Most of us didn’t live under British rule, but over the last two days, imperial voices have been heard loud and clear. This is what the British must have sounded like. Be it the chairman of the Railway Board or the Nashik collector, they’ve held forth as if citizens were mindless herds. The Railway Board chairman justified his decision to make migrants pay for their return home after six weeks of unemployment and hunger by saying this would ensure that “everyone” didn’t travel.
Later, after RJD Legislature Party Leader Tejashwi Yadav and Congress President Sonia Gandhi shamed the Centre by announcing that their parties would pay the fare, a railway official clarified that the states were only being asked to pay 15% so that they didn’t end up “incentivising” travel. One assumes the Railways CEO follows the news like the rest of the hoi polloi. Did he really think that right now, given the situation across the country, the “general public” would hop on to Shramik Special trains for a lark? How is travel incentivised when every traveller has to get a medical certificate at a time doctors are the most elusive species?
The attitude is typically colonial: Subjects have to be treated as if they have no capacity to reason and are only out to take advantage of every situation. Remember Rudyard Kipling bemoaning how “sloth and heathen folly” would bring to nought all the toils of the White Man? The same reasoning, though never articulated, has prevented the Centre from unburdening godowns bursting with 77 million tonnes of foodgrains—almost three times the normal buffer stock—by distributing free grains to everyone. This, even when reports dating from just before the March 24 lockdown showed that the majority of the poor were being forced to reduce their meals to one a day as cities wound down. It was just such an imperious attitude that made the Maharashtra government insist that ration card holders must buy their subsidised quota of foodgrains first before being given the Centre’s free quota.
This diktat came without any steps being taken to discipline notoriously corrupt ration shop owners or repair perennial glitches in the rationing system, and without any acknowledgement of the reality that one-third of the urban poor do not have ration cards. In the same way, the Nashik collector suggested—in so many words—that those walking home could make their own travel arrangements. He would facilitate the return only of those living in Nashik’s government shelter homes. “Mere distress is not a sufficient reason for opening a relief work,” Viceroy Lord Lytton had declared during the Great Famine of 1877-79.
Indeed, for our rulers, it’s business as usual, “mere distress” or not. Look at the way the railways have calculated that they are bearing 85% of the migrants’ fare. From the loss incurred by running these trains at 60% capacity (a necessity), to the cost of the meals and water provided en route, they’ve factored in every detail, including reservation and superfast charges, though the latter do not apply. After such ‘subsidy’, workers on some routes have ended up paying more than the normal sleeper fare! The East India Company would have been proud. Perhaps the most telling indicator of the disconnect between the rulers and the ruled are the English-language websites on which many states expect workers to register.
The attitude of the government is not that workers must be brought home as effortlessly as possible because what’s pushed them to bankruptcy is government policy, implemented inhumanly. There is no acknowledgement of their constitutional right to life, which includes their right to food and dignity. If some of them are being fed khichdi once a day after making them queue up for hours; if they are now being allowed to go home after their parents borrow from moneylenders to send them the fare—that’s the mai baap sarkar’s largesse.
And the police with their lathis make sure they don’t forget this. But these “new-caught sullen peoples/half-devil and half-child” as Kipling called the colonised, may yet surprise their masters. Having seen that they matter neither to their home state that pushed them out, nor their host state, which they built, some might decide to chart a different future. What seemed glittering cities of opportunity just a months ago have turned into blood-sucking stifling hives of sickness. The urban economy that fed on migrant labour might find itself floundering as they decide to stay back in less hostile environments.
The deprivations they suffer there may seem less painful than what they’ve gone through during the lockdown. Already, some construction workers have told this columnist that once they return from their village, they’ll never go back to work for their builder, who neither paid them back wages nor called to check how they were faring during the lockdown. Kipling’s “silent sullen peoples” might just, silently and sullenly, exercise their rights. That would be a fitting payback. The state’s decisions left them gasping. Now it may well be their turn.
Jyoti Punwani Freelance journalist based in Mumbai