I have a dream.

That one day our entire political class will have the guts to admit to corruption, loot and pillage and leave their fate to the ones they owe everything to – us.

 

That we will have the chance to storm our national and state parliaments only to ask political leaders who have illegally amassed wealth upto thousands of crores – how much is enough?

 

That we will all in turn admit to have constantly participated in this corruption and resolve never to do the same again.

 

That money meant for mid-day meal schemes for poor children, for employment to those on the edge of hunger, for drinking water to millions dying of thirst, will never ever be siphoned off again.

 

 

I have a dream.

 

That the 200 million Indians at the bottom of the pyramid will stop dying of broken hearts – first forgotten, then neglected, now simply ignored.

 

That 100 million Indian children will not go to bed hungry every night. 100 million. Two Englands.

 

That one day a politician will visit the adivasis in Rehatyakheda village in Chikaldhara block in Amravati district and see that they have never had electricity, have one hand pump for water and the nearest hospital is 35 km away. No politician has ever been there since 1947.

 

That someone in government, anyone, with compassion, with decency, with a conscience, will allow tribals to stay and profit from the land they and their ancestors have nurtured, loved and grown up on.

 

 

I have a dream.

 

That the 26/11 attack on Bombay will spur civil society to unite and present a force that government will never again ignore.

 

That in time we will have the maturity to reflect on the mistakes India might have made to incite such hatred.

 

That when we sentence a murderer to death we are looking at the world like he does – killing as a solution – when in fact it is the beginning of the problem.

 

That if Muslim organisations that support terror are categorized as terrorists, then so should right-wing Hindu terror-supporting organisations be deemed as such.

 

 

I have a dream.

 

That the 7000 female foeticides that take place every day in India will stop.

 

That 20 million children (the population of Australia), forced into prostitution in this country will be freed and shown daylight.

 

That pregnant women will never again have their wombs slit, their living fetuses torn out and dashed to death while they were set on fire – Gujarat, 2002.

 

That there will not be a rape every 23 minutes in this country. Or a dowry death every 33 minutes.

 

 

I have a dream.

 

That small farmers will never again have to apologise to their children and then commit suicide.

 

That Section 377 making homosexuality a crime will be abolished.

 

That when a girl goes to her mother and says her uncle, or her father has molested her, she will not be asked, “Are you sure?’ She will not be told, “Don’t be silly. You’re imagining things.”

That one day, Muslims who fled Bombay in 1992, will return to their homes. Even if a 93-yr old artist couldn’t.

 

 

I have a dream.

 

Of a time when we will cheer a Younis Khan sixer as lustily as we cheer a Yuvraj Singh one.

 

Of a time where no girl child will ever have to walk the 5 km average to fetch water everyday. Instead she will spend that time in a school.

 

That we will allow people with Aids to work with us, eat with us, live with us. With dignity.

 

Where God is not a Setu, a pandal blocking the street or the reason for jihad, but is linked with our hopes, our hearts, our homes.

 

 

I have a dream.

 

That one day I will be six inches taller.

 

Have a full head of hair.

 

Look nineteen forever.

 

And always have the right, witty answer when face to face with a beautiful woman.

 

 

But I also have a dream

 

That I will never ever be scared to speak the truth.

 

That one day I will have the means, the time, the heart to gather all the street children in this country, put them on a train and take them to a land where they can heal. Where they can play, laugh, eat, do nothing.

 

That we realize that ‘slum-dwellers’ are not the cockroaches of the world. They are fathers. Forced out of their villages through poverty, now struggling to make money, pushed and abused by the police. They are mothers working as ‘kaamwalis’ in three houses a day so their children can do what they didn’t -  go to school. They are children, who have, like all children, an equal dose of delight and tears in them, not dirty, lice-ridden creatures shivering in the rain holding today’s newspapers in a plastic bag.

 

 

I have a dream

 

Where every Indian plays a sport, any game, for atleast an hour a day.

 

Where no hockey player will ever again have to sell his medals to feed himself.

 

Where we win twenty Olympic gold medals in London 2012. If we do things right, It’s possible.

 

Where the Indian rugby team wins the World Cup. We are ranked 75^th now. I will cheer from my wheelchair.

 

 

I have a dream.

