August 24, 1998

Why has a nuclear nation failed to fulfil its basic needs?

Tavleen Singh

On the eve of Independence Day, I met a little Indian citizen called Tushar Kulkarni. He will be two years old next month and has spent 14 months of his tiny life hooked up to a ventilator in a windowless isolation room at Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).

Had he been born American, British, French or German, Tushar would have been leading a normal life by now. If his parents gather the money to take him to a speciality hospital in the United States -- and wean him away from his ventilator -- he may even be going to nursery school by next year. But if they do not, Tushar's future is uncertain.

The best Indian doctors say they have done all they can. Some have even suggested that Tushar's parents take him off the life-support machine and let him die. But which parents can do that when they have letters from American doctors assuring them that they understand the problem and will be able to solve it.

So the parents live between suffering and hope. They fill Tushar's room with children's drawings and colourful toys. They try to comprehend what he wants from the expression in his big, bright eyes and the clenching of his tiny fists.

It is sometimes in the stories of ordinary people like the Kulkarni family that you discover the truth about our country. Through their suffering you learn about the tragic state of Indian healthcare 50 years after Independence. The Kulkarnis are educated, middle-class people. But they don't fall into the VIP category. So they have no access to the funds made available to our politicians and bureaucrats for treatment abroad.

Neither are the Kulkarnis poor enough for their story to be just another statistic from below the poverty line. More Indian children die before the age of five -- of curable diseases like diarrhoea and measles -- than in almost any other country in the world.

Yet we must rejoice -- as the Government's Independence Day propaganda tells us -- because we are now a nuclear power. Our scientists, we hear, are among the best in the world. They are capable of technological achievements that match the West. In the 21st century, we could become one of the largest producers of computer software on the planet.

To quote Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, science and technology are at a "pinnacle". In one of those Independence Day advertisements the Directorate of Audio-Visual Publicity inflicts on us annually, Joshi says, "During these five decades, democracy flourished, the green revolution transformed India into a food exporting country, and science and technology reached its pinnacle."

It becomes hard to share Joshi's joy when you realise we are incapable not just of giving little Tushar a chance to live but even of manufacturing his life-support machine. AIIMS is the best hospital in India. But you need to remind yourself of that when you observe its standards of hygiene, so appalling that patients could die from the cure rather than the disease.

In the hospital's gardens, patients who have travelled from distant places lie around with their sad little bundles of bedding and their kerosene stoves. The reason? The hospital cannot accommodate them and they cannot afford to go elsewhere. But rejoice, for as Joshi says, "We have pledged to wipe every tear from every eye. Now we pledge to see that there is a smile on the face of every Indian. Love India. Love its glorious past, scintillating present and secure its pristine glory."

Sushma Swaraj, Joshi's cabinet colleague, is not to be outdone. She ensures that our telephones (if they work) sing Vande Mataram to us. The BJP is big on this kind of plastic patriotism. It is the kind of patriotism that easily takes offence.

The BJP's swadeshi stormtroopers consider it national service to smash bottles of Coca-Cola and lead marches against multinational companies. If you ask them why they should be so bothered about these things, they tell you it shames them as Indians that foreign goods should flood the country. How come we never hear them being ashamed of our hospitals and schools -- or the fact that despite our "scintillating present", we are unable to feed our children?

Strictly speaking, the BJP cannot be blamed for the mess India is in. But ever since it came to power in Delhi it has, for reasons that are really hard to understand, taken responsibility for the mistakes of the past. More plastic patriotism? Probably.

The BJP ranks are filled with people who believe that the meaning of patriotism is to have only good things to say about Bharat Mata. The problem is most of these patriots make no distinction between Bharat sarkar and Bharat Mata -- just as the Congress once made no distinction between India and Indira.

This is probably why another Independence Day has gone by without a political leader telling us the truth about what went wrong with our "tryst with destiny". Until this happens, we cannot hope that anything will really change. Till then Independence Day for me will be the image of a small boy with big eyes, living on life-support in a hospital room. He could be cured for approximately the same amount of money an average MP spends, illegally, on his election campaign.

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