India’s democracy experiment and especially the ill-advised decision to introduce universal adult franchise without any education qualification, has enabled the worst elements of urban and rural elites — a lumpen bourgeoisie driven entirely by self-interest and aggrandisement — to rise to the highest offices of the nation. If not, how does one explain that as soon as a ten-member inter-ministerial team comprising top bureaucrats of the Central government arrived in Davangere (Karnataka) on November 19 to investigate the severity of drought conditions in 17 districts of north Karnataka, it ordered itself an elaborate lunch within the premises of a school of a drought-stricken village? Unfortunately, such profligate establishment expenditure and brazen insensitivity of the neta-babu brotherhood is hardly unusual. In 1993 when a massive earthquake flattened the town of Latur in Maharashtra, the state government sent a delegation under Dalit leader and minister Ramdas Athavle to assess the scale of damage. However, as soon as the hon’ble minister arrived in devastated Latur, he constituted a task force of local government employees to search for free range chickens for his lunch. On yet another occasion while on a visit to Ahmednagar, former Union minister S.B. Chavan sent his Dakota airplane back to Mumbai to fetch his lunch. And in 2008, former UP chief minister Mayawati — she of selfie statues fame — sent her official airplane from Lucknow to Mumbai to bring back a pair of bedroom slippers. But why pillory the neta-babu brotherhood for whom parasitism and hands in the public till have become a well-established tradition? One has yet to hear any of the eggheads who outshout each other on the television news channels, or learned editors of mainstream print media endorse our campaign to curb runaway establishment expenditure. Perhaps they have too many kith and kin busily feeding from the public trough.
