Harsh Mander is a writer who constantly places the plight of India’s poor in front of the country’s middle and upper classes.
Mr Mander is Director, Centre for Equity Studies and Special Commissioner to the Supreme Court of India in the Right to Food case. He formerly worked in the Indian Administrative Service in Madhya Pradesh and Chhatisgarh for almost two decades.
Mr Mander is a human rights worker and scholar. He works with survivors of mass violence, hunger, homeless persons and street children. He has authored 12 books and writes regular columns for the Hindu, Hindustan Times and Mint. Director Shyam Benegal adapted one of his stories into a film.
Mr Mander’s latest book, “Looking Away, Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India,” has just been published to critical acclaim.
The front cover photograph of the book shows the underside of a street sleeper’s feet, with one of the big toes missing.
Harsh Mander's work is characterised by the use of real life examples, children and adults from India's twilight world of destitution.
In his latest book Harsh Mander asks the rapidly growing Indian middle class to shake itself out of its apathy and confront its attitude to the underclass it uses, sometimes abuses and mostly ignores.
Describing one of the reasons he wrote his current opus Harsh Mander has said,
“We’ve exiled the poor from our conscience and our consciousness. We’ve erased them from our films, television and newspapers. Also, in the very manner in which we are raising young people, we have created bubbles of life where our children do not go beyond multiplexes, cars and air-conditioned schools. They almost never encounter the poor in any capacity except those who are there to serve families.
Today, advocates of the poor are considered illegitimate. It is believed that those who seek state interventions for the poor are dinosaur-age things that are holding the country back.
We need to take care of each other. Art, culture, poetry, and films have a huge role to play in this. There are no people in the world who are as close to their cinema as we are. We learn how to love, weep, dress, make our hair from our films. But our cinema reflects our consciousness- which is why the exile of the poor from our cinema is extremely tragic because it reflects and reinforces a particular consciousness. For now, let’s at least revive some of those songs and films and get young people to engage with them.”
As “Looking Away” launched in India recently, the Asian Voice asked Harsh Mander how he collects the poignant personal narratives displayed in his work. He said,
“I have gathered all the stories in my book – of street children, homeless people, people battling hunger and destitution, survivors of religious violence – in the course of my work with them as a human rights worker. I am a writer, columnist, teacher later –all I have learnt is through my work and solidarity with these people who live enormously hard lives.”
The emotional toll of collecting and listening to the harrowing stories of deprivation and abuse must be high, one would think. But Harsh Mander finds light in the darkness.
“Each story I encounter - of desperate hunger, sleeping rough, surviving hate attacks, and so on – weigh heavily on my soul, enough for several lifetimes. If I survive it is because so many of these stories are illuminated with extraordinary resilience, spirit and generosity, even amidst mind-numbing suffering. I wonder often if I lived with what they have, would I be able to sustain even a fraction of their endurance, and their hope and compassion.”
He points out that India adopts measurements of poverty which are minimal, more close to a starvation line. “If we adopt the global standard of 2 dollars a day adjusted for purchasing parity, 70 percent of India’s people are still poor, although India also has a huge wealthy middle class larger than all of Europe, and the third largest number of dollar billionaires in the world.
A minimal framework of universal rights – to food, education, health-care, clean water, sanitation and social security – would cost 10 percent more of GDP. India’s current tax to GDP ratio is just 17 percent. Adding 10 percent would still be much below a country like Brazil.”
Harsh worked as Country Director, ActionAid India from 1999 to 2004.
Among his awards are the Rajiv Gandhi National Sadbhavana Award for peace work, and the M.A. Thomas National Human Rights Award.
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“If we adopt the global standard of two dollars a day adjusted for purchasing parity, 70 percent of India’s people are still poor,” Harsh Mander.
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