuddin, who was recently charged with six criminal offences including sedition, and is suspected of fudging his university law degree. Two other members of India's shadowy elite, Chhota Rajan, the Mumbai don, and his hitman, D K Rao, who is serving a 10-year sentence for murder, claim to have bribed a Maharashtra minister to reinstate 12 police officers who turned a blind eye to their crimes but were caught and punished.

Contrary to popular legend, India is not a rich country of poor people. It's a poor country with rich people like 23 dollar billionaires. But the rich mind their pennies with care. So, Rajya Sabha members need no longer pretend to live in the state they represent. Abolition of the residence qualification allows someone from Aizawl to represent Kerala without setting foot in the state.

Hence, the newspeak of honorarium for allowance. Laws must keep up with the times, and courts and police defer to power. Flexibility promotes national integration, encourages dynamic upward mobility and inspires today's aam to aspire to become tomorrow's khas.