O & P: Opinions can be polluting too
By Shashi Tharoor
Weekly Column "Shashi on Sunday" in "The Times of India"
October 07, 2007

Opinions: As may be readily apparent from this series, opinions flow from lndian tongues like the Ganga through Benares: profuse, stimulating and muddied with other people’s waste-matter. From village tea-shops to urban Coffee Houses, Indians give free rein to their opinions, which like those who express them, often do not have visible means of support. On most issues, however, these are unrelated to any expectation of action, and the Indian public as a whole largely acquiesces in governmental policies even when they are contrary to its professed beliefs. In India, the expression of public opinions is no proof of the existence of public opinion.

Paan: Is India’s answer to French wine as the essential adjunct to a good meal, a useful if mildly intoxicating aid to digestion and the most national of liquid vices, though each consumer is obliged to generate his own liquid and to dispose it of against the most convenient wall. (This even led one Japanese health expert to declare that acute TB was endemic in India because he had seen so many people spitting blood). The distinctions between a Calcutta-patta and a Banarasi-mitha are at least as significant as those between a Bordeaux and a Burgundy, but paan-chewing is too down-to-earth to have evolved the same pretentious vocabulary as its French counterpart. It is time we established our own paan columnists, to wax lyrical about the ‘strong body’ and ‘delicate coconut fragrance’ of a 2007 Madrasi beeda, contrasting it, perhaps with the ‘heady bouquet’ and ‘lingering aftertaste’ of a silver-wrapped Mumbai concoction.

Parsis: See Zoroastrians. (I had to have something beginning with Z, didn’t I?)

Partition: Is the scar inflicted by history upon the nation, when Pakistan was carved out of India’s stooped shoulders by the departing British. Its human cost in lives, in the tragedies of displacement and flight, in lost faith and comradeship across communal divides, in the surrender by people on both sides of a part of their national heritage, was appalling enough; but it was further augmented by the colossal waste of resources thereafter in mutual defence preparedness and in actual military conflict. Partition betrayed both those Hindus who lived in what became Pakistan and those Muslims who were abandoned in India by the more affluent and vocal of their co-religionists. Above all, it betrayed all those, irrespective of religion, who believed that nationhood transcended creed and credo.

Political Parties: Grow in India like mushrooms, split like amoeba and are as productive and original as mules. The old saw that two Indians equals an argument and three Indians equals two political parties can almost be taken literally, as every ‘leader’ disgruntled with his lot in one party takes off to found another. (Shri Ajit Singh, if memory serves, has actually ‘‘led’’ 11 parties in the last 10 years.) As a result, most of India’s so-called ‘national’ parties, with the sole exception of the BJP, are variants of the Congress (or variants of variants of the Congress), even when they have been founded with explicitly anti-Congress aims. The proliferation of regional parties, often with appeals that do not go beyond a single state, has further complicated this situation and virtually guaranteed coalition governance in perpetuity in Delhi. While there is something to be said for the view that a multiplicity of parties is inevitable in a pluralist polity like India’s, where a number of groups contend to defend their interests, a total fragmentation of political representation can hardly be in the national interest. And it is difficult to be entirely enthusiastic about a system in which a political party, rather than being the vehicle for the expression of a coherent set of ideas and interests, is merely a convenient cloak for the ambitions of an individual leader, to be cast off (or stitched to another’s raiment) whenever it suits him.

Pollution: You can live in India today provided, as the old Tom Lehrer song put it, ‘‘you don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air.’’ Indians have learned to live with pollution, inhaling more particles each day than a chain-smoker might in the West, and boiling their water for fear of being laid low by every imaginable liquid-borne pollutant (and many a poison, including arsenic). India’s cities are among the world’s dirtiest. The air in Kolkata or Delhi is all but unbreathable in winter as car-exhaust fumes, unchecked industrial emissions and smoke rising from countless charcoal braziers get trapped by descending mist and fog.

When the Australian cricket team last played in Delhi, its coach complained the smog-laden air gave the home team an unfair advantage-by impairing his players’ performance. Factories belch forth noxious black clouds. Effluents pour untreated into rivers. Sewage systems reek and overflow. Governments pass regulations, then ignore them. Meanwhile, more and more cars ply the congested roads, and more small factories open up that do not meet pollution-control standards. Cardiovascular and respiratory illness is rampant, with attendant health costs estimated at 4.5% of India’s GDP. In other words, more than half of India’s annual economic growth is wiped out by pollution, and development is taking place largely at the expense of the environment. But given a choice between living more modestly in a ‘‘green society’’ and becoming more prosperous in the midst of brown, most Indians would be happy to gasp and wheeze all the way to the bank.