TheTwo Faces Of India
By Seema Mustafa
The Asian Age
01 January, 2004
There was a time when India looked at the poor as the yardstick for policy making. Today she looks at the middle class and the rich, the poor having disappeared from the map of progress and development. The political language is now coloured by corporate hype in era of hard sell consumerism.
The rich will dance their way into 2004, the poor will huddle together for warmth, not knowing one day from another. Tears? No, there will be no tears for life has taken away their ability to cry.
This column should have been the traditional year ender, full of cheer, hope for the future, a bright India looking ahead to prosperity, peace, and progress. But only two images come to mind.
The tiny mite standing at the traffic lights in the bitter winter of Delhi, half naked, shivering, hand outstretched for a paisa from the cars that roar by, heedless, uncaring.
Or the five young children sitting just below a glitzy shop window in Mumbai, with a tattered piece of red cloth covering their little heads, as they look at the high heels tip tapping their way up the stairs into the shop.
There should have been anger and resentment in their faces. But there isn’t. Only a certain resignation born out of a life of hunger and poverty. India, they say, is racing ahead. Can’t you see how life has changed.
We have televisions, we have cable, we have computers, we have a choice of luxurious cars, we have huge malls, don’t believe me, go to Gurgaon, man, you will feel at home as if you are in the United States.
These slums, they should be shifted outside the cities, man, they are an eyesore, they breed poverty and crime, they are the wastes, the rubbish we have produced. Villages? What villages? Talk real, have you been to the new night club, the atmosphere there is great and the beer real chilled.
The distance between the poor and the rich is growing. It is true that the rich have grown richer, and the poor are poorer with life remaining a struggle for those in living in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh.
Is there any one State that can say it is as prosperous as the shopping malls that adorn its big cities? Drought devastates the people in Rajasthan, floods wipe out the people in West Bengal, earthquakes wipe out the people in Gujarat, and the Indians step in to wipe out the Indians left untouched by nature.
The State remains invisible, and apart from announcing some compensation that is never really paid, sits back and helplessly watches natural disasters and man engineered calamities overtake the people who find themselves alone in the hour of crisis.
There was a time when India looked at the poor as the yardstick for policy making. Today she looks at the middle class and the rich, the poor having disappeared from the map of progress and development. The political language is now coloured by corporate hype in era of hard sell consumerism.
Ministers in the Central government rarely speak of the villages of India, their area of interest having shifted entirely to the consumer class and its concerns.
The poor in Delhi, for instance, have been shifted to resettlement hovels on the outskirts lying there for years now without electricity, roads or drinking water.
The jhuggis that magically disappeared from New Delhi, much to the delight of those whizzing by in their new cars, did consist of people who are now living in undeveloped tracts of land sold to them by the government.
They live without sanitation, without roads, in dismal conditions that defy belief. Those driving for a shopping spree at the Gurgaon malls should take a detour to one of these settlements for an insight into real India.
There are villages in India where there has not been electricity since Independence. There are villages in India where there are no roads, no hospitals, no medicines, no sanitation, no schools, no teachers, no books, no blackboards.
There are villages in India where there is no drinking water, except dirty wells that spread disease and infection, and hand pumps bringing up brackish water.
There are villages in India where child marriage is rampant, where Dalits cannot draw water from the same wells, where women have no rights and no health care, where girls are not educated, where there is no day, only night.
The poor in India are fast turning into a large faceless entity. They no longer matter. Except as a dependable vote bank to be exploited by the political parties during the elections. This has to change. This must change.
Otherwise the lid will burst off the pressure cooker of resentment and hit the rich in their mansions with the full force of boiling fury. Policy must turn back to focus on the poor with schemes being wedded to their concerns and their realities.
The face of India is not Mumbai or Delhi or Bangalore. The face of India is the village of India and this face has not changed in 50 years of independence, it has just grown older, thinner, resigned to a fate from which there appears to be no escape. Ask them. They will tell you their story.
The Dalit who has lived his entire life outside the village, cleaning the others filth, doing the dirty work, never participating in mainstream village life, drinking water from a well reserved for him.
The woman, married when she was a child, delivering a baby every year, beaten and traumatised, eating the scraps left after the others have been fed, skinny, anaemic, looking 65 years at the age of 40 years, her life over even before it ever began.
The small farmer, grown more impoverished with time, struggling to make ends meet as costs spiral out of his control.
Life has not changed for them. They remain untouched by the IT revolution, the gains of globalisation. Their reality has not changed. But their pictures are not seen on television any more. Their stories are not read in the newspapers. They do not matter.
For they are out of tune with the India that is racing ahead without realising she cannot win the race by leaving behind the majority of her people way behind the starting post. She will only break herself into pieces.
It is with a heavy heart that one writes this column, as there is no blame to apportion, just a deep unhappiness that yet another year of missed opportunities has gone by.
Cheer can only come from hope and there is no indication that the New Year will bring with it the realisation that reckless globalisation has to be tempered and the poor brought back on the map for India to enter the race with a fair chance of winning.
Unfortunately, those who can deliver, the political class, are too eaten up with corruption to be even partially effective. They are so busy looking at the rich and the famous, making money, and joining the shakers and movers that they have forgotten the people they represent.
Except of course, when elections come around and they are compelled to return to the poor lest the poor vote them out. They go into the field with an arsenal of weapons. They accuse their rivals of corruption, in the belief that their corruption has remained hidden from the people.
They speak of castes and religion, in the hope that divisiveness will work to their benefit. They peddle Hindutva, in the belief that hatred will consolidate their vote bank. They sell lies and falsehoods in the hope that these will pass as truth.
They talk of electricity and water, knowing as well as those who vote for them that the promises are not to keep, only to make. There are no pangs of the conscience.
The politician is now a criminal, for whom politics is a lucrative industry to be used for personal gains. What about the people? What people? Oh, those chaps who voted, of course we remember them, we will see them in the next elections.
A chief minister quits following a furore over a corruption scandal in which he is implicated. His party re-instates him, insisting he is innocent even though the people know otherwise.
A minister quits when the media exposes his involvement in a major scam. His party embraces him, describing him as a star. A chief minister presides over a pogrom in his State. He does not even bother to quit for he has only done what he believes in. He emerges from the violence as a major leader. Where then is the hope?
Where is the cheer? Certainly not in the villages of India where the poor will go to sleep on December 31 2003 in darkness and wake to the New Year without clothes to keep themselves warm or a hot, wholesome meal.
The rich will dance their way into 2004, the poor will huddle together for warmth, not knowing one day from another. Tears? No, there will be no tears for life has taken away their ability to cry.