Insensitive society shames humanity

Kalahandi district in Odisha had become a symbol of abject poverty and backwardness some decades ago. Pictures of famished children and scorched fields from the tribal district had hurt the nation then. If the district had attracted attention because of famine deaths, diseases and deprivation, it has now rushed into national consciousness with a
searing image of disrespect of death and the worst kind of official callousness. The moving image of a tribal man who had to carry his wife’s dead body on his shoulders for many miles, accompanied by his weeping daughter, spoke of the drought of human compassion, not just the failure of the official machinery to come to his help in the hour when he most needed it.
 
Dana Manjhi’s wife had died young of tuberculosis in a government hospital. He did not have the money to pay for an ambulance to take the dead body to his village 60 km away. Odisha has a scheme to provide ambulances to poor people to take their dead home from hospitals. But not one was available to Manjhi. Nor was anyone officially concerned or personally moved when the man lifted the body and started his slow and lonely trek, with a grieving daughter in tow. When the story hit the TV screens, the collector acted to make arrangements to send Manjhi home with the body, but the final 50 km of concern do not erase the first 10 km of callousness, turned darker by contrast. Even after this, shockingly, according to reports, he was harassed by officials before he could perform the last rites.

Dana Manjhi’s story has other elements too which should not be missed. A young woman had to be taken for treatment to a hospital 60 km away from her home after decades of promises to take basic healthcare to villages, close to people’s homes. She dies of tuberculosis against which there have been targeted campaigns and programmes for many years. The failure of the state is glaring, and it is an indictment of the system. But the failure that drove Manjhi on to the road is more basic and concerns our being human. It is an insensitive society that denied a poor woman the right to die in dignity. The image of the man with a dead body on his shoulder tells us more about poverty and exploitation and the helplessness of a poor tribal than a thousand reports and treatises about Kalahandi. It will haunt us and should shame us, because Kalahandis are elsewhere too. Kalahandi is not just geography but a state of mind.