I recently journeyed to Dehradun by car after many years.
We mainly used the expressway, bypassing small towns and villages like Modi Nagar, Meerut, Khatauli, Shamli, and Muzaffarnagar.
It was a thought-provoking drive.
Whenever I had gone to Dehra Dun earlier, it was usually by bus.
I saw the true essence of India.
Children begged in tattered clothes at crossings, and street vendors sold their goods under the harsh Indian sun or in the winter.
I witnessed weathered men and women carrying burdens on their heads and guiding cows and buffaloes home.
But now, everything has changed.
I couldn’t see anything, not even the towns and villages mentioned above.
Without road signs, we wouldn’t have known they still existed.
The road ahead seemed endless, with sparse traffic and numerous toll booths delaying us and depleting our wallets.
I felt transported from one house to another in a prolonged swoosh in an air-conditioned car with background music playing.
One song that stood out was Fast Car.
Tracy Chapman, an African, was belting out the woe of a poor woman, asking a friend to flee to a city and get a job and see what it meant to be living.
The song made me wonder whether all these highways, expressways, Vande Bharat Express, and bullet trains have not made city dwellers less aware of the harsh living conditions in remote areas of India.
Even in major cities, most of the more privileged travel in luxury cars with tinted windows and designer sunglasses, oblivious of the hardships faced by their less fortunate brethren.
The poor people are eyesores for them and mere obstacles on India’s path to becoming a three trillion dollar economy.
The irony lies without the labourers and construction workers, all those expressways, high-rise buildings, offices, and airports wouldn’t be completed but remain as projects on paper.
Who would cook food, drive cars, or tend to the lawns?
They would be helpless without them, as proved by shifting the people in the jhuggi clusters in and around the Railway Colony on Vinay Marg in the late seventies at Mongolpuri and Jehagirpuri.
Nobody reported for work for weeks afterwards at the Government flats of senior bureaucrats on Vinay and Kautilya Margs.
When they returned, the authorities looked the other way.
It is not to say marginalising a particular class of people was intentional.
India has to pay a price for the development of India.
Yet there have been times when the ruling dispensation tried to hide the poverty of India behind huge curtains if not wish them away.
Under the Congress rule, the VIP route from the IGI Airport to the Rashtrapati Bhavan screened the sight of poor living in abject poverty.
Years later, the BJP government did the same thing in and around Pragati Maidan. PM Modi did not want to let the visiting heads of state at the G-22 Global Summit have a glimpse of India’s poverty to depict India as shining.
The stark absence of visible poverty along the route of over 250 km to Dehra Dun should make anyone wonder if he is not already aware of the ground reality.
Where are those 80 crore Indians to whom the BJP gives free rations?
Do they exist, and is it another one of the Government’s scams?
The roads connect cities with towns and villages, but they mostly link only cities and merely transport (should I use the world teleport) the privileged from one place to another.
No wonder they always speak of the three trillion economy as if the 80 crores don’t exist.
They do not see them anywhere during their travels outside cities.
Their lavish lifestyle conceals the suffering of the poor.
The less fortunate may wear jeans out of necessity rather than choice.
The rich wear torn jeans-at least their women.
I have yet to come across men clad in torn) as a fashion.
The jeans poor farmers wear are either hand-me-down from the affluent or bought at a flea market in Sarojini Nagar. That is enough for the city-bred to criticise the farmers’ movement since some protesters wore jeans or ate pizza at sit-ins around Delhi borders.
It only shows how disconnected they are from reality.
The jeans may cost around Rs. 500/- and pizza is sold at fast food corners.
The less fortunate may not wear designer clothes or enjoy Western cuisine, yet they have the power to unsettle the wealthy, for whom these items are status symbols.
The well-off would wish the existence of the unfortunate away if they could help it.
There is even a rumour going around that some think tanks of the world are even contemplating depopulating Earth to create poverty-free expanses.
Like the rich, the poor have always been part of India, but in overwhelming numbers.
They seldom count more than mere slogans, usually during elections, to gain or retain power.
During Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s time, it was ‘Desh Bachao, Garibi Hatao.
Under the BJP dispensation, PM Modi wants India to become a world guru.
Nobody cares about the faceless Indians.
They remain forgotten.
They came in search of jobs not available back home but asked to fry pakoras to earn a living or stop consuming onions or tomatoes if prices became unaffordable.
The city-bred always question their origins.
Where do they come from, and where do they go?
As if unaware that a vast majority of Indians reside in towns and villages, unseen and unheard despite advances in communication!
It’s akin to asking why the poor sleep on pavements in times of accidents when a drunken driver runs over them.
Do not they have any other place to live or sleep?
But where? Nobody is willing to answer, not the nation’s politicians or thinkers.
These faceless Indians have been left far behind in an attempt to keep up with the developed world.
The elite in India suffer from a low self-image and are seeking recognition from the West.
This network of high-speed roads hasn’t reduced poverty but has only made it less visible in India. So, when Hindutva talks about renaming India Bharat, which India are they referring to? India as Bharat living in metropolitan cities or small towns and villages?
The name may change, but India will still reside in the villages and small towns. Just as two Indias exist, two Bharats will also continue but separately. They will never merge as one.
Rajendra Yadav is a free-lance writer, a blogger, and a member of Shri Ram Chandra Mission, a Spiritual Organisation, also an anti-child labour activist
