The Big Story: Bed omens

It was the story that India’s English media users chuckled about all day on Tuesday. At a political meeting conducted by Rahul Gandhi in Deoria in eastern Uttar Pradesh, residents walked out with the string cots or khaats bought in by the Congress. The cots were props used by the party to conduct a khaat sabha, a "cot town hall", a new meeting format being essayed by the Congress in Uttar Pradesh along the lines of Narendra Modi’s immensely eye-catching chai pe charcha, discussions over tea, during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

Rural India rarely intrudes into the living rooms of urban, English-speaking Indians. If it does, like in this case, it’s ridiculed. On Twitter, #ReplaceMovieNamesWithKhats trended.

Of course, not only is the ridiculing of poverty extremely distasteful it is also a sign that shows how disconnected India’s elites are from the country's problems.

India’s English newspapers rarely carry news of rural distress. Prime time debates on television are conducted over issues like Baluchistan – an irrelevent issue to someone in Deoria. Even our national politicians rarely talk of poverty these days. The prime minister’s loudest message, this term, has been on foreign affairs. Watching mass media in India, one would almost assume it’s a country that has dug itself out of poverty and is getting ready to confront a different level of issues. Nothing could be further from the truth.

On Monday, Unesco announced that India will be 50 years late in achieving its universal education goals. India achieving universal secondary education is so far away – 2085 – most of the readers of this piece will be dead by the time it happens. Of course, in many ways, even education is a luxury for India’s children. One out of every four neonatal deaths occurs in India. A child born in Bangladesh has a better chance of living past its first birthday. India also suffers from debilitating malnutrition and lack of food. You would never know this from consuming mass media, but Nepal does a better job of feeding its people than India. Amazingly, rural Indians today are actually eating less than they were 40 years ago.

We can see this rural distress in bits when even elite landed castes like the Patels in Gujarat resort to violence to demand more benefits. And of course, we can see when people make a grab for a free khaat.

Political Picks

  1. Kashmir unrest: The Opposition will ask the government to engage with separatists who met them.
  2. The Supreme Court declined to allow Essar Group vice-chairman and 2G case accused Ravi Ruia to travel abroad on the grounds that he might never return.
  3. Cauvery water row explained: Why Tamil Nadu andKarnataka fight over river usage?
  4. “Assaulted” in Noida, Kashmiri man calls up three helplines, gets no help.

Punditry

  1. In the Indian Express, Harsh Mander looks at the victims of the Muzaffarnagar anti-Muslim violence and their lives three years later.
  2. Why has India forgotten the Palestinian issue, asks KP Nayar in the Telegraph.
  3. Survey opinion research is an incredibly valuable tool, but there are challenges to measuring beliefs, drawing inferences, and using limited open data, point out Neelanjan Sircar and Milan Vaishnav in Seminar.

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In the Bihar floods, pregnant women are most vulnerable as risk of disease looms, reports Maneka Rao.

“We always have about four or five women delivering at any given point of time,” said Dr Jabaharlal Sahu, the medical superintendent in-charge of the primary health centre.

But why do they not have more beds?

“We have only six beds in total,” said Dr Sahu. “It has always been the case.”

The shortage of beds also meant that a woman who has given birth is not permitted to stay in the health centre for too long. Thus all the women who had delivered so far were supposed to go back home in the evening.