Ranjona Banerji: In India, beware of compassion

The idea was that I would write about compassion again and about the odd nature of feeling empathy or even sympathy for others Especially as seen in urban India today Clearly it is an odd concept since some Indian industrialists and businesspeople feel no compunction when they declaim on national television Spare me sob stories about the suffering poorFarmers who cannot pay back their loans are freeloaders businesspeople who cannot repay their loans are either canny moneymen who opt for bankruptcy or the government steps in to replenish starving banks for the good of the country PicAFPThis contempt for the poor in India is not new Years ago movie star Nargis expressed her unhappiness with Satyajit Rays films because she felt they showcased Indias poverty to the world Bollywood since then has been showcasing Indias crassness to the world without any selfawareness at all Every political move which is made by any government towards social welfare is often seen as a votecatching sop No political move to help corporates is presented as a sop since cheap land and tax breaks are seen as necessary for developmentEven the otherwise generous Tata group had its then chairman exiting Bengal because the poor people of Bengal demanded their due in land acquisition He moved from the Bad M of Mamata Banerjee to the Good M of Narendra Modi but no one cared that the farmers of Gujarat were equally shortchanged but sadly for them voicelessFarmers who cannot pay back their loans are freeloaders businesspeople who cannot repay their loans are either canny money men who opt for bankruptcy or the government steps in to replenish starving banks for the good of the countryIts all perspective of course In India we like to see ourselves as more moral than those in the West more familyoriented more communityminded more inclusive We believe this even when we live in the West and watch our children struggle with our various hypocrisiesBut when you strip it down no society can survive if it forgets ignores or pays lip service to its neediest The democratic West especiallyEurope understood this a long time ago Communism presented the dream but then failed in compassion when it handed all power including that of thought to the StateAnd where the state cannot fulfil its obligations civil society steps in Or it tries to And we reach the crux of the problem again The tightlyheld pursestringMention NGOs in urban society and you are bombarded with lectures about fake NGOs and leftieliberal bleeding hearts as if both are the same thing Most fake NGOs have some political andor business connection Most genuine NGOs do not But it is so much easier to tarnish all NGOs than to open your wallet While NGOs are struggling to get funding from Indians successive governments make it more and more difficult for them to get money from abroadThere is a theory and it may well be plausible that there is a religious pinning to the lack of general generosity in India That the reason why many Indians who donate R5 crore doors to temples will not give even Rs 5 lakh to some worthy cause is that they are looking out for number 1 when it comes to our various divine presences The same theory tells you that in the West Christianity teaches both compassion and donationI will buy these theories up to a point Many generous donors in the West today are not religious not any more at least And there have been enough horror stories about what the Church has done with its money However even a total sceptic must concede that there is more compassion in these societies than we appear to have in ours And we must ask ourselves why to be compassionate is almost a bad word in IndiaFor years we the more fortunate have inured ourselves to the misery around us You cannot live unless you do that we have told ourselves And over the years we have tried to make ourselves into the victim A member of the film community in Mumbai now a popular TV debater had complained to a newspaper I once worked with that the media was too obsessed with slum dwellers and was ignoring the middle classes Why talk about someone else who is going to suffer anyway when you can talk about meBut how long can we survive as a society as we continue to roll up the car window and turn away No dont answer that You wont like what you will hearRanjona Banerji is a senior journalist You can follow her on Twitter ranjona Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycom