The lonely death due to heat-stroke in the Arizona desert on the US-Mexico border of seven-year-old Gurpreet Kaur in early June, which attracted banner headlines in the US media, seems to be business as usual for India’s politicians and callous establishment. The little girl was in a group of migrants from India and several South American countries who had crossed over illegally into the US. Gurpreet’s mother had left the exhausted child in a shade as she went to search for water. In a post-mortem press statement her parents said they were “desperate to provide her a better and safer life” in the US. According to US Border Patrol sources, the number of illegal migrants from India apprehended along the south-west border has risen from 77 in 2008 to 8,997 in 2018.
On June 20, some 80 relatives of 243 illegal migrants from Delhi NCR who had embarked on Deva Matha 2, a country fishing boat in January to sail to New Zealand, organised a protest meeting at India Gate, Delhi complaining about police and official apathy in investigating their mysterious disappearance into the blue. They had paid over Rs.3 lakh each to people smugglers who promised to ferry them to New Zealand for a better life. With reports of their baggage washing up on Kerala’s shores soon after, the probability is that all of them have perished.
These recent tragedies are the mere tip of the iceberg. As a consequence of the law’s delay, the insolence of office, systemic corruption, rising inequality, pervasive under-employment, neglected education, breakdown of law and order and sheer lack of opportunities, contemporary India, shaped for over seven decades by the socialist establishment and neta-babu brotherhood, has become one of the world’s largest exporters of human capital. Emigres include not only blue collar workers who endure inhuman working conditions in the Middle East countries, but also upper middle class youth provided highly subsidised higher education in the few dozen globally-benchmarked institutions such as the IITs and IIMs.
Curiously, the huge rush of citizens to flee the country arouses no sense of shame or guilt within the neta-babu brotherhood, the establishment and middle class. On the contrary, the country’s warped bourgeoisie views a child or near relation parked abroad as a badge of honour rather than a vote of no-confidence in its capability to establish a prosperous society of opportunities.
In his monumental 12-volume A Study of History, written over 27 years (1934-61) renowned historian Prof. Arnold J. Toynbee attributes the decline of civilisations to the failure of “dominant elites” to improve the living and material condition of the proletariat at the base of society, through creative innovation. When dominant elites transform into intellectually sterile oppressive minorities, civilisations decline and fall, he posited. In reality, the rising exodus of citizens from the subcontinent at great risk to life and limb, represents a massive loss of faith in the State and the self-serving bourgeoisie which have transformed into oppressive minorities prompting mass secession of the proletariat from a bankrupt, inegalitarian social order.