Some years ago when the Sachar Committee pointed out that our great secular, socialistic government had done a pretty miserable job apropos of the welfare of the Muslim citizens of our republic, the imperious government of imperial India promptly decided to set up a Minorities Finance Corporation. Recently, a young woman was raped and killed in a brutal manner in imperial Delhi. Therefore, we now need a Women?s Bank. Presumably, all the investors, directors, employees, depositors and borrowers will be women. Sounds like a neat idea. One word of warning to Indian women: The only other country that has an all-women?s banking office is Saudi Arabia. I am not sure that Indian women want to have the privileges that their Saudi sisters are blessed with. An ominous prospect indeed and worth pondering over.
Maya-vaada is an old Indic, Vedic, Vedantic, Gandhian, Nehruvian, secular, socialistic idea. This means that the phenomenal world we see is an illusion. Therefore, it stands to reason that our great government deals with illusions. Muslim poverty may be a reality. But our response need only be an illusion ? that is sufficient. Whether the finance corporation actually helps Muslims is beside the point. As long as it has an office in imperial Delhi and several government officials pretending to work, we have done our duty. It is pretty certain that a women?s bank is not at all likely to improve the safety or welfare of women. But that is hardly the point. We have given up on trying to improve our police or judicial administration (I doubt if even all the 300 million gods of India put together could fix our police or court system ? so why should we mere humans even bother to try). But we can set up a women?s bank ? and, therefore, we will. The beauty of this solution is that we can feel the warm glow of satisfaction of having ?done something?, or even better, ?having pretended to do something?.
We can similarly set up welfare programmes for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and any other disgruntled or oppressed/repressed/suppressed groups that we can keep conjuring up all the time. Better still, we can announce that we intend to set up such welfare programmes. The warm glow of satisfaction that even the act of announcing provides us is uniquely Indian ? and anyone who dares to deride or criticise this is unpatriotic, unmatriotic and a lackey of sinister foreign elements forever plotting to distribute bombs in our country through tiffin boxes or threatening to lower our credit rating to junk status or otherwise unreasonably making fun of the Vedas, Gandhi, Nehru, Mother India, etc.
In the years to come, our great government is bound to set up special programmes and institutions for left-handers, former smokers, the vertically challenged and so on.