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T
hese are the stark, brutal and
dehumanising images which
will define the 2020 Covid-19
pandemic in India: hundreds
of thousand distressed
people who emerged from
the shadows of the cities
and towns which had failed
them in their hour of desperate need,
making their way home to distant villages
across the country. They walked hundreds
of kilometres, stoically for the most part,
after a stringent lockdown was announced
by Prime Minister Narendra Modi without
any notice. With all public transport shut
down, the endless lines of the hungry
and hounded walked, and walked, across
the baking plains of the country, through
jungles and bylanes, trying to dodge the
baton-happy police and unsympathetic
officials at inter-state border crossings.
From being migrant workers who earned
their living doing all kinds of jobs, they had
become a mass of bodies that needed to be
kept under strict surveillance because they
were seen merely as carriers of infection.
That’s why Jamlo Makdam, a
12-year-old girl, died of exhaustion and
dehydration after walking 150 kms from a
chilli field in Telangana where she worked,
on the way to her home in Chhattisgarh’s
Bijapur district. Jamlo had set out with a
group of fellow workers after they ran out
of work and food, taking the jungle route
to avoid the police on the main roads. Her
story made it to the front pages but there
were countless such tragedies involving
children, women, men and entire families
that went unreported.
It is difficult to comprehend what a
sudden lockdown can mean to migrant
workers who even in the best of times live
in a permanent state of insecurity. Faced
with a lethal combination of crises, of
disease and hunger, they were, naturally,
willing to take their chances with Covid-19
rather than the predictable destitution
through continued unemployment. That’s
how it has been in the past, too. While it
may be simplistic to draw parallels from
history – for instance, to find similarities
with what happened in plague-ridden
Florence in the 14th century and the
coronavirus pandemic in today’s highly
globalised world – certain behavioural
patterns and certain attitudes may serve to
underscore historical continuities.
In A Journal of the Plague Year written
some 300 years ago, Daniel Defoe dwells
at length on the consequences on the poor
of the deadly bubonic plague epidemic
that ravaged London in 1665:
It must be confessed that though the
plague was chiefly among the poor,
yet were the poor the most venturous
and fearless of it, and went about their
employment with a sort of brutal
courage … Scarce did they use any
caution, but ran into any business they
could get employment in…”
In another entry, Defoe, who writes
here more like a researcher than as a
novelist, asks impassionedly:
Let anyone who is acquainted with
what multitudes of people get their
daily bread in this city by their labour,
whether artificers or mere workmen—I
say, let any man consider what must be
the miserable condition of this town if,
on a sudden, they should all be turned
out of employment, that labour should
cease, and wages for work be no more.
Scouring history for similarities with
past pandemics (usually the plague), can
turn into beguiling academic exercises,
●
‘Chhobi 2’ by Laboni Jangi in ‘Borders of an Epidemic’
Invisible threat,
invisible people
●
Borders of an Epidemic: COVID-19 and
Migrant Workers
Edited by Ranabir Samaddar
Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata, April 2020
Unlocking the Urban: Reimagining Migrant Lives in
Cities Post-COVID-19
By Aajeevika Bureau
Udaipur, Rajasthan, April 2020, 90 pp
32 Days and Counting: COVID-19 Lockdown,
Migrant Workers, and the Inadequacy of Welfare
Measures in India
By Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN)
15th April & 1st May 2020, 50 pp
L AT H A
such as Stanford professor Paula Findlen’s
ruminations on Boccaccio’s Decameron,
written in 14th century, and its supposed
resonance with our Covid-19 travails. She
says: “Widespread fear became a basis
for further mistreatment of the poor,
foreign, and disenfranchised sectors of
society — those who did not have the
luxury of flight.” That has held true down
the centuries, in different geographies
and societies. Fear, panic and despair
have been the defining features since the
Plague of Athens (430-426 BC) — one
could read Thucydides’s account of it in
his History of the Peloponnesian War when
mortality rates spiralled out of control
and took a heavy toll on physicians.
The dilemma for the poor has always
been whether to stay or flee; for the
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36
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JISHNU
well-to-do, the concern has been how
to keep suspected carriers of infection at
bay. In the 1896 bubonic plague outbreak
in Bombay, it was the rich who fled the
city first, followed later by the poor.
