Hawker bill proposes 6-month jail

Quietly, the Government has decided that Mumbai hawkers will be banished out of sight, without sound. It stinks of elitist power abuse.

Why fight? Collude …

It is amazing what political consensus (some call it collusion) can achieve. Quietly, in the Winter session of the Maharashtra legislature, this anti-hawker bill was passed. Without a word of protest. Every political party – Congress, BJP, Shiv Sena joined hands to ensure passage of this bill.

Political Santa Claus 'accept' gifts before distributing 'favors'. Welcome to the 'modern' Welfare State. Bought and sold, even before you can say 'Constitution of India'! (Cartoon by Kirtish Bhatt; Pub: Dec 2009) Click for larger images.

In a bid to control illegal hawkers across Mumbai, the state legislative council on Tuesday passed a bill that proposes a jail term of six months along with a penalty ranging from Rs 5,000 to Rs 50,000 for individuals indulging in unauthorized hawking.Any unauthorized hawker caught red-handed would be fined Rs 5,000 the first time. If caught again, the fine would progressively increase and a repeated hawker would attract the maximum fine of Rs 50,000.

The bill will now go to the governor for his assent.(via Hawker bill proposes 6-month jail).

According to estimates, there are over 2.5 lakh illegal hawkers in Mumbai, while only 17,000 vendors hold valid licences. Interestingly, the BMC has not issued a single new licence in the last 20 years, while the number of hawkers continues to grow with every passing year, sources disclosed.

As stated in the Tuesday bill, “It will be mandatory for each individual who wishes to start a hawking business to obtain a licence from the civic body. The definition of hawkers covers roadside vendors and persons conducting business on roads and artisans.” (via Hawker shocker, News – Cover Story – Mumbai Mirror).

With such political ‘unity’, when all political parties unite against the citizens, India will surely ‘progress.’

The Government must not stop at this.

Forget about questioning me. Have a TV to hear my answer ...? My only fear is that such an attitude may well be the reality. (Cartoonist - Kirtish Bhatt; Posted: Feb 18th, 2011). Click for larger image.

Public interest

Further, the Government must acquire all hawking space. After acquiring the hawking space, roads must be broadened. These hawkers crowd roads and reduce the car-driving pleasure of the Uber-rich and the Unter-rich. The Uber-rich and the Unter-rich have a sacred right to the pleasure of comfortable car driving as per the latest UN’s Human Rights Charter.

Do not disturb

I would go further and recommend that the Government acquire hawking space so that the comfortable can remain comfortable.

Just like the Government acquires land for factories, so the rich can remain rich or become richer.

Discomfort to the Rich and Comfortable may turn these rare species into an endangered species. If the Rich and Comfortable turn into an endangered species, who will become the icons of Rising India?

The dirty, ragged hawker!

I command thee … Progress!

I am also not forgetting that the hawkers ‘snatch’ business from all the glitzy glass-and-chrome malls – a major crime.

After sinking thousands of crores in these prestigious glass-and-chrome malls, investors find themselves powerless in the face of these hawkers. Will the Government abandon these investors, who have invested thousands of crores for India’s prestige and progress.

So many poor people, in full public view is also bad, for the eyes. And bad for India’s image abroad.

The poor must remain quiet – and out of sight.

Make way for the bribe takers - These are not the bribe-tigers fighting corruption. (Cartoon by Kirtish Bhatt; source and courtesy - bamulahija.com). Click for larger image.

Only 6 Months in Jail?

The Government must not stop at just extorting heavy penalties and imprisoning these hawkers. This problem of hawkers will not go away by simple penalties and imprisonment.

I would suggest that instead of imprisonment or heavy fines, hawkers must face some light gun-fire.

By the way, most of these dirty, ragged hawkers are also dark brown or black in colour. Another good reason to shoot them. They should be shot.

Definitely, certainly, urgently.

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Barbarians at the gates

Ancient Rome or modern America – the rich get education and the poor die in wars.

Ancient Rome was exactly the same. Modern education too, 'teaches' the selected few how to retain control of the system. (Image source and courtesy - http://anticap.wordpress.com). Click for larger image.

Barbaric Rome

Was Rome a civilization? Ever?

With nearly a million slaves in the city of Rome itself, with wars, butchery, massacres (in Gaul, Carthage et al), on what basis could Rome be called a civilization? When people are civil to each other, the society can be termed as a civilization. One imagines that education will stop us from accepting propaganda as history.

