Bharatiya Janata Party member and actor Khushbu Sundar is easily swayed by anyone praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi, even if it is a girl selling flowers to make ends meet instead of attending school.
She may have deleted her post on X (formerly Twitter) and apologised for it, but not before she was called out for her irresponsible behaviour.
She seems to have met a little girl, who was trading a bunch of daisies and white roses for money at a traffic signal in Mumbai. The girl should have been in school, learning history, geography and science. But that did not seem to have occurred to Sundar.
Glorifying social evil
Instead of questioning why a minor was out in the streets, Sundar was inspired by how she was earning money to help her family and put food on the table—because the girl was selling flowers while singing Modi’s praises.
“Young kids were selling these flowers (in the photograph) with sincerity and pride. A young kid said was hungry, and asked me to buy them. I gave her money to eat and asked her to sell the flowers to someone else, she smiled at me and said, ‘maa phool bechti hoon, bheekh nahi maangti. Hamare Modi Ji ne yeh sikhaya hai, atmanirbhar bano. Mai bhi wahi kar rahi hoon (I sell flowers, I don’t beg. Our Modi ji has taught us to become self-reliant. I am doing that),” she wrote in her post. The caption was followed by the hashtag #ModiHaiTohMumkinHai.
Overlooking child labour is an abdication of duty and responsibility. It is a social evil that India and the world have been working to eliminate but the pandemic adversely impacted that effort in the last decade.
Despite numerous alarming incidents making headlines regularly, the issue gets very little attention in the mainstream discourse. Even in the last year alone, various cases of abuse of underage girls employed in Delhi-NCR households were reported by national dailies.
A child cannot be, should not be atmanirbhar or self-reliant. A ‘young’ child, as Sundar repeatedly emphasises, should have someone to nurture and take care of them. Modi should have made it ‘mumkin’ (possible) for the girl child to see big dreams from small classrooms; that would have been a vindication of his regime. The fact that she has to sell flowers on the streets while crying atmanirbharta is a clear failure.
Sundar later offered an apology and said that she saw a glimpse of herself in the child. “I, who has been through struggle, pain and hardship as a child myself, saw me in that child whose eyes spoke of confidence and courage,” she wrote.
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Increasing child labour
This incident brings the important issue of child labour back into focus. In the post-Covid era, the school dropout rate has reportedly more than tripled from 1.8 per cent in 2018 to 5.3 per cent in 2023, according to the Unified District Information System for Education report 2021-2022. School dropout rates might also indicate more and more children joining the informal labour force.
The problem of child trafficking also stayed in the news last year. Visuals of underage girls being thrashed and starved in upper-middle-class homes of the national capital shook our conscience and served as a wake-up call.
Despite the lack of India-specific data in the absence of a recent census, the International labour Organization estimates that, for the first time in two decades, child labour is expected to increase post-pandemic. It’s particularly concerning as it has been on a downward trend since 2000. Within six years, the global child labour fell by 94 million. However, since 2016, the number of children involved in hazardous work increased by 7.6 million (worldwide), a 2021 report said.
Elections are around the corner, and everyone understandably wants a ticket. Praising the Prime Minister may earn Sundar goodwill and even a ticket. But it won’t guarantee a win.
Views are personal.