Calculation, impulse and the calculated impulse

Hunger is not a problem that grows apace with efforts to alleviate it, says SUDHANSHU RANADE.

THERE has been increasing indignation in the past few months; millions of people are being left to starve though the Government has more than 50 million tonnes of food on hand, all bought and paid for. What sort of Government is this, people ask, that sits scanning the horizons for ways to use this food - when the answer lies right before its eyes: feed the hungry.

As the murmurs of discontent grew louder and louder over the past few months, the Government, unfortunately, chose to keep silent; to simply ignore the clamour. And now that the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) has struck a serious blow, with its petition to the Supreme Court, the Government still oddly gives the impression of having little to say for itself. There have been "some" deaths, it admits. But these deaths were due not to starvation but to "chronic malnutrition".

The PUCL insists on being told whether or not the "right to life" guaranteed by the Constitution does or does not include the right to food. The judges were left without an option; even before the trial began, they stated that "even if the foodgrains had to be given free, it should be done as no person should be deprived of food merely because he has no money".

No one can possibly fault this proposition; unlike the squalor of slums, hunger is not a problem that grows apace with (as a direct consequence of) efforts to alleviate it. However some stray thoughts come to mind.

First, the PUCL, true to its track record (as for instance the time it took up cudgels on behalf of a handful of dalits who set fire to and killed a busload of passengers after robbing them), will use this trial, too, to put on trial the system of justice itself. Second, at the time the Communist Party of India (M) decided to throw what weight it had behind the farm lobby (Mahendra Tikait and others), in the early 1980s, knowing full well that the masses had nothing to gain but an "education", I had raised precisely the question that the PUCL has now raised, in precisely this form: why was not the CPI(M) instead arranging mass agitations around the granaries, which then, as now, were bursting at the seams - while people starved to death? The answer I got from senior leaders was that without "food security" the country would become "more vulnerable to the onslaught of imperialism".

Third, it is foolish to allow oneself to get distracted by "side" issues; no matter how important they might be. As a young bachelor, I once set out to hire a maid to wash, cook and clean. Two applicants turned up; one well past 80. Her need was greater, and so it was naturally she who got the job. I simply did not see what else I could have done. Older now, and wiser, I have shed my illusions. Mass hunger cannot be tackled by impulsive action; as a casual by-product of your efforts to tackle some other problem. Try to do it in this flip way, and you may well end up leaving the masses a great deal worse than you found them; as in the case of Chairman Mao's Great Leap Backward.

Finally, even free food will be of little help. The most desperate are literally dying on the streets; you will see them there, wallowing in their grime. Bishop Heber got a taste of this once, after a breakfast with the Nawab of Oudh at which the latter "showed his brilliant crown and asked me if there was any difference between his crown and that of the King of England. The visit ended with my being handed a purse of Rs. 30 in quarters to throw among beggars, as was usual on such occasions. I asked my sepoys to keep away the more able and bring near the blind, lame, leprous, and the very old. They did this but later, to my mortification, I saw that some of the weakest and most helpless of those who were admitted to the side of my chair, were hustled away, on their return to the crowd, to snatch away from them the alms which they had received; and one poor old woman, to whom I had given half a rupee on account of her great age and infirmities, was, thrown down, trampled on, and her hands, arms and breast dreadfully pinched and bruised, to compel her to unlock her grasp of the money. The Resident's people rescued her, or she probably would have been killed".

As for those who are better off, among them you will find aging, aged rickshaw pullers, straining away at their chains for all they are worth, trying to keep out of their minds the fearful thought that they have reached the end of the road. In the end, one thing is certain. These are not problems that can be solved by a jerk of the knee.

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