Where Angels Prey

by Ramesh S Arunachalam

  Age might have rendered him incapable of physical participation but it is obvious that the old man’s commitment remains unshaken. But of course, that is the way it is, Chandresh thinks to himself. These men are converts for life, more often than not!

  “Thank you so much for sharing all of this with me. If you trust me enough, can you tell me what brought you into the folds of the Maoist movement? Was it purely ideological or was there a stronger, personal reason?”

  The old man’s face takes on a faraway expression. There is also a look of immense sadness on his face. When he speaks, however, his voice lacks any emotion.

  “It was 2 November 1984. Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by her own security guards just two days earlier. My family and I were staying on the fields of a landlord and tending to it on his behalf. The landlord was originally a mahajan, or moneylender. He had slowly grabbed large tracts of tribal land through manipulative and coercive means. He would lend money to tribals for agriculture or other purposes, at very high rates of interest, take away their produce as interest, and value it at low rates. He lent them more and more money and eventually took away their land, leaving them indebted and vulnerable.”

  Chandresh feels suddenly weary and powerless. How many times had he heard this story? And each time, he could not help being gripped by the same sense of helpless outrage.

  The old man seems fully aware of his story’s impact on Chandresh.

  “The exploitation did not stop there. He would force the female members of those indebted families, and children, to entertain him and his friends at their weekend parties, which were also attended by corrupt officers and police officials. One day, when I returned from the field, neither my wife nor my 12-year-old daughter was home. They rarely used to go out, so I was grabbed by a sudden fear. I ran to the landlord’s house at the far end of the field to seek his help to find them. To my deep shock, I saw my wife and daughter leaving his home in a distraught state. They were both bruised and their clothes were in tatters. They did not survive the ordeal. Within two days, my wife killed my daughter before committing suicide herself. I walked around the village like a mad man for the next month or so. The only thing that kept me alive was my quest for justice. I knew that I would never get justice if I went to the police or the judiciary. So I chose to go to Chotanna instead. I joined his dalam and became a foot soldier in the battle against exploitation and social inequity. It took me two years before I managed to secure justice for my wife and child, and I did it with my own hands! In January 1986, while the landlord and his friends were returning to Rampachodavaram from Rajahmundry, we kidnapped them all, beheaded them and placed their heads on posts in the main marketplace in Rampachodavaram. Not only was this justice for my own family but for all those who had gone through a similar ordeal. It was also a warning signal to all those who believed that they could get away with exploiting the poor. Three of my colleagues from that incident were arrested in August 1986. The Gurtedu kidnappings were to secure the release of those brave men among others.”

  From experience, Chandresh knows that anything he says will sound trite under the circumstances. The old man seems to have exhausted his quota of words too. They remain seated in companionable silence for a while, both drawing on their beedis almost in tandem.

  Chandresh knows the man will be deeply insulted if he offers him money. He was not out to barter his grief for gain. And yet, he feels it would be churlish to walk away with nothing more than a handshake.

  “Can I buy you another cup of tea?”

  The old man’s eyes twinkle.

  “No more tea but maybe I could bum a cigarette off you in return?”

  Chandresh’s jaw drops. The sly old fox had known all along!

  He sheepishly hands over the pack of cigarettes that he fishes out of his pocket.

  The old man smiles at him benignly.

  “Please do continue with your efforts. No matter if you don’t always get results.”

  As Chandresh offers to shake hands in a final goodbye, the old man shakes his head. He places his hand on his forehead and offers the traditional greeting.

  “Lal Salaam!”

  CHAPTER 8

  RANGA REDDY DISTRICT, ANDHRA PRADESH,

  29 SEPTEMBER 2010

  The villagers watch open-mouthed. It is like a scene from the movies—a Vijayashanthi movie, to be specific! Except that Vijayashanthi4 is almost always in uniform and beats the villains to pulp. Muscle flexing is not this petite, feisty young woman’s style, though. Veena Mehra, the newly appointed district magistrate of Ranga Reddy district, means business. As she eyeballs the evil landlord into submitting to her authority, the small crowd lets out a cheer. The noise becomes deafening when she escorts Rajayya to her official jeep. A bonded labourer for 33 out of his 40 years, he is free at last! More than half a century after India achieved its independence, the practice of bonded labour as a form of modern slavery continues to exist. The economically backward Ranga Reddy district has always found itself in the eye of this controversy. When news of Veena Mehra assuming office as DM broke, those who knew of her tough stance against all forms of exploitation found reason to celebrate. On her part, immediately upon taking over, she promised to act on an ILO-sponsored report containing 30 bonded labour case studies in the district.

  Rajayya’s father had been a bonded labourer too; it was a family tradition. With no fixed or movable assets, the only thing of value he had to pledge at the time of a financial crisis, was the family’s physical labour. Rajayya was first pledged to the landlord at the age of seven for a sum of Rs 25,000 and was given the responsibility of grazing the landlord’s cattle. He was paid a nominal salary of Rs 50 per year. While it took ten years to repay the original loan, the family had taken more loans to pay for weddings, funerals, illnesses and the like, in the interim. As a result, Rajayya was never a free man. Not until the government, in the form of Veena Mehra, intervened, that is!

