6 min readJul 12, 2026 06:17 AM IST
First published on: Jul 12, 2026 at 06:13 AM IST
Every time I return from a sojourn in some foreign city, I think how lucky our political leaders are that so few Indians can afford to go abroad. Less than 2% of our vast populace ever gets to see a foreign country, so they are unable to ask the questions that they must ask. Questions they cannot ask because they do not know that the more horrific, shameful and depraved aspects of Indian life do not exist in more civilised countries. In countries with less ambition to become the ‘Vishvaguru’, people do not live in filthy, degraded conditions that become filthier and more degraded when the monsoon comes. The media in those countries do not treat as normal that a thirteen-year-old girl was raped so brutally in Rajasthan by thirty-two men that she died from her internal injuries.
Last week I returned from a few days in London, where I went to catch up with my exiled son. And this child’s story was the first I saw on social media after returning home. It shamed me and made me very angry. This young schoolgirl was coming home in an autorickshaw when the driver abducted and then sold her to a hotel owner. He colluded with other hotel owners to arrange for her to be gang raped for five days. She was moved from hotel to hotel, and somehow nobody found out. How? By the time she escaped from the clutches of these evil perverts, her body was too broken to be saved. But if the double-engine chief minister of Rajasthan has shown any empathy, he has done so invisibly.
Invisible also have been those self-appointed guardians of Hindu culture or as they like to put it ‘bhartiya sabhyata’. An estimated hundred girls in India, half of them children, are raped every day. Those are the registered cases, the actual figure could be much higher, and never do we see the outrage from those defenders of Indian culture that there should be. They are eloquent about crimes against women in Islamic countries but rarely speak up when little Indian girls are abducted, brutalised and killed. Why?
Still recovering from the horror in Rajasthan, and while switching channels for more uplifting news, I came upon the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh speaking about the loot that has gone on in the Ram Temple in Ayodhya on his watch. He railed against those raising their voice against the looting of the temple, on the flimsy grounds that they had no right to speak since they had allowed Muslims to pray on the steps of the Hanumangarhi temple. “Can you imagine the Hanuman Chalisa being recited in a mosque…who are these people to speak when they could not do anything for Ayodhya? It is only when a double-engine government was elected in Uttar Pradesh that the grand temple to Ram could be built.”
Chief ministers of ‘double-engine’ governments say almost nothing without reminding us of that double engine, but the truth is that double-engine governments have done little to improve abysmal living conditions in their states. This is because what they seem to concentrate on is creating double distractions from real issues like the total collapse of infrastructure when the rains come. The monsoon comes every year, even if belatedly because of El Niño and every year, we see flooded homes, broken roads and children dying because of the diseases that the rains bring.
In Mumbai this year, whole sections of the city drowned, and instead of explaining why, the government of Maharashtra spent its time worrying about how to close dance bars and how to bring a uniform civil code. Other double-engine chief ministers distract from their glaring failures of governance by trying to concentrate the attention of gullible voters on statues and temples.
It is no surprise, then, that last week the Global Liveability Index put Delhi and Mumbai at 120 and 121, out of 173 cities. We do not need an international index to tell us that our cities are unlivable. All we need to do is walk down a street or go shopping in a bazaar to stumble over rotting garbage, rats and filth.
Such conditions exist mostly because the average Indian has no idea that there are clean and beautiful cities in other lands. Or because of being lulled into a sense of false pride and nationalism by politicians who tell him that he should not bother about material comforts when he has leaders who build grand temples and statues taller than any other in the world. It is not just ordinary people who get distracted from real issues; we in the media do as well.
Last week, our major TV channels concentrated on showing us pictures of the Prime Minister speaking to the diaspora in different cities on his latest foreign tour and, in Indonesia, how he wandered around one of the grandest Hindu temples, Prambanan, with the Indonesian president in tow.
Speaking of Indonesia and the speech he made there, did you understand at all what he meant when he went on about the number eight? If any of you did, I would sincerely appreciate your thoughts on the significance of this number. During the Covid lockdown, was it not the number nine that he seemed to hold in mystic awe? As someone deeply interested in India becoming better, I hope he finds time one day for real problems.
Such conditions exist mostly because the average Indian has no idea that there are clean and beautiful cities in other lands. (File) 
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