Serious question --
Stories like this come out of India fairly often.
How come the government hasn't been overthrown yet?
Or severe riots, insurrections, etc?
Seems like that would happen elsewhere, no?
Stories like this come out of India fairly often.
How come the government hasn't been overthrown yet?
Or severe riots, insurrections, etc?
Seems like that would happen elsewhere, no?
In this article, for instance, only the poorest of the poor are truly starving and the vast majority just doesn't care enough to protest. While the middle classes are too busy with their own lives, the poorest and most disadvantaged people are too busy trying to eke out a basic living to actually protest about it.
Let me try to list some reasons as to why.
India has no real opposition party in the centre or most of the states. Most ruling parties end up having uncontrolled power.
Corruption has become so pervasive in the Indian pillars of governance that we don't really have a Law & Order System anymore. The Police are corrupt and the judicial system is corrupt. Criminals thrive, as long as they have money.
Failure of the Law & Order system encourages corruption in the political class. The times that an opposition party does become a bit powerful, they end up being just as corrupt as the ruling party. Most Indian election candidates use the support of various mafia and unscrupulous businessmen to win elections. Once they win this way, they need to help such people now that they are in power.
Over a period of time, these issues have become so pervasive in the Indian system that today the educated and the middle classes stay away from politics. They live in their own laissez-faire life with private utilities, security and medicine. They pay their taxes but don't expect much from the government in return as long as the government doesn't interfere or hinder them.
The powerful media is too busy and is rarely anti-government because government advertising forms a big part of their revenues. So they don't carry such stories for long. The media has their own pressures since they have to keep circulations high by keeping the prices virtually free.
A section of the civil society had been trying to hold anti-corruption protests in recent times. They started with a lot of support but soon the media lost interest in them and nobody really pays any attention to their rallies anymore.
Now for all these reasons, the middle classes are mostly apathetic to the plight of the poor or the fact that the rich are exploiting the nation.
Oh, common please stop this.
If the poor worried about themselves, they will no longer be poor. Expecting other protest for you, earn for you, farm for you is a thing of the communist past.
Nobody is going to come and do it for them.
Also, your whole idea that only the affected should protest in a society is grossly simplistic and if I might say then naive. A society exists to protect all its members including the weaker sections. This has nothing to do with communism.
Social evils are fought by the society as a whole. Should men not fight for women rights, should straight people not stand up for LGBT rights, what about priveliged races against racism?
I think you need to think your argument through without getting needlessly worked up.
I'm invoking Godwin here but this quote is thoroughly apt.
When the Nazis came for the communists, I said nothing; I was, of course, no communist. When they locked up the Social Democrats, I said nothing; I was, of course, no Social Democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I said nothing; I was, of course, no trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left who could protest.
1. Wait for free food to arrive every six months.
2. Note the pattern that the current job/work/profession is not working out and shift to something else instead.
3. Wait for somebody else to protest for me, and stubbornly insist for a free food package every time my village goes hungry.
If I were the person I will opt for 2).
But I take your point that we must protest. But protest against what? These men are in need of jobs, the maximum we ask for is the government to pass reforms which can create jobs.
Without this we can very well fix corruption and solve this for the moment. But they will need food again in the next six months. Like I said before, now this time where will you get the free food from? and how long will this continue?
Also it would be ridiculous to ignore the mentally ill and disabled living in poverty. Often people can't transition into new lines of work easily because of physical limitations.
Anyway, at an NGO that tries to build skills among the poor, the middle-class employees were all talking happily about how nice it was that it rained the previous night, because it had been a hot few months. One of the trainees then quietly said during the conversation that people like them don't really like the rain, because it pours in through their shanties and RUINS THEIR STORED FLOUR (!!) that they use to make rotis.
The last part was that the thing that nobody (including me) had ever thought about. That takes the suckage due to rain to a whole new level.
If you've never watched the Vice Guide to Liberia (http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/the-vice-guide-...) you should. One of the things that stood out to me when reflecting on it is the very first few seconds when they're crossing stagnate water likely containing disease and insects carrying disease. There are nevertheless trees around and lots of dirt--why no bridges? In West Point, why no latrines and toilet pits near or on the beach? Why is there so much systematic incompetence?
In the US at least much of the systematic incompetence comes from the fact many homeless people have some form of mental illness. You can excuse these people and by all means help them, some can even become quite "normal" and productive if they have access to medication that helps keep them stable. The rest? It's hard to find much pity for them.
I don't think my attitude here is particularly "conservative" either, but more due to an engineering personality. If there's a problem, fix it. Unfortunately many poor people give in (through culture, religion, or something else) to a sort of defeatism or general acceptance of their suffering, and those that are theoretically capable of imagination and problem solving nevertheless shirk from it. That's what is truly depressing to me.
Obviously, they would started doing so after the rains started. The point of the story is not to say that the poor are too stupid/poor/helpless to figure out how to protect a few kilos of flour.
The point of the story is like quantum mechanics, the effects of events on a poor person will sometimes be surprising and hard for a non-poor person to understand.
The same reason why the Chinese government still exists: hope and the middle class. There is a growing demographic of middle class people whose fortunes improve every year due to a prospering economy. This growth has not really trickled down into the lower classes, but it doesn't matter - so long as the middle class does well, stability exists. Likewise, so long as there is hope for the poor to join the burgeoning middle class, stability exists.
This, coincidentally, is also the greatest challenge facing China. Inevitably the explosive growth will slow down, and there will be no more hope for social mobility. At that point everything is going to go to shit.
> "Or severe riots, insurrections, etc?"
I can't speak for India, but in China there are. You just don't really hear about them because the government has a very tight lid on things, and they are such regular occurrences that they would hardly get much airtime in the West, even if journalists had unfettered access.
Its just that people by now are so used to all these problems so many of them sort of just go by it.