Recently, I was in India when the country was shaken by a cross border terrorist attack on the military barracks at Uri snuffing out 20 lives. India has reportedly responded with successful surgical strikes on several terror launch pads in the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) across the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir. The surgical strikes provided some clarity to the government’s very muddled Pakistan policy. WATCH VIDEO: Allegation By Pakistan About Women In Jammu & Kashmir ''Baseless'', Says India At UN In between the Pakistani aggressions that India has successfully thwarted, all governments in Delhi have appeared to be at wit's end, blowing hot and cold- in Modi's case going from impromptu tea summits with the feeble Nawaz Sharif to the extremely hawkish declarations by his ministers and MPs, only to then sheath India's military sword. I am not suggesting there should be a perpetual all-out war between the two neighbours. But to an outside observer unsteeped in the art of double or triple speak, New Delhi's Kashmir policy vis-a-vis Pakistan may seem at times unclear and less than firm. Even in the aftermath of the very clear and firm surgical strikes, it remains to be seen whether the clarity and firmness continues. The Kashmir issue, thorny and complex though it is, isn't even the worst problem facing the country. The worst and the most intractable drag on India is the almost omnipresent corruption and near complete neglect of people's basic health and educational needs of most of the population in the country. Women, young and old, continue to be raped all over the country exposing a shocking degree of brutality. From the outside looking in, it seems that the brutal but unfortunately not unique or rare case of Nirbhaya, hasn't shamed or deterred would be rapists among us. Just within the last few days a 12-year-old in Lucknow has been reportedly gangraped by five men while her parents were held down by some 15 others. This comes on the heels of a teen and her mother being raped in the fields surrounding a major highway in Bulandshahr near Dehli and the gangrapes of a 20-year-old woman and her 14-year-old cousin in Mewat, Haryana. WATCH VIDEO: Surgical Strikes: Eyewitnesses' Accounts Validate India's Claim Of A Lethal Strike The naked and brutal dance of religious vigilantism continues to vitiate the domestic peace and harmony of the country. In its latest incarnation the Haryana Police, impotent and unable or unwilling to strike fear in the hearts of would be rapists, was busy raiding the highway eateries in Mewat 'searching' for 'dangerous' beef just before Eid. In the midst of it all the ruling elite noxiously trumpets the robust economic growth, its space adventures and Modi's thunderous speeches; and most- and I stress Most with capital M- of the population of the country continues to live in poverty-below India's own national poverty line. A walk around the big cities, small towns and villages quickly confirms the horrendous poverty, corruption and the political neglect. The walking and talking victims of Corruption, Hunger, Poverty and significant Lawlessness continue to haunt one long after the initial encounter. Just before I left Delhi a story had broken of deaths of 'malnourished' children in the Sheopur and other parts of Madhya Pradesh. Let's forget the euphemistic "malnourishment". Call them hunger deaths that they are. The stories of hunger deaths abound in India. Google malnourishment in India and one is bombarded with story after story of the death and destruction caused by hunger and poverty. Hunger in India is worse than in the Sub-Saharan Africa. More children die of hunger in India than anywhere else, any other country in the world. But watching, as I did, a major Delhi TV anchor solemnly declare the Sheopur hunger deaths "an eye opener", you would think this was the first-ever case of malnourished, undernourished or simply hungry and bloated children dying in India. We knew the corrupted ruling classes of the Indian polity, in a never ending stupor at the switch, hadn't noticed or worried about it. But it was hard to believe a news anchor on a national TV network was surprised at the deaths of hungry poor children of Sheopur. But then I should have known the impervious worlds of many journalists in the bright spanking TV studios of major TV stations, just like the worlds of many a corrupt politicians, used to their air-conditioned Mercs and Beamers surrounded by security paid for by the poverty stricken and other Indian citizens, great swaths of which continue to merely exist and subsist under the cruel world of modern day politics and officialdom in India. The impervious worlds of these politicians and journalists only collide with reality once every four or five years-at election time. In between elections many politicians and journalists act like malevolent emperors and pliant courtiers of yore. The only thing missing is the usual royal screams of "Let them eat cake". And even on that score some of them do not fail to horribly shock; Raj Babbar's claim of a hearty meal in Mumbai costing a mere Rs 12 and Rashid Masood's claim of a full meal in Delhi costing Rs 5 only, in 2013, are cases in point-all in an effort to justify the then changed, completely arbitrary and pitiful poverty line. And by the way a clinical or hospital response for the affliction of large scale hunger and poverty is nonsense. Only a wholesale change in the way the Indian ruling classes govern India can stem the grinding hunger and poverty in India. And for that to happen the ubiquitous hunger, poverty and corruption of India must make an uncomfortable presence in the imagination of all Indians all the time-not just the Indians suffering hunger and poverty; they must rise up to challenge the corrupt polity, hunger and poverty of India.
