5 min readAug 16, 2026 10:19 PM IST
First published on: Aug 16, 2026 at 06:40 AM IST
On India’s eightieth birthday, all our political leaders need to hang their heads in shame. Or to use the inimitable Hindi expression, drown themselves in a handful of water. It should mortify them that it is young people who have come forward on this day that we celebrate Independence Day, to tell them what their priorities should be. These young people have reminded them, and us, that the money and time wasted on building a new parliament house and a new residence for the prime minister could have been better spent in repairing rural schools.
The Cockroach Janta Party has announced that this August 15, they will begin a campaign to repair rural schools. To make their case, they have spent the past week posting pictures of village schools on social media. In these pictures, we see classrooms with crumbling walls and bare floors. We also see school toilets so filthy that it is hard to believe that little children, and especially little girls, will be made to use these sickening hellholes. The pictures surprised me not at all because I have seen schools exactly like these in states across India. But especially in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
In an odd coincidence, I was brooding over these things while gathering my thoughts for this column, when the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh popped up on my television to make an ugly, divisive, dangerous speech. Since Pakistan’s Independence Day is now Partition Day in India, Yogi Adityanath thought it appropriate to remind young Indians about those trains that came from Pakistan filled with dead bodies. As if rehearsing for next year’s election, he said that it was the Congress Party that was responsible for Partition and that if Narendra Modi had been prime minister, this would never have happened.
In making this speech, he accidentally revealed why, in 12 years of being the prime minister, Modi has failed to improve the appalling state of government schools or end corruption in national examinations. He and his chief ministers have been too busy doing other things like reminding young Indians about the horrors of the past in which the villains were always Muslims and the victims always Hindus. No country that wallows in the wounds of history ever succeeds in building a better future. Very sad that it has taken the cockroaches to remind us of this. So, kudos to you cockroaches.
Is there anything then that can be truly celebrated on India’s eightieth birthday? When I asked my new best friend Claude this question, it trawled through its artificial intelligence and concluded that democracy and the peaceful transfer of power were some of the things to celebrate. Not needing to import foodgrain, as we once used to, is another thing we should celebrate, and the reduction in extreme poverty from 45% in 1990 to less than 15% today is also an achievement unless we compare this with our old enemy China. Until 1980, we were growing pretty much at the same rate, but the Chinese economy is five times India’s now, and 800 million Chinese are out of poverty. Literacy is 97% compared to our 70%.
It is shameful that when we talk about 70% of our population being literate, we mean literally that. When average Indian children complete their education in a government school, they can count in a basic sort of way and read in a basic sort of way. That is all. This is why I agree totally with the Cockroach Janta Party’s new campaign. Nothing is more important than fixing the serious defects in government schools. There are those who like to romanticise about how wonderful these schools were once and how they deteriorated since Modi became prime minister. This is not true. They were always schools only in name. But Modi can certainly be blamed for not getting his chief ministers to make changes on a war footing.
Every Independence Day the thing that saddens me most is the sight of small children, barefoot and in rags, standing at streetlights in Delhi and Mumbai selling limp, sodden national flags. Sometimes the children are so small that their hands barely reach the windows of passing cars and sometimes their clothes and flags are so soaked that they look as if they have spent hours in the rain. I always pay extra for the flags, hoping that if the money is not stolen by older children, the little ones will be able to celebrate India’s birthday with a hot meal.
Every year I have waited for our political leaders to notice these desperately poor children and try and do something for them. It has never happened. This year the leader of the Cockroach Janta Party not only noticed them but declared angrily that these children should be in school, not on the streets. It warmed my heart to hear him say this, and although I am not in a celebratory mood on India’s 80th birthday, I continue to hope that there will come an Independence Day when instead of empty patriotic slogans from our political leaders we will have younger leaders who know what India’s priorities should really be.
What tops my list is the miserable state of our children. May an Independence Day come when on the streets of our cities we no longer see little children selling Indian flags just to make enough for a celebratory hot meal.
Every Independence Day the thing that saddens me most is the sight of small children, barefoot and in rags, standing at streetlights in Delhi and Mumbai selling limp, sodden national flags. 
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