Spraying chemicals on migrant workers to sanitize them as in Uttar Pradesh. Locking them up in a shed as in Bihar. Opening temporary jails for them as in Haryana. Herding them into ill-equipped quarantine centers across national highways. A Home Ministry circular invoking the penal provisions of the National Disaster Management Act to imprison such defaulters. India has shamed itself in its utterly inhuman treatment of migrant workers – jobless, hungry, without shelter, trying to get home to deal with the wreckage of their lives caused by an abrupt lockdown. As one of the workers, exhausted after a long trek from Haryana, said, “Why don’t they shoot us, that’s all that’s left.”Is the Modi Government so clueless about the social economic reality of crores of Indians that it thought it could just declare a lockdown, implement it in four hours and people would be in a position to stay within the lakhsman rekha drawn by the Prime Minister outside every home? What is home? For lakhs of migrant workers in Delhi, it is sharing small rooms with fellow migrants as tenants in slums or at construction work sites or in the premises of the small dhabas (eateries) where they work or even within shuttered shops. Once all these places of work were shut, thousands of workers had no alternative, driven by the real fear of hunger, to step across the PM’s lakshman rekha to start the trek home. The Economic Survey of Delhi puts the numbers of migrant workers at around 1.2 million, but no one knows for sure, since there are no proper household surveys done in the recent past. It could be much higher. Even the census does not have proper assessments of the numbers of migrant workers. If one takes the entire National Capital Region, the numbers would go up by another million.
What prevented the government from giving a few days’ notice before the lockdown? It is not as though this was a demonetization measure which demanded secrecy. This was a measure for the public good to ensure control of the danger of community transmission of the Coronavirus. It required the full cooperation of the public. Across the world, countries have declared similar lockdown with prior notice of between one to three days. Why did the Prime Minister have to wait till 8 pm to announce the lockdown, why not in the morning, why not the night before? In his first address broadcast on national TV, he had indicated the lockdown plan – so why could it not have been announced then? The way it was done reflects an authoritarian style associated with this government.
Leave a Reply