Two Indias: It is not (just) about religion but economics power...

Last year when we were in Lucknow, I started a tag called "Two Lucknows" to point out some of the wealth disparities that were treated as so common place... inequalities that made me feel uncomfortable, but I wanted to understand the reasons for why they seemed so endemic.

Allen happened to have a conversation with a Banarasi weaver. His story (which I've asked Allen to write below) reminds me that so much of these inequalities we see are the result of someone with more political and economic power being able to exploit someone less well off... This type of extortion doesn't recognize religion so much as opportunity. "Oh, you really need this loan now -- well, I'll only be able to process the paper work if ...."

Here's Allen's account below:

Today I met an 80 year old weaver and asked him if he felt tensions were increased between Hindu shop-owners and Muslim weavers because of religion - particularly after partition. He said that it was nothing like that. It was just rich people cheating poor people and it had nothing to do with religion - and then he gave several examples of the ways in which the Government tries to help poor people (both Hindu and Muslim) and how somehow the money they set aside for the poor never actually reaches them....

He also talked about corruption in the banks and the police and everywhere else. He says that all total he has lost about 1,500,000 rupees over the last ten years because store owners simply did not pay him for the materials they took from him. There was a sharp decline in the market overall, so store owners were struggling to pay their bills. I am extrapolating from this, but my guess is that the easiest bill for them to NOT pay would be their I.O.U's to the weavers who supplied their materials. They'd pay off the banks and electric companies first....

I asked him if he could get a lawyer and he said that the lawyers cost money and these are all rich people they can bribe anyone for anything - he won't get anywhere that way. Then he went to the example of the Bank. He took out a loan from a bank once. 15% interest. But in order to get the loan for 100,000 rupees he had to bribe the official 3,000. So he had to first save up money to take out a loan.

Then he and Nandan went on to share so many stories about corrupt officials and police that the conversation steered away from where it had started, but I thought it was very interesting to hear first hand about the sort of thing I had previously only understood to exist in the abstract.