On the notion of fundamental rights

I'm reading "The Deadly Choices at Memorial," a long-form feature that won this year's Pulitzer Prize. It's a great story, but I was hampered by a sentence in the second paragraph.

"Within days, the grisly tableau became the focus of an investigation into what happened when the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina marooned Memorial Medical Center in Uptown New Orleans. The hurricane knocked out power and running water and sent the temperatures inside above 100 degrees."

The mystery here - besides how writer Sheri Fink got paid to spend 2 years researching a single project - is what happened in this community medical center when government resources failed.

I remember traveling to New Orleans with a student group nine months after Hurricane Katrina. The land was a swamp. Roofs lay on the ground, separated from supporting houses. Cars, crushed like aluminum cans by the waters, were lodged upside down amid the splinters of fences that they'd crashed against. The land looked exactly as it must have ten days after the hurricane, except the waters had receded.

In some of the houses that we excavated, where water and mold still stood a foot deep, we found the remains of bodies - both human and animal.

It's been nine months, I thought at the time. How can it still look like this?

Later on, I talked with a New Orleans resident about the month after the storm. When she described going down from her FEMA trailer to get Red Cross water supplies because her pipes had burst and her electricity was gone, when she described surviving on moldy cereal bars, I was shocked and hurt.

This is America, I thought then. This doesn't happen here.

Indeed, the government's response to Hurricane Katrina would have embarrassed a Third World government, never mind that of the United States.

But back to Fink's second paragraph. No water, no power, temps above 100 degrees. And that's where I had to stop, because those are exactly the conditions that half of my current country lives with on a daily basis.

Fink uses the word "failure" to describe the government's hurricane response. The Indian government's response to the past 60 years of independence is, unfortunately, on a similar scale.

Indians like to make fun of Americans for the things we cannot tolerate - heat, dirt, dust, extreme poverty - but in this case, hardiness isn't something to be proud of. To become accustomed to living around the failures of the state is its own form of tragedy.

I doubt any New Orleans resident alive today will forget the way the American government abandoned them (an abandonment that was part indifference, part inefficiency - the new Homeland Security Department's treatment of the Katrina debacle made a mockery of Bush's claims to be the "CEO President.")

In India, the government gets a free pass because people have low expectations. When the Courts fail to deliver justice because it would require condemning the son of a powerful family, when legal cases drag on for twenty years, when the water that flows from every municipal tap is so contaminated that it will kill millions of children every year - we just live with it. We just accept it.

When the government sets up a desalination plant on a remote island that fails to deliver any practical benefit to the community, we just accept that it's another expensive government photo op.

But Indians are still drunk on the legends of the West, where the rumor is that governments don't fail.

Unfortunately, this is a myth. The American government has failed on many fronts, although we don't like to admit it. Some people point to health care, I think Social Security will prove to be an equally large failure (although one that is no longer fashionable to talk about)

What does it mean for a government to fail? A government failure is different from a failed government, and a failed government is still different from a failed state. Katrina falls into the first category, Pakistan is quickly inching its way toward the second, and Congo appears to have claimed the third. But for a citizen, the question really boils down to: what should my government be doing, and how much of that is it doing?

In the United States, we assume we are entitled to electricity, clean drinking water, police. But these are things that people in other parts of the world regularly do without. Does that mean that all those governments are failures? (This may seem culturally insensitive, but some civic services are a net good. How many people on earth would prefer to live in a country where the government didn't provide trash pickup?)

So either we say that the Indian government has failed, or we somehow have to say that Indians are entitled to less. (There don't seem to be too many areas - any that I can think of - where the Indian government delivers better services to its citizens than the American government does. I know it's not a fair comparison - population, income, age, extent of colonial legacy - but aren't these just excuses?)