When VS Naipaul wrote in 1964, "Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate mostly besides railway tracks...." his description of collective Indian shitting became something of a phrase celebre. Besides achieving some grotesque fame, open air bowel excavations were justified by spiritual gobbledygook. Regrettably, Naipaul did not have access to numbers or details of the health hazards he so graphically described. His objection was aesthetic.
Data published in the UN Millennium Development Goals report 2014 should shame us, especially those who own indoor toilets with 21st century appliances like the bidet.
It is estimated 800 million out of 1.2 billion of our population relieve themselves under a threatening sky. "The world does not offer us the decency to let us defecate in private", says a woman from Patna whose daughter was recently raped when she went into the killing fields.
While the Modi government is busy doing spectacular things like single-window clearance for foreign investment and identifying the date and year of the great Mahabharata war, one doesn't read or hear much about what it proposes to do for eliminating a shocking disgrace from our society. Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze point out, "The history of world development offers few examples of an economy growing so fast for so long with such limited results in terms of reducing human deprivations."
An anti-poor spectre haunts the country. Only jholawallahs and garrulous lefties talk of rising inequality. Whatever criteria you adopt, 30 rupees or 40 rupees a day, one third of the `world's extremely poor' live in what is allegedly the third biggest economy on our planet.
In 2014, to write about the poor is to run the risk of being criticized as an advocate of the rejected politics of entitlement. It seems Mr Modi's victory is also a defeat for those championing special rights for 800 million people. Instead, we are told to follow the Gujarat template.