Uttar Pradesh, the state of polio
The Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) accounts for 68 percent of polio cases reported worldwide. According to data from the National Polio Surveillance Project (NPSP), India – accurate, it claims, till 18 January 2003 – 1206 of the 1529 cases of polio in India are located in UP. A very distant second is Bihar, which has 114 cases. The numbers are alarming, and there is danger that if things continue the way they are in UP, India's polio eradication programme will end up as yet another shamefully unfulfilled five-year plan.
Despite a whopping USD 96 million donated annually by various international organisations and multinational corporations for New Delhi's polio eradication programme, and the previous union health minister, CP Thakur's vow to make the nation polio-free by 2005 (the current minister, Shatrughan Sinha, wants to attack the virus "on a war footing"), India is one of the only 20 countries still afflicted by the virus; the others are either in South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan) or Africa.
In UP, where over 66 percent of the reported cases are Muslims, polio survives to afflict another generation due to suspicion, illiteracy and misinformation. In the western district of Rampur, polio-afflicted Uzma, daughter of Tehazib Jahan, exemplifies the problem at hand. The mistrust towards the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP government and the follies of the Congress before it have meant that many members of the minority Muslim community of UP believe that the drugs will render their children sterile. This fear comes from memories of Sanjay Gandhi's sterilisation drive during the emergency of the late 1970s and the vicious 'hum paanch humaare pachchees' ('we five, our 25') rhetoric of the Hindu right, the mathematically flawed logic of which insinuates that a highly procreant Muslim population will swamp Hindu India.
The suspicion of the government has remained embedded in the rural Muslim psyche, and they have been reluctant to participate in the anti-polio drive despite the encouragement of Imam Bukhari of the Delhi Jama Masjid. The people are often so frightened and unwilling to trust that they answer social workers from behind closed doors saying they will not, at any cost, allow their children to be given the vaccines. 26-year-old Rustam Suleimani pedals a rickshaw in the district headquarters, Rampur, in spite of polio, with whatever strength his only good leg affords him so as to earn the month's 1000 rupees necessary to feed his wife and infant child. He might take his child to the pulse-polio programme but his neighbours are unmotivated by his state.