Indian’s mission is to help his country’s poor

Press, 6 August 1983, Page 14

Indian’s mission is to help his country’s poor

By

GLENN HASZARD

Vikas Bhai is a man with a mission.

He could have been a rich man but he has put aside material ambitions to work for the poor of India in the northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

Westerners may think that the only people helping the poor in India are Christians, but that is far from the truth. Vikas Bhai is neither a Christian nor a Hindu. In a country which is perhaps the most devoutly religious in the world, Vikas Bhai is an atheist. Mr Bhai is in New Zealand as a guest of the aid and development organisation, Corso, which provides some support to him in his work among the poor from his base at Varanasi, India’s holy city, formerly called Benares. He works as a detached worker, co-ordinating small groups of volunteers who work among the down-trod-den, doing everything from teaching them how to use the law to the best advan-

tage, advising them on irrigation, and how to form a trade union.

Mr Bhai, aged 43, has been working with the poor in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar since he left university in the state of Maharashtra in 1965, with a B.Sc. and engineering qualifications. His family is extremely unorthodox by Indian standards. His father was a professor of mathematics and his mother graduated in law

and practised as an advocate.

They are a high caste Brahman family but have no pretensions about either caste superiority or religious duty. Mr Bhai never had the sacred thread ceremony as a teen-ager, so that in the eyes of orthodox Hindus he is not a “twice-born” Hindu. Because of this and his association with the Untouchables through his work, he would be despised by most devout traditional Hindus.

He is not. daunted by the immense task he faces.

He says he sometimes feels he is not making any progress but is not pessimistic.

“I have no success stories to tell but I still have a tremendous faith in the capacity of the ordinary people to change, and the more I work with these simple people the more thrilled I am to see how independent they are in spite of all the bondage and the exploitation and the repression,” he said. He says he is fortunate because his parents did not

put any barriers in the way when he set out in the 19605, initially to provide relief for people stricken by the worst drought for a decade or more.

“I chose what I wanted to do in life and I am doing it.” He says that while India has advanced in many ways to become a great industrial nation, the essential problem of disparity between the rich and the poor remains.

For the disparities to be removed there had to be fundamential changes in the planning framework of the capitalist system. “I don’t think we can blindly copy Russia or China. We have to work out our own model. It would need to be egalitarian, people-based and socialist,” he said. While in Christchurch on Thursday Mr Bhai met youth and community workers, and Thursday evening addressed a public meeting. Yesterday he was to meet some of Christchurch’s unemployed at the Unemployment Collective in Lichfield Street.