http://www.sentinelassam.com/mainnews/story.php?sec=1&subsec=0&id=55098&dtP=2010-11-28&ppr=1#55098
Perils of being a mere consumer
WITH EYES WIDE OPEN
D. N. Bezboruah
Certain events of Wednesday and Thursday in Assam have underscored what
inevitably happens when a very large segment of a State’s population persists
in being mere consumers and when traders from another State who seek to take
advantage of the lack of local productivity decide to exploit the situation by
resorting to abnormal prices and extortionate profits. On Wednesday, All Assam
Students’ Union (AASU) activists ordered the employees of the Vishal
supermarkets in Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Jorhat, Tezpur and Silchar to leave the
supermarkets and locked up the premises. This led the management of the Vishal
supermarket at Guwahati to close shop on its own. While this action might be
regarded as peremptory and extra-constitutional, there was no report of
violence on Wednesday. However, on Thursday these activists vandalized the
property of the Vishal supermarkets in Guwahati and Jorhat. In Jorhat, the
provocation is stated to be that policemen used used hockey sticks instead of
truncheons to beat up the activists and disperse them. The rampage is reported
to have gone on in Guwahati for about 20 minutes from 12.30 p.m. under the
very
nose of the police. This is not terribly surprising. If the annexation of over
87,000 hectares of Assam’s territory can go on unabated at Merapani and
several
other places along our borders with other States under the very nose of the
Assam Police, the police must regard such acts of vandalism as very trivial
matters.
These events lead one to the question of what could have happened to provoke
the AASU activists to target just one supermarket chain for such action.
According to AASU adviser Samujjal Kumar Bhattacharyya, the top management of
the Vishal group of supermarkets sought to blackmail the AASU leadership by
planning to release an audio tape-recording of the latest discussions on the
enhanced amount of donation to be made annually to the AASU by the Vishal
group. Bhattacharyya insists that there is nothing in the discussions that the
AASU would like to conceal from the public since the AASU and a few indigenous
student organizations of the State have long sought and received donations
from
the people and business establishments of Assam and will continue to do so.
However, Bhattacharyya alleges that a conspiracy against him and the AASU has
been hatched by a fledgling activist group of Gauhati University called Forum
that has also strongly supported the construction of mega dams in the region
for the generation of electricity. Bhattacharyya has also accused the State’s
Power Minister Pradyut Bordoloi and former Chief Minister Prafulla Kumar
Mahanta of stoking the conspiracy against him. Prafulla Kumar Mahanta is
understandably hurt at this allegation emanating from the AASU which he led at
one time and which had given rise to the AGP of which he became the only chief
minister of Assam.
Before one gets down to the real reasons for the conflict between traders and
consumers, it is important to take a closer look at the question of donations
and financial support to student organizations and other activist groups or
NGOs. It is very easy to forget that there is a strong element of volition in
the matter of donations. The donor has the right either to donate or not to.
If
he/she chooses to donate, the question of how much will be paid is a matter of
discretion for the donor. However, the line between seeking donations and
extorting funds can become a very thin one. In seeking donations one tends to
cajole and plead for a larger donation than what is being offered. A slight
change of tone can change the cajoling or pleading into coercion. And when the
beneficiary determines or seeks to determine the amount of donation that must
be made, it is no longer a matter of seeking a donation. The AASU must keep
this yardstick in mind when seeking donations and use it to judge whether the
seeking of a donation has turned into an act of extortion. In any case,
whatever the provocation, students must never be allowed to vandalize anyone’s
property. No one has the right to do this, but students being of an
impressionable age will begin to believe that this is permissible activity and
not a crime. Even before we go into the realm of proper human values, the very
danger of vandalizing shops or any property must be kept in mind by student
leaders. Students can land up in jail the moment a senior officer of the force
lands up at the spot and orders the policemen on duty to nab offenders.
Besides, have the AASU leaders given any thought to what could happen to
innocent Assamese people who go to other States when people elsewhere decide
to
pay back some hapless Assamese—any Assamese—by way of retaliation? Who would
take the responsibility for having triggered off such retaliatory actions? In
any case, the fact remains that the AASU cannot obviously take the law into
its
own hands.
All this takes us to the kind of psychology that gives rise to such conflicts
that are avoidable. Much of our problems stem from the fact that we are not
producers of anything and have turned into mere conspicuous consumers. We had
an agrarian economy going, but today we do not produce even adequate rice for
the State. Fish is an important part of our diet, but we do not even rear the
fish that the State needs. Well over Rs 2,000 crore goes out of the State
every
year just to buy fish from elsewhere. We do not even have the skills to earn
the kind of money that will support the kind of conspicuous consumption that
drives us all the time. Thus there is greed on both sides. There is very
pronounced greed among traders who must support a host of organizations
seeking
donations and subscriptions all the time that others cannot support with their
earnings. They not only want to make up their donations from the public, but
they want to teach people a lesson for not being able to do anything
substantial to earn the kind of money that can support their strong
consumerist
urges. So they hike prices as much as they can. They have to make up also for
what they pay political parties for the elections. The outcome of this is that
traders regard themselves as being on the other side of the line—as our
adversaries. On the other side, there is the greed of those who insist on
living in a style that their incomes cannot support. No wonder two things are
beginning to happen. First, the kind of tolerance that once existed between
the
trader from another State and the people of Assam is beginning to disappear.
Secondly, the identification of the trader from another State with Assam that
used to be forged is also disappearing. Many of them have stopped speaking in
Assamese as they used to.
In order to combat the menace of rising prices, we must all stop being
conspicuous consumers who cannot produce anything. We have to take a very
tough
stand against exploitative traders, a corrupt administration where the
minister
in charge of civil supplies cannot control prices at all and the large number
of middlemen who are contributing to this abnormal inflation in the State.
This
toughness is not physical toughness, but rather mental toughness that gives us
the strength to resist buying anything that is not selling at the right
prices. This calls for two kinds of action. The first is to avoid buying any
luxury items for a whole year or so until prices come down to realistic
levels.
The next is to selectively boycott items of food that are thought to be
indispensable. If the price of onions has touched Rs 50 a kilo, give it up for
two whole months until the stink of rotting onions fills the warehouses and
makes traders desperate. If the price of fish has become extortionate, give up
eating fish for six months. All traders will begin to toe the line of
consumers
rather than the line of the politicians who are actively helping the price
increases. And the items selected and the time selected for the boycott of any
item should be only by word of mouth among consumers so that the element of
surprise is not lost. If we cannot make these very petty personal sacrifices,
we shall have to take the beating that we are getting from extortionate
traders now, and things will only get worse. The traders now see the people of
Assam as their adversaries, and extortionate prices will come down only when
(a) the ruling party in the State stops milking them for the elections; (b)
extortion of some form in the name of donations and contributions comes to an
end; and (c) a strong and sustained consumer-resistance movement succeeds. The
important thing to remember is that traders can pass on all the donations they
make to the buyers and make them pay in the form of increased prices; the poor
consumer has no such weapon against the traders. Our only weapon is to reduce
buying or cut out buying completely. For this we need great toughness of the
mind, not of the body. Let us build that mental toughness and also develop the
skills that will enable us to earn what we need instead of going to traders to
cadge humiliating donations. It is also important that our students should
spend their time studying instead of going around collecting donations or
breaking other people’s property out of misdirected frustration.
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