Modi’s promise of ‘achhe din’ was the most cruel joke of the year. In the one and a half years of his no-rule or misrule, Modi appears to have no clue on how to govern the country, or help the people in their hours of crises.
What a month! I have spent nearly 40 years in Mumbai but never experienced this type of weather. The Mount Mary Fair is still dragging on. The sky is parched, we do not know when and from where the next showers are going to come from. Aged people in the city talk menacingly of the time when Bombay was partly evacuated when it threatened to run out of precious drinking water. Not a drop of rain fell during the normally abundant rainy months of July and August. How would school, college children, the large work force, houses and hospitals manage? For three or four years, the weather gods were equally unkind. August was bad and September was worse. Somewhere around September 10, as I drove to the airport to catch a flight to the US, the sky rumbled with thunder and opened up for days together. In no time, the deficit became a surplus; the matter was forgotten till the next time such a situation occurred.
What was rare is now becoming routine. The routine may soon be frequent. The item in question, water, is not food which can be produced more or imported. In the early years of our freedom, we often were hit by famine. People starved and died but the nation survived. Somehow water got transported, despite harrowing tales and pictures showing desperate frantic digging of river beds. Mumbai, befitting its status as the number one metropolis, managed to escape this disaster. But the never-ending problems did not register; its lessons were not learnt. The pulsating and dynamic city still continued to depend on the three-month long monsoon. Politicians did everything possible (including ‘yagnas’) to avert a major tragedy. The question on every one’s lips was: “Has Mumbai’s luck finally run out?”
Besides water deficit, Mumbai had to worry about other issues. Three train accidents within four days which, despite a few fatalities, disrupted traffic all over. But the massive population of Mumbai never learnt its lessons. Like Roman emperor Nero fiddled while his Rome burned the people, in Mumbai and those who ruled them shunned their responsibilities. If the civic issues went out of control, it could not bother them a bit. If the noise levels went up, they would care less but go right up to the Supreme Court fighting for favourable judgements on the issue. The corporators, their kith and kin and contractors with itching palms, were ready to fleece the civic body with hardly any one bothering to punish them for the potholes which emerged again within no time. Who bothered? The jobs went back to the same contractors and their henchmen. ,
The city turned into one of bizarre policies, more bizarre politics and quixotic decisions. What else can one make out of the small groups of religious minorities judging the ban on animal slaughter and consumption for some days for so-called religious purposes, even if it meant the deprivation of livelihood for lakhs of people? Jain money bags from Gujarat aligned themselves with Gujarat politicians and the greedy local bureaucrats to make life miserable for the ordinary people of Mumbai. There is already enough tension in Mumbai between the rich Gujaratis and the locals on lifestyle issues (meat vs bhaji and ghee-laden prasad vs dry roti and pickle), which are ideal issues for Raj Thackeray’s MNS and the Shiv Sena to pick on each other and lead to violence of a new kind. The nosey parkers in the RSS are now planning to distribute cows among muslims who care for them and not eat them.
This is not just about Mumbai or Maharashtra. Spare a thought for the country’s richest business centre or capital city where middle class or poor parents carried their infants, burning with high fever, at odd hours of the night from hospital to hospital only to be refuted admission and treatment. All this inequality and injustice was in the land of Prime Minister Narendra Modi whose promise of ‘achhe din’ was the most cruel joke of the year. In the one and a half years of his no-rule or misrule, Modi appears to have no clue on how to govern the country, or help the people in their hours of crises or take decisions to bring immediate relief to the poor and the sickly. Sixteen months is a long period to cast off princely robes and go down to the level of the common man. As Modi lands on India’s rural plains, we do not know how much of the cheer is for his colourful costumes and how much for the rural touch, promising the moon for the masses. But in the current period of Modi’s rule, people have not discovered any concrete benefits.
A serious problem is threatening the nation- food grains including all varieties of dal have crossed the century mark, fruits—including the cheapest ones— cost a fortune, medicines and medical treatment are frighteningly expensive. John Donne’s immortal poem ‘Death Be Not Proud’ may well describe the medical scene of India.
Why is there so much hoopla surrounding Modi’s image, both in India and abroad? The Americans and others see in Modi what they wanted to see in urban India: good roads in selected regions, cities with multi-storey posh shopping arcades, entertainment centres, multiplexes where tickets are sold at a rate that could burn a hole in the pockets of many; even popcorn sells for Rs 100 a bag. How many urban middle class families can afford to spend an evening at the cinema? Outside the cinema, dozens of urchins in torn shorts gaze hungrily at half-eaten ice cream cones and packets of chips. As one drives into the interior towns, the rich-poor disparity hits one harder. Is this India or yet another banana republic of South America? Very soon, Modi is certain to visit these parts of the world and discover his own version of ‘Discovery of rich India’.
