Focus on rural India, look at hunger index

A 130-year-old picture over my desk as I write this shows eight skeletal figures, including a small child, engraved and hand coloured in Paris in the 1880s. The eight people are victims of the Orissa famine that substantiated Dadabhoy Naoroji’s Drain Theory, that Britain was enriching itself by “sucking the lifeblood out of India”. Another nationalist, Romesh Chunder Dutt, who studied 10 19th century famines that killed 15 million Indians, concluded that “every year of drought was a year of famine.”

One would like to think all that lies in the colonial past. But, sadly, famines ravage contemporary democracies too, including the world’s largest. Of course, they are never acknowledged. A formal declaration makes various forms of relief expenditure mandatory. Moreover, as a British journalist reported, India’s semantic revolution has eliminated famine. There is no starvation, only scarcity. In the 1980s when visitors to Kalahandi district in Orissa reported starvation deaths, the authorities refused to admit there was famine. Kalahandi highlighted the Indian contradiction. It is a food surplus area where 87 per cent of the population languish below the poverty line.

Another complexity surfaced when C.S. Subramaniam, one of the pioneers of India’s Green Revolution, baffled Australians by claiming India was self-sufficient in food. Why then bother with imports The answer: There was enough food for everybody but everybody couldn’t afford to buy it. This sounded like another callous verbal sleight of hand like insisting there is no famine because the government hasn’t invoked the Famine Code, or the linguistic refinement of calling starvation scarcity.

My wood engraving of famine victims, bought many years ago in Singapore, has taken on a grim significance. The past must still be with us since the International Food Policy Research Institute shows that India lags behind neighbouring Bangladesh in feeding its people. Instead, we preen ourselves over “surgical strikes” across the Line of Control, stridently demand a seat at the high table of the United Nations, and boast of our superpower credentials.

Bangladesh ranked just below India in the IFPRI’s 2000 Global Hunger Index. Now, Bangladesh is seven places ahead of India which grovels in the 97th position among 118 countries. If it’s any consolation, Pakistan ranks 107 and Afghanistan 111. Niger, Chad, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone also follow India. But Sri Lanka, Nepal and China are all ahead of us with Kenya, Malawi and even Iraq, ravaged ever since the American invasion by Kurdish ambitions, Shia-Sunni rivalry and, now, the deadly so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

The report’s most ominous section refers to children. They are the future. Jawaharlal Nehru once said India had no orphans because all boys and girls were Mother India’s children. A cruel parent she has proved to be. Thirty nine per cent of Indian children below five are stunted (too short for their age) while 15 per cent are wasted, weighing too little compared to height. Both are caused by chronic, acute malnutrition which results in high fatalities. One out of every 20 children dies before its fifth birthday.

It isn’t surprising that the most disadvantaged children are from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in far-off villages. The Bharatiya Janata Party is obsessively convinced that building an enormous temple to Ram in Ayodhya at huge public expense will solve all India’s problems. Narendra Modi’s failure to do or say anything to contradict fallacies born of ignorance and superstition suggests a dangerous accommodation of the dehati world of the priest on Shimla’s Jakhoo Hill who showed me a neatly cut footprint in modern grey cement and expected me to accept it as Lord Ram’s.

Populist politicians are often the most primitive, but all Indian rulers like to blame the British for their shortcomings. Let me, therefore, mention two names that deserve honour in the history of famine. Some readers will have heard of Ian Stephens, editor of the Statesman, whose brave exposure forced governments in Calcutta, Delhi and London to take note of the 1943 Bengal famine. Amartya Sen acknowledged Stephens’ work in an obituary tribute in the Times, London. Stephens was doing his job as a journalist, but Charles James O’Donnell, an Irish member of the Indian Civil Service, went beyond the call of duty and jeopardised his career to highlight the injustices of famine programmes.

His concern and courage deserve recognition. What government officer today would have the courage privately to publish two pamphlets, The Black Pamphlet: the Famine of 1874 and The Ruin of an Indian Province, severely criticising the central regime as O’Donnell did They called him “the enfant terrible of the ICS”. He complained to the secretary of state for India about Lord Curzon’s administration. Having ruined his own career, O’Donnell quit the ICS, which he had joined in 1872, and became a member of the House of Commons where he continued to belabour the British for the crimes they committed in India and Ireland.

Instead of pursuing empty military and political ambitions that promise nothing for the people, and instead of trying to fob us off with slogans and gimmicks, the government should devote far more attention to the countryside. It’s where India lives, as Mahatma Gandhi said. Agriculture is neglected. So are rural problems like health, housing and education. The Supreme Court has criticised the “ostrich-like attitude” of some state governments towards the current drought. It could say the same of the attitude towards the countryside of a Central government that is far too anxious to win international acclaim to bother about its own backyard.

We don’t want to repeat the nightmare experience of 1943 when my childhood was rent by cries of “Bhaat... Bhaat...” often from people who were already dying.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author