Jamil Chughtai
As per statistics made available by Global Multidimensional Poverty Index Report on the shining India of today, there are over 120 million Indians who do not have proper food to eat as they live below the poverty line, more than 15% Indian minors are under-nourished in addition to 11 million street children, 18% male and 20% female eligible youth are without any employment. Moreover, the number of people living in Indian slums exceeds the total population of Britain while there are well over 1.77 million people who do not have shelter over their heads. So much for “the aspiring world power” that over 75,000 of its homeless are forced to live in Sanjay Gandhi National Park alone. Similarly, while 60% of Indian population do not have proper sanitation facilities, another 20% masses do not know at all what is electricity. Millions and millions of people sleep on footpaths of major Indian cities including Delhi, Calcutta, Mumbai and Hyderabad without proper food, water and medicines to sustain their lives. Poverty is the cheapest, purely indigenous and a local product of India, as malnourished and ill-fed public can be spotted in every nook and corner of the self-styled biggest democracy, sending an open message to the world how senselessly insensitive Indian governments have been to their very own public during the last seven decades.
Quite painful, however, has throughout been the attitude of India’s ruling class when seen in the backdrop of the miseries that their general public experiences every day. As an utter disregard to the depressing condition of their masses, India continued to spend billions of dollars on arms purchase to stay at the top of the list as world’s biggest spender on defence purchases. In her latest madness for arm’s purchase, India has inked a deal worth 777 million dollars with Israel for supply of Barak-8 air & defence missile system, in addition to their earlier transaction of the same war equipment worth 630 million dollars. In April last year, Israel had also won 1.6 billion euros order from India which it hailed as its largest ever arms export deal, especially from a country that cannot provide a single morsel to her poor people living beneath the misery mark.
It is not only Israel that feels exalted in selling their war mechanisms to India, it has Russia and USA which are at daggers drawn to become the bigger supplier of weapons-of-aggression to India. During his recent visit, Russian President Vladimir Putin won an order for S-400 surface-to-air missile defence system worth 5.2 billions. But despite the fact that this huge arms transaction worth billions will further degenerate the life of already poor Indian masses, it is being considered by Russia as a mere peanut deal compared to what they used to have earlier being the sole as well as biggest supplier of arms to India. However, that very status is now being enjoyed by India’s new-found love, the United States of America, which in fact made Nerendra Modi’s last year visit to the US conditional to arms deal to the tune of 23 billion dollars that included sale of F-18 and F-16 aircraft to India.
The poor Indian could still have endured these redundant financial burdens in the name of national defence, but the widespread corruption among the personnel and officials of its armed forces have made Indian Defence Establishment an utterly unreliable entity in the eyes of masses. The never-ending occurrences of corruption scams and scandals involving officials from Indian army, navy, air force as well as the defence ministry have fizzled out the erstwhile grace and respect for military personnel among the Indian public. Dishonesty, frauds, bribery and other sleazy tactics are now so commonly found in the Indian civil and military set-up that the society has by and large started taking them for granted. Nothing has happened to the ex-Indian Air Chief S P Tyagi who was arrested last year by the Central Bureau of Investigation for receiving over 450 crore rupees as bribe for procurement of 12 Agusta-Westland VVIP helicopters at the cost of IRP 3,700 crore. Similarly, people of India may rest assure that nothing would happen to the beneficiaries from the defence ministry who received bribes to the tune of US$ 17 million in purchase deal of Rolls-Royce jet engines and that of French fighter aircraft Raffale where Indian public ended up losing over 5 billion dollars merely due to whimsical changes made in the original purchase deal by none else but PM Modi himself.
In nutshell, it is really shocking to see a country aspiring to become both military power and economic giant in the days ahead, while it bears extremely bleak public service credentials, it flagrantly violates human rights of its minorities and its civil-military establishment continues to be heavily embroiled in corruption. This formidable increase in recent defence spending and massive arms buying spree clearly manifest that India is hell-bent to accomplish its designs for regional supremacy and global power status at the cost of very basic needs of the biggest mass of its poverty-stricken general public whose accumulation gave it so-called status of the world’s largest democracy. India must beware that history is yet to provide a precedence where a nation has dispensed with both justice and moral values on purpose and still continues to nurture sublime dreams same as that of India.