 

That one day we will all stop what we’re doing – working on our fields, tending to hundreds of patients, sweating it out at cricket practice, running our paan-dukaans, trying to balance the household budget, begging our child to have, bas one more bite, driving a local train, closing that complex merger…we will stop what we’re doing and suddenly realize, all of us together, at the same, precise moment, that we are all Indians, and that there is no one like us on this planet – we are unique. Because we fight with words all the time, with fists sometimes, we talk loudly on our phones, laugh loudest at our own jokes, we are sexist, smelly, love sweets, swear we will exercise tomorrow and don’t believe in queues. But that we are also moved to tears by a sad film song, we fight to pay the bill in a restaurant, you cannot leave our home without atleast a cup of tea (and thepla, and vadai, and shingada, and matthi…), we feel guilty when we don’t stand up if someone elderly walks into the room, we don’t shake hands – we hug, we are all first cricket selectors, then bankers, lawyers, bad actors…, we stand up and cheer during the climax of Chak De, we all watch terrible soaps on television and swear we don’t and we all love Sachin Tendulkar. And at that moment, that moment when we realize we are all the same, the choice will be ours – to turn to the stranger on our side and say – We are 1.2 billion. 1.2 billion. The world is six and a half billion. That’s one Indian for every four non-Indians. Sounds good. Let’s do it.

Tahira woke with a start. Instantly she knew she had overslept because the sun was high enough to stream through the window of her room. She rose, brushed her teeth, and hurried to feed Bajru and Bhondu, the puppies. The house was empty. Her parents were out on the farm. Where was her brother Altaf? Multi-tasking, she prepared breakfast for both of them and brushed her hair. Hearing the soft slop of spilling water she ran out to give Altaf a hand with the handis.

“Forgot to turn the pump on did you? Ammi must have been furious.”

“Ammi is furious with you! I told you to go to bed last night!”

“I have a computer test today, idiot. What did abba say?”

“Let her sleep. She has a computer test today.”

Tahira smiled, missing her father already.

“What are you smiling for? Have you made breakfast?”

“Hmm. Take the daliya off the stove. I’m going for my bath.”

“Don’t forget to switch the geyser off! And Tahira!  What should we take for lunch?”

“There are some baasi rotis and lauki ki sabzi . Pack them. Extra achaar for me.”

As they got off the village school bus, Tahira and Lakshman could feel the excitement of the day building. Today was Dr. Ambedkar’s birthday. He was a famous national leader who helped write the constitution. He had formed the Dalit movement which had fought and won their battle for equal rights in the 2020s. Although she was not a Dalit, Tahira looked forward to the special sweets and the singing of Buddhist hymns. They lined up in the school yard. Their principal, Mrs. Rao, walked up to the mike.

“My children, I know you are looking forward to the singing and sweets, so I won’t take much time. On a day like this let us take a few minutes to remember and give our thanks to the leaders of the Second Freedom Movement, the fruits of which we enjoy today. If the freedom struggle of the 1940s unshackled us of the British, then the fight of the 2020s liberated our minds. I still remember the caste system as I was growing up in this village. Those were dark days in our lives. Today, let the only caste system be the one of meritocracy, of human values such as love, compassion, equity. Enjoy the day, children. Oh, and, best of luck to the standard nine students in their computer exam today!”

The soothing, mystical notes of the first hymn began to fill the air. Tahira shut her eyes contentedly.

“What should we do, Arshad?” Naseem called out as she made the children’s bed. God what a mess these kids made!

“I think we should say yes.” Arshad called out over the noise of the washing up he was doing in the kitchen.

They were talking about renewing the leasing out of their farm to an agri-business company for the next three years.

Wiping his hands, Arshad walked in and slumped onto the bed.

“Oof-ho, Arshad! I just made bed!”

“Naseem, our income has more than doubled in the last three years, we still own our land, and they pay you for advising them on fields in the entire taluka. It’s a win-win situation.”

“Yes, but sometimes don’t you think we should do something else?”

“You’re thinking of the handloom idea? Ok. Let’s start doing research about it.”

“I’ll get on the net and see what incentives the government is offering. Oh, that reminds me. Are you going to have a talk with Tahira or am I?”

“About what?”

“Her getting up late everyday.”

“Let her be. She had a computer test today.”

Arshad smiled. He was missing his daughter already.

