ELECTION 99
COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
ELECTIONS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

The strange case of Shantaram Ganiga

When Shantaram Ganiga, the third son of a poor farmer in Bhatkal in Karnataka's South Kanara (aka Dakshin Kannada) district, saw the advertisement in 1996 calling for applications for a job opening in Saudi Arabia, he finally saw a faint flicker of light at the end of the deep, dark tunnel.

After passing his tenth standard exams, Shantaram had slogged it out for 10 long years as a part-time employee in the local post office for a princely salary of Rs 300 per month (approximately eight dollars). A "Gulf" job, he reckoned, would work the same miracles for his family as it had for countless others.

Three of his sisters had been married off -- and there were two more waiting at home.

Meanwhile: • Considering that every third scam in the United States involves blood-sucking private insurance companies, why is the BJP-led government so anxious to allow them here? • Would the BJP have removed Kalyan Singh as Uttar Pradesh chief minister and prepared the ground for his expulsion, in spite of his constant carping of the prime minister, if the party's showing in the general election been better? • Ashok Gehlot, who led the Congress to victory in the assembly election but lost the general election, has been given a thumping mandate in the civic election in spite of a hike in power tariffs and bus fares, and in spite of not paying a bonus to state government staff during Diwali. What does it prove? • Since the US has banned import of Mangalore Ganesh beedis till it stops its alleged use of child workers, shouldn't the Indian government ban Nike till the American government firmly and conclusively guarantees that the shoemaker no longer uses the sweat shops of southeast Asia? • How many Indian bowlers will announce their retirement at the end of the Australian series? One, two or four?

The interview took place in Bombay and, of all the boys from Shirur village who took the test, only Shantaram passed. The visa came in June 1996 and Shantaram was off. He wrote letters every month to his mother and brothers, and made the occasional telephone call to his friends back home.

From the very beginning, the grass seemed less green than it seemed from the other side.

"I am not destined to live happily. I came here because I thought I would earn more, but I'm not sure of my karma," he wrote to his brother within a month of landing. The next month he was writing his mother: "Even a single meal a day is difficult. I don't even have enough money to post letters."

The money woes only got desperate. "Even if I work for five years here, we will not be able to repay all our loans," he wrote to his father on August 3, 1997, and announced his plans to "run away" and return home at the end of the month. "How much more can one suffer?"

In the same letter, Shantaram promised to send his father some money the moment he got his salary in a few days' time. Nagappa Ganiga waited. And Lakshmi Ganiga waited. There was no money in the mail, no mail even. Two months later, an official looking letter, written in English, arrived.

The illiterate farmer did not know what it said. So he took it around the village. Even those who had a passing knowledge of English couldn't read it. Or, even if they could, didn't want to tell him. Because the letter was addressed not to Nagappa Ganiga, but to "The Heirs of Late Shantaram Ganiga".

Shantaram Ganiga was dead.

The letter from the "General Organisation for Social Insurance" contained a cheque for 1,000 riyals for the final rites of the deceased. Period. How did Shantaram die, when did he die, where did he die, and where was the body for the "final rites" were questions for which the letter had no answers.

Thus began Nagappa Ganiga's search for his dead son. It was a daunting one, because he did not know the name or address of the company which had employed his son, or what he did, or what his salary was. Neither did he know Shantaram's passport number or the name and address of the Bombay agency which had recruited him and sent him his visa.

The only thing Nagappa knew was that Shantaram had been working in a place called Abha, some 800 km from Jeddah.

Nagappa wrote to the insurance company: they said they were helpless. Nagappa contacted the then local MP: Oscar Fernandes wrote to the ministry for external affairs and the Indian embassy in Riyadh. Two weeks passed. Nagappa made some 20 phone calls to the embassy. Still nothing happened.

"Did we ask you to send your son here?" was among the "diplomatic" responses Nagappa heard. "Send us photocopies of his visa and passport. We will see what can be done," was another. How could a poor, illiterate farmer give our Indian Foreign Service officers what he didn't have himself?

Against such a backdrop of official arrogance and nonchalance, coupled with his own ignorance, Nagappa Ganiga turned to Ravindranath Shanbag.

By day, Shanbag is a doctors's teacher, a lecturer at the prestigious Kasturba Medical College in Manipal. By evening, he is one of India's most proactive consumer activists, who writes an extraordinary column called Bahujana Hitaya, Bahujana Sukhaya (Kannada for "The welfare of many; the happiness of many) for the Kannada daily Udayavani.

Dr Shanbag and his friends got down to work. They spoke to friends of Shantaram from the same village, who had also taken the Gulf job interview. They were told that the interview had been conducted by Al-Hazrath Travels in Bombay. From the recruitment agency, they found out the name and address of the company Shantaram worked for: Mustir Saeed Pardan Al Qahtani, Sarat Abeda, Main Road, Abha, KSA.

They tried reaching the company by phone. But the person who would pick up the phone at the other end could say no more than "Hello" in English. So they got hold of somebody who could speak Arabic. Even then, the only response Dr Shanbag & Co got was: "Shantaram Ganiga is dead. Take the insurance money." The vital questions continued to remain unanswered.

Meanwhile, Nagappa Ganiga sent his eldest son to Bombay. The Saudi consulate didn't let him in. "It's all in the hands of the Indian embassy in Riyadh. We don't have any connection with this issue," was the explanation. Nagappa Ganiga was back to square one. Only this time, fortunately, there was Dr Ravindranath Shanbag with him.

On Christmas day, 1997, Shanbag wrote a full page, broadsheet column in Udayavani: "Gulf Kannadigas, do you know what happened to Shantaram Ganiga?" The idea was to reach the thousands of Kannadigas in the Gulf, where Udayavani is widely read, to pitch in. Dr Shanbag explained how the efforts of Nagappa Ganiga, and his own efforts, to trace the whereabouts and remains of Shantaram Ganiga had met a dead end.

