India Insight

Whenever anything happens in India, anything at all, you will find someone on Twitter muttering with suspicion about how it was a political conspiracy. What for? Votes, power, money, the usual. Nobody seems to be able to accept the idea that people sometimes just goof up, that cluelessness trumps deceit and a desire to irk other people.

It’s not like there is no evidence for this simple, if inelegant explanation. Look at the cabinet reshuffle this past October, when Minister of State Lalchand Kataria’s induction in the defence ministry was put on hold after confusion over names in the final list.

Personally, I love then-Foreign Minister SM Krishna’s goof-up at the United Nations Security Council when he accidentally read the Portuguese foreign minister’s speech.

And look at these advertisements…

The Bharatiya Janata Party came down hard on the Gujarat Congress Party on Monday after Congress ran an election campaign ad on malnutrition. It included a picture of a child who apparently was a victim of floods in Sri Lanka. Congress said that the BJP should concentrate on the issue, not the picture, while the ruling party called Congress “desperate”. That would work, but only if whoever prepared the ad knew that the kid was from Sri Lanka, and decided to dupe people. More often than not, people think that representative images are good enough to get the point across, and then don’t understand why they aren’t.  That’s not desperate; it’s just clueless.

Here is some Twitter reaction:

@sunandavashisht - Shameless Congress-Malnutrition child of Srilankan floods shown as Gujarati child in ad campaign against BJP#shamecongress

These are the personal views of Siddharth Chatterjee  and do not reflect those of his employer, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Follow him on Twitter: @sidchat1

Since India’s independence, the mammoth task of feeding its hundreds of millions, most of whom are extremely poor, has been a major challenge to policymakers. In the coming decades, the issue of food insecurity is likely to affect almost all Indians. However, for the poorest amongst us, it could be catastrophic. India ranks 65 of 79 countries in the Global Hunger Index. This is extremely alarming.

In the past few years, uneven weather patterns combined with over exploited and depleting water resources in various parts of India have wreaked havoc on food security, particularly for small and marginal farmers, as well as the rural poor.