Pandemics follow a familiar playbook, but
every outbreak is different and none so
much as the current one which is occurring
in a extremely globalised, interdependent
world based on liberal norms which has
changed even more dramatically since the
2009 swine flu pandemic. It was the first
flu pandemic to hit the world in more
than 40 years and it originated in the US,
killing up to 575,400 people worldwide. A
disproportionate number of those deaths
occurred in Southeast Asia and Africa
because of limited access to prevention
and treatment resources.
2020
Covid-19 is spreading at a blistering
pace and, atypically, it is the rich countries
that are facing the brunt of it — at least
so far. There are other factors that
make this pandemic uniquely different.
According to Ranabir Samaddar, director
of the Calcutta Research Group (CRG),
it is because three major global crises
have converged: the ecological crisis,
the failure of the global capitalist order
and the health/biological challenge. In
his Introduction to CRG’s Borders of
an Epidemic: COVID-19 and Migrant
Workers, Samaddar says the combination
of the three crises, a consequence of
neoliberal policies and the “demotion of
public welfare in favour of privatisation”,
will result in chaos.
As borders close everywhere in
concentric circles, Samaddar thinks it is
the ultimate vindication of “the closure
agenda championed by xenophobic
politics and ideology that went on
through the two long centuries of liberal
rule under the garb of trade protectionism,
regional integration, WTO, barbed wire,
closure of walls, ports, and drawbridges
to stop the migrants” (p3). His sweeping
commentary on “War, Pestilence and
Revision of an International Order”,
reflects his political leanings when he
says the pandemic is an additional threat
to the established global order which is
facing a major challenge from “rising
nationalism and economic power of
non-Western countries” (p 2). He means
China, which he defends fiercely against
the unwarranted criticism of the West for
its handling of the pandemic outbreak in
Wuhan. In his opinion, the reaction of
the Western world to the outbreak of the
epidemic in China was “nothing short of
a racist response”. (p 8)
However, it is India’s humanitarian
crisis centred around the migrant worker
that the report concerns itself with,
focusing 13 of its 14 chapters on the dire
situation of migrant workers. Everyone
has failed them, Samaddar notes starkly:
Political parties have fallen silent.
They are clueless about how to
respond to the crisis of lives and
livelihoods of the migrant workers.
Even the All India Trade Union
Congress (AITUC) with its hundred
years’ history of organising the
workers is silent. In the time of crisis
the traditional defence mechanisms
of the society are all dead…There
were no inputs from bureaucracy,
political parties, local governments,
autonomous and semi-autonomous
bodies, and other social forums, as
neoliberal governance had cut itself
off from all conduits between the
market and the society. (p 18)
A clutch of other reports published
in the aftermath of the nationwide
lockdown on 25 March 2020 say the
same thing: the invisibility of the migrant
workers to the official machinery even
though their number runs into tens of
millions, with estimates ranging from 100
million to 450 million. In the wake of an
ill-conceived and disastrously executed
lockdown, they erupted on the scene,
milling around every transport hub and
highway across the country. The legions
of the precariat, carrying their meagre
belongings on their head, and marching
steadfastly home has evoked memories
of the 1947 Partition which haunts our
collective memory even if few of us have
witnessed it. Both events speak to us of
dispossession, trauma and suffering. But
as mentioned before, historical analogies
have their limitations.
 Aajeevika Bureau’s Unlocking the
Urban: Reimagining Migrant Lives in
Cities Post-COVID 19 provides a sharper
understanding of the dynamics of the
visibility and invisibility of labour. Based
on detailed case studies of Ahmedabad
and Surat which are among the largest
hubs of migrant labour in the country, the
report paints a Dickensian picture in its
chronicling of the lives of migrant workers,
and in the ways they are dispossessed and
exploited to facilitate the growth of cities.
The case studies show that the increasing
wretchedness in the rural areas has led to
“the creation of large armies of footloose,
wage dependent labour, who migrate to
urban areas to perform jobs at the lowest
end of labour value chains”. Refered to as
“circular migrants”, the report explains
the phenomenon of circular migration and
how “migrants move between different
urban work destinations and their rural
villages, without settling in the cities
where they are employed…While workers
remain at their work destinations between
3 to 11 months in a year, they always
return to their source villages”.(p 9)
The case studies in the Aajeevika
Bureau report expose the underbelly of
the predatory labour market fostered
by neoliberal policies and are a damning
indictment of Modi’s vaunted “Gujarat
model of development”. Surat is one
the places which witnessed violent
resistance to the lockdown by workers
desperate to go home. Implicit in this is
the fundamental challenge of citizenship
for migrants. The report contends that
since states are organised by ethnicity
and language, citizenship finds its basis
in political communities with a shared
history based on linguistic, ethnic,
religious and cultural commonalities. As
such circular migrants often find that
the everyday process of exerting their
citizenship rights is as fraught as it is in
the context of international migration.
