Pity the Subcontinent

[VetDoctor]

Pity the Subcontinent
Zafar Hilaly

In no country are there as many malnourished poor as there are in India. “India has the largest number of seriously undernourished people in the world not just in absolute numbers, but in terms of standard criteria, even relative to its population size”. And, in no country in the world where the economic growth rate has been as high as India’s over the past decade ( five to nine percent) has the impact on the vast majority, and their abysmal quality of life, been less.
According to the World Bank, only 15 countries outside sub-Saharan Africa had a gross national income per capita lower than India’s in 2011. Half of India continues to defecate in the open air because half of all households in the country don’t have access to toilet facilities. This is not to suggest that the social sector statistics for Pakistan are really any better. In fact, in some cases, like providing rudimentary education to the populace, they are a lot worse.
So it is really quite obscene that these two countries are perennially threatening to go to war with each other – adding to the misery of their people. But that is what’s happening, as the fracas over the killing of the five Indian soldiers on the Line of Control, allegedly by the Pakistan Army, and four Azad Kashmiris, avowedly by India, threatens to escalate into more than just a slanging match.
By the looks of it, Modi – India’s version of Hafiz Saeed – has entered the stage and is blaming Pakistan for the events on the LoC, railing fire and brimstone on Pakistan. Modi stands a much better chance of being elected prime minister in India than Hafiz Saeed will ever have here. India may well have an extremist at the helm of affairs before we do in Pakistan, which is a bet no one would have taken regardless of the odds on offer.
Who is really to blame for the disastrous state of affairs between the two countries? That’s been pretty obvious for some time and the short answer is: the privileged (ruling) classes, the higher caste, the richer lot – of both countries – whether in uniform or in civvies. They have a stranglehold on all, repeat all, key institutions in their respective countries and call the shots on policy. Consequently, they ensure that the fruits of development are exclusively theirs to enjoy.
The Indian social commentator Shobha De had this to say of the Indian privileged classes: “The India we are lauding (for its growth rate) forms but a microcosm of this vast land. It is the India of the elite, the privileged, and the affluent. The only India we want the rest of the world to see and acknowledge, because we are so damned ashamed of the other. Ashamed and ignorant”. She may as well have spoken of the privileged elite in Pakistan.
De did not spell out why or how she had reached that conclusion but she does not have to. Professors Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze have done that very effectively, along with evidence, in their opus ‘Uncertain Glory – India and its contradictions’.
Apart from the woeful inability of successive Indian governments to lift the poor of the country out of the prehistoric squalor in which they live, the authors allude to other reasons why India remains so troubled and why Indians should be ‘ashamed’ of what is happening in the country. But that’s another story and another topic.
For the purpose of this article what is interesting is their linking of economic development with the Indian media’s approach to human rights violations in occupied Kashmir and, to boot, the maltreatment of the minorities in India – including and especially – Indian Muslims. They do not believe these essentially political and moral issues can be divorced from India’s developmental efforts as they impact enormously on the morale and well-being of a significant proportion of the population and their participation in national life.
According to Sen and Dreze the ‘honesty’, ‘fearlessness’ and ‘freedom’ the Indian press boasts about goes out of the window when it comes to depicting and commenting on ‘the strategy of brutal suppression’ and ‘state-organised violence’ in Kashmir. Instead of being exposed and criticised – nay, reviled – the deprivation and discrimination Kashmiri Muslims face are ignored. What is worse is that legislation such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1958, which enables the authorities to shoot on sight and arrest without warrant as well as a virtual guarantee of immunity from prosecution for human rights abuses is justified ad nauseam in sonorous, self-righteous editorials of the press and by Indian TV hosts.
The reason for the maudlin nonsense we read so often in the Indian press about the goings on in occupied Kashmir stems from the belief that peddling untruths and covering up the murder and mayhem perpetrated by the Indian army and paramilitary forces are somehow kosher because they come within the purview of the ‘self-discipline’ that the Indian media has imposed on itself ‘not to interfere in national security matters’.
It’s a piddling excuse and so characteristic of official India – an open countenance and closed thoughts. Pakistan has been pointing that out for a long time but the international community traditionally views Indians and Pakistanis criticising each other as a case of the pot calling the kettle black and, more recently, as a pathetic failing state (Pakistan) working off its bile against a traditional enemy on its way to proving a spectacular economic success.
But, because now that the same thing is being said by two distinguished Indian professors, one of whom is a Nobel laureate, hopefully it won’t be dismissed out of hand. Alas, there are only a handful of Indians among the 100 million or so (out of the 1.2 billion) – the real beneficiaries of the rise of ‘shining’ India – who may actually want to do something about it and feel moved, or are brave enough, to write and speak forthrightly on the subject.
As for our own privileged lot, we need no Nobel laureates and Harvard professors like Sen, or even any social commentators, to tell us what they are like. Many who will read this article form part of that elite and in their candid moments will or, at least, should concede that – 66 years on – their ilk and leaders, past and present, have rightly been judged to be corrupt, irresponsible and in some cases, like Ziaul Haq, vile, whose policies have seen the country defeated and humiliated, the people derided, swindled and betrayed and brought to a pass that today the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.
Pity the subcontinentals. We are a hard-working, pliable, ingenious population, worried about our daily bread, capable at times of untold sacrifices but restless and anxious for good government. We don’t want to be kept ignorant or bewildered or insecure by the arbitrary manipulation of our emotions or fed on a diet of deceit and lies. We don’t want our wealth squandered on superfluous things – on arms and insensate wars. We don’t want pitiless, overbearing, unscrupulous and avaricious leaders to head our mass political parties. We don’t want them eternally squabbling among themselves.
We want peace and the opportunity to get on with our lives. Is that asking for too much?
Email: charles123it@hotmail.com

http://e.thenews.com.pk/8-16-2013/page7.asp#;