From Modi to Mayo International school: We are all snobs in new India

Narendra Modi’s dizzying rise (from selling tea to running the nation) has prompted a wave of self-congratulation and much chest thumping that in “meritocratic” India all, irrespective of their social or economic background, are equal. Class snobbery? What’s that? So, perhaps time for a reality check lest we should get carried away by our own hype. And all we need to do is to take a dispassionate look at three random events over the past week: a private school in Delhi being accused of bullying children from poor families; an international study quoting one out of every four Indians as saying that they practise untouchability; and Modi himself feeding into the elitist patronising view of those from the “wrong’’ side of the tracks by pleading that Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti be forgiven for her crass “Ramzada-Haramzada’’ remarks because as a poor village woman she didn’t know what she was doing. Viewed together these three unconnected events confirm what we all know but refuse to acknowledge—namely, that despite the equality mantra (“sab ke saath, sab ka vikas’’ being the latest), at its core Indian society remains deeply casteist and class conscious. And the malaise is so widespread that it exists at every level, including educational institutions –the so-called temples of enlightenment. Take the case of Pooja, a class V student of Delhi’s Mayo International School, who was slapped by a teacher  for believe it or not–wearing “kajal” to school and sporting two pigtails instead of the kosher one ponytail. She was told that her dress sense betrayed her “low’’ class—a reference to her family background. Her father is a factory worker and she was able to get a place in this fee-paying school thanks to a local government scheme to provide bright children from economically weaker sections (EWS) access to quality education. Pooja’s humiliation didn’t end there. When her parents protested she was suspended on grounds that they “misbehaved’’ with the teacher—a charge they vehemently deny. “In fact it was the school authorities who were very rude and called the security to throw us out. But still we apologised for the sake of our daughter’s education,” said Pooja’s father Kamlapati. The school has not denied that Pooja was slapped. The question her parents are asking is: would she have been humiliated in this manner had she been the daughter of a rich businessman instead? There is anecdotal evidence that EPW children in other schools face similar problems. According to an NGO, which works for educational needs of poor people, many stories such as Pooja’s go unreported because parents are reluctant to talk about them for fear of “retribution”. Recently in another school, a boy was called “mundu” (local slang for an errand boy) by a teacher in front of the whole class when he failed to answer a question. When his father complained he was told it was meant as a joke. “Bullying of such children both by their classmates and teachers is routine,” says Abha Singh who works with such families. “Some parents have stopped attending parent-teacher association meetings because they say they feel patronised.” [caption id=“attachment_1841703” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] A person ridiculed for his alleged lack of class is in turn distancing himself from someone he regards one rung lower than himself in class terms![/caption] But, ultimately, it is not about schools. They only illustrate at micro-level what is happening in the wider society. Remember even Modi’s background became a subject of some rather distasteful jokes before his PR team cleverly turned the whole thing around to project him as the public face of the “new” aspirational India where even a chai- wallah can aspire to rise to the top. And it was the likes of Mani Shankar Aiyar and P . Chidambaram, great public champions of social equality, who led the charge. Aiyar was the first suggesting that given his origins Modi could at best aspire to sell tea at the Congress party office. Then, in an apparent dig at his academic background, Chidambaram said his understanding of economics could be written on the back of a stamp. Even now, in private, people who ought to know better ridicule Modi for his “lack of class”. P.M. Vasudev, a senior academic at Ottawa University, Canada, described Aiyar-Chidambaram jokes as a “telling evidence of the class prejudices that are entrenched in the Indian psyche and permeate the society”. “With many of the negatives in contemporary India, it is possible to trace to the Mahabharatha the attitude underlying the statements of Aiyar and Chidambaram. At the display by the Pandavas and Kauravas on completion of their training in military skills, their guru, Drona, dared any person in the assembly to challenge Arjuna. When Karna rose to do so, Drona insulted and humiliated him about his lowly social position as the son of a chariot-driver and questioned how he could dare challenge a prince. Of course, in doing so, Drona brushed aside the main issue – namely, the skills of the contestants. Betraying deep-seated rank prejudices, he taunted Karna about his social position. Meanwhile, a joint study by the National Council of Applied Economic Research and the University of Maryland, USA, reveals the depth of social prejudices in Indian society with a quarter of the respondents admitting to practising untouchability. “Those who admit to practising untouchability belong to virtually every religious and caste group, including Muslims, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes…,” _The Indian Expre_s reported while a survey of first-year students of IIT, Bombay, revealed that a whopping 56 per cent of students from SC/ST and other backward classes felt “discriminated” against. Social biases are not unique to India but the big difference is that unlike, for example, in the West there is little effort here to fight them. Western societies, on the other hand, are working hard to transcend differences based on race or class. Covert racism and class snobbery still very much exist but a persistent campaign backed by strict laws to banish such socially divisive attitudes has made a huge difference. Political correctness is often derided, but by defining what constitutes socially acceptable behaviour in an enlightened society and expecting people to adhere to it the West has succeeded in raising consciousness about such issues. In Britain, David Cameron was forced to sack a ministerial rank colleague, Andrew Mitchell, for calling policemen “plebs’’ during a heated argument. More recently, Labour Party got rid of its shadow attorney-general Emily Thornberry for tweeting a picture which appeared to mock working class people. Here, in contrast, Niranjan Jyoti continues to thrive with the prime minister staking his own prestige to shield her invoking wholly specious arguments such as citing her unsophisticated background. Meanwhile, in a convoluted attack on left-liberals, accusing them of elitism, journalist Shekhar Gupta has hailed Modi for “embracing” people like her arguing that this is what has made him the most popular PM since Indira Gandhi, adding “They (Sadhvi and company) are now coming, smashing the defences of the elite liberal ivory tower.” But he misses the point that Modi was, in fact, extremely patronising towards Jyoti. This is what he said in Lok Sabha: ““Nobody approves of such language. Minister has apologised. She is new and we all know her rural background”. In other words: let’s forgive her because given her background she is beyond the pale of our expectations of civilised behaviour. ‘People like her are not people like us, so don’t judge her by our standards’ is what he is effectively saying. What a pretty sight: a person ridiculed for his alleged lack of class is in turn distancing himself from someone he regards one rung lower than himself in class terms! Can the cycle of snobbery—Mayo International’s elitism at one end, and Modi’s view of “rural’’ people—get any more vicious? So, welcome to “new’ India where we are snobs now.