Plight of poor more important than N-deal, terrorism

It has been a life-changing forty days. It has left me speechless at the callousness of our leaders and our systems. And it has left me in floods of tears and the daily lives of our millions.

It began, as most important things in my life do, unplanned. This was the first election that I hadn’t been offered a ticket to stand by the Congress. In fact, the elections were not centre stage in my thoughts - after all it was going to be yet another choice between a motley crowd lead by the Congress or an equally motley one lead by the BJP.

Nothing was going to change so why spend sleepless nights or woe-filled days thinking about two unsavoury realities.

And then a single call from my then-only-an-acquaintance Mukul Sinha. Two days of thinking about the proposition and waking up on a Monday morning with the clear call to stand for the Lok Sabha, and to stand alone.

My trek across the constituency started the very next day, 12 days before I filed the nomination. I wanted to know the people, where they were, what they wanted.
140 villages. 2.5 lakh people. Every single slum in Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad. Many housing societies and colonies, many up-market towers. Same story repeatedly, differently, but same none the less.

There is no water. Not to drink. Not to bathe. Not to cook with. In Gota Housing, built 23 years ago under a grant during the regime of Chimanbhai Patel, angry citizens showed me the filth that came as water every four to eight days. They pay a water tax. In fact, they pay two — one to Auda and one to the Panchayat. Yet they have to buy tankers. A 60 something woman told me, “All these years I have carried water to my third floor home. Today I can not. Do I sit here in the dust and bathe and cook?”

In village after village there are floods during the monsoon where people swim out of homes and no water for the rest of the year. Women showed me calloused hands from pumping the hand pump with no water coming through.

In the Charedi hutments opposite GEB in Gandhinagar, 4,000 families live without electricity, water, sewage, roads or ration cards. Young men are regularly beaten up for not having papers to prove that they exist. Many calls to the authorities have not got them the necessary papers.

In Rama Pir no Tekro, 35,000 families live in squalor and filth. Most of them, in this posh Naranpura locality, are rag pickers who leave their homes at 4.30 am. There are twenty pay and use toilets for the 1.5 lakh people, ten each for women and men. But they open at 8 am and shut at 5. Office timings for non-office human beings. Of course there is no work option.

In Chandlodia, in the slums, drunkenness caused through humiliations of having to beg, unsuccessfully, for work, has lead to a proliferation of illegal breweries. The women have to go out into the open for their ablutions. But drunken men leave them no safe possibility of doing so after dark. The result is a very high incidence of urinary tract infections.

In an up-market society in Sabarmati D Cabin, residents gheraoed me screaming abuse at the empty water tanks. An 80 year old blind couple held my hand and said, “Beta, when we go to fill water from the tanker, we pay for, sometimes we knock over someone’s balti. And they beat us. What can we do?”

62 years of Azadi. Of rogues talking of nuclear deals and terrorism when our people can not even find water to drink or a toilet to go to without humiliation. And the story gets worse and worse.

Win or lose, I will fight for their rights. For their dignity. And for our constitution.