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State Discourse on Poverty

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Estimation of poverty is a great paradox in India. Jean Dreze drew our attention to this paradox: Nothing is easier than to recognise a poor person when you see him or her. Yet the task of identifying and counting the poor seems to elude the country’s best experts.

The recent controversy regarding poverty estimates in India testifies that measurement of poverty is an organic part of the assertion of state power. Let us narrate the controversy in the language of Harsh Mander: Ten years ago, in a landmark case in the Supreme Court (SC), the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) demanded a legally enforceable right to food. During the past decade, the SC has passed a number of orders, steadily expanding the duties of governments to end hunger and malnutrition. Matters came to a head when the petitioners presented damning evidence of rotting foodgrains, demanding that such critical wastage should halt in a country of immense poverty and hunger. They suggested that these stocks be distributed to all households in the 150 poorest districts. The government opposed this, saying that state-subsidised food should be targeted only to poor families. The SC asked the government to explain how it estimates the number of poor households in the country. The Planning Commission replied in its affidavit that Rs 26 and Rs 32 a day for rural and urban households, respectively, “ensures the adequacy of actual private expenditure…on food, education and health”. This affidavit was widely reported and ordinary citizens understood, for the first time, how governments estimate poverty in India.

It may be mentioned in this connection that under attack for its Rs 26 and Rs 32

per capita cut-off for rural and urban poverty line, the Planning Commission admitted (on 3 October) that the benchmark was “very low”, but said that it would not alter or withdraw its affidavit in the apex court on the issue as it was “factual”. However, in a damage-control exercise, the Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh declared at a press conference (as reported in the media) that the government favoured delinking of food entitlement and other social programmes from the present poverty line, which was derived from the Suresh Tendulkar Committee’s findings.

The assurance given by two important officials that the government will deliver economic and social justice to deserving citizens, whatever be the official poverty lines, seems elusive. Our recent experience suggests that the government offers special “development” packages only to those regions which are characterised as “disturbed” in the counter-insurgency discourse of the State.

Mary George

Thiruvananthapuram

The Beltway Mob have destroyed a great nation, and brought discredit to a people who constituted themselves on the principle “that all men are created equal”. The ongoing siege of Wall Street shows that at last Americans realise that their nation is unequally and cruelly divided between the 1% rich and the dispossessed rest, with at least 20% of their undernourished children living in homes being seized by unprincipled banks, and with fathers who have lost any hope of getting jobs.

This destruction of the cherished dreams of a great people did not happen in a day. Wars and foreign conquests brought Americans windfalls of ill-earned wealth. It is the Beltway Mob that smoothed conscience and perpetrated a gigantic fantasy, like their ancestors in Rome or in Whitehall, a hundred years or so ago. First, the easily sold lie that the people they conquered were barbarians, of different names, Boadicea, Tipu Sultan, or more lately Gaddafi of Libya. The second lie that people must sacrifice their sons in short wars, that unfortunately time and again turned disastrous, to bring civili sation and well-being to the conquered. The third lie that they themselves were selflessly dedicated to the public good everywhere.

A new American president has to prove he also has the heart and stomach of his predecessors, when it comes to war and pillage. Bill Clinton, who feared to be soft, quickly recovered his ratings by bombing a pharmaceutical firm in the Sudan. FDR was spared the need to commit a ferocious act by the second world war, which luckily for him was the right war, and it also brought in jobs for the many and profits for the few in unimaginable quantities. The charismatic Jack Kennedy put the small emerging country of Cuba outside the pale and started the Vietnam war, so he was also alright, but not quite right enough as his tragic end proved.

Now, President Barack Obama needs to do a lot more since he is black and his middle name is Hussein, so he has unleashed the latest act of international banditry on Libya, hoping to be re-elected in 2012. Then, in his last term he hopes to achieve some social good, before he turns into a lame duck. We can already see his eight years in office divided into the first two of big talking, the next two of rightwing moves at home and wars abroad, the third two years of attempting to fulfil some promises, and the last two looking back to ensure a chair at Harvard. This is the deal the Beltway Mob offers him.

The American people can do more. They are by and large likeable, openhearted and friendly, and with strong local traditions of democracy built around their town halls. They are hardworking and innovative – as Pablo Neruda said “We like not your military face, but your unassuming hand covered in oil”. It is that hand we all want to grasp. Now with the siege of Wall Street comes a chance for Americans to see what this mafia has wrought in their name, at home and abroad; here is a chance to fall back on their own sturdy independence and shun banditry abroad; to cut their dispossessors to size and enforce reparations; to clean up Congress as they would their own town hall; to disperse the Beltway Mob to their homesteads; to make Obama the president they wanted and not just another Uncle Tom.

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