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Analysis | Coronavirus lockdown: if India treats its migrant workers like dirt, blame it on caste

  • Heart-rending scenes of migrants escaping the cities in a lockdown fail to move the authorities
  • The higher-caste policy elite sees only low-borns struggling to survive, and cannot understand the fuss. Isn’t that the natural order of things?

Reading Time:12 minutes
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Migrant workers try to catch buses on the outskirts of Delhi amid the coronavirus lockdown. Photo: Bloomberg
All governments like to make pious noises about the poor, democratically elected ones even more so. Even if they are run by elites with little genuine interest in the well-being of the unwashed, they at least put up a show of caring. It’s not just virtue-signalling, it’s survival. Which is what makes India’s handling of the coronavirus lockdown so baffling. The political leadership of the world’s biggest democracy these days doesn’t even pretend that it cares about the poor working class.
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Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown at a notice of just four hours in late March, India has witnessed epic scenes of migrant workers fleeing the cities. As livelihoods vanished overnight, millions of casual wage earners have hitch-hiked and cycled, but mostly just walked hundreds of miles to get home, often in other states. Some collapsed on the way and died from the exhaustion. Many have been run over.

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Last Friday, 16 migrant labourers were crushed to death by a goods train. They were walking along the tracks and had fallen asleep, exhausted, and had assumed that trains were not running because of the lockdown. On Thursday, eight migrants died when the truck they managed to hitch a ride on collided with a bus. There is no concrete figure of just how many have died so far fleeing hunger while their government says it is trying to protect them from a pandemic.

About 100 million people are said to undertake short-term migration annually in India, taking up back-breaking informal work. From brick kilns and spinning mills to agriculture and roadside eateries, lowly paid workers are ubiquitous, yet inconspicuous and unnoted – outside art-house films and lofty editorials. They are not even considered bit players in India’s stunning growth story starring its software engineers and billionaires. The apocalyptic tide of reverse migration and the cruelty of the authorities towards the migrants have triggered outrage and turned the spotlight on them for the first time.

Suddenly forced out of the woodwork by the coronavirus and spilling out on to the highways, the hitherto-invisible migrant worker has been staring out of prime time news at adequately stocked Indians wrestling with the monotony of watching Netflix and working from home. The distress of India’s informal labour has never been more visible. Except to India’s rulers.

Theinitial government guidelines on the lockdown did not even mention migrant workers. The federal and most state governments have not bothered with any meaningful plans for them, such as providing regular rations or helping businesses pay their wages. For weeks after the lockdown began, there was no talk of transporting them back to their places of origin. Beyond holding them down in cramped, unhygienic shelters with little or no food and zero or scant allowance, there was nothing. Their dehumanising indignity contrasts with the triumphant return home of another kind of migrant worker, the prized Non-resident Indians (NRIs), and rich students stuck in Covid-hit countries such as China, Italy and Iran, who were evacuated by special flights arranged by the government before the lockdown.

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A migrant labourer, who arrived from Gujarat state on a train, inside a bus leaving for her native village in Uttar Pradesh, India. Photo: AP
A migrant labourer, who arrived from Gujarat state on a train, inside a bus leaving for her native village in Uttar Pradesh, India. Photo: AP
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