Of 'B' teams, malnourishment, and tribal rights - or why our politics ignores key issues

Does a non-BJP government ensure a solution to vital issues of malnutrition or of 'development' that displaces the poorest and ruins the environment?

A day after Mamata Banerjee's high profile Mumbai visit, where she projected herself as the face of the coalition against Narendra Modi for the 2024 general elections, the West Bengal chief minister posed for a picture with industrialist Gautam Adani. Congress supporters pounced on this as evidence of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) being the "B Team" of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). But the TMC chief had made no bones about her willingness to do business with the most powerful capitalists in the country, both of them known to be close to the ruling party at the Centre. "We need both, Ambanis and Adanis and kisans and the public sector," she had declared in Mumbai.

This wasn't quite what Banerjee had said barely a year earlier. In February, she had described Adani as a "big BJP capitalist who will forcibly purchase crops from farmers." But that was just a month away from the Assembly elections. With the prime minister campaigning against her, it would have been stupid not to express vociferous support for the farmers' protest. Now that the TMC chief has shown her ability to take on Modi, she can confidently welcome the "BJP capitalist" – an openness that Congress CM Bhupesh Baghel cannot display in his frenetic attempts to get Adani to mine the Hasdeo Arand forests in Chhattisgarh.

Neither the Adivasis' determined resistance to this 7,500-hectare project that will not only destroy their homes but also prove to be an environmental catastrophe nor his own leader's promise to these very Adivasis deters Baghel. In 2015, when the BJP ruled Chhattisgarh, Rahul Gandhi had met Hasdeo's Adivasi gram sabhas which had passed resolutions against mining, to express his party's support to their struggle for their "jal, jangal, jameen (water, forest and land)".

Read | Over 33 lakh children in India malnourished: GoI data

There's hardly any party that hasn't been seduced by the country's two most successful corporates. Those who oppose Banerjee's national ambitions might do better to expose her shocking record on a more crucial front: tackling malnutrition. Even as the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS) showed an increase in child malnutrition in Bengal compared to 2015-16, data submitted to the Rajya Sabha on utilisation of central funds under the POSHAN Abhiyaan meant to fight malnutrition revealed that Bengal has used not a single paisa till March 2021.

Malnutrition is not as appealing a topic as Adani or opposition unity, so news about it is buried in the inside pages. But the brief news report on the Ministry of Women and Child Development's data released last week to the Rajya Sabha showed a criminal apathy cutting across party lines towards ensuring that our future generation does not waste away. The NFHS showed an increase in malnutrition in children under 5 in all but nine of 22 states; yet 12 states had not used even half the central funds allotted to them to prevent this. Those who hadn't even used one-third were the BJP governments of Arunachal Pradesh, Ladakh and Puducherry and the Congress government of Punjab. Uttar Pradesh lags behind the already low national average on child malnutrition, anaemia in children and pregnant women, infant and child mortality, showed the NFHS but had used just over a third of the funds.

The topic of malnutrition always gets lost in statistics. But to get to its essence, one only needs to visualise the figure of the under-nourished child we see on our footpaths, and then remember just two statistics: 74 years after Independence, every third child in our country is that emaciated child. Governments know that childhood malnutrition affects long-term physical growth and mental capacity. Yet, they couldn't be bothered to use the funds available to transform the future of that child.

Elections are around the corner in five states, including the country's electorally most important state. The speeches of BJP leaders, including the PM, sell the same old themes of "appeasement, riots, vote-bank politics, lungi-topiwalas" and coalesce with images emanating every day from BJP-ruled states: namazis, churchgoers, Muslim vendors, Hindu-Muslim couples and inter-faith friends being systematically attacked; Dalits raped and police failing to file FIRs. Will voters in these states reject this divisive electoral campaign as did their counterparts in 12 other states?

That would be a difficult feat, given the BJP's financial and political might. If it is achieved, all those sickened by the routine bullying of minorities by Hindutvawadis, backed by BJP governments, will celebrate. But is that enough? Does a non-BJP government ensure a solution to other equally vital issues of malnutrition, of "development" that displaces the poorest and ruins the environment? Or, can all those issues wait for now?

(The writer is a journalist)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.