In a dilapidated house in Rajbiraj, Babita Paswan has returned. A few days earlier, she had given birth to her child not in a hospital, but on the pavement outside it. The hospital was right there. But she did not have the money demanded for the blood test. The night caved in, and a few hours later she delivered the baby by the roadside. Babita has now come home. Her house is small, but the question this incident raises are large. In a democracy, some events are not merely news, they become a test of the system. Babita’s delivery is one such event.

On October 2, which is right around the corner, the world will remember Mahatma Gandhi on his birth anniversary and observe the International Day of Non-violence. The most uncomfortable place to remember Gandhi is perhaps the one where there is no picture of him—only a poor Dalit family, a newborn child and one question. 

How safe, after all, is the weakest citizen of the state?

To read Gandhi today only as a practitioner of non-violence would be to diminish his thought. He also raises fundamental questions about modern civilisation, the state, the economy, political power, social inequality and civic ethics. Gandhi’s question remains the same even today: What does the arrangement of state and society change in the life of the weakest person? Babita’s home suddenly makes these questions very concrete.

Here one is reminded of the economist Jean Drèze. In Drèze’s 

work one finds the tradition of viewing poverty not merely as income but as deprivation linked to real access to food, health, education and public services. The quality of public services and access to them affect the real freedom of the poor and marginalised citizen.

In Babita’s case, this difference becomes visible. There was a hospital. There was a health system. There was an institutional framework for maternity services. Yet the lack of money for one necessary test opened the distance between a right and access to that right. Here economics meets democracy. Babita’s pocket was empty. But the question is not only about the pocket.

Should a citizen’s right depend on the capacity of their pocket? Having a right in law and being able to exercise that right in life are not the same thing. Having a constitution and having constitutionalism are not the same thing. Having elections and having democratic citizenship are not the same thing. Having a government and having governance are not the same thing. And having a right and having the capacity to use that right are also not the same thing.

Babita’s home is a small geography of these differences. There the language of the Constitution and the language of life stand face to face. One language says there is a right. The other asks,  but where is the path to reach that right? Gandhi’s criterion of the ‘last person’ returns here. In Gandhi’s famous tabeez (talisman), the face of the poorest and weakest person becomes the moral test of any policy or decision. The question is whether that decision increases, even a little, control over their life and fate.

Seen from Babita’s home, this criterion becomes very simple. Did the state give her the right to a safe delivery? Was that right actually available to her? And if it was not available, where was the shortfall? Here Gandhi’s non-violence principle also demands a new meaning.

The moment we say violence, the image of sticks, bullets and killing comes before us. But some forms of violence are so ordinary that we stop calling them violence at all: poverty, discrimination, humiliation, exclusion, inequality of opportunity, unequal access to public services, the unequal burden of natural risks.

To limit Gandhi’s non-violence merely to not causing physical injury to anyone would be to read his thought incompletely. Read more broadly, Gandhi’s idea of nonviolence invites us to ask whether a human being is being pushed into a social arrangement in which life remains continuously insecure. In this sense, Babita’s roadside delivery is not the story of one hospital alone. It points to a social arrangement in which, for the poorest and most marginalised citizen, risk comes first, and security comes last.

The question of democracy is not only who rules. It is also who has how much control over their own life. Here democracy and Swaraj meet each other. The moment one reaches the question of development, another paradox appears. We speak the language of development a great deal. We speak far less the language of the risks that development produces. A road was built. Whose land was lost? An embankment was made. Where did the water go? A river was controlled. Where did the next flood arrive? A city expanded. Whose settlement was left behind? Who paid the price?

The recent Himalayan floods have once again reminded us that Nepal cannot be read in separate compartments of the hills and the Tarai. A river does not understand political boundaries. Water does not read administrative maps. Gandhi’s view of nature returns here as an uncomfortable question. Are we developing or redistributing risk? If the benefits of development are concentrated at the top and its risks are pushed downward, what sense can it be called just development?

In Nepal’s democratic journey, the street has been an important political space. Citizens’ discontent appears on the street. And the government here either ignores the voice of the street or represses it. The purpose of democracy should perhaps be that a citizen does not have to reach the street every time to speak.

For Gandhi, dissent is not an activity external to democracy. Satyagraha was the citizen’s moral confrontation with unjust power. But for Gandhi, the means were as important as the end. Truth and non-violence were a method of transforming politics. Today, therefore, two questions stand before us. What kind of state do we want? And before that, what kind of political culture do we need to build that state?

One can disagree with Gandhi. One should. But Gandhi’s usefulness does not lie in accepting all his answers for today. His usefulness lies in the questions he left before us. Returning to Babita’s home, Gandhi’s same question is heard again. What is the presence of the state in the life of the weakest citizen? Is her poverty only the problem of her pocket, or of the public system as well? Does her right exist only on paper or also in life? Who receives the benefits of development and who bears its risks? Seen from Babita’s home, the vast philosophy of democracy suddenly contracts into a small courtyard. There is a mother, a newborn child and a door that opens toward the state.