Hunger is a political choice, a weapon of war
Shariq Us Sabah :
In October 2023, images emerged from Gaza of a mother boiling grass to feed her children. Weeks later, in India’s Jharkhand state, news quietly surfaced of a nine-year-old tribal boy who collapsed in his classroom from chronic undernourishment.
Separated by 4,000 kilometers and vastly different political contexts, both children were victims of the same structural violence. Hunger is not a misfortune. It is policy.
In both Gaza and India, hunger is not about the unavailability of food. It is about access. Who gets food, who is denied it, and why. This is not a failure of logistics or nature. It is a failure of politics. And in both cases, the children suffering are mostly poor, racialized, and forgotten.
India is no stranger to malnutrition. In fact, it ranks 111th out of 125 countries in the 2023 Global Hunger Index, below neighboring countries like Nepal and Bangladesh. According to the National Family Health Survey 5 (2019 to 2021):
35.5% of children under five are stunted (low height for age)
32.1% are underweight
19.3% are wasted (low weight for height)
These figures are not the result of famine or war. They are the outcome of chronic governmental apathy.
The country’s two major child nutrition programs, the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) and the Midday Meal Scheme, have seen massive underfunding.
ICDS funding was cut by nearly 27% between 2019 and 2022, and in many rural districts, anganwadi workers go unpaid or deliver services with no food stock.
The burden falls disproportionately on Dalit, Adivasi, and Muslim children, who are systematically marginalized in the healthcare and food distribution systems.
In Bihar’s Kaimur district, nearly 45% of Adivasi children under five are stunted. In Delhi’s informal settlements, unregistered Muslim children often lack access to ration cards, effectively rendering them stateless in the eyes of welfare policy.
What makes India’s hunger crisis insidious is its normalization. Children are dying of malnutrition not in camps or conflict zones, but in classrooms and homes. Their deaths do not spark outrage. Only paperwork.
In Gaza, hunger is not a consequence of failed policy. It is a military strategy. Since October 2023, when Israel launched its most extensive military campaign in the enclave, food, water, and medical aid have been systematically blocked from entering. UN agencies have warned of famine-like conditions, particularly in northern Gaza.
The destruction is not collateral. It is calculated. Israeli forces have bombed bakeries, destroyed irrigation systems, and targeted fishing boats and agricultural warehouses.
According to Save the Children (March 2024), this amounts to the deliberate destruction of food infrastructure, which is a direct violation of international humanitarian law under Article 54 of Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions.
The use of starvation as a weapon is a war crime. In Gaza, it is enforced with diplomatic immunity.
To compare Gaza’s siege to India’s systemic neglect would be to flatten crucial political distinctions. One is an occupied territory subjected to military blockade. The other is a postcolonial democracy with institutional failings. And yet, both crises converge at a moral junction: the deliberate abandonment of poor children.
In both cases, hunger is not accidental. It is the end result of decisions. Funding cuts, policy paralysis, militarized border control, caste exclusions, and settler colonialism. The structures differ, but the outcome is the same. Children dying because their lives have been politically devalued.
What unites these crises is global complicity. Gaza’s siege is debated in UN chambers while aid trucks are denied entry. India’s malnutrition crisis is buried in appendices of government reports, rarely surfacing in headlines unless it coincides with an election.
This is not merely a failure of governance. It is a collapse of empathy. A world that spends trillions on surveillance, war, and artificial intelligence cannot ensure that children do not go to bed hungry.
For Indian Muslims, Gaza rightfully evokes outrage, grief, and solidarity. Its suffering resonates across centuries of shared faith and colonization. But solidarity, if it is to mean anything, must be consistent. The same ethical energy that fuels protests for Rafah must extend to the malnourished child in Godda or Gadchiroli.
The Prophet Muhammad did not call believers to care only for their co-religionists. He called them to care for their neighbors. That neighbor may be a Palestinian orphan or a starving Dalit girl. Justice does not ask us to rank their pain. It asks us to refuse all of it.
To speak out against starvation in Gaza while ignoring chronic hunger in Assam’s detention camps is not justice. It is compartmentalized compassion.
There is enough food in the world. There is enough grain in India. What is missing is the will to prioritize the lives of the most vulnerable.
In India, that means restoring ICDS funding, universalizing food ration access, and ending caste and religion-based exclusions. In Gaza, that means lifting the siege, ensuring humanitarian corridors, and holding Israel accountable for starvation warfare.
Globally, that means ending the system where some lives are rationed while others are armored.
The child boiling leaves in Gaza and the one fainting in a classroom in Bihar do not know each other. But their hunger speaks the same language. And their survival should not be a matter of politics. It should be a matter of principle.
(Shariq Us Sabah is a writer and researcher. Courtesy: countercurrents.org).