O J's Corner : Reflections

Private money-lenders

Private money-lenders have become a menace to the society as more and more cases of harassment are being unravelled in many parts of the country.

Reasonable transactions would have been all right, but in almost all cases they fleece the loanee. Worse, they harass the borrower to their wits’ end.

In Kerala, the situation has climaxed to an extent that an organisation has sprung up to offer help, physical and moral, to the borrowers who are suffering from the onslaughts of the gangs employed by the lenders. No wonder in local parlance the private money-lender is known as “blade”.

The other day, the “blade-virudha samithi” ( Forum against unscrupulous money-lenders) organised a rally to the Gandhi Square at Kottayam, a small town in Kerala. Their main demand was to amend the Kerala Money-lenders Act and the Negotiable Instruments Act to provide legal cover to the money-lenders so that their functioning would be germane before  law. The mafia activities should be controlled and misuse of cheque facility by them should be banned.

The private money-lenders are now a law unto themselves. They retain gangs, or felons, known as goondas in native expressions, to recover unpaid dues. The situation is such that the capital amount would always remain unrecovered in their argument even as the borrower goes on making payments which would be treated as interest.

Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan and Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan have made it cleat that “blade mafia” would be clipped. The revised Goondas Act, which is in the pipeline, should have provisions to mercilessly deal with “blade operators”.

Don’t be under the impression that the menace is confined to Kerala. A gruesome incident reported by The Times of India, Mumbai edition, refers to farmers hacking to death a local money-lender politician and his henchman in Chambhar, off Akola, in Maharashtra. Of course, the reporter has erroneously treated the case as Maharashtra’s Naxalbari act.

Reading the full story, it is clear that no Naxalbari element was involved in the retribution by farmers of a whole village against these two fellows. They were hit with an axe and their heads smashed. The bodies lay in the fields for two hours before the police arrived and pursued the matter.

The farmer-borrower had taken Rs one lakh from the lender a few years ago on an interest rate of five or seven per cent. They paid him close to Rs 1.40 lakh. The lender would not give their plot of land back to the borrower. They took another loan and promised to pay him Rs 4.5 lakh more in the presence of the police and the panchayat leaders. The lender was agreeable to it. When the borrower’s children went to the field in question, they lynched them.

Over 1,000 villagers ran to the field where the money-lender and his henchman were reigning supreme and hacked them to death.

Further, all of them made a beeline to the district collector and requested him to arrest all of them as they were collectively responsible for the act.

The incident speaks volumes for the revenge the farmers would take when they are driven to the wall.

Those who have availed of loans from private banks for purchasing vehicles and other gadgets also now-a-days face the wrath of the gangs retained by such banks and financial institutions. A visit to common liquor bars would reveal the presence of gangs almost everywhere.

There would be a time when the harrowed borrower would strike back.