The plague in India is no longer a local affair, The entire world is worried about it. Several European and Arab countries took drastic action in no time. They cut off air, land and sea links with India. The air authorities in the ULS.A,, U.K. and Japan set up medical check posts at airports to arrest the spread of the disease. The world at large has per se, nothing against India. They are rightly concerned about the health of their own people.
Strangely in India, on the other hand, no such concern is visible in the action, rather the inaction, on the part of the government. Neither the prime minister nor that country’s health minister has spoken a word about the disease, and the measures being taken to fight it. On the other hand, the entire issue has been allowed to be handled by the bureaucracy, India’s health secretary made a shocking statement immediately after plague broke out in Surat about 10 days ago that the government had placed no restrictions on the movement of the people of Surat to leave the town. In any other country, the outbreak of plague even in a remote village would have been of national concern. Instead of Surat subjecting its people to medical checkup and giving medical aid to the sick and curing them of the disease, the Indian authorities blandly denied any restrictions on the movement of the people. The result was that the disease spread to almost all the north and northwestern Indian states. From a few hundred initially, the ailment has caught several thousand people in India in about a week. The chief minister of Gujarat has said that it was not possible to stop the movement of the people of Surat. For that, he said, at least 50,000 army men were required. The Gujarat chief minister’s statement is in tune with the thinking at all levels in the Indian state. What is common is the absence of concern about the spread of the disease. ‘Had there been a political will, the mobilization of 50,000 ‘army men at an hour’s notice would have posed no problem. Did not the Indian state mobilize 5 lakh strong army in 1984 to enact the operation Blue Star? Again, did not the Indian prime minister order the development of more than 1 Lakh army men overnight in Punjab to silence any reaction against the slaughter of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere in the wake of Mrs. Gandhi’s murder? Surat is one of the major towns of Gurjarat. It is known as a bastion of Brahmins in India. That state claimed the lion’s share of benefits over other states for the past 47. years. The major beneficiaries of the development are the upper caste Hindus of Gujarat. But it is equally true to say that the plight of the common people in Gujarat and elsewhere in India is pitiable. At the receiving end are the downtrodden, lowcaste poor people. These people live a life worse than what is in store for pigs. Surat is not the only town amenable to epidemics like plague. There are numerous such towns in India. In each such town there are numerous areas with pigs and dogs. The Indian rulers know they could afford to do without attending to the problems of the godforsaken colonies in Surat and elsewhere in the country. But the Indian rulers could not dictate the world governments about how to act to arrest the spread of the disease internationally. Now the effort of the Indian health ministry is to doctor data on the plague and mislead the world public opinion. The Indian media has gone to the incredible length of assessing Pakistan’s “gains” from the steps taken by countries to keep their national boundaries free from the spread of the dreaded disease. What is uppermost in the minds of the Indian rulers is the likely economic losses as are sult of international quarantine of India rather than the health of the people affected or likely to be affected by the dangerous disease.
Article extracted from this publication >> October 7, 1994
