Food: India’s unique national security debate

Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

NEW DELHI — Security is definitely a matter of definition.

When we talk about security in Northeast Asia, we’re thinking about the threat posed by more than a million North Korean troops, thousands of artillery pieces and long-range missiles tipped with weapons of mass destruction, probably nuclear.

Indian students line up for lunch.  /Manish Swarup/AP
Indian students line up for lunch. /Manish Swarup/AP

That’s the meaning of security in most places around the world. Think of the National Security Agency in the U.S. We know all about their mission from all the stories we’ve been reading about Edward Snowden.

Security also has quite another meaning — one in which probably many more lives are at stake.

That’s food security. You might think the term had come into vogue when considering how many North Koreans are underfed or starving, but I’ve never heard it used in the context of North Korean problems. “Food security” is not at the top of the agenda in Pyongyang. The leaders there seem more concerned about the other type of security.

You have to come to India to learn about the dimensions of food security, the reality of more than half the country’s 1.2 billion people going hungry every day.

India is now adopting an enhanced food security program to meet the demand. The whole program, if it penetrates the state and local levels, will sap more than one percent of the GDP, but there’s no guarantee that those who need the handouts will get more than a small percentage of what’s intended.
The debate over food security gets at the heart of Indian life. Listen to the opposing arguments.

“Markets can ignore the hungry, but poor democracies cannot do so beyond a point,” wrote Ashutosh Varshney, director of the India Initiative at Brown University‘s Watson Institute, in the Indian Express.

“Food security is the price India’s rising capitalism might have to pay for functioning in a low-income democracy.”

Chetan Bhagat, a best-selling novelist, shot back in the Times of India. “The government will not spend on productive assets, we’ll scare the foreigners away and we will never have good infrastructure, schools or hospitals,” he wrote. “We’ll keep caring for poor people until our money totally runs out, the nation gets bankrupt, inflation is out of control and there are no more jobs.”

The president of the ruling Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, Italian-born widow of Rajiv Gandhi, prime minister for five years after the assassination of his mother, Indira, in 1984, has battled with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to put food security at the crux of priorities. Rajiv was assassinated in 1991, two years after his party lost out in elections, and Sonia presumably has her eyes on the political star of their son Rahul, who may be in line to continue the Gandhi dynasty.

The most ardent foe of “food security” is a leading Indian political figure, self-styled “Hindu nationalist” Narendra Modi, chief minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat, at the forefront of India’s economic and industrial rise.

The furor shows the depth of the divisions in a society that includes a Muslim minority of nearly 180 million. That’s about as many as in the “Islamic Republic of Pakistan” that broke off from India, 80 percent Hindu, when they both gained independence from Britain in 1947. Communal strife at the time of “partition” killed more than one million people.

Modi got himself into trouble with Muslims more than a decade ago after riots in his home state killed more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims. Exonerated of any role, he never apologized for what happened.

Then, in an interview with Reuters that’s a huge story here, he tried to show his empathy by a most unfortunate choice of words. “If a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful,” he remarked. “If something happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad.”

The dominant figure in the Bharatiya Janata Party, with deeply Hindu roots, Modi intended the remark to show his feelings for those who died. In fact, comparing the massacre of Muslims with the death of a puppy may not cost him much popularity since he draws his deepest support from a wellspring of Hindu extremism. At the same time, his opposition to the food security bill may fortify his image as a pragmatist critical of schemes likely to founder in corruption.

If nothing else, Modi’s puppy remark provided a break from the food security debate. “How can he divide the country in such a way,” asked Rashid Alvi, a senior Congress leader from a distinguished Muslim background.

That’s a question that Indians are asking with increasing ferocity while the ponderous apparatus of a new food security program goes into motion to feed people to whom “security” means enough to survive — far more important to most people than either military “security” or communal differences.

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