Troubled conscience

 The sight of a severely disabled man, or woman, or even a child, with withered hands and feet that cause them to move about on all fours, supporting themselves on heavily calloused elbows, ankles and haunches, is common but disquieting. And yet, it seems, the dismissal of the serial deaths of beggars and vagrants at the Beggars’ Colony in Bangalore as the result of ‘natural causes’ does not seem to have pricked the conscience of a state government that has driven itself to eradicate them. Beggar eradication is another name for social cleansing.

The Beggars’ Colony typifies those squalid dens, no better than concentration camps, which warehouse and then rid the urban landscape of absolute paupers with mutilated limbs, cankers and sores. In these estates of the vanishing dead, the state does the gratuitous act of cleansing the cities of beggars who cannot be choosers. It is done because the sight of beggars disturbs us and they remind us of the poor and the dispossessed who inhabit the pavements and underpasses. The beggar also reminds us of the burden of unfulfilled promises during elections. The apparition of the dirty, the unwashed and the abandoned hovering around the grand feasts of the affluent must go. It must be removed because its presence in the midst of accelerated urban development brings back to mind what we have long tried to get rid of — conscience, which is now a thin patina on the surface of Indian society.

The Beggars’ Colony is like an exclusive island for penal servitude for those whose only crime is, as panhandlers, they seek alms for sheer survival. Beggars and vagrants will be thrown in, and the only things that will come out are corpses clothed in rags while the riches are enjoyed by officials of the social welfare department. In the colony, the state has abdicated its responsibility for those with  medical and social needs, for those who lack not only skills to enter the labour market but also those who do not have the social and personal networks to support their survival. The country’s beggars do not count because neither do they constitute census statistics nor are they part of electoral rolls. And yet it is not just the government that must be blamed. We must hear our inner cadence, introspect and implicate ourselves whenever we hear the sound of unease.