There is this legend about  that renowned Kashmiri mystic saint-poet, popularly known as Lal Ded: it is said that she was once spotted by the equally renowned philosopher-ruler, Shah Hamdan, squatting by the river bank, rubbing clean from the outside a pail full of filth. At which the Shah asked her the obvious question: why was she  thus scrubbing the outside of a pail full of filth.

It is said he was devastated by the profundity of the simple answer he got: “I am only doing that which  everybody does everyday.”

Well, some six centuries after her passing, the Indian Republic is proving her right to the rim.

The new Indian prime minister, a veritable Louis XIV, a state unto himself, has declared a Swachhita Abhiyaan (Cleanliness Campaign), and “patriotic” celebrity brooms are dutifully out on the streets. Indeed, one ruling party satrap seemed so short of any filth to clean up that he was obliged to procure a basket-full, dump it on the road, and promptly sweep it off, duly recorded  by the media lens.

All this while, of course, some sixty percent of all Indians continue to defecate in the open, with no one to clean up the  leavings, needless to say, except the flies and  sundry bugs who bring the merry bacterium back into households and shanties and food shops, giving the local practitioner and the pharmaceutical industry lots to gather in. No cameras there. Call all that the filth in the pail.

The pail indeed is not just a pail but a cauldron of humongous dimensions and carries more than just this kind of filth. It carries unclaimed children sold in their thousands to bondage and slavery, often beaten and burnt in posh homes for daring to disobey, Dalits routinely made playthings of torture-games, struggling Muslims never allowed more than some tantalising  respite between one  politic riot and the next, and made unrelieved objects of epithets of hate blared from public platforms and local vernacular sheets, “ethnic” Indians raped, maimed, killed in the metropolises for looking different or not speaking the local language, custodians of public morality who lie from all ends of their mouths and play glib football with the very laws they make when such laws recoil upon them for their cavalier misdeeds, frozen, ruthless elders who think nothing of hanging by the next tree young people who wish to be left alone to live their own two lives, or of paying hefty sums to have female embryos aborted before they appear as troublesome women, and mounds of ill-gotten wealth that surfaces now and again from  one  palatial kothi or the other—altogether, filthy feudal minds reinforced by filthy new money and brazen poltical clout, who purchase, deal, bash, and deceive their way to power and pelf. And dutiful bureaucratic and other state apparatuses who do their bidding for the most part, not to speak of men of corporate wealth who can buy out whole  governments  to smooth their way to pyramids of profit over millions of destitute lives. And still the cauldron contains further instances of unclean bestiality that truly bring  the gut to the maw, even as the politic brooms are out  to feed the politic cameras.

In the so-efficiently governed state of Chattisgarh, don’t you know, in the town of Bilaspur, poor, illiterate, resourceless women  from the innocence of hinterlands are made captive guinea pigs to  Hitlerite government programs of population control, without being told why they have been herded prone upon bare hospital floors, filthier than anything in the cauldron where the politic broom  is most needed, and slashed in double-quick time piecemeal from cervix to uterus with unsterilized instruments and expired and poisonous medicines, in  an award-winning orgy of cleaning up their offending  wombs of the capacity to bear children. All in the grand  “national interest.” So does it matter that some fifteen of these guinea pigs are already dead, and many more waiting to die. Remember, the only  good poor people are the dead poor people, if one might thus plagiarise an infamous white “patriotic” American pronouncement once made about the native Indians there.

Just to recall: this accomplishment was preceded in the same state of Chattisgarh by two other instances of  cleanliness—one involving blinding hundreds from similarly award-winning cataract surgeries, and the other even better—removing whole uteruses, presumably without intention, a nationalistic endeavor gone  awry  from  a forgivable,  benign error.  In any noble “nationalist” project, the targets must remain steady and waiting even if the guns mutilate or misfire.

You would think such atrocities ought to lead to some clean-ups among the perpetrators. Well, think again; those responsible for such botch-ups remain beyond the reach of the swachhita broom.  Only some lowly, obedient heads may roll for a time until they are fixed right back upon award-winning shoulders. Don’t forget we had knowledge of plastic surgery all the way back in ancient times.

Oh, the unconscionable cruelty of it all. An ancient Indian saying has it “where women are respected, there the gods have their abode.” Well, that place surely is not India.

It never was.  Our genius was and is in the crooked skill to make words stand for non-existent realities.

In that skill resides our proverbial greatness.  Between the palaver and the deed stinks the cauldron. So swachhita we need, but not just of the kind that our numero uno has in mind.

Badri Raina

Badri Raina is a well-known commentator on politics, culture and society. His columns on the Znet have a global following. Raina taught English literature at the University of Delhi for over four decades and is the author of the much acclaimed Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth. He has several collections of poems and translations. His writings have appeared in nearly all major English dailies and journals in India.