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Things That Happen In India

After the riots in Bombay in 1992-93, I was enlisted to help in a campaign to ensure victims' families got their compensation from the government. Our team collected names, verified identities, told people where to go and what to do to get their payments. It was a depressing business, but never more so than the time I was asked to help a destitute baker who had migrated from Uttar Pradesh. A man called Samiullah.

One night during the riots, Samiullah's bakery was burned down. The same night, his 14-year-old son was hacked into tiny bits of flesh and bone by a gang of thugs. Trying to claim his compensation for the death of his son, he was getting the familiar, ancient treatment from the bureaucrats in charge: demands for bribes, "come back next week" and stuff on those lines. After he had made many futile trips by himself, I began going with him when he went to the office in charge of compensation.

Those visits were a revelation to me. I saw for myself just how subhuman a breed we have populating -- polluting is much the better word -- our government offices. I'm sorry you didn't see it for yourselves. Because the runaround they gave poor, utterly devastated Samiullah and his wife was a sight to behold, an object lesson in torment and persecution.

Together, we visited the office several times, were turned away on one flimsy pretext or another several times. Each time, I found it still more difficult to explain to this pathetic, weeping couple just why they would have to trudge into town still again. But even with all these infuriating trips, nothing I had ever experienced prepared me for one moment in particular.

That was when Samiullah and I sat across the table from one of the ugliest of the officers. The compensation cheque -- signed, payable to Samiullah, ready in all conceivable respects -- lay on the table between us, no more than a couple of finger-lengths away. But the hyena posing as an public servant would not hand it over to Samiullah. Take a train back to your village in UP, he told the baker. We'll post it to you there, he continued. Make sure you demand it, he advised, for those government officers in UP only know how to create trouble. They are not helpful like we in Bombay are.

Had I not been with him, Samiullah would have taken this wise advice and caught the train to UP, there to wait until his cheque arrived, if at all. He knew no better, the poor man. He also did not know -- yet -- that the hyena really wanted a bribe. Had Samiullah coughed one up, he may have found, as if by magic, that the cheque did not need to go to UP after all. In fact, after I intervened and asked the big boss at that office to help, the cheque was simply handed over to Samiullah right then. The hyena just wanted his rotten pound of flesh.

If you are wondering: "What kind of man would prey on a man with no income, whose son has died a horrible death?" I can tell you: this kind. The kind who were in that office.

Two years ago, a man I know in California -- I'll call him Srinivas -- visited India with his wife and daughter. They landed in Bangalore, where relatives were waiting to drive them to Hyderabad, their home. It must have been a happy reunion, and there was more family waiting in Hyderabad to meet them. As they set off from Bangalore, nobody had an inkling of what was to follow.

What followed was a horrific tragedy, an accident on the highway in which Srinivas's wife and his brother were killed.

What followed that and continues today is a nightmare. The police dragged their feet about accident reports. Things were stolen from the wrecked car. Medical help was near impossible to find. Bribes were expected or demanded every step of the way. Getting a form from an insurance company to make a claim against a policy took a good few months -- just the claim form! The insurance companies have steadily stonewalled instead of paying claims.

Oriental Insurance, whose policy covered the car, is just one example. They began by offered a ridiculous figure for the car, knowing well it was too low. Taken to court, Oriental has spent two years seeking and getting adjournments and postponements of the hearings. All just to lead up to the affidavit they have now filed, one that denies practically everything about the accident and Oriental's liability under the policy.

In two years, the claim has moved precisely nowhere. There is little reason to hope that it will move anywhere in the next two years. If and when Oriental is finally forced to pay, it will have to pay the policy amount and no more. The lack of any punitive action for these scumbag tactics makes it in Oriental's interest to adopt these tactics.

Similar sordid stories apply to the other insurance policies, and in fact to nearly every aspect of what happened to this family. Not one of the various legal and other issues about the entire tragedy has been resolved in these years, something that serves to compound the horror for those who lived through it. "I feel very embittered about India," Srinivas told me when we had a chat recently.

No wonder he does. When he returned to the USA, the American insurance company that had issued a policy covering his wife sent him their condolences and paid the policy amount in three weeks. Yes, condolences. Yes, three weeks. That's what happened in big bad racist bullying America; but two years after the dreadful day, there is no sign that anything similar will happen in Srinivas's own home, in the land where he grew up.

I wrote about Samiullah's son in a Rediff column a year-and-a-half ago, and I think I will write about my California friend's experience in a future column. That's why I have done little more here than paraphrase what happened to them. But why have I put them both in this column? After all, apart from tragedy, there is little these two sorry tales share. So why bring them together?

Actually, there are two things they do have in common. One is the openly grasping, corrupt bureaucracy we tolerate in India. The second thing so saddened and angered me that I felt a near compulsion to write this column and tell you what it is.

As I mentioned, I wrote about Samiullah's son in an earlier column. Srinivas also wrote up his experience, hoping to get it read in India, hoping that it would have some positive effect there. That in the end, some good might come from what happened to him.

The common thread is in two reactions we had to what we wrote, reactions that seem to represent a certain body of opinion. Somebody who read my column wrote to say Samiullah was a creature of my imagination, that I had made the whole thing up, that these things could not have happened in India. It didn't much matter; I wrote him off as the nut he certainly is.

Until the other day, when he swam forcefully back into my mind. That's when I heard about a man who lives in India who read Srinivas's account. He dismissed it offhand. Srinivas must have made it all up, he said, because these things don't happen in India.

These things don't happen in India, more than a few people seem to think. So why do they happen in India? Me, I am sure the airy disbelief has something to do with it.

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Dilip D'Souza