When citizens seek death

‘Guj’s Muslim fishermen seek mass euthanasia.’ The headline in today’s New Indian Express is rather unnerving. The issue raises two questions. (1) Is the government meant only for a particular community of people? (2) Can euthanasia be permitted?

Whose India?

India has a Prime Minister who revelled in making statements against a particular community while he was a chief minister. When he became the PM, he stopped making such public utterances which were not only crude but also subhuman. But his attitude towards that community hasn’t undergone any improvement. In fact, he seems to think that India is meant only for one particular community. Mr Modi loves to travel all over the world and suggest solutions to international problems and environmental disasters. But back home, he is as parochial as a dog in its alley. This is the reason why the Muslim fishermen in Gujarat, Modi’s own state, seek death. They know that their future is bleak as long as Modi’s party remains in power. And the party will remain in power for quite some time, for all we know.

The Modi government has written off corporate loans amounting to eight lakh crores. That’s a huge amount, undoubtedly. Very huge, in fact. In the same country where the affluent people get such favours from Modi, poor people like farmers and fisherfolk are driven to suicide by denial of survival supports. Long ago, I wrote in this same space that Mr Modi’s strategy for eradicating poverty was eradication of the poor. Who does Modi really care for? The question is worth asking again and again. To whom does India belong under Modi’s pontificate?

Choose one’s death?

Can people be allowed to choose their death? I have written earlier in defence of euthanasia. I would certainly like to choose my death when I realise that my further life is pointless. I am a fervent supporter of euthanasia. But in the present case, where a community of people ask for the right to kill themselves because they are let down by their own government, there is something drastically wrong. It is a clear and sad indicator of the government’s failure to look after its own citizens. I won’t support that sort of euthanasia.

There are many places where the poor are being neglected by both state and central governments. Even Kerala which boasts of high standards of living has areas where people live in abject poverty. Attappadi is one. Infant mortality rate in that place of Adivasis is higher than the national average. The national infant mortality rate is 27. What it means is out of every 1000 infants born in the country 27 succumb to death before the age of one. Kerala’s infant mortality rate is an enviable 6. But in Kerala’s Attappadi, the rate is 32. 

A pregnant woman being taken to hospital in Attappadi

What Kerala is doing to the Adivasis of Attappadi is what Modi is doing to Muslims in the country. Some people are driven to their deaths by their own governments! Is it any wonder then if such people demand the right to die en masse?

We know that no court is going to give any people the permission to embrace death as a community. But the very demand made by the people should open the eyes of the government to certain harsh and painful realities in the country.