Dr. Sulekh Chand Jain
I take you back in time to about 1948 (I was only eleven old years then) in Delhi. After Independence, there used to be ration for all basic daily necessities such as wheat, flour, sugar, cloth, and cooking fuel (kerosene). There were government- sanctioned and approved ration shops all around the city where one could buy (once a week) the allotted quantity of these items at the government-approved retail prices by showing an official ration card. One of my acquaintances (not a relative) had such a ration shop. Every week, he would receive the allotted quantity of these items in wholesale from government warehouses, which he would then sell in retail. People frequently had to wait in line to get their allotted weekly ration. One night, I had a chance to sleep at that shop —there were some sleeping quarters in the back of the shop. The owner, a devout Jain, woke up about four o’clock in the morning, did his samayak (prayer), and then opened all the bags of the wheat flour (may be ten of them) on the concrete floor. Nearby, he had stored another ten bags of sodium silicate, or soapstone powder. The price of this sodium silicate powder (mostly used in soap making) was about less than half of the price of wheat flour. He opened the ten bags of the sodium silicate powder as well and mixed all of them with the wheat flour; thus ending up with twenty bags of adulterated flour. He distributed ten bags of the adulterated flour through the ration shop and the remaining ten in the black market at probably double or triple the price of flour set by the government. Let me remind you that sodium silicate powder is whiter and finer than wheat flour and mixes very well with the wheat flour. In fact, the customers liked this adulterated flour so much (because it was whiter and finer and, so they thought, better) but little did they know that the adulterated flour was a cause of their slow but very painful death. The thought of committing all this deception and killing five-sensed, human beings did not bother the owner or that Jain shravak a bit, in my opinion. I am sure he continued this practice as long as he could. A friend of mine here in Houston recently sent me a You- Tube video about adulteration in food in Pakistan (kindly note that Jains have nothing to do with it) with a comment, “Friends even though this show is from Pakistan, I wonder how good it could be in India? They use dead animals, rats, discarded bones, you name it they use it to make ghee, oil, gelatin and many daily use items! The Jalebi and Pakoras you may be eating are made from these! A must watch - a ten minute TV report can save your lives - Pakistan’s ‘edible oil industry.” Click here to view the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7NPgrCvg-0
Note, by including this video here, I am not at all implying that Jains engage in this kind of trade or adulteration, but one thing is clear - there are no boundaries, inhibitions, or monopoly by any community when it comes to adulteration; only the verities, size and scale may be different.Now you decide; is this behavior consistent with ahimsa?