  Watching Rajayya leave her office with his family after repeatedly expressing his gratitude, Veena feels a quite a sense of satisfaction. This feeling is one of the perks of her job, to be revisited every time circumstances or forces beyond her control challenge or frustrate her. The challenges and frustrations definitely outnumber the scattered moments of contentment. Yet, it is the latter that make her efforts seem worthwhile. Despite belonging to what can be described as a privileged, high-caste background, she has always been a firm believer in the universal right to human dignity. After a degree in electronics engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, she chose to enter the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), when most of her colleagues were jetting off to foreign shores in pursuit of higher education or other opportunities.

  While securing a man’s freedom is a worthy task in itself, it does not completely resolve the problem at hand. The government can exert its authority in releasing those who are in bondage and even punish those who have been oppressing them, but the larger issue of lack of access to resources and the resultant indebtedness remains. With no other resource but their own physical labour from which to eke out a living, the poor are forced to turn to their employers at the time of financial need. The employers, be they landlords, brick kiln or factory owners, make good use of the opportunity to extract cheap labour and keep them bound to them for years at length.

  While the government and other agencies have tried to tackle this very need for livelihood opportunities, a steady income source and access to finance in emergencies through a variety of schemes, each of them has had its own share of attendant problems.

  Veena’s mind goes back to the call that she had received from the Principal Secretary (Rural Development, GoAP), MR, just a couple of days ago.

  “Your favourite bête noire is causing havoc yet again!”

  While Veena had an inkling of what he was referring to, she had wanted to make sure just in case.

  “Sir, there are so many of them that I have lost count. Which one are you
referring to?”

  “You are among the few sincere and straightforward officers we have, Veena. So yes, the bête noires are many. But this one is surely special. This one had you winning a Presidential medal when your opponents were hoping you would be suspended in disgrace!”

  Veena could not resist a dry smile, though she knew MR would have no way of seeing her expression.

  MR had been referring to the Krishna Crisis5, of course. It was one of her earliest battles, coming within a year of her first posting as District Magistrate of Krishna District. Although her family originally hailed from Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh, they had moved to Andhra Pradesh more than three generations ago. She had been more than happy when she had been allotted to serve in Andhra Pradesh after being inducted into the IAS cadre.

  Veena’s grandfather had always teased her saying that she had a penchant for drama. Or, maybe, drama had a penchant for her. She had made her entry into the world on a stormy night, complete with lightning flashes and thunder bolts. Ever since then, things were always happening around her or she was where things were happening. Her first assignment as DM was quite a dramatic one too. Located between the Krishna and the Godavari delta, the Kolleru Lake is the second largest fresh water lake in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Almost 15,000 acres of the lake had been encroached upon by the land mafia. Veena had headed the Kolleru operation, which took on the might of the local heavyweight politicians who were part of the land mafia.

  Veena further initiated “Palle Nidra”, an innovative programme that involved making a night halt at villages along with officials and public representatives. It was during one such halt that Veena had come to know certain unsavoury truths regarding the MFIs operating in the area. Truths that led to the ballooning of what has been described as the Krishna crisis. It was a curious case of protectors turning predators. There were three major complaints against the MFIs operating there: one, that they were charging exorbitantly high rates of interest, ranging from 40 to 60 per cent per annum; the second was that they were abusing human rights by detaining relatives of defaulters or suggesting to them that the borrower commit suicide so they could claim the insurance money; and three, that they were creating large-scale rural indebtedness.

  Yet another key reason that triggered off the Krishna crisis was the rivalry between the public sector bank-supported SHG Bank linkage programme, funded by an international donor and the Andhra Pradesh government, and the private sector MFIs, funded by robust private sector and foreign banks. Keen to show better results, the MFIs had adopted a variety of underhand and anti-client measures to boost their profits. The spate of suicides was the reason why their unsavoury and illegal activities were exposed, leading to their suspension. Interestingly the suicides, as a consequence of indebtedness, started increasing from 2006, when the state government started encouraging the growth of MFIs as an alternative to public sector banks. MFIs had shown scant regard for the laws of the state while lending to the poor and they often flaunted their certificates of registration with the Federal Banking Regulator to prevent any action by the state government.

  During one of her visits to the villages, Veena had met the family of Victoria, who had pledged her ration card and then the mangalsutra of her newly married daughter with an MFI in order to meet emergency expenses. This was in gross violation of the FBR norms which prohibited MFIs from taking collateral for the loans provided under the microcredit category. Subsequently, the MFI recovery agents had applied severe pressure on Victoria to make repayments and, finding herself unable to meet their demands, she had committed suicide.

  An infuriated Veena had raided the offices of many MFIs in the region, including Aashray, DevEx and Sowmya, among others, and had charged them with collection of higher interest rates, almost to the tune of 40 per cent, and for harassing borrowers. In the process of the raids, they had also unearthed signed blank demand promissory notes at many of their premises.

