Aheli Moitra
A little scavenger girl at the Dimapur District Sports Complex asked me today if I had seen Indira Gandhi. She wore a tattered home gown and about 10 Congress caps left behind at the stadium. Four other children and she were being managed by an older woman to collect empty water bottles left behind. A kilo of plastic will fetch Rs. 15, and a kilo of cardboard Rs. 5.
They had a strategy worked out for the team. Bottles and cardboard boxes were collected with efficiency and speed—first in smaller heaps, then into individual plastic sacks, and transferred to a bigger pile. Even bottle caps were segregated from bottles; all in ten minutes. Before they could take their earning out, the security threw them out.
Had I seen Indira Gandhi though? No, I had seen Sonia Gandhi. And the difference of who we had seen defined the wide gulf between the scavenger girl and me.
In the 1970s, Indira Gandhi had asserted that poverty will be done away with. If present trends in India, both urban and rural, are followed, we notice that the poor are being done away with. From 2004 to 2006, in Mumbai alone, 300,000 people below poverty line were shown the city’s door. The attempt was to remove ‘post 1995 encroachments’. The poor were called encroachers while financially stable families like ours, which also moved to Mumbai post 1995, were offered luxurious apartments to live in.
Today, Sonia Gandhi pointed to nepotism within the governance set up in Nagaland. She is right as well. But the irony of her statement was too loud even for the shoddy sound system. The Congress has not only survived on nepotism but seeped it into the veins of the Indian democracy. Patrick French’s book, ‘India’, does a thorough job of documenting the hereditary members of parliament that the Congress has influenced and produced, keeping the circle of leadership and benefit to certain groups. The rest have been delegated to flagship schemes. No doubting their good intent for the poor. But practically, their non transparent implementation has cost the poor dear. The move towards urban cleansing has resulted in the easier removal of the poor instead of alleviation.
The institutionalized corruption in Nagaland that Gandhi referred to is much the same. The Nagas, while emulating the larger Indian system, have simply remained true to this. The regional party that now criticizes the national party is but a reflection of it.
The partiality in delivery of services to the poor, while opening up foreign markets for the rich will soon follow in Naga society. If the future of marginalized little girls remains at the level of a scavenger, it will be of little significance who, or which party, the Naga people vote to power, now or later. It will be significant, however, that the Nagas monitor governance, demand transparency and apply it through unique systems. If not, it will be the people who earn Rs. 15 from selling a kilo of plastic, who will present a new ground for efficient governance and politics.
