‘Real India’ – Way to go

India, the home of Bollywood; the world’s biggest democracy; the new super-power. India the land of dreams. This is what it’s convenient for us in the West to believe about this enormous country.  But leave Delhi by train and it’s impossible to avoid the truth. The view from the windows is hellish.  The urban trackside for mile upon mile is piled with garbage – interrupted by pools of black, mosquito breeding sewage.  Fires burn desultorily, and ineffectually wherever the eye can see – for most of the rubbish is plastic and won’t burn like paper used to.  And in amongst it all are people, mostly migrants from the countryside, exchanging subsistence for a cash livelihood, clinging to the city fringes and living off its detritus.

At each surburban station, Nizamuddin, Tuglaqabad, Faridabad, Mathura, the air closes in on you, unspeakably vile.  The stench of human waste is still one of the characteristics of Indian cities.  India does not do ‘urban’; what it still does is pile up rural escapees in shanties made of rag and tin, and then concrete them in, unremittingly ugly.  There is almost no provision at all.  If you used to defaecate in the fields, you now defaecate along the track or road.  If you broke your old earthenware crocks to celebrate each Hindu festival with new ones, and chucked the shards away, now you do it with all your waste, for waste disposal requires civic muscle, and that’s in short supply.

Civil society emerges out of altruism – small platoons of enthusiasts with the freedom and resolve to change things.  Britain’s institutions and services all began with Victorian self-help groups.  Schools, sewerage, charities for the blind, the sick, for orphans, lepers, stray dogs, all were pioneered by Christians.  Yet, in Orissa, India’s poorest state to which we are en route, Christians are not regarded as Indian or even human. The worst massacre of Christians since Partition took place in Orissa on 23 August last year, under the orders, so it’s said, of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad – the World Hindu Movement – who claim Christians are ‘impure’, foreign.
Most are dalit ¬– literally ‘untouchable’. It is still a sin for a dalit – or outcaste’s - shadow to fall on a Brahmin.  It is actually illegal in India for a dalit to convert to Christianity, and so escape this oppressive caste system. If they do, they lose numerous ‘privileges’ such as schooling, and job opportunities.  In Orissa, 85 per cent of the population is officially dalit.

Despite massive infrastructure development going on everywhere, India’s age-old hierarchicalism and massive, religiously-consolidated injustice is everywhere.  The new fantastically built-to-budget and to-time Metro in Delhi, the preparations for the Commonwealth Games in 2010, Bollywood’s brilliance and now the appointment of a non-resident Indian (NRI) as Obama’s Surgeon General are difficult to square with real life for the majority of Indians.

It is nearly 9pm, and we are in Sleeper Class – the lowest there is on the long-distance night trains – just outside Agra.  There are another three classes of carriage above this one, before we get to the kind of facilities India’s PR machine would have the West believe is standard.  My travelling companion, an English stoic who was born in Orissa, and who works on justice issues with church leaders, has just stamped on her sixth cockroach after brushing it from the bench.  A tiny mouse tries to make off with a wet teabag leaking onto the floor by my foot – a teabag missed by the dusty beggar child who moved the filth around earlier this evening with a bunch of twigs, in exchange for a rupee.

Every few minutes a different human deformity or disfigurement hobbles up or down the corridor selling some small item or simply begging for a few paise.  A boy with a hand missing; another without a foot; several who are blind; an ancient crone; a man with his face stretched by burns into a rictus of perpetual surprise.  No one else flinches as this ceaseless river of human tragedy flows by.

Poverty is institutionalised – and education statistics tell the shocking tale.  According to figures cited by the Evangelical Fellowship of India magazine AIM, of the country’s 1.123 million government schools, 87per cent are in rural India; of these 46,346 ‘primary schools’ don’t even have a building, 15,791 listed don’t have a single student; 121,794 have only one teacher; and over 50% don’t have toilets.

Those who cannot afford private schools are, like so much else in India, effectively thrown away.