Article 21 & the heat wave

Statistics may be just be numbers. It is often the limitation of arithmetic over human values. The information therefore about how lakhs of people go without drinking water and how India is the hunger capital of the world are spine chilling – if we are prepared to spare a thought.

The gory summer that throws up fatal numbers every morning through the newspapers is not just disheartening but a reflection on our total lack of sensitivity and prays for a sense of priority. Official figures put the death toll at over 2,000.

This could match any rather large scale human disaster. More people have died this summer in the country than perhaps in a collection of terrorist attacks and bomb blasts. How do ‘WE THE PEOPLE‘ react? Time and again courts in the country have ensured to talk about the right to life and liberty.

What is it about the right to life and liberty of those unnamed 2,000? Why were they the carved out exception, the proviso to Article 21 of the constitution of India. When there is a flood warning the government step in, move people to safe places and ensure that they are not victims of the disaster and that they are rehabilitated.

The State sees for itself and rightly so a welfare role of existential justification in ensuring that it steps in to aid and assist large sections of the public. It would be contextually irrelevant to deal with the evolution of the modern state. Suffice it is to state that the modern state surely has a welfare role.

Even systems vowed to laissez-faire like the USA went loud and clear with its recent Obama Healthcare programme to ensure that its role of a modern government is seen in proper perspective. Our constitution guarantees that, “No person shall be deprived of his life and liberty except according to procedure established by law.”

Courts have unhesitatingly extended the scope of this guaranteed right and have zealously gone about its protection. In fact it is perceived as arguably the most vital of the guaranteed rights under the Indian constitution. While initially it was perceived as the mere right to live, over the decades the judicial wing has worked hard and sincerely to define its ever expanding vistas.

The right to life is not just animal existence but right to dignified living, courts have categorically held. Viewed from this perspective, we need to examine the natural calamity of people dying in the twin states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh as victims of the heat wave. Various questions arise, if we are willing to debate.

One important issue is the role of the government responding to the tragedy at a rehabilitative level and at the preventive level. Is it not only just and expectant that the government steps in to ensure that life is valued but also extends a minimum living infrastructure that does not expose the common man to the whims of nature? While “do not under estimate the power of the common man” is a popular cinematic cliché, we need to sensitise governments to the stark reality that we still live in a country where people do not get drinking water on a daily basis. Dehydration in high temperatures has taken its serious toll and the government translates this huge human tragedy to just numbers.

India has over taken China in recent reported figures as the starvation capital of the world. From Manmohanomics to Modifile, from Congress to TDP and TRS, one constant feature seems to be the poor being an electoral priority not a development issue. The cliché that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer is a truth beyond the Modi magic and the Rahul jokes.

We can twitter till tragedy strikes near, we could ping on Facebook jokes of the politicians and can create WhatsApp groups in favour of saffron politics or against it. In the meanwhile people are dying under a constitutional form of government. We need to wake up and act before the constitution becomes just another law.

By L Ravichander