When You have a Right to be Angry

In mid-2014,  an intrepid report in Down to Earth documented the horrific plight of the tea garden workers in the Dooars region of West Bengal, the result of a decade of abuse, false promises and chicanery.

The story was reminiscent of the zamindari system of vicious apartheid: pathetically poor estate workers laid waste by starvation living in hideous labour lines; rich owners, most of whom had purchased gardens for the value of the large parcels of plantation land - a rich bet for their unaccounted wealth – living in Kolkata and elsewhere in pampered luxury.  Most of them cared little for their people, the environment or tea and postponed paying wages for months on end when times got rough.  When the costs exceeded revenues and continued to do so, they fled, leaving starving workers -  hundreds of whom have died over the years – and widespread malnutrition and disease.  The story was graphic and telling: a photograph of a woman – a bag of bones and rags - whose meal comprised two chapatis with a filling of tea leaves inside, as she could not afford anything else.  An image of a man on the brink of death, his ribs outlined against a shrivelled skin.  A child with little hope of survival, its eyes glazed.

And I saw these photographs that made my stomach churn, for this was inhumanity, avarice, callous premeditated murder.  

I petitioned the National Human Rights Commission which issued a show cause notice to the West Bengal government.  Who then replied with assurances of minimum food and a dole.  I was satisfied and even self-congratulatory.

I could not have been more wrong.  The story continues, for nothing in the realm of misery for the poor in India changes to their advantage.  What is different this time is that there is a villian who is big fish. 

GP Goenka is not just another businessman.  He has, for many years now, owned Duncans, a tea company that owns a number of estates in the Dooars.  Duncans was, not so long ago, a profitable company, but Goenka made some bad decisions, using the money from tea (and a load of debt) to buy a fertilizer business.

He, though, is not paying the price. 

In 2015, thirteen workers in the Duncan estates died of starvation, for no wages were paid to them and there was no food to eat, the West Bengal Government having a non-functioning PDS.  Thousands of others are in the whimsical hands of Destiny and Empty Promise, as the malnutrition levels of workers and their children in the Duncan estates soar.  Reports speak of human trafficking, of immense agony that each of these families goes through as they have no options but to wait, borrow, wait again.... until there is no borrowing option anymore.  Which is when they resort to selling the only piece left: themselves. 

Why can’t they just move out of there, you ask?  Well, some have, most haven’t.  Because moving, you see, is not easy  for those who have been trod on, cast out, abused and starved.  No labour force can be that mobile for, if it were, the wages paid to labour in India’s cities would never have increased.

Goenka, of course, has his point of view, but, dammit, no perspective, no excuse, no disingenuous self-flagellation (albiet slight in his case) can condone such deliberate, negligent, callous egocentricity.  How can he and every one of his managers stand by silently watching these workers emaciate themselves to physical ruin?  Are they, these ‘tea barons’, not accessories to their deaths? How could any of their defensive actions  be an excuse for a ‘let-them-be-damned’ approach, when the certain consequence of such inaction would be their demise?  Why is this not premeditated murder, a phrase I use again?

There are times in life when excuses do not count.  This is one of them. 

In 2012, I had embarked with enthusiasm on a new book that would be a travelogue through tea country; a collection of stories and anecdotes from the Brits to the Twits (my term for Twitter users).  Travelling around Assam, I met planters.....and some workers.  The planters’ stories were quaint and olde-world and their anachronistic lifestyle was charming, but the workers’ labour lines – equally anachronistic, but in a very different way – were as appalling as they were putrid.  When one planter – an Assistant Visiting Agent (which is a senior designation) - referred to his labour as being ‘bull headed’, suggesting that they were unthinking enough to not be much better than vacuous-headed animals, I knew I was barking up the wrong tea bush.  I had no wish to meet any more of these wise men, so I abandoned the project.

Goenka is a bad guy for sure, but he must savour the company of rogues he is with.  An article in The Mint on January 22^nd 2016 by Sudeep Chakravarti details an investigation by BBC News and Radio 4 into the working and living conditions at the largest plantation companies in Assam, Mcleod Russel (India’s largest tea enterprise by area) and The Assam Company.  The findings were shocking: he quotes from the BBC report  “Images of workers’ toilets and accommodation at the McLeod Russel estates made facilities in Indian slums appear salubrious in comparison, accompanied by details of abject poverty, malnutrition and disease.”  And “Assam Company came in for criticism for not providing workers in an estate protective gear while spraying agrochemicals, and for employing child labour.” After pressure from international buyers, the article states,  Mcleod Russel is making some amends, but you will forgive my pessimism, for I have long abandoned the notion of business being a source of social good.

As if to prove me right, Mcleod Russel declared its financial results four days after this write up, on January 26^th, 2016: profits have dropped big time, one report lamented.  In the three months ended December 31^st, 2015, the company made profits after tax of about fifty seven crores, against about eighty crores from the earlier year’s comparable quarter. I could picture the Khaitans – the absentee Anglophile satrap-owners of Mcleod (with a 45% stake) – weeping at this drop and at the stock market’s phlegmatic view of the company: their own stake in the company was now worth a piffling seven hundred crores thereabouts.  One shivers at their sorry plight, the poor little rich boys of Mcleod Russel, a plight serious enough to make them forget the starvation of a thousand others.

There are times in life when excuses do not count.  This is, I insist, one of them.

Fifty seven crores of profit in a quarter is about seventy six lakhs of profit every working day.

Enough money, you will agree, to do the right thing.