These days I find myself thinking often about Jean Valjean. Who was Jean Valjean? Readers, if unfamiliar with Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, would certainly remember a play titled Bishop’s Candlesticks. The principal characters there are Monseigneur Bienvenu, a saintly bishop, and Jean Valjean, an ex-convict.

Jean was imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread during a time of extreme poverty. He did so, not only compelled by the fire in his belly but out of compassion for his widowed sister’s seven starving children. He was convicted with five years of rigorous imprisonment. Niggled by a sense of injustice, and fully convinced that the system was as criminal as he was, he tried to jump the prison on more than one occasion. As a result, his original term of five years got extended to nineteen years in all.

Free at last and out of prison, Jean Valjean meets with rejection and humiliation everywhere in the society. But a life-transforming experience comes his way when he becomes, quite accidentally,a guest of bishop Bienvenu, whose simple lifestyle and spontaneous kindness make Jean mistake him for a ‘good priest’; as, in his opinion, a bishop would not be hospital to the poor.

Jean, thanks to degradation that he suffered due to the harsh and subhuman conditions of imprisonment, succumbs to the evil streak in him and steals the silver cutlery of the bishop. He is caught by the gendarmerie (the police) and brought back to the bishop for investigation. The bishop bails him out by pretending to have gifted the stolen items to Jean. He goes a step further and adds an expensive pair of silver candlesticks to the list of the ‘gifts.’ As they part company, the bishop says to Jean. Look, I am purchasing you from your own evil nature and giving you to the good God.

The seed of a new life is thus sown in this hardened criminal. The criminal does not become a saint immediately. But he enters a new phase which Hugo describes as follows-

“Jean Valjean, cudgel in hand, his blouse on his hips, his knapsack filled with stolen objects on his back, with his resolute and gloomy visage, with his thoughts filled with abominable projects…”
A century ago Jean Valjean was condemned to be a galley-slave and suffered degrading imprisonment for nineteen years. He continued to be punished with social opprobrium.

Two significant changes have come about since then…

First, the stolen silverware has now become the passport for status and respect, provided the scale of theft is Himalayan. The Valjeans of our times do not come alone, looking dilapidated and lost, at night. Nor will they carry their booty in knapsacks, but in caravans of trucks.

No one would call them thieves. They are known as generators of “non-performing assets”! I wish all citizens had equal opportunities to serve the country by generating such “assets.” (How something that never ‘performs’ can be an ‘asset,’ we are never told). We would be the richest country in the world on the strength these ‘assets’ alone, provided economic activities of this nature are democratized.

The non-performing assets currently stand at 7.5 lakh crores of rupees! The beneficiaries of this bank booty are the richest in the country. You and I wonder why it is that Modi, in his missionary zeal to save the country from the corrupt, do not even remember them! The stolen silverware in the knapsacks of our respectable mega-thieves continues to swell. And their national importance likewise; in tune with the magnitude of their mystified thefts, carried out smoothly and smartly under the aegis of the national motto: “Satyameva jayate!”

The second issue is that our Jean Valjeans are at no risk of coming into contact with a saintly bishop, sankarachaya, maulana, or jatedar. The fivestar godmen and godwomen they hobnob with are, anyway, busy guarding their own share of the silverware. It should not be taken that the Jean Valjeans of our times are atheists. No, no! They are, differences apart, ardent in their religiosity. They seek divine protection especially for their outings of mega burglaries and share the booty at least in part, it seems, with their respective, partisan gods, “to keep them quiet” as an impish wag put it the other day.

The gods of the rich, by the way, revels in politics. They know that politics is the art of the possible. It is a sphere of sheer expediency. Corruption is the scripture of expediency. Wealth is at once the seed and the harvest of corruption. You have to be rich enough to be able to practise corruption with profit and immunity. If you are a poor farmer who borrowed Rs.3000 from a bank, which you could not repay because the crops failed, you would end up as Victor Hugo’s Valjean. But if you have cheated the country to the tone of tens and thousands of crores you will live comfortably thereafter in London, and other places of comfort and distinction, extending fabulous hospitality to your very useful well-wishers. The happiest thing is that you are at no risk of bumping into a saintly bishop and, thereby, developing unease about the mountainous silverware all around you.

Depravity was real even a century ago. But spiritual light was also real as a silver lining on the clouds of venality. Now we have clouds pretending to be the silver lining, glittering on the tainted foreheads of our ethical nights.