Prime Minister Narendra Modi fancies himself as a man who tackles tough problems. He does this to the accompaniment of catchy slogans aimed at focusing public attention.
But there is one aspect of India on which he and his mentor organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), are totally silent: India's population problem which, politically, is the hottest potato of all. So far there hasn't been a single tweet from them on this.
But the thing is, for success, all their other campaigns depend crucially on the number of people they have to deal with. Even if no more than one per cent of Indians don't get the Swachh Bharat message, it amounts to 12 million people, or a little less than the whole population of all Scandinavian countries. They can make India a very dirty place.
There is reason for this avoidance: forgetting that the new generation of voters has no memories of the horrors of the Emergency, all politicians believe that any talk of population control will cost them all the votes.
And there is a reason for that as well: the Gandhi family.
Most people, when asked about the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi and her son, Sanjay, in 1975, say that it almost destroyed India's democratic future. But they are only half right.
The two, but mainly Sanjay Gandhi, also destroyed India's economic future because although by a stroke of luck democracy was restored in March 1977, the damage done to the country's population control policies during the Emergency was never repaired. Having been fully aware of the problem, after 1977, India's political class began turning a blind eye to it.
It has ceased to be a part of the political agenda. No political party since 1980 has put it on its manifesto. That's how toxic Sanjay Gandhi's compulsory vasectomy programme was.
src:sify.com