Is ‘education’ the answer?

Take this extract below, for instance. Written by a well-known talking head on TV, a pollster, a political analyst, writes about JPC confrontation between the Congress and the BJP

Exactly 1,600 years ago, on August 24, 410, the barbarians (the Visigoths) were at the gates of Rome. They sacked and pillaged a prosperous but decadent Rome. Thousands of Romans fled to the countryside, leaving the “Urbi” devastated. Thirty-five years later, the Vandals also sacked Rome. Though Rome survived for some more time, the sacking in 410 marked the beginning of its disintegration.

The other day, Ratan Tata used the word “banana republic” that outraged us. We already have crony capitalism and loads of corruption and now parliamentary vandalism. The barbarians are at our gates too. Our foot is already on the slippery banana skin. Ek dhakka aur do, and we’ll get there. (via Dorab R Sopariwala: Barbarians at the gates).

Strange – to think, accept and call the Romans as civilized. The largest slave-owning empire of the ancient world deserved destruction. In my book, Alaric The Goth, was far more civilized than the Romans. Possibly, Alaric’s Goths attacked Rome to end its slave capturing ways.

Squash the bug

Let us assume that the imagery of a civilized Rome destroyed by a barbarian Goths is right.

Still the analogy of civilized Congress versus a barbarian BJP is completely inept. Neither is the Congress superior nor is the BJP any less civilized than the Congress. If at all, the fight by the Opposition to demand accountability through the JPC route, is commendable. After all, the issue at stake, is arguably, India’s biggest scam.

Fooling enough people, most of the time, by using lotsa money! Is that the trick? (Image credits embedded). Click for larger image.

All the people … all the time

Dorab, between you and Ratan Tata, you share a common trait. You believe that the desi noise, smells, heat and dust of Indian democracy is below you.

Remember that JRD is buried in France. India was not good enough for the dead body of this Bharat Ratna.

Tatas have made a long-standing claim that they are superior to other Indian businesses. A claim, supported only by assertions and repetitions. Without empirical data or evidence.

In fact, surveys show that Indian companies have higher reputation in home markets than most other corporations across the world. Going by anecdotal evidence, Tatas cannot be superior than others. Just like BJP cannot be much different from Congress.

Flawed comparisons, all round. Romans and Goths, Congress and BJP, Tatas and Others.

Swami Vivekanand in the USA

Swami Vivekananda to me has been slogans. Is there more to him?

A rarely seen photograph of Swami Vivekananda. (Vivekananda, who traveled widely to deliver his spiritual message, in Pasadena, Calif., in 1900. From the Vedanta Society of Southern California; source and courtesy - nytimes.com). Click for source.

So little to go on …

Do most Indians ‘admire’ him, because of the press he got during his US visit? And later?

But then, I must also admit, I have not quite been able to figure out this man. But then I have not tried hard enough.

Does the 2ndlook community have any answers?

‘British Raj was not a vampire empire’

India must be bled, it must be done judiciously. The lancet should be directed to those parts where the blood is congested, or, at least, sufficient, not to those already feeble for the want of it. (Lord Salisbury - Secretary of State for India – 1866-1867; 1874-1878; Foreign Secretary – 1878-1880; Prime Minister – 1885, 1886 – 92, 1895 – 1902).

Warren Hastings, when attacked by Edmund Burke, Lord North, and Fox, in the House of Commons for corruption, unlike Clive, offered no personal defence. Instead he portrayed himself and the British Raj as the Saviour Of India. (Original by James Gillray titled 'The Political Banditti Assailing the Saviour of India', published by W. Holland in 1786 or 1788. Image source and courtesy - shijieminghua.com. See 1851 water color version from Bohn Collection at http://goo.gl/a90mq). Click for larger image.

Historians today, many in India too, promote  the myth that the British Empire

bore no resemblance to the ‘vampire empire’ created by King Leopold of the Belgians in the Congo, which was responsible for perhaps 10 million deaths, let alone to the genocidal Nazi empire or to Japan’s vicious and corrupt Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Imperium et Libertas was a contradiction in terms. What it meant in a Roman mouth, as Gladstone said, was ‘Liberty for ourselves, Empire over the rest of mankind.’

