IT’S NOT OFTEN THAT BY READING ASSORTED run-of-the mill reports in a newspaper on a single day, one can acquire a penetrating insight into the pathetic condition of the nation. Your editor had this surreal experience last month while perusing the Bangalore edition of the New Sunday Express (NSE, March 11).
On the first page the weekly featured a news story (‘Unable to pay bribe, man carries dead son’) reported from Baripada (Odisha). In a re-run of a similar story widely reported in 2015, Bajun Sorji, a poor tribal, had to carry the corpse of his young son, who died in a state government hospital, to the local bus stand, because he couldn’t pay the Rs.400 bribe demanded by the hospital’s hearse driver to take the corpse back to Sorji’s native village.
On page 9, NSE featured a Unicef report that 36 percent of children under age 5 in Karnataka (pop. 62 million) are stunted, and 26 percent are too thin for their height because of prolonged drought conditions in several districts of the state. Two pages later, the newspaper’s Bhopal correspondent reported that in Madhya Pradesh — ruled for the past four years by the BJP chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan — there were 62 gang-rapes of women, including 33 minors in the 120 days between November 2017 and February 15, 2018. (‘Shivraj’s MP reports 62 gang-rapes in 120 days’).
On the same page, NSE narrated that 25,000 farmers had undertaken a 180-km march from Nashik to Mumbai, protesting chief minister Devendra Fadnavis’ “anti-farmer policies”. According to the aggrieved farmers, the government’s agrarian loan waiver scheme announced in June 2017 to benefit 8.9 million farmers, has benefitted only 55,000, and of the Rs.34,000 crore promised only Rs.13,000 crore has been disbursed. Although this report confirms that the long march of distressed farmers is supported by the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), it failed to mention that Ajit Pawar of the Congress-NCP government (2009-14) of the state, is charged with defalcating Rs.10,000 crore from the irrigation ministry.
In 2013 incurring considerable time and expense, your editor launched the subscriptions-based (Rs.100) Children First Party of India with a full national development agenda. Only 113 citizens enrolled as members, forcing abandonment of the project. Evidently, the country’s middle class is content with alternately electing the Tweedledum and Tweedledee political parties which have ruined every sector of India’s high-potential economy. Clearly, the electorate prefers politics as usual.