Garibi Hatao

“Garibi Hatao,” translated in the novel as “Get Rid of Poverty,” is Indira Gandhi’s campaign slogan, carried across India’s walls and banners as the country’s political landscape intrudes on Saleem’s account of military travel. The phrase offers an emphatic promise of change; its brief appearance, set against a journey toward war, also shows how political language can reach people unevenly and remain beyond their view.

Campaign slogan and public presence

During the 1971 journey to Dacca, Saleem notes that Indira Gandhi’s New Congress Party had won a landslide victory, taking 350 of the 515 seats in the Lok Sabha. The slogan “GARIBI HATAO” is glossed as “Get Rid of Poverty” and described as blazoned across the Indian landscape on walls and banners. It is not presented as a private utterance but as a repeated public inscription, joining electoral victory to a concise promise directed at poverty.

A message missed in transit

Saleem and the sixty thousand West Wing troops, together with the sixty-one members of the CUTIA units, fly to Dacca by way of Ceylon to avoid flying over India. The route means they cannot see the election celebrations or the slogan displayed across the country. The group arrives in Dacca in early spring and travels in requisitioned civilian buses to a military camp; the campaign’s message remains outside their immediate experience even as its political setting forms part of the world through which they are moving.

Slogans, language, and political reality

The novel places “Garibi Hatao” among public words whose meaning depends on where and by whom they are encountered. In another episode, Saleem’s recitation of a Gujarati rhyme during a procession is taken up by the crowd and becomes a war song before a clash between language-based demonstrations. The contrast is not that the slogan itself causes violence, but that political language can circulate beyond its speaker’s control and acquire force through public repetition.

Saleem’s account of Pakistan later describes a different danger: a society in which reality is shaped by what people are instructed to believe. Against that reflection, the Indian campaign slogan is both a visible political promise and part of the novel’s broader attention to the distance between words, public claims, and lived circumstances. The text records the slogan’s reach across the landscape, while Saleem’s diverted journey marks how even a message made ubiquitous can remain unseen by those caught in history’s movements.