Murderers All!

Are we too big to manage? Are we too busy to care? Or is it a matter of competence? Are no rights vested into a new born? Is the state not responsible to ensure that the child born to every mother in this country is healthy and has a fair chance to come out alive? Is this right not vested in the unborn child and the mother who carried the child in her womb? Is not the State a custodian of both the Child and the mother? And when the mother is malnourished and the kid still-born, why is the state not accused of Infanticide? Each year, my government kills more mother and child than all of world’s terrorists put together!

When I drive on the road, am I not entitled to a road with signages and fences? A road that does not suddenly run into a ditch without warning, a road where cows, buffaloes and villagers do not squat right in the middle? The government that allows Pajeros to be sold also allows the highways to be devoid of signages, devoid of policing and devoid of maintenance. More deaths happen on Indian roads that in the bloody drug wars of Latin America. Should the government not be booked for culpable homicide not amounting to murder?

When the weak and the vulnerable are exploited in every corner of this country, their pleadings are heard at our highest courts every day. And then its falls silent. The labyrinthine judiciary of India, through its heartless delays and sheer lack of accountability, has together with the legislature, ensured that the poor die poorly, unheard, unsung, uncelebrated, nameless, and often, even before being born. Ask me and I will tell you what will happen to the kids of Rickshaw Pullers, Rag Pickers and the Street Sex Workers. They will all die, just as they were born. I will never know who is actually accountable for the death of a jay walker who was crossing a 6 lane national highway and was stuck down by a SUV which was trying to avoid running into a truck, which itself was trying to avoid falling into a ditch for fear of breaking an axle. And then the truck and the Pajero, along with its inmates are set on fire by locals, as a crude justice to the death of a drunken jay walker.

Living in this country is Kafkaesque.