A fractured freedomHarsh Mander Share  ·   print   ·   T+  

Democracy in our country seems to work only for some. For those who have been left out of the growth story, freedom is still an unfinished business. Harsh Mander

I n six decades of freedom, India has substantially pushed into the fading memories of history many of the ravages of centuries of colonial rule. Famines are vanquished; India grows most of its own food needs; its cities glitter; graduates from its universities are welcomed the world over; its youthful consuming middle classes attract investment from distant corners of the globe; and its corporate giants stalk the world economy. Its flawed but still robust democracy endures and deepens; and its people organise themselves around myriad causes for resistance and caring, in tens of thousands of sites, which fuel hope and change.

And yet — in vast stretches of this antique teeming land — darkness, unfreedoms and despair persist. On farm-lands, sweat-shops, brick kilns and mines, men, women and children are compelled to toil long hours for dirt wages, often thousands of kilometres from their homes. Even as governments continue in denial, millions work without the freedom to leave oppressive employers, only because they are bonded to them for the loan that helped them survive illness and starvation. Many remain years in debt bondage for a small loan which never can be repaid, because interest rates are 5 to 10 per cent every month compound. Globalised industries have extinguished the livelihoods of masses of small producers — artisans, weavers, tailors, street vendors, farm and fish workers, who are left behind to survive in penury.

Millions of persons are forced into degrading, low-paid work, cleaning human waste or disposing corpses, only because of their birth in disadvantaged castes. They are barred from drawing water from common taps or hand-pumps, or from drinking tea from the same cups as other people. None will eat from their hands; and any hint of assertion is crushed with brutal violence. Even in schools, dalit children are seated and fed separately.

Girls and women often suffer cruelty and deprivation even in the intimate spaces of their families. Wealthy and educated people use modern technologies to efficiently eliminate them, even before they are born. They toil harder, but often eat least and last, and are denied their rights to inheritance, schooling, healthcare and recreation. Their fate is even bleaker if they are single — widowed, deserted, divorced, unmarried — they are stigmatised or harassed even as they struggle for dignified and self-reliant survival.

Indigenous communities have been driven out of their forest homelands; dispossessed of their agricultural lands; crushed by usury; displaced and uprooted by mines, industry and dams; their delicate, humane cultures trivialised; their spirit broken.

Threats to pluralism

Persons of minority faiths have learnt to live as ‘children of a lesser god' — in life-long fear of attack because of their religious identity; of profiling as terrorists or criminals; of facing daily discrimination and distrust when they look for a house or employment; their ghettoes denied public services like drinking water and education.

And then there is the ferment of zones of conflict, in the nation's north-western and north-eastern peripheries, as much as in the central forested heartlands. Here people have taken up arms against the state, for diverse claims of self-determination, ethnic assertion and a more egalitarian society. In these regions, generations have learned to live among uniformed men brandishing arms to coerce them into submission; to survive check-posts and violent home searches; forced disappearances and extra-judicial killings; incarceration and torture. Here the state is in undeclared civil war against its own people; and it often arms renegade civilian groups to lawlessly fight their own communities.

The country's prisons are crowded with people too poor to afford lawyers, charged often with petty crimes, for which the maximum punishment if their crime was to be proved is less than the time they are forced to spend trapped behind jail walls. Beggars' homes incarcerate destitute people for the ‘crime' of being destitute, sometimes for three or even 10 years. Children who have no adult to take care of them are locked for their entire childhoods in loveless and brutalised state institutions. State institutions also incarcerate the differently-abled, the mentally slow, and the emotionally disturbed.

Forgotten

In the shadows of city lights, children, women and men sleep on pavements and under over-bridges, surviving by picking rags, pulling rickshaws or daily wage labour. Children spend their days in waste dumps, roadside eateries or factories instead of in schools and playfields. People pushed out by drought, hunger, caste oppression and unemployment, crowd the city shanties, because we do not plan cities to include the poor, but we cannot survive a day without their cheap labour.

Freedom remains fractured and bitterly contested in this land. Democracy works only for some, who thrive in its liberties, security and choice. Others are condemned to life-sentences variously

of hunger, homeless, stigma, fear, penury and neglect. The exiles from India's secular democracy are masses of indigent children, women and men. They survive, persevere, hope, resist and sometimes overcome, not because of but despite India's Constitutional safeguards, its glittering growth story, and its powerful state.

Governments today no longer believe that their responsibility is primarily to protect and uphold the freedoms of the disadvantaged. It is instead to facilitate markets, hoping that these will produce wealth and jobs, and one day — we do not know how many generations later — the millions who are left out will walk free and prosperous.

Long decades ago, the people of India gave to themselves a Constitution which promised people liberty and sovereignty. But the business of freedom remains unfinished. There is not one but hundreds of freedom struggles yet to be waged, and still countless more to be won.