Lament in a Time of Global Pandemic: Identifying With The Migrant Poor |A.Lozaanba Khumbah

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“How deserted lies the city,

            once so full of people!

How like a widow is she,

            who once was great among the nations!”

These are the opening lines of the book of Lamentations from the Bible. It was written in the 6th century BCE when the kingdom of Israel went through great national suffering. These ancient lines of lament, however, poignantly capture the current state of our cities in lockdown. For most of us, the world as we have known it has paused. Our lives have been suspended. And we are stranded between the past and the future even as economies plummet and livelihoods disappear before our eyes.

This moment of ‘pause’, experts have pointed out, is extremely important – what we do now will largely determine the kind of world we live in after Covid-19. Government policies are going to determine the lives of millions for years to come. The businesses and industries that it saves will (re)configure the economic landscape drastically, perhaps further accentuating inequality. The surveillance techniques that are being employed to track the disease will probably be a permanent part of life.

In this article, I take a cue from the writer of Lamentations and propose that we lament. And this, I believe, is one of the most important things we can do as a nation. At its very core, to lament is to express sorrow over a great loss. But more importantly, it is about identifying with those who have suffered loss – an intrinsic character of a community. In our country, there is no question that it is the poor who have lost, specifically the migrant labourers who have been going through hell for the past two months. This is an invitation to participate in their tragedy.

An indifferent country

If a call to lament sounds rather strange, it is due to the unimaginably high levels of indifference in our country. If there were any doubts about our apathy, it was duly exposed by our reactions to the death of migrants run over by a goods train (Rohit Kumar, The Wire, May 13). ‘How could they have been so irresponsible? They have no one but themselves to blame. Who sleeps on a railway track? Why couldn’t they sleep by the side of the tracks?’ This was the response from large sections of social media users in a country that had witnessed the sight of several thousand migrant workers walking hundreds of miles back home.

How do you explain this attitude of the Indian masses tweeting away from the comfort of their homes? It is as if these migrant workers inhabit a different universe, as if they are not from the same country. Or more accurately, as if they are less than human. The quality that makes us human, the ability to relate with another human being and share in his or her pain seem to disappear when it comes to migrant workers in the cities. P Sainath (Firstpost, May 13) said it well: urban India never really cared about migrants. It cared only about the services they provided.

This indifference to suffering comes quite naturally to Indian society. The caste system thrives by ignoring and silencing the struggles of those in the lower-rung of the hierarchy. And I am persuaded to think that 70 years of Independence have not transformed the Indian psyche that has been conditioned over millennia. On the contrary, combined with the powerful idea of upward economic mobility, Indian ears have become less sensitive to the cries of the poor. Success has come to be measured by the ability to live with higher and higher levels of indifference.

My point is that the problem highlighted by the migrant labourers’ exodus from cities is not only about economic inequality. Far from it, it reveals how marginal a space the poor have come to occupy in our collective societal imagination. Their ‘invisibility’ in the city has always been taken for granted. In fact, admit it, we have always treated them as if they were dispensable. In our country, the poor have become the real other.

No government for the poor

The honorable Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not addressed the issues faced by migrants in any of his speeches. To begin with, it is quite clear that migrant labourers were not factored in when the government decided for a lockdown. But two months into the lockdown and even after many gut-wrenching stories of starvation, police atrocities and the loss of many lives, the migrant crisis is far from resolved. There is no other way of putting it: the poor is not the priority of this government.

Prior to Modi’s fourth address to the nation, many commentators had expected him to highlight the issues faced by migrant labourers. But in a speech where he articulated his vision of a self-reliant India and announced a 20 lakh crore stimulus package, Modi was silent on migrants. But this is no mistake. Modi’s silence speaks clearly of his idea of India where inequality is assumed and the poor taken for granted. By that logic, the lakhs of migrants strewn around the highways are a shame to the country; they reflect poorly on India’s image. In fact, they imply that Modi has been a failure and therefore mentioning them would amount to acknowledging his mistakes.

But the Covid-19 pandemic and its mismanagement have made a mockery of the Indian government. It has also exposed deep-seated bitter truths in Indian society. If only we admit it, this government is guilty. And we are a convicted country. The 18 migrant laborers squeezed together and traveling in a concrete mixer is proof. Every migrant who has walked home through the burning sun, with a baby in her arms (or in her womb), is witness to the great injustice in our great country. And every man, woman and child who fell lifeless on the road testify against the system that oversaw its death.

A call to mourn

That is why a call to mourn makes sense to me. It is not a sign of weakness or of helplessness. On the contrary, this is an antidote to apathy and self-obsession – if we allow ourselves to be disturbed by the death of Jeeta Madkami, the 12-year-old girl from Chhattisgarh who died after walking for three days.

The call to mourn is a challenge to see through her mother’s tear-filled eyes and recognize where we have arrived as a nation. It is, therefore, also a call to confront the empty rhetoric of power and acknowledge what Modi could not: that as a country we failed the most vulnerable amongst us.

The government has been criticized for treating the migrant issue as a law and order problem. As a society, we seem to be treating it as something with which we have little to do, as an issue that is out there. It does not strike us yet that we are living through perhaps one of the greatest humanitarian crisis in the history of independent India, caused not so much by a virus but due to a systemic failure. This is a crisis of national priorities and a misplaced idea of greatness. But this is also a crisis of the narrative of success, one in which we are all entrenched.

Therefore, we have to mourn. We have to identify with the most vulnerable amongst us. Only then can we begin to treat our bhaiyas and didis not only as those who mop our floors and clean our toilets but as equal image-bearers of humanity. This is not only moral. It is also highly subversive because it counters the narrative that inherently ascribes more value to the rich and considers the poor as expendables – a narrative which caused the migrant crisis in India. To mourn is therefore to resist any attempt to marginalize the poor, whether it is in the response of the government, in the imagination of society, or in the narrative that weighs the worth of a human person in economic terms.

Nearly a month and half into the lockdown, the government was forced to make arrangements, including buses and special shramik trains, to bring migrant workers back to their homes. This is a welcome move, even if they appear to be driven more by political reasons rather than humanitarian concerns. It also raises the obvious question of why it was not done much earlier. But even if the dust settles down and every single person desiring to go home has been enabled to do so, the migrant crisis should not be forgotten.

It exposed a populist incompetent government, just as demonetisation and GST did. But the migrant crisis revealed in no uncertain terms how marginal space the poor occupy in our country. This should disturb every concerned citizen.

It is even more troubling that this group of people did not find a place in the Prime Minister’s imagination of a ‘self-reliant’ country nor relief from his 20 lakh crore package meant to help realize that dream.

To conclude, the scale of the human tragedy that unfolded in the months of March and April cannot be captured by the official death tolls. It is perhaps one of our lowest points as a nation. We may begin to fathom its depths by listening to those who have suffered the most. Perhaps then we may learn to be a community again, and bear one another’s burden – even if that is suffering. And in doing so we might discover what it means to be a truly great nation.

A. Lozaanba Khumbah is currently pursuing a Ph.D. from the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

This article is being published in the June edition of ‘Veritas’ by JNU Christian Fellowship, New Delhi.