Within a week, over 100 letters and fax messages poured into Dr Shanbag's office. A host of them were from Gulf Indians hailing from the same district as Shantaram: Abdul Azeez, Mohammed Iqbal, Parvez Ali, Nassir Hussin, Gopalakrishna, Cyril D' Souza, Abdul Ghafoor, Abdul Majid, Hussain, Rahman.

The message from all of them was the same: "Send us the physical details of Shantaram. We will hunt for his body." But, as Dr Shanbag points out, the more startling aspect was that while Shantaram Ganiga was a Hindu, 90 per cent of those who offered to help were Muslims.

"When all other routes lay closed, the path of humanity opened up," is how he puts it.

Since it wasn't feasible to get everybody into the act, Shanbag & Co wrote down the names and contact numbers of all those who had offered help and sent it to the first four who responded to the SOS with this postscript: "These people have also offered to help. Can they also be roped in to do something?"

All of them grouped together and within 48 hours, went to the Indian embassies in Riyadh and Jeddah to protest against their inaction and non-interest in the Shantaram Ganiga issue. Almost immediately, the ambassador was on the phone to Dr Ravindranath Shanbag. But....

Around the same time, a youth called Shashi, working in a place called Qamis Mushayat, 1,200 km from Riyadh, telephoned Udayavani and said, that for all its brave words, the Indian embassy would be able to do little in the matter, and that he and his friends were proceeding to do something on their own.

That same day, a "Committee to trace Shantaram Ganiga" was formed by Shashi and 12 others. In less than two days, the youngsters found Shantaram's body lying without care or attention in a government morgue in Abha, the village where Nagappa Ganiga's son had been working.

With the hardest part of their assignment -- finding the body -- now behind them, the members of the committee got down to complete the rest. And in it, lies a lesson for all our pseudo-secularists: that communal, linguistic, or international harmony is not achieved to the clink of champagne glasses in drawing rooms, or through hot words in seminars, but on the ground like this. And it happens without exhortation but voluntarily.

As soon as Shantaram's body was found in the Abha morgue, it was shifted to Qamis Mushayat by Y S Jayakodi, a Sri Lankan who worked with Shashi. Simultaneously, two Pakistanis -- Gahroor Rehman and Nasir Khan -- swung into action and booked an airline to transport the body back home.

Shifting the body back to Mangalore still entailed a great deal of paperwork and contact with the Saudi bureaucracy. And stepping into help with their knowledge of the Arabic language were a Lebanese, Michael Yakub, and a Saudi, Nader Mohammed.

At this point that five others -- four Muslims and a Christian -- from south Kanara district joined the committee to help transport Shantaram's body home: Mohammed Iqbal, Cyril D'Souza, Yaqoob Ismail Bawa, Ahmed Sharif, Moiddin Hajmath.

But there was one other problem that Nagappa Ganiga and his wife and their seven children had to surmount before they could see the body of Shantaram.

A not-so-small problem of one-and-a-half lakh Indian rupees that was required for the body to be airlifted to Mangalore airport, which was closest to Shantaram's home-village, Shirur. Nagappa Ganiga was still repaying the loan he had taken to send Shantaram to Saudi Arabia, and rustling up such a huge amount at such short notice was out of the question.

Dr Shanbag conveyed the problem to the youth who had done the impossible. But the response startled him even more. "Don't worry about the money. We will organise it. You just send us the power of attorney to take charge of the body from the hospital," was the fax message he received. The power of attorney was written in Arabic by Maulvi Abdul Hassan of the Arabic Institute in Mangalore and sent.

And so, ten months after he died, Shantaram Ganiga returned home, thanks to an extraordinary breakdown of communal, regional, religious and linguistic barriers.

With the body came an envelope addressed to Dr Shanbag. It contained Rs 33,000, the money left over from the amount the committee members had collected to have the body sent home "Please hand this over to Nagappa Ganiga," said the letter. "May God bless him, and all of us."

How Shantaram had died had been mystery all this while, and in it, too, lies a wonderful story of how we -- Indians and Pakistanis and everybody else, and Hindus and Muslims and everybody else -- are actually one country, one people. And how it takes small people like Shantaram Ganiga to prove it so.

Through the agency, Shantaram had found employment in a little farm. On August 12, 1997, he had been working on an electric pump in the garden when an electric shock jolted him and threw him into a well. The first person who jumped into the well to rescue Shantaram was a colleague: Abdul Rehman, a Pakistani!!

Rehman and other co-workers fished out Shantaram. He was still alive, the heart was still beating. But the nearest hospital was more than a kilometre away, and there were no vehicles to transport Shantaram. Finally, Rehman carried Shantaram on his shoulders and reached the hospital.

Shantaram was dead; but in his death, and after, the Boy from Bhatkal had kindled the most potent force on earth: humanity. The communalists can chew on that.

To express his gratitude, Dr Shanbag faxed a message to Shashi, the convener of the "Committee to trace Shantaram Ganiga." "Where in Karnataka do you hail from?" asked Shanbag in Kannada. Shashi faxed back: "I'm not a Kannadiga; I'm a Malayalee from Kerala. My name is Shashidharan." The linguistic chauvinists can chew on that.

So, how did Shashi read Shanbag's original article and swing into action? "One of my colleagues, Mohammed Iqbal of Jodumarga (also in south Kanara district) read it to us and we were all moved beyond words. That's when we decided to do whatever we could. So what if Shantaram was a Hindu? This was God's work, and God's work had to be done."

All of us can chew on that.

With thanks to Udayavani, and M V Kamath

Krishna Prasad