The mercury has hit 45 degrees Celsius in Delhi and the city’s poor are being cooked alive. Yet again, we see the tragic spectacle of a modernising society treating its most vulnerable citizens as so much human fuel for the engines of progress. British aid groups, ever the conscience of a decaying empire, have demanded action.
But what action? The same performative fists shaking at the heavens that we saw during the Great Famine? The Victorian era, too, had its charities, its pamphlets, its moral outrage.
And still the poor died in their thousands. We are witnessing not a failure of policy but a failure of civilisation. The Indian elite retreat into their air-conditioned bubbles, while the rest swelter in a heat that would make even the most hardened Roman slave revolt.
History tells us that such inequality does not end well. The fall of Rome was preceded by a similar disconnect between the patricians in their villas and the plebeians in their tenements. The question is not whether this crisis will deepen, but when the reckoning will come.
And when it does, those British aid groups will be horrified, as they always are, by the consequences of their own impotent posturing.
