HomeIndiaIndia’s hunger, education and freedom trapped in the vortex of Hindutva!

India’s hunger, education and freedom trapped in the vortex of Hindutva!

India’s hunger, education and freedom trapped in the vortex of Hindutva!

Vandita Mishra October 14,2024

After BJP’s victory in Haryana elections, discussions have started again about the ‘double engine’ government and its achievements and its acceptance by the public. How Congress lost the election while winning and how BJP won it while losing it is a matter of a different debate. The issue is whether the law and order and social indicators have really improved in BJP-ruled states? Has the Modi government really given a ‘model’ by adopting which BJP-ruled states are continuously climbing the ladder of development? Has the Modi government itself been able to set a standard of better governance despite running the government for 10 years? For me, the answer is ‘no’.

‘Governance’ is still a very complex standard, to assess the Modi government, one can start with ‘hunger’. In view of Covid-19, the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana was started in March 2020. The effort was to ensure that the citizens of India do not remain hungry during the pandemic. Under this, free ration was arranged and about 80 crore Indians benefited from it. But the question is, did people in India not need ration before the pandemic? Of course they did, that is why the UPA government brought the Food Security Act in 2013. Now providing food to people is no longer dependent on elections and speeches. The government is legally bound to provide ration to the needy.

Vandita

But when this scheme was started in 2013, India’s Global Hunger Index (GHI) score was only 17.8. According to the index, the lower the score of a country, the better it is in terms of food security of its citizens. As this score increases, the situation of hunger in the country also increases. A year later in 2014, when the power of the country passed from Congress to BJP and the leadership was going to Narendra Modi, the same GHI had decreased to 17.1. This was a period of ‘moderate’ hunger in India. But since 2014, due to the negligence and bad policies of the Modi government, the condition of hunger in India continued to increase. Before the Covid pandemic reached India, the Modi government had taken the score of the Hunger Index beyond 30 points. Now India was grappling with ‘severe’ level of hunger. It was during this period of severe hunger that the pandemic also started showing its face. In 2023, India’s score was 29.4 and the country was ranked 107th among 121 countries in terms of hunger.

Now the Hunger Index of 2024 has also come out. India’s hunger score has decreased nominally to 27.3. Now it is being said that India has improved. Whereas the reality is that India has “reduced the bad” this time. In such a situation, my question is that if 27.3 score is good, then what should be said about the scores of 2013 (17.8) and 2014 (17.9)? This is also the question that what did the Modi government do to India that the GHI score which was on track till 2014 went off track in 2015 (29.2)? How did ‘moderate’ hunger suddenly reach ‘serious’ level? What kind of policies were made that made it necessary to ignore the deprived sections of India?

The basis for assessing the hunger index is mainly ‘malnutrition’, ‘stunting’, ‘wasting’ and child mortality. Amidst all the election noise and the echo of the double engine, does anyone know that about 36% children in India are victims of stunting, about 19% children are victims of wasting. Along with this, 13.7% children suffer from undernourishment and about 3% children become part of child mortality every year. The analysis of GHI shows that malnutrition has increased since Narendra Modi came to power, the situation of hunger remains ‘serious’. These figures highlight systemic problems like food security, poverty, and gender inequality.

The latest statistics of the National Crime Records Bureau show that year after year, crimes against women are increasing in India. Morning newspapers are filled with news of rapes. Uttar Pradesh is the best example of the so-called double engine government and this state is at the top in terms of crimes against women. Uttar Pradesh is also at the top in the country in terms of gang rapes. Madhya Pradesh, another example of the double engine, is second after UP in terms of gang rapes. But PM Modi, ‘hurt’ by the gruesome rape in Calcutta’s RG Kar Medical College, seemed forced to take the support of a rapist in the Haryana elections. The entire country has seen Narendra Modi’s selective silence and helplessness. Dera-Sachcha Sauda chief and rape convict Ram Rahim was released on 2 October on a 20-day parole just before the recent Haryana assembly elections.

Rape accused Ram Rahim was also released on 5 October before voting so that he could seek votes for the BJP. Just like Ram Rahim was released on parole again and again, he did not disappoint BJP and Modi. This rapist openly asked his supporters to vote for BJP. This was Ram Rahim’s 11th parole. Not only this, PM Modi knows that there is a constant competition between his popularity graph and the falling value of rupee. He knows that he cannot win any election on his face alone, so he does not see any harm in taking support from a rapist. Giving shelter to rapists just for political gains and to remain in power is the reason why the courage of the miscreants committing crimes against women has increased.

Education is another way in which the citizens of a country are empowered. The foundation of a strong education system is academic institutions. The foundation of these institutions is based on their academic freedom. Narendra Modi’s government is engaged in destroying this academic freedom. India’s condition in the Academic Freedom Index 2024 is worrying.

The annual report published by the Academic Freedom Monitoring Project of Scholars at Risk (SAR) states that the most prominent threats affecting the academic freedom of students and researchers include measures to impose political control and impose a Hindu nationalist agenda on universities. SAR is a network of 665 universities around the world, including prestigious institutions such as Columbia University and New York University. The report takes a comprehensive look at India. According to the report, India’s academic freedom has fallen from 0.6 points to 0.2 points from 2013 to 2023. The most important point of the report that needs to be focused on is that the Modi government is engaged in Hinduization of India’s educational institutions. Describing this policy of the government as the biggest threat, the report says that “In India, the biggest threats to the academic freedom of students and scholars include efforts by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to impose political control and impose a Hindu nationalist agenda on universities and university policies that limit student protest.”

University education determines the future of a country. How will a country work in the interest of its citizens, how will governments be forced to make citizen-centric policies, how will governments be prevented from turning into authoritarian forms? All this is determined by university education. Students coming out of these educational institutions act as ‘corner stones’ for the country and not political student organizations that harass professors to impose religious ideology in universities. Take the case of JNU’s Professor of Political Theory Nivedita Menon, who has been given a place in this report. Because she is a critic of RSS, students of Akhil Vidyarthi Parishad harassed her forcefully, UK professor Natasha Kaul was banned from coming to India for criticizing RSS. There are innumerable examples that prove that efforts are being made to destroy academic freedom in the country’s educational institutions to impose the agenda of Hindutva.

A government which has made the mistake of considering contesting and winning elections as democracy is not concerned about the fact that the country is facing severe hunger, women are becoming increasingly unsafe, rapists are being given political patronage and India’s educational institutions are being tampered with on the directions of the RSS. In such a situation, the citizens will have to decide how appropriate the so-called double engine governments being formed in the country are for this country. One has to be cautious about the fact that if these governments continue to be formed like this, then the leadership of these political parties will get a ‘license’ to play with India’s future and this would be unfair.

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