History is deep waters. Easy to read but difficult to ride. Like a great river, which looks placid as it flows, its tides are obedient to the rudders of boats in good weather, but conceal under-currents strong enough to pull an aircraft carrier down. There are blind spots in navigation, and history’s kinetics is no different. Amana Dei, a tribal and wife of Dana Majhi from Melghara village in Odisha, is a blind spot. Majhi walked 10 km carrying her body from a hospital, accompanied by the couple’s 12-year-old daughter. There was no ambulance.
In Odisha again, the deceased Taramani Barik’s limbs were broken to fit inside a box by sweepers. Another blind spot is 40-year-old Dulali Devi of Dhanbad, Jharkhand. She had twins last week, a son and a daughter. She kept the boy, but sold her girl to a childless woman for `7,000.
Alongside the glitzy rush of New India, which abounds with the toys of the good life (smartphones, play stations, new cars and high rise apartments with mod cons) as the country displaces Japan and becomes the world’s third-biggest economy in terms of purchasing power parity, there is another India outside the expanding parabola of its brightly lit future where 194 million people starve. India’s GDP has climbed faster than a Diwali rocket, but only 1 per cent of it is spent on improving the health of its citizens—50 per cent of Indians still live in makeshift shelters; 85 per cent of villages don’t have secondary schools. And so on and so forth ad nauseam. Enough to make a young man driving his new Audi over a cyclist barf.
Our social and political vernacular has changed. Words like austerity, hunger and garibi have been replaced by growth, development and corporate tax. Rising India doesn’t want to confront poverty. It’s like a dirty secret, pushed into the recesses of the closet of conscience, moving further and away from the attention of the India that matters. Because poverty is not fashionable. We have even lost our hypocrisy to sympathise.
Hunger means ordering pizza, not children starving in Kalahandi. Even the West speaks less of India’s dispossessed and more about its swanky cities, its IT powerhouse status and NRIs. The world no longer sees us as a caricature of snake charmers and beggars, but of call centre executives taking jobs away from America and provoking Donald Trump to mimic our accents.
The good news is that in the past polls, the inverse of poverty—development—was the slogan. The bad news is in UP and Gujarat; it is good old caste polarisation that dominates the discourse.
The truth is, weakness is no longer acceptable in aspirational India. Today, policy is not a poverty alleviation tool in backward India, but a means to empower a rising nation. The challenges of fighting poverty are tackling unemployment and infrastructure—not just hunger. Perhaps we have grown up. We are no longer finding our feet through Soviet-style planning. Maybe we have become ruthless enough not to feel compassion for the weak. Their plight shocks us on TV, but does not move us enough to glance in the rearview mirror and stop. India is making history as the world’s fastest-growing economy. History is kind to the winners. Sadly, it’s a lesson that those who have lost out in India’s race for progress haven’t learnt. Poverty is our new blind spot.
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com