How well does India work as a nation?

A Sena threat to disrupt Sunday’s examinations led the Railway Recruitment Board to put them off, but many like the 22-year-old Shankar, a Bihari from Chhapra, were unaware of this and landed here to appear for the tests.

But as Shankar got off the Lokmanya Tilak-Varanasi Express at Kalyan at 1.30 pm yesterday, he was set upon by a Sena mob lying in wait for him and other Biharis. His small-town-youth excitement on landing in a big city and his bright blue-and-red bag easily marked him out as an `outsider’ hoping to find a way out of the poverty of Chhapra.

“[He looks like a Bihari as well]” a woman activist shouted as Sena goons rushed towards Shankar, quickly surrounding him. The youth sensed trouble and abandoning any attempts at bravado, began weeping and tried to fall at the goons’ knees.

But there was no space for Shankar to bend as the activists preferred him on his feet for it made it easier to slap and kick him. Accusing him of “stealing jobs from Maharashtrians”, the goons set upon him.

“[Why did you come from Bihar? Are there no jobs there?]” someone taunted as another slapped him across his frightened face.

“Will you go back on your own or should we bundle you into a train to Tamil Nadu?” a woman asked. “I will go back, sir, today itself,” a hurt and humiliated Shankar, stripped of his dignity and self-respect, replied his eyes moist with pain and embarrassment.

But Shankar did not scramble into just any train to flee Maharashtra, as countless others have been forced to. Instead, he took shelter in a Rs 100-a-day motel along a dirty yard near the station.

“How can I go back. I thought I will take the exams and see if I get the railways’ work,” Shankar said. “My father is a tailor running a small shop and my mother cannot work because she has cataract in both eyes. I have two sisters. They have to be married off.”

The Constitution of India guarantees equality to all Indians. It guarantees the freedom to move throughout India. What it does not guarantee is rule of law, and more importantly, respect for the law. And stories like Shankar’s happen every day across this vast country, gnawing a little more at what our latter days kings democratically elected pols call the ‘national fabric.’

How much would it take to spiral out of control? Some of the poorest states in the country — Bihar, Orissa — with high illiteracy and unemployment rates, are ominous, standing powder-kegs. One of the reasons they have not exploded yet was that there was a safety valve, however slim, of escaping the mire into the relative affluence of places like Gujarat and Maharashtra. But what if those doors were shut in their faces?

Places like Bihar, Jharkhand and Orissa also play host to a wealth of natural reserves — coal, uranium, steel, mica. How long before the cry goes out in the coal and uranium mines — “no outsiders here!”?

Is it India’s destiny to devolve into a set of regional fiefdoms run by chauvinistic hooligans? History would say yes.