Black Sheep Or Scapegoat?

IN December 1990, security forces raided a village in Nagaon district in Assam. They couldn't nab a single ULFA militant, and instead picked up a 69-year-old illiterate Nepali milkman called Arjun Sharma. And slapped eighty TADA cases on him. All of seven years later, the milkman remains incarcerated in Guwahati jail. Chargesheets have been filed against him in 53 cases, and TADA being TADA, all of them non-bailable. It will be years before these cases are settled either way, and in any case Sharma, already 76, is unlikely to live till then.

The word 'scapegoat' has its roots in Biblical times, when Jewish chief priests would symbolically lay the sins of the people upon a goat and send it off into the wilderness. In recent times, Indian politicians have skilfully refined this high art tradition. The goats come in all shapes and sizes, from hapless Arjun Sharmas who help some small-time policeman pretend to be medal material, to the Rs 700-crore Tata Tea which fits with equal ease into the finely-honed scapegoat strategies of our senior politicians.

The gameplan—at the senior politician level—works thus. The lid has been blown off some can with particularly eeky smelly things inside, so look around for someone big and famous connected with the can in some way and GO FOR HIM. The bigger and the more famous that person is, the better the strategy works. And you have to go for him with such force and fanfare that public attention remains focused on him and not on the more uncomfortable and important issues.

We've seen it before. The securities scam explodes, and officials instantly find the man of their dreams: Harshad Mehta. He's high-profile, appears on magazine covers, flaunts his Toyota Lexuses and the golf course inside his apartment. So the entire enforcement machinery concentrates on him, pictures all over the place of the unshaven big bull being dragged around by policemen, while every other scam-tainted stockbroker (and some of them far bigger than Harshad), politician, banker, industrialist gets away scot-free.

Hundreds of people die in broad-daylight bomb blasts in the country's commercial capital, and the authorities focus attention on a dimwit film star. For Sunjay Dutt comes in handy for the government: however high and mighty a person may be, he is not above the law. Gimme a break.

What about Nadeem? Isn't it strange to go public with a suspected killer's name, when that man is sitting in London? Doesn't common sense dictate that you either wait for him to come back and arrest him as he gets off the plane, or start extradition procedures first and then talk about it? Instead, the Mumbai police talks first and contacts Interpol some days later.

The scapegoat gambit returns now with Tata Tea. The company firmly denies that it ever knowingly financed the ULFA in any way, as the Assam government is accusing it of doing. But even if Tata Tea paid the ULFA, I do not blame it at all. This is a company whose executives' and their families' lives are under constant threat from the militants. In the last eight years, at least 10 tea industry people have been killed by the ULFA, including the wife of a tea garden manager, and at least 13 kidnapped, of whom one is believed to be dead. The state law and order machinery is plainly inadequate, if not non-existent. The Assam police force—and I'm not kidding—doesn't even have enough money to pay its fuel bills. To the tea manager, the choice is often between payment and death. Which is not a difficult one to make.

If tea companies have been paying the ULFA, they have been doing so to keep their people safe, because the State is unable to protect them. Indeed, they would like nothing better than not having to pay. These payments are a symptom, and definitely not the disease. Successive Assam governments have failed miserably to contain insurgency, and now we have to believe that it's all the tea companies' fault! It's like: since we can't touch Chhota Rajan, let's throw the lawbook at that shopkeeper who pays hafta to Rajan's gang. Tata Tea provides more employment in the state of Assam than any other private sector company. But to warped excuse-mongerers, the company's very success and size make it the perfect scapegoat.

Thankfully, the strategy—at the rich and famous level—has an inbuilt flaw. People soon turn sceptical, and the scapegoat in fact starts getting public sympathy. So Harshad Mehta is back in business, celebrating his birthday on his website, and when he says he likes the BPL scrip, the share price moves up within days. Sunjay Dutt too is doing quite well, and though I have never been able to stand the man on screen, his popularity is apparently undiminished, if not growing.

But Mehta, Dutt—and now Tata Tea—have resources: they can hire the best lawyers, lobby with MPs and MLAs, and dig in their heels till the news reports move from the front page to the bottom of page five, at which time the government, having achieved its purpose of diverting public attention, can tiptoe away from the case and go back to business as usual. But for Arjun Sharma and thousands of others like him rotting in prisons across the country, there's no salvation. No salvation as long as an impotent state machinery, with its infinite capacity to never do the job it's meant for, keeps hunting for scapegoats—whether soft targets like an illiterate milkman or red herrings like India's largest tea company.

With reporting by Nitin A. Gokhale