Poor migrants are India’s new invisibles
Four dry rotis scattered on the railway tracks, fourteen migrants killed in their sleep as a goods train dashed through a part of India, in the midst of a lockdown designed to save lives. The intellectual debate in the country is at a high decibel, it’s all about economic security versus health security. Nobel Laureates from around the world crowd the television screens doling out advice. Politics reigns supreme and no one notices or pretends to notice the ‘invisible’ India that is walking on long roads home. Pictures, they used to say, are worth a thousand words but in India that is no longer true. Distressing images of migrants, dragging their few worldly belongings, infants held in arms, are there for all to see. Their hunger and eventual starvation is a story that only embarrasses most of the upwardly mobile India, so best is to pretend this doesn’t exist. For these people, the debate is not about economic security versus health security, it is about not having any security at all. It is a simple story of a meal a day and daily wages that ensure you survive another day.
They are not a small number and yet surprisingly, the administrations at the centre and state levels, irrespective of their political hues, simply forgot to take them into account when it was decided that the country would be in a lockdown to save lives from Covid-19. While India’s quick decision to enforce the country wide lockdown has no doubt helped saved many lives, I wonder why it was conveniently forgotten that this country and its millions wage a daily battle against something even more deadly — hunger.
The government’s economic stimulus package of Rs20 trillion is good news on the paper and industries hope to open up soon and the wheels of an economy are hoped will be in full swing too. But the migrant labourers, who have spent the last of their meagre life savings in this lockdown, to get back to their villages in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and other parts are unlikely to return to the cities soon. After all, what is it that our urban cities like Delhi and Mumbai, for instance, hold out for them? The promise of labour and daily wages is hardly likely to be a temptation for the thousands who poured out in the streets of Delhi a few weeks back demanding a safe passage home. The scare of starvation clearly outweighed the global scare of the virus.
India’s poor today have a new reality. They are also today India’s invisible, the ones no one wants to see, talk or bother about. The nation-state has global ambitions, we compete with China and we sit across the table with world powers like the United States and Russia as an ‘almost’ equal partner. The squalor of India’s poor then is an embarrassment and an avoidable topic. We want to focus on the glimmer of our new prowess, at our ability to supply the world with drugs like hydroxychloroquine that has the potential to fight Covid-19; and food for our wretched migrants and daily wagers is a low, useless priority. The invisible will stay hidden, for a long while it seems.
The squalor of India’s poor then is an embarrassment and an avoidable topic.