Belching Out the Devil (28 page)

Before I leave I ask, ‘Can we take a photo of you and your grandchildren in front of your home?' ‘Yes. Of course.'

He calls for his two grandsons, Subham and Nishant, who are seven and ten, and they stand under the porch in front of the wooden cot their father had lain in as we arrived. The grandsons stand quietly, impassive and polite. Mahendra, their dad suddenly remembers he is wearing only a vest. He rushes inside and comes out doing up the buttons on his shirt. The children's hair is sorted with swift parental hands and someone must have said, ‘Tidy yourselves up,' as the two boys tug their shirt bottoms and brush down their sleeves. Then with a herding shuffle and one arm gently around each child, Kuriji allows his chest to swell a little. They stand straight and confident, looking at the camera with a happy pride and I ask, ‘Kuriji, do you hope that one day your grandsons will inherit this land?'

‘Yes. They will. Automatically.' He answers instantly, without a second's hesitation, not taking his eyes away from the camera. He seems so sure. So painfully sure.

 

 

T
he Company's ability to take credit for positive news is monumental. In fact it is inversely proportionate to their ability to distance themselves from the negative. Not surprisingly they talk up the jobs they create and the benefit they bring to a community. TCCC say they employ 6,000 people directly and ‘indirectly, our business in India creates
employment for more than 150,000 people.' Which sounds intriguing, who are these 150,000 people who benefit from the Company largesse? When pressed Coke said their ‘positive economic impact is multiplied by the employment generated through our chain of distributors and retailers, through our vendors…[and] point of purchase.'
²
So the Company are taking credit for shopkeepers and street vendors who stock Coke…Now I have dealt with quite a few Coca-Cola PR and press people over the years and under these rules I would just like to make it clear that I am indirectly responsible for the creation of those people's jobs.

 

To put Coke's economic benefit to India into perspective, consider the Company's claim to have invested over $1 billion in just over a decade. The money that comes into India from foreign transnationals comes under the category of Foreign Direct Investment. But another source of money coming into India is remittance flows: very simply, this is workers leaving the country, working abroad and sending money home. The economist and analyst Kavaljit Singh estimates that, ‘In India, remittance flows are nearly four times larger than FDI flows.'
³
This means that hard-working ordinary folk looking for a better life for their family and sending the money home put significantly more money into the Indian economy that foreign-based transnationals like Coca-Cola. And by significantly I mean four times as much money. Every year.

A potent image of the benefit the company has brought to Kaladera was shown to me early on in my visit and it happened before I went to Kuriji's farm and met the farmers' struggle committee. The day started with an encounter that was as sudden as it was unexpected and it began in a
fertiliser supply shop in the village. This is the place I was to meet up with Kuriji; it is off the main drag, past a row of barbers in wooden huts lathering customers' chins and on a corner of a network of tight alleyways stuffed with traders. The shop is very small, with two doors, one opening at the front, the other to the side street. Instead of walking around the corner of the shop, you could walk in one door and out of the other and cut an entire second off your journey time. But somehow the place is packed with sacks, barrels, boxes, bottles, a couple of toilet seats to one side and a smell of ammonia that indicates the organic movement has yet to gather strength here. Pride of place in the shop pinned to the wall is the Indian flag covered with the slogan ‘Pepsi Coca-Cola out of India!' Hanging a foot away by some seed packets, is its polar opposite: a Coca-Cola calendar with a picture of a chipmunk drinking Coke through a straw.

 

Helping me out with the translating is Amit Srivastava from the Indian Resource Centre, an NGO that has worked a lot with grassroots groups on the issue of Coca-Cola. Amit is an Indian non resident and a US citizen, so working on Coca-Cola's practices in India means he can attack the rapacious standard bearer of American capitalism and visit his mum in Delhi at the same time. He is about my age and has a West-Coast style ponytail, which is two years past its wear-by date.

‘Good to see you. Hello,' Kuriji greets Amit and myself in English. ‘Here please. Sit,' he says ushering me to a fold-out chair in the one remaining bit of space.

‘Water?'

 

A copper metal pot with a spout is passed round, Amit holds it away from his lips and the pours water straight into his open mouth.

‘Chai? For you?'

‘Yes, yes please.'

 

I sit back and Kuriji explains today's itinerary. ‘I will take you to my farm. And you will meet the farmers who are organising the agitation to talk with them. This afternoon I have arranged it.'

 

And with the business part of the morning over we get down to the hard work of sipping tea. I must have been there all of three minutes when an old man, with cracked NHS glasses and goggly eyes appears in front of me. Wearing a traditional big red turban dotted with tiny yellow and green flowers, his magnified black eyeballs hold me in his gaze, as he unleashes a torrent of Hindi gushing from him nonstop, as if gasping for breath might prove lethal. The village grapevine must be on broadband, because he had heard I was in the shop. It is me he has come to see. Well, not me exactly, he had heard a foreign journalist was here and how was he to know any better?

