Forgotten children of Thar

When George Santayana said “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — he probably was not thinking of Sindh and its governance. Sometimes even when we know the past (and the present) we still repeat. Unfortunately, those who are condemned here are the poor children of Thar, who are politically useless for the leaders and make little difference whether they are alive or dead.

Well dead they are, by the scores. This year and the year before, and the year before and so on. While statistics often mask the real tragedy, sometimes they are useful to illustrate how deep our rot is. In the past month alone, there have been 47 deaths of children in Thar due to malnutrition. The number is upwards of 155 in the last three months. The number is gut-wrenching but the response that varies from apathy to denial, deflection to lip service, is beyond shameful.

When the issue of malnutrition first caught prominence in the media, I remember, it was March of 2014. There were widespread calls for the resignation of Mr Qaim Ali Shah, then chief minister. But he did not resign, for that is not how we operate. It was suggested by some apologists that he is getting old and governance is not quite his thing anymore. There were lots of hopes on the Stanford educated new Chief Minister, Syed Murad Ali Shah. Unfortunately, he has fared just as bad in this matter.

We seem to be on a different planet than many of the other nations. A ferry sank in South Korea in 2014, with no fault of the prime minister, but he resigned because he did not do enough for the loved ones. Latvian prime minister resigned when a fire led to the collapse of a supermarket roof in 2013. A fire raged at a Mall in Kemorovo region in Russia last week and the governor resigned for not acting with empathy and having a tone-deaf response.

I will leave the comparisons between ours and other world leaders to the readers.

The governing party in Sindh takes pride in being progressive and caring about all citizens. Their manifesto is impressive and inclusive. It talks about social justice and the Twitter happy leaders are the first ones to raise the cause of the marginalised. All good — except the action on the ground in the province and the promise on the paper are millennia apart. Whether it is the chairperson or the chief minister, whether it is the leader of the opposition or anyone in the ruling family, there is no ownership of responsibility and no strategy. The bureaucratic arm is equally uninterested. In his response to the chief justice (who we will come to later), the secretary health simply said that he is unable to get doctors to go to Thar. If he thought that absolves him and his department of culpability and responsibility, he is clearly mistaken.

The reason this news has come to the fore is that the chief justice is taking notice of deaths in Thar. Perhaps viewed from a short-term lens, this is a good thing. But in reality, this shows the utter breakdown of the system and lack of any inherent responsibility. The CJ should not be the person policing the performance of a given department. That is neither his mandate nor his job. But in a world where no one is doing his job protecting innocent children, how do we define what anyone’s job is anymore?

Here it is equally important to understand that just because health is a provincial matter, it does not mean that vulnerable children are no longer the responsibility of the federal government. Every citizen, regardless of where he or she lives, deserves not to die due to corruption, mismanagement and apathy. The federal government doesn’t seem to be interested in the poor of Thar either. It is said that inaction is just another form of action. We call death by willful action as murder. What should we call death by willful inaction?

Published in The Express Tribune, April 3^rd, 2018.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.