In an upper caste village in Bihar during a recent election, I was taken to see the quarter in which the mouse-catcher community lived. On travels in rural India, I have often seen desperate poverty, but this ‘Musahar’ quarter was the worst I have seen in a very long time. This mouse-catcher community was confined to living at some distance from the main village, in a largeish crater on the edge of a railway track. Mud hovels lined lanes so narrow that two people would find it hard to pass each other. When I went into one of the hovels, I found it frighteningly bereft of the ordinary things we need to survive — food, clothes, bedding.

The children I saw in this ‘Musahar’ quarter were barefoot and in rags, their hair and teeth showed signs of acute malnutrition. The men I spoke to said they made a living by doing odd jobs for the upper-caste families in the village. When I saw the excellent report in this newspaper last week on the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, I remembered that ‘Musahar’ quarter. It surprised me not at all that the reporters who wandered about Bihar to gauge the reaction of ordinary voters to the Election Commission’s new demand for proof of identity found that they........

© Indian Express