Virulent times for faceless millions

The artist Hasif Khan (@hasifkhan on Twitter) has created an artwork that best represents how India has responded to the lockdown called by the Union government. It is a painted in sombre colours, and shows a few people standing in balconies, applauding and clanging vessels. They are in buildings that face one another. They are in groups of two or three per balcony.

Between the buildings, on the road below, there is a long and densely packed mass of people walking. They are carrying loads on their heads, including children. Their clothes are stained and faded into colourlessness. The sky is open above them. The people on the balcony are shown with facial features. The people on the road have no faces. A small caption in Tamil reads: “Social distancing”.

This is indeed how India has responded to what has been inflicted on it by decisionmakers. The so-called middle class (so-called because it is middle class only by global standards; in comparison to the poverty and destitution of India, it is actually a wealthy minority) was enthusiastic most about the sounds it was to make in celebration of the three-week staycation. It was cruelty to revel in and salute the infliction of trauma on the majority, but that is precisely what we did in banging and clanging and clapping.

A few hundred thousand of us can work from home, collecting tens of thousands — some hundreds of thousands of rupees — a month for switching on our computers and making calls. For millions, this is not possible. It is impossible for the daily wage worker, the labourer, the construction worker to WFH, as we have begun to know it. It is not possible even for the self-employed, the carpenter, plumber and electrician, who must work on someone else’s property and for that reason must travel.

Why is it important for them to work? It is because if they do not work, they do not eat. That is what daily wage work means. It may or may not surprise readers to know that 50 per cent of the income of the average Indian is spent on food.

And given that incomes are disproportionately skewed in India towards the top 10 per cent or less, it can only be imagined what proportion of her income the median Indian spends. Perhaps 60 or 70 per cent, or even more.

It is this group of people who took to the roads the moment the government announced a three-week lockdown and the ending of their employment. More than 600,000 people have been taken off the roads, the government said to the Supreme Court earlier this week, and are being housed in shelters. We have no idea if this number is accurate and heaven alone knows how many are still on the road making their way to some distant place.

The question is why they left in the first place. It is because in times of uncertainty they will head towards a sanctuary. Their village and the people they know and trust. Would we in the upper class place ourselves in the hands of the government in times such as these? And if not, why do we expect that the poor would? The Indian state is weak and lacks capacity. We can speculate about this. But the poor are the ones who actually encounter it and know and have experienced its weaknesses and incompetence.

For us, the fact that MGNREGA wages are not paid or delayed is a news item. Or that rations are denied because of mismatched fingerprints linked to Aadhaar. For millions of people it is a lived reality and it is something that happens to them. It is not realistic to expect them to have faith in such a state when their lives and those of their children are at immediate stake, as they were on Tuesday night when that announcement was made to shut India down.

We were given four days to get ready to create cacophony at 5 pm two weeks ago. The poor were given four hours, and that too at 8 pm, meaning that they were given no time at all to prepare for what was to come for the next three weeks.

The journalist Barkha Dutt encountered a family of three on the road. The man carried their child and his wife their belongings. Her tweet read: “I met Krishna as he carried his 5-year-old son on his head, he was walking to MP. His wife Poonam carried their life’s belongings. Volunteers stopped to offer food & water for a 700 kms journey. They said: ‘No thanks, we have some already.’ That’s the dignity of our poor.”

Another tweet spoke of 50 Adivasi labourers and their families in Maharashtra on the road to nowhere. Their contractor had switched off his phones and they were finding it difficult to get even water from the villages. And mind you, all of this is just the immediate trauma. The agony of how to survive till April 14 and in the months beyond will also weigh on the minds of those who have been abruptly put out of work.

India’s informal workers are 90 per cent of the labour force. In the non-farm sector, this number is 83 per cent of the total, meaning that only 17 per cent of those working in the nonfarm economy — industry, services, government and all of it together — draw a regular salary. The rest work without written contracts. As many as 136 million workers have been made vulnerable because of this lockdown and what is to come because of it.

Even the organised sector, meaning people employed in blue-collar jobs with security, will suffer. A report in Mint said that nine million jobs were likely to be immediately reduced across the manufacturing clusters of textiles, capital goods, cement, food products, metals, plastics, rubber and electronics. Manpower cuts in the automotive industry had already started last quarter owing to falling sales.

This is the spectre of what is to come. This nation of poor is going through and will continue to go through extreme trauma, both because of this virus and because of the actions taken to fight it. The virus seems unavoidable. The numbers in Hubei, New York, Spain, Italy and elsewhere show that there is no chance of stopping it from spreading. It will infect many and perhaps even most of us, but its relatively low rate of mortality means that few of us will die from it.

If we can accept that reality, we might be able to mitigate what we are doing deliberately that is negatively, violently and traumatisingly disrupting the lives of hundreds of millions.

Would we in the upper class place ourselves in the hands of the government in times such as these? And if not, why do we expect that the poor would? The Indian state is weak and lacks capacity