 

When he finally comes up for air Kuriji explains, ‘He wants to show you something.'

‘Show me something?'

‘A well,' says Amit.

‘Oh.'

‘He wants to show you a well.'

‘A Coca-Cola well!' adds Kuriji.

 

The old man tilts his head and looks at me. Through the lenses his pupils look so large that if he ever took MDMA his eyes would end up bigger than his face. He cocks his head one way and then the other awaiting a response.

 

Taking a deep breath I say, ‘Right then,' before reluctantly and unknowingly stepping off into an unscheduled revelation.

 

The old man leads us through the market, down the shaded alleyways and out of the centre of the village, out past the stalls and homes, out to where the shacks and
shanties stack up in rickety regularity. This is a
basti
, a slum, home of the landless labourer, the Dalits, the lower caste. Out here the roads are wider, the tarmac thinner and the dust thicker.

 

The old man arrives at the edge of the
basti
, excitedly turns to us, refocuses, declares ‘Here. Look!' and presents a large pothole with an outstretched arm. I've never seen a pothole get such a build-up and introduction. I should give it a round of applause but I'm a tough audience when it comes to potholes. I live in Lambeth, south London, we're connoisseurs. We classify potholes as something that an Invacar can't climb out of, anything less is a divot.

 

Amit, Kuriji and I stare at this metre-wide hole with a bit of tubing poking out above the soil.

‘This what he wants to show you,' says Amit.

‘A hole?'

 

The old man with the bushbaby eyes smiles in triumph, his one skinny arm outstretched waving at it like a tourist guide.

‘A hole?'

 

He grunts and points again. I remain singularly unimpressed. But the crowd forming a circle around us obviously views this with slightly more significance.

 

People seem to gather easily in India. Even in the smallest village an argument over parking can over draw many more spectators than the average English County Cricket match. The throng here has assembled quickly, it's three deep already with kids pushing past grown-ups to get to the front and getting slapped on the head for their trouble. Already there is shoving at the back and shouted comments - this is a proper crowd, a mere scapegoat away from a rabble. Someone
screams the words, ‘Coca-Cola!' which is the trigger word for the old man to begin.

‘This is the well Coca-Cola built for us,' he says with a flourish. ‘Coca-Cola came. Coca-Cola drilled this well.'

‘Useless,' shouts a man from the crowd.

‘Not deep enough,' says a man in a grey T-shirt in the front row. ‘They don't drill deep enough.'

 

The old man shakes his finger in the air and shouts to regain his position as chief storyteller, ‘Soft soil! They only drill in soft soil not to rock.'

‘Too shallow,' says grey shirt.

‘It fell in,' the old man says.

 

The well had worked fine for a few months but once the moisture in the surrounding soil was gone it dried up and Coke's well collapsed in on itself and died. However the cave-in had only occurred at the bottom of the shaft, thus allowing one of the less sure-footed village goats to tumble down it and die too.

 

The old man starts, ‘When the goat died, the community thought this is dangerous and a child will fall in and die too...'

‘So we filled in the rest of the well,' says grey shirt nipping in to finish the story.

 

The old man glowers at him then turns to the hole. And for a moment the old man, grey shirt, the crowd, Amit, Kuriji, and I stand over the small crater of detritus that once was a well in respectful silence. HadIalily about my person I would have cast it at that moment.

‘The public of this colony are all distressed because of the shortage of water,' says the old man.

 

Wonky well aside, the bigger issue is the scarcity of water. It is
normally women who bear the brunt of this, as they are the ones who have to fetch it. There's a group of women in the crowd so I try striking up a conversation by saying ‘Hi' and holding out my hand. At the front of the group a small lean woman sticks a hip out, one arm folded and the other pulling her yellow and green headscarf across her face. She glares at me and there is no need for a translator to know that she's saying, ‘Who does he think he is?'

 

Amit shoots me a prompting stare, brings his hands together and mouths ‘namaste' at me.

‘Namaste,' I say bowing slightly awkwardly.

 

With a tiny movement she pulls her chin up in contempt. Someone declares, ‘He's a reporter.'

 

She retorts to the crowd while holding me in a hostile gaze. ‘It's not going to bring any difference to our situation. The water problem will remain.'

 

I do what I do best in these situations, which is smile and bumble, and she agrees to speak though will not give her name. I nickname her The Stare.

 

The lack of water here has many consequences. Drawing it from the hand pump can take a long time and there may not be enough for the 200-250 families here. If a woman wants to make sure her family has enough water she has to work harder.

‘What time do you get up for water?'

‘We get up at four in the morning.' She replies, in a slightly less hostile manner.