Starvation deaths in Delhi: India is great but we Indians are definitely not

Today, my head hangs in shame as an Indian. This shame is not because there is any flaw in India. The multicultural country, part of a magnificent civilisation, is undoubtedly great. This land of legends such as Gautam, Kabir, Amir Khusrow, Gandhi and Nehru is definitely great. But there are no traces of this greatness in us, the Indians. Had we been great in real sense of the word, then our three daughters won’t have died of hunger right in the middle of the National Capital of India.

Shame on us! At least I am ashamed of myself. We are so deeply submerged in the glitter and humdrum of the capital city that we don’t even realise that someone is languishing in hunger right in our neighbourhood.

About four decades ago, I had seen an ailing beggar dying near the Victoria Terminus in the cosmopolitan Mumbai. After that, I was not able to sleep properly for three days. Even then, I was reassured by thinking that such a death would never happen in Delhi. I was under the impression that people may sleep hungry but won’t die of hunger, at least not in Delhi.

Alas, the recent deaths of three minors due to starvation has proven me wrong. Delhi has changed. Now, it is a metropolitan. But now, dwarfs live here instead of human beings. Two governments function from Delhi.

The bigger of the two, the central government, is always busy in running a rather showcase campaign against poverty. While poverty is yet to disappear, the poor surely have been dying silently, one after another. Right under our nose.

Mandawali, where three young girls died of starvation, happens to be the constituency of the Deputy CM of Delhi, Manish Sisodia. When Manish Sisodia walks, a convoy follows him. Thousands of rupees are spent on just maintaining such a convoy. But there is no provision in government rules to provide food to someone who is starving to death in the area.

What a grim irony. The girls died. No one came to know about it, neither the Councillor, any minister nor administrator in the area. But now, there is a queue of political leaders outside the house of the poor man. The father, who could not feed his children after losing his rickshaw, must now be feeling deeply distressed. Had these people come to his house just a day before, he would not have suffered such a heart-breaking tragedy.

Long ago, Premchand had written a story with the title ‘Kafan’ (the Shroud). The wife of the protagonist in the story dies in the same manner. And he mitigates his misery by buying and drinking alcohol with the money he has collected as donation for buying a shroud for his dead wife.

The father of these girls, who died of starvation in Delhi, seems to have come out of Premchand’s fiction. It is being said that he was an alcoholic. That his rickshaw had been stolen. He had not been able to feed his children for a very long time.

In such a pitiful state, if he was trying to drown the miseries of his life in alcohol, then perhaps it’s not his fault, but of the society which couldn’t feed its starving children.

India is surely great, but we Indians aren’t, can’t be!