Commentary/ Dilip D'Souza

One Theft, Many Questions

No, this is not one more column about the "political crisis" in India. At least, it's only peripherally about it. Instead, I want to tell you about Neeraj and Arun.

These little fellows are bright, cheery and affectionate brothers in a building near where I live. When I go over, which is close to daily, they are invariably outside, riding around on cycles or playing cricket. They stop and hail me, exchanging high-fives and pretend-shooting me with their index fingers. They are good friends with the other kids in the building; all of them play together and run in and out of the flats freely.

Some days ago, one of the brothers stole some small thing from one of the flats. A trivial incident really, but it happened. And when it did, it immediately put the building's residents -- and me, too -- face-to-face with an age-old question. Not what to do about the theft, but what to do about class.

Here's what I have not told you yet: The brothers are the children of the building's watchman. The whole family lives in a small shed at the back of the building. Neeraj and Arun sleep under a mosquito net in one of the open garages in the compound, mainly because there's not enough room in the shed for all of them to lie down. Their father is determined to educate them; they are both doing well at school. As I mentioned, they are bright, alert kids and it is impossible not to like them.

Now many of us are fired by ideas of equality. We would like to treat people the same regardless of what we like to call their station in life. The only thing that matters to a relationship, we would like to think, is congeniality.

So with Neeraj and Arun. As far as I know, nobody in the building treats the brothers any differently from any of the other children. So they play with the others's toys, mingle together, talk with each other as equally as kids can get. They go to school, study hard, play hard, just like the others. And the brothers get along with everyone. To an outsider, this was equality indeed: She could never have guessed that two of the children running around in the compound slept in the garage every night, if it mattered at all. It was all very nice and encouraging.

Until this little theft came to light.

Because the nice picture got a little muddied when one of the brothers decided to pocket something from one of the flats. It's easy to think it was the familiarity, and that alone, that caused it. They should never have been allowed in the building, some will say, you can never tell with these people.

But what was the choice? Do you prevent the watchman's kids playing with the others? Do you forbid any contact? If you do encourage them to spend time together, do you insist that when the other kids run off into their flats, those two stay outside where they belong?

And if they are walking in and out of your flat like everyone else, can you really expect them to understand why, once playtime is over, they must return to the mosquito net in the garage while their friends go up to their spacious flats? Can one of those boys really comprehend the idea of property; why he has so little but his friends have so much?

I'm not done with the questions yet. Should a child of 8 or 9 really be made to know his place in our society, understand that just because he is a watchman's son, he cannot cross certain lines? Can you blame him for reaching out to some attractive little bauble? And now that he has, what do you do? Think once more of forbidding the other kids from playing with these two? Tell them they must stay outside always? Divide, where there had been oneness before?

Suddenly, with this one incident, all these questions cried out for answers.

There cannot be a block of flats in Bombay today that does not have a watchman. They also equip themselves with large iron gates and high walls. We who live in them think that these guarantee our safety. We think that we can wall ourselves off from whatever goes on in the outside world. If there are many far poorer people out there, we imagine walls and a uniformed guard will keep us isolated from them and their concerns, relieve us of the need to think of those things. We even ignore the irony that the very guards we employ often come from those slums we want to shut ourselves off from.

But Neeraj and Arun showed us that it's not that easy to escape the issues. You see, they live inside the wall. Their presence reminds us that one day we will have to stand and face up to the kind of society we have and are continuing to build for ourselves. What does it mean to treat children equally, as this building's residents tried to do, when their lives are so clearly unequal? How can a country sustain itself with the enormous disparities in wealth, in social station, we see in ours?

And if we do start asking those questions, what is the solution: preserve the disparities and the walls? If so, how long will that be possible? Might it be wiser instead to make the national commitment to address poverty that we have always sidestepped?

That last means investing in education, in health, in housing, in our people. Today, it is unfashionable to speak of that kind of investment. But I am convinced that to achieve any truly lasting economic growth and prosperity, there is no escape from investing, and heavily, in these social basics. Making every Indian equally prosperous is neither possible nor desirable; but guaranteeing every Indian an education and an equal crack at life cannot be allowed to remain off the national agenda as they have done for years. They must be national priorities. Far more surely than any amount of military spending, that will build and preserve a strong and secure India.

Perhaps you think I'm reading too much into a simple theft that will soon be forgotten. Perhaps I am. But I can't help wondering what Neeraj and Arun will be thinking in a few years, if not already, when they are old enough to comprehend the vast gap between where they are and where their friends are. Why should it be so, they will probably ask. What answer will we give them then?

In this becalmed week, while we wait for a gang of crooked and disreputable men in Delhi to decide what the future will hold for us, I wonder about kids like these two little friends of mine. The men talk about exotic ideas like corruption and communalism and secularism and Hindutva, about temples and more temples and coalitions and more coalitions. But I wonder: is even one of them thinking about the concerns of hundreds of millions of Indians like Neeraj and Arun?

On half a century of evidence, I suspect the answer to that last question is: No. I also suspect it's up to us -- you and me -- to turn that answer into: Yes.

Tell us what you think of this column