Looking Away Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in new India by Harsh Mander Speaking tiger;Price: Rs.495; Pages: 418 There™s a thriving community of impassioned Left liberals in Lutyens™ Delhi, the academy and media, which dominates the public discourse and shapes public policy. Unfortunately, its power and influence is in inverse proportion to its capabilities, cognitive or otherwise. Even to this day, this privilegentsia is blissfully unaware that it was the wrong ideological left turn of their idol Master Joe Nehru (as he was known in Harrow College, UK), and the acts of commission and omission of his dynastic and ideological heirs, which have reduced high potential post-independence India into a wretched inegalitarian republic of open, continuous and uninterrupted corruption and injustice. An influential and articulate voice within this left liberal community is of Harsh Mander, a member of post-independence India™s privilegentsia (public school, St. Stephen™s, IAS), former India director of Action Aid and member of the National Advisory Council (2010-12), constituted by Congress president Sonia Gandhi to advise the party and government on ways and means to alleviate poverty, inequality and social injustice. During his brief tenure in NAC, Mander was a driving force behind the Food Security, Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee legislations. A prolific author, currently Mander is the founder-chairperson of the Delhi-based Centre for Equity Studies. The provocation for his latest oeuvre is an observation made by American philosopher Noam Chomsky ” a darling of the liberal left universally ” about post-liberalisation India™s newly-emergent greedy and uncaring middle class. œWhat is really striking to me¦ is the indifference of privileged sectors (sic) to the misery of others. You walk through Delhi and cannot miss it, but people just don™t seem to see it¦ they put themselves in a bubble and they don™t seem to see it, Chomsky reportedly said in 2013. Mander evidently shares Chomsky™s penetrating insight into the manners and mores of the country™s new middle class. œA dispassionate external observer would be bewildered by middle-class India™s capacity to look away when confronted with enormous injustice and suffering; by our society™s cultural comfort with inequality, he reflects, explaining the title of this compendium which catalogues the challenges of poverty, corruption and social injustice that define contemporary India. Starting with a damning indictment of businessmen and economists who voiced apprehensions about the inflationary impact of the Food Security Act passed by Parliament in 2013, the author unsparingly lays bare the numerous and multiplying inequities, injustices and deprivations that characterise post-1991 India. This compendium is divided into three broad sections. The first, titled ˜Many exiles of India™s poor™, contains 18 short essays which expose the shocking extent to which the country™s poor majority is deprived of food, housing, education, and respectable employment. In addition, several essays detail the ruination of the justice and public medical and education systems, and the pitiful plight of the nation™s farmers and neglected tribal communities. To the credit of the author, the economic distress of the poor…
