Shame on you Sonia Aunty

They dressed up our two most famous Slumdog children in their Oscar clothes to go to Delhi last week to see the Queen. Little Azharuddin Mohammed wore his American tuxedo and Rubina Ali a black gown for their meeting with the Rajmata of India. While they waited in the sun outside 10 Janpath they entertained the media circus that trailed them by singing ‘Jai Ho’ and telling them what they would talk to ‘Sonia Aunty’ and ‘Rahul Uncle’ about. It was a sickening celebration of something that must never be celebrated—India’s grinding, hopeless, shameful poverty.

Its ugliest face has been on display in The New York Times this past week in the form of a slide show of starving Indian babies who look as if they have been through famine, war and pestilence. In fact they are just products of normal peacetime ‘shining’ India. The story that accompanies the pictures reminds us that two-thirds of India’s children are malnourished by the age of two, that 8 million are visibly starving and 60 million more manifest malnourishment in their inability to grow normally. My only objection to Slumdog Millionaire is that it depicts poverty as something that can be joyously overcome. It cannot and living with it is about the most horrible thing in the world. The children who acted in the film have returned to their hovels in Mumbai and admit that they can no longer deal with the horror of being real life slumdogs.

India’s real life billionaires love to boast in the forums of the world about India being a ‘young country’. Half of India’s population is younger than 25, they like to say, so there is no question that the 21st century will be India’s century because in an ageing world we can provide the human capital to keep the wheels turning. Really? With half of India’s children suffering from various degrees of malnourishment is this possible? Malnourishment does not just stunt the body, it stunts the brain. How many mentally stunted children do we know who grow up to become employable adults?

What makes India’s poverty such a disgraceful, dark thing is that it would not exist if the poor had not been the Congress Party’s most reliable vote bank. Indira Gandhi used this vote bank to its fullest in the ‘Gharibi Hatao’ election with that most famous of her campaign slogans. ‘Woh kehtey hain Indira hatao, main kehti hoon gharibi hatao’. The poor remained poor after she won and the vote bank remained intact until copycat Congress leaders like Mulayam Singh and Laloo Yadav lured the Muslims away and Mayawati took away the Dalits. More than 90 percent of the poor in India are either low of caste or Muslim.

They would not be poor if the crores and crores of rupees spent on poverty alleviation programmes had not been wasted on unwieldy, leaky efforts like Sonia Aunty’s favourite NREGA scheme. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme serves mostly to keep poor people in poverty for the rest of their lives but because it has the blessings of Sonia Gandhi it has now been spread across the country. If the money spent on it had been invested instead in an Akshaya Patra type midday meal scheme there would be no starving children in India today and our slumdogs would go willingly to school to eat that one hot meal a day. In Karnataka where Akshay Patra began studies show that school attendance went up to nearly a hundred percent and school performance improved dramatically. So if it is so easy why does nobody do it? Well, in the opinion of your humble columnist it is because when the Bharatiya Janata Party had its brief moment of ruling India it chose not to redefine governance but only to enjoy the thrills of power. If the Government of Atal Behari Vajpayee had changed only the functioning of the ministries that deal with the social sector India may really have ended up ‘shining’.

India can never shine or become an economic superpower as long as the majority of Indian children remain malnourished, illiterate and living in urban slums or villages that are worse than slums. Hollywood can be forgiven for celebrating our slumdog children and fawning over them as they enjoyed their fifteen minutes of fame on the red carpet. It is much harder to forgive our own political leaders for seeking to exploit the desperate, sickening poverty that these children have returned to. Shame on you Sonia Aunty. For this lack of basic compassion if for no other reason you deserve to lose the elections. Our problem is that on our bleak political landscape it is hard to detect one person or political party that deserves to win.

- Tavleen Singh
Source: This article appeared in the Indian Express and can be found here