The Indian state’s contempt for the most vulnerable, most voiceless of our citizens is one of its ugliest features. The ‘people’ in whose name we suffered decades of economically debilitating socialism are the very people Indian officials treat like dirt. It is my conviction that if they treated them like human beings instead of chattel, thousands of desperately poor people in our towns and cities would lift themselves out of poverty without any help from those anti-poverty schemes on which we have spent thousands and thousands of crore rupees.

Nandigram is an extreme example of the attitude of the Indian state towards the poor and it is fascinating that it should be a Marxist government that behaves in such a thuggish way. But every day, anywhere in India, if you know people living below the poverty line you will hear stories of the weakest of our citizens being marginalised by the state. Most of the people I know living in extreme poverty live on Mumbai’s mean streets. I know them because of an attempt on my part some years ago to try and lure street children into going to school by giving them a hot breakfast every morning under a programme called Nashta. My effort failed but I keep in touch with them and some of the girls are now married with children of their own.

One of them came to me last week and asked if I could help her husband get into driving school. I had earlier paid for other street kids to learn how to drive and thought it would be as simple as it was before, but when Surekha took her new husband to the Good Luck Driving School she was asked if he had a birth certificate, school leaving certificate, or a voter identity card. When she said he did not, she was told that as he could not prove that he was Indian, he could not be admitted because the local transport authority can only give licenses to Indians.

... contd.