How Come The Poor Are Condemned To Hell?  

Mahesh Vijapurkar

Inequality in incomes is a worldwide phenomenon though standards of living in a few countries in Europe, for instance, could be such that even if one is stinking rich, the other is not bone poor. To the extent that we see and know, there is a sense of equality between persons in the manner in which they are treated, though some biases, like racial, are not unknown.

But to treat the poor as not humans is something we in India have perfected. Despite calling ourselves a modern country on the basis of an ancient civilisation, we continue to look down upon them as something inanimate. Since they are treated such, heaping indignities seems so normal. There are scores of such instances that have surfaced in the past few months.

Even in death, there is a difference between the two classes. Those among the better-off get decent funerals, and lot of notice as if a huge pillar of the community has just collapsed. Funerary references testify to this mindset. The poor don’t even get a pauper’s funeral with the local bodies doing the needful. They are like a leaf fallen off a tree, to be trodden under foot.

The latest is as harrowing as the rest, either before or after. In Meerut, a woman had to spend the night outside the hospital with her dead child because the ambulances were not allowed to cross the district borders. Rules came in force; a rich or even a middle class person in distress would have hired a private ambulance or bribed the reluctant driver. A private vehicle meant shelling out Rs 2,500 for the trip.

When another poor died in Kanpur because the ailing farmer was denied even a stretcher to carry him from department to department. In Odisha, a man carried his dead wife several kilometres to reach his home because the hospital denied him a vehicle. Another had to walk carrying the dead because an ambulance left them midway – because ambulances are not meant for the dead.

When media highlights such instances the officialdom come out with excuses. The person did not wait, they said in one case, and wanted to rush. If rushing was the intent, it would have occurred to the bereaved that a 12-km walk took longer than an hour’s wait for the vehicle. Over simplistic official arguments do not make amends to the indignity heaped. They only underscore insensitivity of personnel at the cutting edge.

An 80-year-old woman’s back was broken in an Odisha hospital because there wasn’t an ambulance on hand to take her body for post-mortem. They slung her on a pole in a sheet and carried her. It is, however, not just the official system that is insensitive in such instances. We around them too became thick-skinned to their plight, as in Madhya Pradesh where a crematorium turned a man away because he had no money to cremate his mother.

He was forced to gather garbage – tyres, paper, plastic bags, twigs, etc. to give her the final rites because the panchayat demanded the fee he couldn’t pay.

In Ulundurpet in Tamil Nadu, as per a report in The Hindu a son of a deceased and a “group of youngsters organised a novel protest of seeking alms to raise money to ‘bribe’ a Revenue Official to release Rs 12,500 sanctioned by way of funeral expenses to a bereaved family.” Probably there are more such stories unreported across the country.

If the media remains sensitive, more stories of the ill-treatment of the poor would surface. The poor are humans too, but we tend to treat them as soulless numbers to use as statistic, and no more. If a person’s income goes up by a single rupee over the poverty line of the government, he or she ceases to be poor, but with no difference to their lives.