  There was also evidence of Aashray and DevEx, two competing MFIs, indulging in sleazy and underhand tactics in order to undercut each other. Aashray had tried to disrupt the operations of DevEx by plying the husbands of their field staff with liquor. This way, they hoped, the husbands would not allow their wives to perform their roles effectively. When DevEx officers learned of this, they retaliated by supplying the male field staff of Aashray with sex workers. Veena had been left disgusted by the happenings and, more so, by the blatant disregard most of these MFIs had for the welfare of the very clients they were mandated to serve. Following this, she had ordered shut more than fifty branches of the MFIs in the district.

  Refusing to be cowed down, the MFIs had launched a counter-offensive against Veena by lodging a complaint against her with the Chief Minister. They alleged that she had behaved in a high-handed manner and had not complied with proper procedures before shutting down their branches. They had also insinuated that she was colluding with the banks to cut them out of the supply chain.

  The fight between the MFIs on the one hand and the people and administration of the Krishna district on the other, was of particular consequence because of its possible impact on the course of microfinance elsewhere in the country. For one, just four districts of Andhra (Krishna, West Godavari, Guntur and Prakasam) accounted for about 15 per cent of all micro-loans in the country. The success of the Andhra Pradesh model was what had sold microfinance as an idea to the rest of the country. Many of the MFIs were slowly branching out to other states like Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and the northern “BIMARU” states—Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

  As a consequence of the Krishna crisis, which saw caps on interest rates, loan write-offs and stringent regulations being imposed, the microfinance sector in Andhra experienced a slowdown. Banks, too, were increasingly unwilling to lend to the MFIs as a result. It was around the same time that many private equity and venture capital funds started evincing an interest in investing in microfinance. Wall Street’s entry was undoubtedly seen as a game changer.

  Veena was given a clean chit by the enquiry committee set up to investigate the allegations made against her by the MFIs, and was subsequently awarded the President’s Gold Medal for exemplary service. Wherever she was transferred after that, she always kept an ear to the ground for news on the activities of MFIs in the region. It saddened her to see the sector once again possessed by the ghost of suicides as MFIs returned to their old ways of coercion and oversupply of credit. Similar news was pouring in from other districts too, as she found out during her interaction with her peers.

  The knock on the door brings Veena to the present.

  “Yes, come in!”

  Her PA, Nilanjan, enters with a file in hand.

  “Madam, we have a detailed report of all the incidents in our district.”

  “Five of them, right?”

  “Six in all, Madam! There was a suicide reported last night. And there have been two kidnappings, where the daughters of the indebted women have been held captive as a means to coerce them into repaying their debts.”

  “Have they been rescued since?”

  “The girl from Parichemam village has been rescued, Madam. She was found locked up in an old warehouse about 5 km from the village. The warehouse is said to belong to a local politician whose relative works as a collection agent with SAMMAAN. The police are still trying to find the whereabouts of the other girl.”

  Veena is infuriated by this news.

  “Scratch the surface of most instances of such exploitation and you find some kind of political sanction! Four years have passed and the sector’s conscience continues to be in hibernation.”

  Veena gets up with a start.

  “Call the SP and inform him that I am headed to Parichemam. I want to speak to that girl myself. I am not stopping until we get to the bottom of this and gather enough evidence against SAMMAAN. There can be no better time to push for action.”

  Veena’s phone rings as she rushes out of the room.

  “Good morning, sir!
”

  “Are you on the job, Veena?”

  “You will have a report on your desk in the next half an hour, Sir. I am personally headed to investigate a case of coercion by SAMMAAN. I will get you enough evidence to nail them, Sir. I only hope there is no interference from the higher-ups this time.”

  “It might be a little tough to step back this time, Veena. This is no Krishna crisis but rather a crisis for the whole state, with consequences for the nation and beyond.”

  CHAPTER 9

  HYDERABAD, 1 OCTOBER 2010

  Bob knows he is severely jetlagged but wonders if he is beginning to hallucinate as well. Is his mind conjuring up images of the things he desperately seeks? He had spent all his waking hours on the flight from New York to Mumbai reading up the James Jordin report and mulling over the insightful revelations made by Tom Moody during their brief chat. Then there was the interview with a senior executive director at the Federal Banking Regulator, in charge of microfinance operations, before the flight to Hyderabad. Bob is fairly certain that his brain is suffering from a microfinance overload. Why else would Chandresh Rajan be strolling into the coffee shop of his hotel? It is only when Chandresh walks up to his table and shakes his hand rather vigorously that Bob is convinced that he is for real.

  “Bob, I am truly glad to finally meet you in person.”

  “Chan, you’ve risen from the dead at last! I have lost count of the number of times I’ve tried calling you.”

  “You’ll have to forgive me for that, Bob. The thing is, I have had no network for almost two weeks now. I got back into town just last night and saw your detailed email and travel itinerary. I thought I’d come by and not spoil the surprise with a phone call.”

  “Surprise? More like shock! I was wondering if my jetlagged, overwrought mind had conjured you up!”