Long Live Gandhi!

When creating this blog, I chose the pseudonym Gandhi because it instantly represents peaceful protest, compassion and integrity. These values - so lacking in our leaders today - are the same values that have seen Sonia Gandhi elected as the new leader of India. You will read stories today screaming about the horror of the Indian stock market collapsing as investors (mostly foreign, by the way) pull their money out. You will not read many stories about the impoverished rural majority who voted another Gandhi into power.

While I, living in Australia, have focussed my outrage on Bush, Blair and Howard, many other governments around the world have been peddling the same tunes: "anti-terrorism" and "economic reform" are the new buzzwords and everything and anything can be justified in their name. While some wealthy, educated Indians have been living the dream, others have remained in a generations-old nightmare.

As author Arundhati Roy says "Let us hope the darkness has passed":

"In recent years, the number of people killed by the police and security forces runs into tens of thousands. Andhra Pradesh (neo-liberalism's poster state) chalks up an average of about 200 deaths of 'extremists' in 'encounters' every year. In Kashmir an estimated 80,000 people have been killed since 1989. Thousands have simply 'disappeared'.

The Indian state's proclivity to harass and terrorise has been institutionalised by the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (Pota)... Under the Pota regime, torture tends to replace investigation in our police stations: that's everything from people being forced to drink urine, to being stripped, humiliated, given electric shocks, burned with cigarette butts and having iron rods put up their anuses, to being beaten to death.

Under Pota you cannot get bail unless you can prove that you are innocent - of a crime that you have not been formally charged with. It would be naive to imagine that Pota is being "misused". It is being used for precisely the reasons it was enacted. This year in the UN, 181 countries voted for increased protection of human rights. Even the US voted in favour. India abstained.

Meanwhile, economists cheering from the pages of corporate newspapers inform us that the GDP growth rate is phenomenal, unprecedented. Shops are overflowing with consumer goods. Government storehouses are overflowing with grain. Outside this circle of light, the past five years have seen the most violent increase in rural-urban income inequalities since independence. Farmers steeped in debt are committing suicide in hundreds; 40% of the rural population in India has the same foodgrain absorption level as sub-Saharan Africa, and 47% of Indian children under three suffer from malnutrition. "

Like Roy, I sincerely hope Sonia Gandhi - who now places her own life on the line, having lost her husband Rajiv and mother Indira to assasins - will be able to somehow repay the trust and faith of India's poor and suffering majority.