LETTER FROM INDIA
Mumbai's elite see price of indifference
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VERLA, India: Anand Sivakumaran saw Mumbai's security loopholes. He noticed hotels that checked passports upon check-in, but not bags. He noticed police officers at thronging train stations armed with bamboo sticks, but not guns. He saw soft spots for terrorists. And he did what many upright, affluent citizens of Mumbai do in such instances.
Nothing.
Well, not nothing. He may not have alerted anyone to it, but he used it as material. As a screenwriter in Bollywood, with movies like "Kalyug" and "Nazar" to his name, Sivakumaran, 37, tucked the loopholes into the plot line of his latest film to make it seem more believable.
Indians at all levels are asking questions after the terror attacks in Mumbai last week. But Sivakumaran, like many in the country's educated elite, is also turning the interrogation lamp on himself, asking: Was this our fault?
India's young, educated professionals can be accused of a kind of secessionism. While the poor vote in droves, they often sit elections out. They move into gated communities, sequestering themselves from the country around them; work for foreign firms in industrial parks that do not depend on the state for electricity and water; and insulate themselves from the smoggy air and potholed roads in their sleek sedans.
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And then the gunmen arrived on their boats, and the government dithered and fumbled, and the educated classes began to see the price of apathy.
"The magnitude of this attack has, for the first time, shown to the present generation that indifference is cool only in college," said Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, a 31-year-old writer whose latest novel, "The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay," examines the mores of the young and prosperous. "On the streets of modern India, indifference is also called death."
Now it is indifference that is being besieged.
In the days since the attacks, thousands of young Indians have vented their outrage with the government on the Internet and via text message and signed up for various causes. Facebook communities seeking to galvanize action have attracted thousands of members. Marches have been organized. Petitions have been signed.
But the most intriguing plan may be the revival of an old, failed idea: that India be run by its brightest, not dullest, bulbs.
Strange thought, right?
In many countries, it is the affluent who vote and the poor who don't. India does the reverse. And so, in a country with an urban middle class in the tens of millions, few politicians reflect their values or even their styles of dress and speech. To watch Parliament on television is to witness a scene more evocative of a rural vegetable market than of a life in a modest office in Delhi or Mumbai.
Educated middle- and upper-class people have made some efforts over the years to penetrate the slow-moving, tea-sipping, sycophantic world of Indian politics. But with their unprofitable ideas of accountability and honesty, political parties like the Lok Paritran, founded by a group of engineers, have had limited luck. And so the rich enjoy their money and the poor enjoy their politics, and that is that.
The Mumbai attacks could - just could - interrupt that pattern. It seems that, when their own five-star hotels were struck, the elite quickly realized that, when you pay no attention to public life, you get what you pay for.
Sivakumaran, the screenwriter, in a Facebook post that ricocheted quickly among Indian Internet users, proposed a new kind of political party - "a party of professionals - engineers, doctors, architects, media people, ad guys, film makers, TV folk," he wrote.
The party, he added, would find the best minds and "put them up as candidates, raise money for them, market them, publicize them, get support at the grass-root level for them and try and get them elected."
Jaago Re! (Hindi for "Wake Up!") is a separate campaign, established in 2007, to register young urbanites to vote for leaders attentive to their issues. In the first days after the attacks, it reported a 30 percent spike in registrations in Mumbai.
Meanwhile, a campaign called Change India, based in Bangalore, sent out a mass text message urging city dwellers to behave like other Indian groups that vote in blocs and tend to be listened to by politicians.
These legions of disaffected people share a disgust for the government's handling of the Mumbai siege. They complain that it took a full night to bring commandos to the two hotels, since none were stationed in Mumbai. They complain that Indian officials maintained no floor plans of the biggest hotels. They complain that one official had the gall to say on television that "these things happen."
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