In five-star hotels on Mumbai\u2019s seafront, children of the rich squeal joyfully as they play hide and seek. Nearby, at the National Theatre for the Performing Arts, people arrive for the Mumbai Literary Festival: famous authors and notables drawn from India\u2019s Raj class. They step deftly over a woman lying across the pavement, her birch brooms laid out for sale, her two children silhouettes in a banyan tree that is their home.<\/p>\n
It is Children\u2019s Day in India. On page nine of the\u00a0Times of India<\/i>, a study reports that every second child is malnourished. Nearly two million children under the age of five die every year from preventable illness as common as diarrhoea. Of those who survive, half are stunted due to a lack of nutrients. The national school dropout rate is 40 per cent.\u00a0 Statistics like these flow like a river permanently in flood. No other country comes close. The small thin legs dangling in a banyan tree are poignant evidence.<\/p>\n
The leviathan once known as Bombay is the centre for most of India\u2019s foreign trade, global financial dealing and personal wealth. Yet at low tide on the Mithi River, in ditches, at the roadside, people are forced to defecate.\u00a0 Half the city\u2019s population is without sanitation and lives in slums without basic services. This has doubled since the 1990s when \u201cShining India\u201d was invented by an American advertising firm as part of the Hindu nationalist BJP party\u2019s propaganda that it was \u201cliberating\u201d India\u2019s economy and \u201cway of life\u201d.<\/p>\n
Barriers protecting industry, manufacturing and agriculture were demolished. Coke, Pizza Hut, Microsoft, Monsanto and Rupert Murdoch entered what had been forbidden territory. Limitless \u201cgrowth\u201d was now the measure of human progress, consuming both the BJP and Congress, the party of independence. Shining India would catch up China and become a superpower, a \u201ctiger\u201d, and the middle classes would get their proper entitlement in a society where there was no middle. As for the majority in the \u201cworld\u2019s largest democracy\u201d, they would vote and remain invisible.<\/p>\n
There was no tiger economy for them. The hype about a high-tech India storming the barricades of the first world was largely a myth. This is not to deny India\u2019s rise in pre-eminence in computer technology and engineering, but the new urban technocratic class is relatively tiny and the impact of its gains on the fortunes of the majority is negligible.<\/p>\n
When the national grid collapsed in 2012, leaving 700 million people powerless, almost half had so little electricity, they \u201cbarely noticed\u201d, wrote one observer.\u00a0 On my last two visits, the front pages boasted that India had \u201cgatecrashed the super-exclusive ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) club\u201d and launched its \u201clargest ever\u201d aircraft carrier and sent a rocket to Mars: the latter lauded by the government as \u201ca historic moment for all of us to cheer\u201d.<\/p>\n
The cheering was inaudible in the rows of tarpaper shacks you see as you land at Mumbai international airport and in myriad villages denied\u00a0 basic technology, such as light and safe water.\u00a0 Here, land is life and the enemy is a rampant \u201cfree market\u201d. Foreign multinationals\u2019 dominance of food grains, genetically modified seed, fertilisers and pesticides has sucked small farmers into a ruthless global market and led to debt and destitution. More than 250,000 farmers have killed themselves since the mid-1990s \u2013 a figure that may be a fraction of the truth as local authorities wilfully misreport \u201caccidental\u201d deaths.<\/p>\n
\u201cAcross the length and breadth of India,\u201d says the acclaimed environmentalist Vandana Shiva, \u201cthe government has declared war on its own people.\u201d\u00a0 Using colonial-era laws, fertile land has been taken from poor farmers for as little as 300 rupees a square metre; developers have sold it for up to 600,000 rupees a square metre. In Uttar Pradesh, a new expressway serves \u201cluxury\u201d townships with sporting facilities and a Formula One racetrack, having eliminated 1225 villages. The farmers and their communities have fought back, as they do all over India; in 2011, four were killed and many injured in clashes with police.<\/p>\n
For Britain, India is now a \u201cpriority market\u201d \u2013 to quote the government\u2019s arms sales unit. In 2010, David Cameron took the heads of the major British arms companies to Delhi and signed a $700 million contract to supply Hawk fighter-bombers. Disguised as \u201ctrainers\u201d, these lethal aircraft were used against the villages of East Timor. They may well be the Cameron government\u2019s biggest single \u201ccontribution\u201d to Shining India.<\/p>\n
The opportunism is understandable. India has become a model of the imperial cult of \u201cneo-liberalism\u201d \u2013 almost everything must be privatized, sold off. The worldwide assault on social democracy and the collusion of major parliamentary parties \u2014 begun in the US and Britain in the 1980s\u2013 has produced in India a dystopia of extremes and a spectre for us all.<\/p>\n
Whereas Nehru\u2019s democracy succeeded in granting the vote \u2013 today, there are 3.2 million elected representatives \u2013 it failed to build a semblance of social and economic justice. Widespread violence against women is only now precariously on a political agenda. Secularism may have been Nehru\u2019s grand vision, but Muslims in India remain among the poorest, most discriminated against and brutalised minority on earth.\u00a0 According to the 2006 Sachar Commission, in the elite institutes of technology, only four out of 100 students are Muslim, and in the cities Muslims have fewer chances of regular employment than the \u201cuntouchable\u201d Dalits and indigenous Adivasis. \u201cIt is ironic,\u201d wrote Khushwant Singh, \u201cthat the highest incidence of violence against Muslims and Christians has taken place in Gujarat, the home state of Bapu Gandhi.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gujarat is also the home state of Narendra\u00a0 Modi, winner of three consecutive victories as BJP chief minister and the favourite to see off the diffident Rahul Gandhi in national elections in May.\u00a0 With his xenophobic\u00a0Hindutva<\/i>\u00a0ideology, Modi appeals directly to dispossessed Hindus who believe Muslims are \u201cprivileged\u201d. Soon after he came to power in 2002, mobs slaughtered hundreds of Muslims. An investigating commission heard that Modi had ordered officials not to stop the rioters \u2013 which he denies. Admired by powerful industrialists, he boasts the highest \u201cgrowth\u201d in India.<\/p>\n
In the face of these dangers, the great popular resistance that gave India its independence is stirring. The gang rape of a Delhi student in 2012 has brought vast numbers into the streets, reflecting disillusionment with the political elite and anger at its acceptance of injustice and a modernised feudalism. The popular movements are often led or inspired by extraordinary women \u2014 the likes of Medha Patkar, Binalakshmi Nepram, Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy \u2013 and they demonstrate that the poor and vulnerable need not be weak. This is India\u2019s enduring gift to the world, and those with corrupted power ignore it at their peril.<\/p>\n
John Pilger<\/strong>\u2019s film,\u00a0Utopia,<\/a>\u00a0about Australia, is released in cinemas on 15 November and broadcast on ITV in December. It is released in Australia in January.\u00a0<\/i>www.johnpilger.com<\/a> Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In five-star hotels on Mumbai\u2019s seafront, children of the rich squeal joyfully as they play hide and seek. Nearby, at the National Theatre for the Performing Arts, people arrive for the Mumbai Literary Festival: famous authors and notables drawn from … Continue reading
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