Ash in the Belly by Harsh Mander

Author:Harsh Mander [Mander, Harsh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184758603
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

10

Denying Starvation

Hidden absolute hunger and starvation persist in the shadows of public discourse. When large numbers of people die of starvation, it occasionally captures the media’s attention, and there is transient public outrage. Government officials in every part of the country, hotly deny allegations of starvation deaths, almost in a knee-jerk reaction. Most claim that the deaths result from illness, or heat, or cold, or substance abuse; some even quibble that people were just chronically hungry or malnourished but not starving. I am still unable to tell the material difference between the last two.

With India emerging as the second fastest-growing economy in the world pushing to achieve double-digit growth—despite recent setbacks—it is uncomfortable for policymakers to acknowledge, let alone address, vast reservoirs of unaddressed hunger. The invisibility of starvation and destitution in the food-security debates and strategies derives in part from the problematic and narrow definition of starvation. This is a theme to which we will return later. What is more, few people die directly and exclusively of starvation. They live with severe food deficits for long periods, and tend to succumb to diseases or severe climatic variations they would have survived if they had been well nourished. Official agencies do not recognize these as deaths due to starvation, and instead maintain that the loss of lives was caused by the proximate precipitating factor of infection or nature.

Our investigations revealed that at least ten homeless people die every day on the streets of Delhi, mostly able-bodied, five times more than people with homes.1 It is claimed that they died of the ‘cold’, or in ‘heat waves’. Again, the possibility that they may have succumbed to extreme temperatures that others easily survive because they were critically undernourished is not acknowledged by public authorities.

This chapter will look at the nature of starvation, and how the State responds to it—by failing to see it, by denials, and by blaming the victims.

British famine policy limited itself to prevention of mass starvation deaths but ignored the consequences of malnutrition from prolonged food denials, such as succumbing to eminently curable ailments. Today bureaucracies again deny starvation deaths, and do not hold themselves accountable for the deleterious effects of prolonged food denials. It is reiterated that with the end of large-scale famines, the most important manifestation of hunger is not in the acute deprivation of food, associated with famines and scarcities, but with endemic chronic systemic denials as a way of life even in ordinary times. These people are even more threatened in times of personal, local or larger emergencies. People may not always die of starvation but they live with it, as an unforgiving element of daily living. Famine codes, past and present, do nothing to address these, as we have already shown. In fact, in the past, codes have strictly warned against the ‘misuse’ of relief by people who live even in normal times with denial.

Many contemporary codes, such as that of Rajasthan, do not even admit to the possibility of deaths by starvation. Other

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