Pritish Nandy
31 January 2011, 10:48 AM
31 January 2011, 10:48 AM
Do you realise that India has the world’s largest constituency of invisible people? They are in hundreds of millions. Yet no one notices them. They are a blind spot for us. Yes, they have voter IDs. Some have PAN cards. Nilekeni will soon give them UIDs. Just as the telecom companies have given them cell phones. Banks have opened accounts for them and provided ATMs in remote areas. Despite all this, they remain the lost children of this Republic.
Most of them are young, unemployed. Others are old, unemployable. They are all part of an India that has been left behind. No, they did not make that choice. The choice was made for them by a wily political class eager to have a vote bank they could manipulate. That’s why, six decades on, they remain faceless and anonymous. They don’t belong to the mainstream, the India that everyone’s clapping for. They are certainly not part of the technology revolution. Cell phones are not a substitute for electricity and drinking water. They haven’t heard of economic reforms nor benefited from them. They don’t even know that the India they live in is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. They won’t believe it if you told them. For it hasn’t made the slightest difference to their lives.
They don’t know Raja has walked off with Rs 170,000 crore of public money. They wouldn’t know to count a crore. They haven’t heard of the Commonwealth Games. Nor do they know about the Adarsh Housing scam. But they are aware that politicians are untrustworthy, Government officers won’t help them, and justice is simply not affordable. So they live their lives without any expectations. They don’t give a damn whether Kalmadi goes to jail but they can do with jobs, public toilets, hospital beds, roads to walk on, parks to take their children to, police stations where they can file a complaint without being humiliated. They are proud Indians. They want to live with dignity. They may not know who the President of India is. They can’t name three Cabinet ministers. That a Gandhi rules India is all they know. Ask them which Gandhi and they will stutter.
Most of them are poor. So poor that it will embarrass you to know the extent of their poverty. They are the stats we read in the newspapers. They are part of the 65% who go to bed hungry at night or the 68% who can’t read or write or the 74% who have no access to healthcare. We don’t know them as people, real people. So when they come knocking on our car windows asking for help, we pretend not to hear them. Our drivers shoo them away. Cops pick them up and throw them out of our cities at will. They embarrass us by just being there. We wish they would disappear.
We ignore them. We think we do enough by paying taxes so that the Government can draw up fancy schemes for them. But we also know the schemes don’t work. The money vanishes long before it can reach them. What’s worse, no one cares. That’s what makes it so easy to steal these funds. No one would notice. No one has the time in this bustling economy to listen to some poor villagers complaining that the jobs and moneys promised to them haven’t reached. The urban poor are even worse off. Nobody cares for them. No one even wants to help them because they have been labelled as unwanted migrants. Yes, migrants they are. But not in the way we think. They are mostly migrants from the same state, driven out from their villages by extreme poverty and loss of their land. They are not outsiders. They are the unwanted insiders who we want to hide from the world, as well as from ourselves.
For, like the other big nations of the world, we too have now learnt to be ashamed of our poor. They remind us of our failures. We want to talk to the world today about our ambitious space programs, our nuclear expertise, our defence capabilities, our economic power, our IT genius, the amazing steps we have taken in biotech. We want to boast that four of the top ten richest men in the world are Indians, and that’s not counting our politicians, many of whom hold their wealth in unaccounted assets.
But India can’t go ahead unless it takes into cognizance this large invisible constituency. For if we keep ignoring them forever, one day they will get onto the streets and start protesting like the Egyptians are doing today, the Tunisians, the Libyans. There’s a limit to which people will tolerate the indifference of their Governments, the corruption of their leaders. Once that threshold is crossed, things begin to fall apart. As Gandhi wisely said, it’s the poorest Indian who actually decides where our future lies. But then, if we had our way, we would make even Gandhi invisible today.
Most of them are young, unemployed. Others are old, unemployable. They are all part of an India that has been left behind. No, they did not make that choice. The choice was made for them by a wily political class eager to have a vote bank they could manipulate. That’s why, six decades on, they remain faceless and anonymous. They don’t belong to the mainstream, the India that everyone’s clapping for. They are certainly not part of the technology revolution. Cell phones are not a substitute for electricity and drinking water. They haven’t heard of economic reforms nor benefited from them. They don’t even know that the India they live in is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. They won’t believe it if you told them. For it hasn’t made the slightest difference to their lives.
They don’t know Raja has walked off with Rs 170,000 crore of public money. They wouldn’t know to count a crore. They haven’t heard of the Commonwealth Games. Nor do they know about the Adarsh Housing scam. But they are aware that politicians are untrustworthy, Government officers won’t help them, and justice is simply not affordable. So they live their lives without any expectations. They don’t give a damn whether Kalmadi goes to jail but they can do with jobs, public toilets, hospital beds, roads to walk on, parks to take their children to, police stations where they can file a complaint without being humiliated. They are proud Indians. They want to live with dignity. They may not know who the President of India is. They can’t name three Cabinet ministers. That a Gandhi rules India is all they know. Ask them which Gandhi and they will stutter.
Most of them are poor. So poor that it will embarrass you to know the extent of their poverty. They are the stats we read in the newspapers. They are part of the 65% who go to bed hungry at night or the 68% who can’t read or write or the 74% who have no access to healthcare. We don’t know them as people, real people. So when they come knocking on our car windows asking for help, we pretend not to hear them. Our drivers shoo them away. Cops pick them up and throw them out of our cities at will. They embarrass us by just being there. We wish they would disappear.
We ignore them. We think we do enough by paying taxes so that the Government can draw up fancy schemes for them. But we also know the schemes don’t work. The money vanishes long before it can reach them. What’s worse, no one cares. That’s what makes it so easy to steal these funds. No one would notice. No one has the time in this bustling economy to listen to some poor villagers complaining that the jobs and moneys promised to them haven’t reached. The urban poor are even worse off. Nobody cares for them. No one even wants to help them because they have been labelled as unwanted migrants. Yes, migrants they are. But not in the way we think. They are mostly migrants from the same state, driven out from their villages by extreme poverty and loss of their land. They are not outsiders. They are the unwanted insiders who we want to hide from the world, as well as from ourselves.
For, like the other big nations of the world, we too have now learnt to be ashamed of our poor. They remind us of our failures. We want to talk to the world today about our ambitious space programs, our nuclear expertise, our defence capabilities, our economic power, our IT genius, the amazing steps we have taken in biotech. We want to boast that four of the top ten richest men in the world are Indians, and that’s not counting our politicians, many of whom hold their wealth in unaccounted assets.
But India can’t go ahead unless it takes into cognizance this large invisible constituency. For if we keep ignoring them forever, one day they will get onto the streets and start protesting like the Egyptians are doing today, the Tunisians, the Libyans. There’s a limit to which people will tolerate the indifference of their Governments, the corruption of their leaders. Once that threshold is crossed, things begin to fall apart. As Gandhi wisely said, it’s the poorest Indian who actually decides where our future lies. But then, if we had our way, we would make even Gandhi invisible today.