Lord Salisbury (Marquess of Salisbury – then Secretary of State for India) himself exposed the truth. ‘If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people,’ he observed, ‘the British Empire would not have been made.’ Its purpose was not to spread sweetness and light but to increase Britain’s wealth and power. Naturally its coercive and exploitative nature must be disguised. Bamboozle was better than bamboo, he considered, and ‘as India must be bled, the bleeding should be done judiciously.’
Actually, from the time that Britain had begun to transform its commercial dominance into political ascendancy, India was bled white. During the 1760s Bengal was so squeezed that the province, which the Mughals had called ‘the paradise of earth’, became an abyss of torment. It was ravaged by war, pestilence and famine. A third of the population died of hunger, some driven to cannibalism. Although relief efforts were made, British ‘bullies, cheats and swindlers’ continued to prey on the carcass of Bengal and some profiteered in hoarded grain. Meanwhile Indian revenues (which amounted to perhaps a billion pounds sterling between Plassey in 1757 and Waterloo in 1815) spelled the redemption of Britain, according to the Earl of Chatham. They were ‘a kind of gift from heaven’.

The history of the Raj was punctuated by further famines, which caused tens of millions of deaths. These were not, as Mike Davis claims, colonial ‘holocausts’. But the British failed lamentably in India, as they did in Ireland, in their duty of care. Condemning ‘humanitarian hysterics’ during the worst Victorian famine, Lord Lytton said that the stoppage of his 1876 durbar ‘would be more disastrous to the permanent interests of the Empire than twenty famines’. Despite pleas from the Secretary of State for India Leo Amery during the terrible 1943-44 Bengal famine, Churchill refused to divert scarce shipping to Calcutta. He thought that ‘the starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis’ was less serious than that of sturdy Greeks, particularly as Indians would go on breeding ‘like rabbits’.

After the Indian Mutiny soldiers such as Garnet Wolseley did much to fulfil their vow to spill ‘barrels and barrels of the filth which flows in these niggers’ veins for every drop of blood’ they had shed. During the South African War the British allowed a sixth of the Boer population, mostly children, to die in concentration camps.

British Empire was not only on “slave trade and the indentured labour traffic; cases of acquisitive aggression such the opium wars and the rape of Matabeleland; acts of vandalism such as the burning of the Emperor’s Summer Palace in Beijing and the destruction of the Mahdi’s tomb at Omdurman; squalid fiascos such as the Jameson Raid and the Suez invasion; crimes such as the use of dum-dum bullets and poison gas against ‘uncivilized tribes’ (Churchill’s phrase); massacres such as occurred at Amritsar in 1919, Batang Kali in Malaya in 1948 (the ‘British My Lai’) and Hola Camp in Kenya (1959).”

Piers Brendon does finally fall back on the usual thugee and suttee to justify British rule. And that is where Britain failed the most.

(Cheyte Sing rendering Homage to Warren Hastings. Illustration from The People's History of England; Cassell Petter & Galpin, c 1890). Click for larger image.

The truth behind Thugee

As though India was being overrun by thugs – and every traveller’s life was at risk. Defenceless Indian’s were waiting helplessly, for a saviour. And then the British anti-thugee campaign saved India.

As if Indians had no productive enterprise to engage in, thugee was the only option, for ‘backward’ Indians.

Till the British shone their bright light on us Indians. If Indians were busy with thugee, who was earning money that the thugs were looting? India could not have been the world’s largest economy, if India was Thug Nation.

After decades of loot-and-ravage, when it was suggested that the Indian economy was fragile, Lord Irwin responded,

It was surely unreasonable, to suggest that a country which had an enormous stock of gold and silver, and which was still drawing them in considerable quantities from the rest of the world, was so weak

Figures talk

If yes, why did the ‘Thuggee and Dacoity Department’ with William Sleeman as Superintendent in 1835, could capture no more than 3,000 highway robbers – of which only 400 were executed. Based mostly on the ‘identification’ by a few ‘hand-picked’ witnesses – from a bank of nearly 500 ‘approvers.’ In nearly a decade! In a population of possibly 25 crores.3,000 ‘thugs’ in a nation of 25 crores? Assuming that all the 3,000 accused ‘thugs’, were ‘guilty’, going by modern imprisonment standards,

Some of the most infamous, like Behram was attributed to have committed more than 900 murders – for which he never faced any trial, for murders he confessed to, even after being captured. Most of these thugs were actually rebel peasants who were waging a war against the dispossession of the lands – like the Santhals, Bhils, Gujjars, etc.

Facts speak

Fact is India was not a criminal society then – and not one today.. India today has the world’s lowest police-to-population ratio – and the lowest prisoners-to-population ratio.

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