Russell Street: The middle class came in for a lot of flak at a panel discussion on whether honesty was solely its prerogative.
Speakers at the CESC Ltd presents The Bengal Club 7th Annual Panel Discussion in association with The Telegraph on Friday pointed out that the middle class was vocal against corruption only when others got caught. The discussion on "Honesty is the prerogative of the middle class" was held on the Bengal Club lawn.
"My submission is that to single out one class for all the honesty and consign the others into a disreputable dustbin is perhaps not the correct way.... I have never seen this amount of deterioration of general standards and this is happening to the larger class of helpers of the rich. The rich are the poster boys for all wicked things. But they managed to get away... it's basically the employees or executives who get arrested," former Prasar Bharati CEO Jawhar Sircar said.
Former Union minister Mani Shankar Aiyar looked at a section of the panel and wondered whether switching political alliances was an act of dishonesty. "When a political party - and I am not looking at Pavan (Varma, who was sitting to his left) - switches sides, is that very honest? When individuals jump from one party to another, to speak of me when I joined Mamata Banerjee, was I being honest? Or was I more honest by quitting the one and joining the other."
Varma's Janata Dal United is famous for changing political sides.
Journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta branded the middle class as the "biggest hypocrites in a nation of hypocrites".
"...because they want to be like the rich, they are envious of the rich, they can't be like the rich, they look down upon the poor and then they are worst of the lot when it comes to honesty and individual morality," he said.
The middle class got the stick from Varma, too. "The middle class swings between culpability and outrage, between anger and hypocrisy. When you don't want to pay a bribe, corruption is bad. When a bribe gets you what you want, many among us would say ' Bhai kar do woh kam'," he said.
Trinamul MP Saugata Roy said: "The country is bedevilled by big-ticket corruption."
Moderator Kunal Sarkar, a cardio-thoracic surgeon, had no doubts about the class divide in today's corruption. "As we had been talking through the motion for the last few weeks, a subtle change appeared. In the beginning, we thought of the motion with a question mark at the end but by the end of two weeks, the question mark was replaced by a full stop because it was almost looking axiomatic."
The other speakers were Nilotpal Basu of the CPM and and journalist Swati Bhattacharjee.
The panelists were felicitated by Bengal Club president S.S. Mukherji. "The middle class does not necessarily mean only the financially middle class, it means the larger section of citizens. It seems they are the only ones who will have to be honest.... Others can afford to be anything other than honest," Mukherji said.
