We need to laud effective poverty alleviation

I will make some comments, not to pick holes or to minimize what you have written (https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/news/bahraich-aspirations-gloom).

In the 1990s, I met a group of people in Surat who called themselves as critical supporters of the Sardar Sarovar project. One of them was teaching at the South Gujarat University. He said that their task was to ensure that the rehabilitation programme for the project affected people was carried out in the letter and spirit of what was promised. They went beyond and also helped these people to resettle and adjust to a new life.

But the Khan Market Gang, which has branches in India and abroad and includes such luminaries as Medha Patkar and Arundhati Roy, wanted the people to live in the same miserable lives that they have been living, and not take the opportunities that an independent India was providing them.

In reporting about the agitation against the Vedanta aluminum project in Odisha, Andrew North of the BBC wrote: “Few Dongria Kondh—which means hill dwellers—live much beyond 40, far below the Indian average. One man we talk to says all but one of his five children died young.” Yet, North’s article was actually saying that the protest had a great deal of merit. And in this, he had a great deal of support from the Khan Market Gang.

We all now know that the objective of the Congress party, as disclosed by former prime minister P.V. Narsimha Rao to Arif Mohammed Khan in 1986, was NOT improving the society. And that if the Muslims want to live in the gutter, why should the Congress pull them out? What is not acknowledged is that this programme is authenticated by the members of the Khan Market Gang.

For these Gang members, projects like the one reported are an anathema because they will then have to shut their shop of poverty-pornography, which enables them to write articles, publish books, organize seminars, etc. And get ‘recognition’ from their counterparts abroad, which are in the same game as them with respect to their own countries.

Since 2014, there has been a serious effort to ensure that the delivery of the various welfare schemes is strengthened. Direct bank transfer or DBT, in lieu of subsidy, is one such example. One can always pick holes in this effort, but one has to understand what is the rule and what is exception. While the effective delivery was 20 per cent earlier, today it is 80 per cent and rising; the effort should be applauded.

It was only AFTER the election results were out that people like Shekhar Gupta mentioned in passing that they did see the success of the delivery of the schemes, but chose not to write about it. Because the Khan Market Gang has been propagating that people vote on the basis of a communal (religion and caste) identity, not on the basis of what is good for the country.

I hope more such examples are written, and that this type of news becomes mainstream in journalism, and not fake narratives that the members of the Gang get visceral pleasure in writing about.

 

The author belongs to a business family with headquarters in Goa. He is also the Working President (External) of Vishwa Hindu Parishad