In 65 years, not a single politician has come here.’ It is 5 pm, the sun is softening as we sit amid a bunch of villagers at Rehatyakheda village in Amravati district, 250 kilometres from Nagpur. It has taken us seven hours to reach Rehatyakheda. The last 35 km is a dirt track. “I am 43 and in all these years, we have had no electricity and roads. Only two hand-pumps have been installed for water,” a villager tells me. I look around the village and clichés stare at me: 50% of India lives on less than $2 a day; 100 million children go to bed hungry every night; 62% lives without electricity. Rehatyakheda is a microcosm of all these clichés. It is just another heart of India’s darkness.

There are just two rows of thatched mud huts facing each other in Rehatyakheda. No shops, no dispensary. There’s an apology of an anganwadi; a school room so unsafe that the children study on its open verandah. There are little scrubs of farmland where tuar and chana plants precariously survive. Here, water is scarce and precious. Temperatures climb to 48 degrees in summer. If days are difficult, nights bring their own hardships: pigs, deer and monkeys rampage the standing crops, reducing the already pathetic yields by half.

The village lives in darkness; its children are taught to play in the dark. Food is cooked during the day, eaten by the light of a kerosene lamp, carefully set at its lowest flame, at night. To save kerosene, 10 minutes is all they get to finish dinner.

The nearest medical facility is 30 km away. Pregnant women prefer to give birth in their huts rather than travel two hours on the bumpy dirt track to the nearest public health centre. They know the journey can lead to a haemorrhage and death, like it happened to those women who insisted on travelling to the nearest health centre. This situation has been the same since 1947.

“A couple of years ago, my father fell ill and the few medicines I had did not work. I took him to the dispensary but they had nothing else,” says Narayan, a social worker at Apeksha Homoeo Society, an NGO working in this village and district. “That night my father died. The memory still haunts me and that is why I joined Apeksha.” In this region, Apeksha has distributed solar lamps donated by viewers of the NDTV’s Greenathon last year. I am here to do a ‘one year later’ story about the village that now use solar lamps that my friends and I donated.

When Teri (The Energy and Resources Institute), the partner and advisor to the Greenathon, asked me which region we would like the lamps to be donated to, I only said it should be in Maharashtra’s most backward areas. But I had not bargained for Rehatyakheda.

“You are the first person who is not from an NGO or a government official to visit us,” a villager tells me. “This is the first time we have been given something by someone willingly. For everything else, we have to fight.” They tell me the effect the lamps have had on the lives: 12 hours of light. All night! The men take these lamps to the fields and spend nights there without the fear of animals ravaging their crops. The women cook fresh food in the evenings and the children can now study at night.

But 60 solar lamps can’t make the land more fertile, provide more food or make water any cleaner. Only conscientious and dutybound governance can bring about changes. But where is it? Where did it go after the 1960s? What has made it acceptable to talk about the Sensex more than the infected sores on children who will never see a rural clinic? Why is India not on the streets every time grains meant for the only ration shop near Rehatyakheda is pilfered by hoarders? Why doesn’t Delhi burn when one of the two hand pumps in the village malfunctions and no one comes to fix it?

In the pell-mell of the post-1991 liberalisation push, the middle class is obsessed about wealth. The political class obsessed about pushing more Indians into this consumption-driven tier. Today both are in a conspiratorial dance, a dance of mutual benefit where the silent agreement is: we will make you rich. In return, you keep quiet as we engineer the disappearance of our bottom-most 100 million.

But even as our planners and strategists wait for the 100 million to die of thirst, infection, starvation and diseases, the fun part is they are not dying. It is one of the great ironies of this civilisation that while most Indians have been born into nothing and continue to survive on nothing, they are quite full of life. They live on little and yet retain the ability to comb their children’s hair, sing a folk song, put on their ancestral jewellery and pray on an auspicious day. And keep living. Else, Rehatyakheda would have been a ghost village, a place where adivasis once lived.

But it survives, long enough for me and other Indians to want to question our governors. But cruelly, when the prime minister holds a press conference, the questions are reflective of the deluded paradise we choose to aspire for. In this land, only telecom scams, satellite spectrum and black money  are discussed. Not one question is asked about why no politician has ever visited Rehatyakheda. Why is there no electricity? Why do the schoolchildren here study in a room donated by the forest department? Singh was asked the wrong questions by the wrong people with wrong agendas.

One day, when the PM decides to meet the rest of us, I will take him to Rehatyakheda and make him meet the woman who while serving me a handful of watery tuar dal and a jowar roti for dinner said, “We are very poor, saheb. This is all we can give you. One day perhaps we will be able to afford more.” When, Dr Singh?