Perhaps, that’s why residents of Moria,
Europe’s largest migrant camp in Greece,
appeared more assertive about their
rights during the lockdown than migrant
workers in Gujarat.
Less ambitious but more detailed in
its analysis of the government’s handling
of the lockdown are two field reports by
the Stranded Workers Action Network
(SWAN), a collective of PhD students,
working professors and volunteers
who got together in the wake of the
first announcement of the lockdown
on 25 March. The reports are a scathing
indictment of the inept handling of the
lockdown by a bumbling government that
clearly did not have a clue about how a
vast swathe of Indians worked and lived.
The volunteers, who grew in number
from the first report, interacted with
over 11,000 workers to provide firsthand
accounts of hunger and despair. The
first report titled 21 Days and Counting:
COVID-19 Lockdown, Migrant Workers,
and the Inadequacy of Welfare Measures in
India (15 April 2020) is an angry report
that should be put on the table of every
minister and government official.
In his address to the nation, the
PM barely acknowledged the
unprecedented hardship caused by
the brutal lockdown so far and treated
India’s 400 million migrants … as if
they were a miniscule minority. In
fact, the figures of 0.6 million (in relief
shelters) and 2.2 million (supplied
food), based on the status report filed
by the government in the Supreme
Court, are just another indication of
gross under-provisioning for migrants
during the lockdown.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. As who finds once again that the city has ambivalence of the prevailing political and
the Aajeevika Bureau report points out, failed him in the time of Covid-19. the economic order towards the worker:
migrant workers are so removed from In “Bringing the Border Home: a body valorised when it is a source of
the policy imagination of the authorities Indian Partition 2020” Samata Biswas foreign exchange earnings or a steady
that any plan to ensure rations and shelter attempts to relate today’s situation to the source of income in poor households but
to migrant workers was bound to fail. ways in which migrants were visualised a matter of concern when it is suspected
Neoliberal policies of the past decades, in the Partition of 1947. The essay darts to be a carrier of infection — a body that
which systematically exclude and exploit in different directions, and looks only is shorn of dignity and respect. Similar
migrant workers to facilitate economic cursorily at the Partition theme before in tone and content is the next chapter
growth, have resulted in the catastrophe settling on the social divisions in society. by Anamika Priyadarshini and Sonamani
we are witnessing now. It elaborates What the pandemic has done even before Chaudhury on “The Return of Bihari
on the marginalisation of the migrant, it hits its peak in India, she writes, is the Migrants” amidst the overwhelming fear
pointing out that the relationship coming together of every faultline that and anxiety caused by the pandemic. Not
between the circular migrant and the city divides us as a people — a repetition of only are they treated with suspicion and
is located on the cusp of two inter-related what the previous chapter posits. brutal disregard by the authorities after
themes: their arduous trek home – interred in
Not for nothing is the biggest camps with no facilities – but also rebuffed
One, their adverse incorporation to weapon to fight this ‘war’ called by their village and community.
the urban growth model where they social distancing. Because it once The themes chosen for this compilation
provide cheap and flexible labour again points at the distances that are by Calcutta Research Group highlight
in highly extractive and exploitative inherent in our societies, the distances the major political, economic and social
work conditions. Two, their exclusion that make life easy for some of us, concerns thrown up by the first pandemic
from urban governance facilities obscuring the labour that goes into in post-Independence India. Borders of an
and services which relegates them creating that life. As a society we have Epidemic is a fine project but sadly it has
to informal and insecure living distanced ourselves from those that come undone for want of strict editorial
conditions. This marginalisation of have built our cities, those that grow control and pedestrian writing by some
circular migrants is further aggravated our food and those that deliver them, of its contributors. Samaddar tries to
by their inability to exercise or demand those that clean our roads and offices pre-empt criticism by saying that the
full and substantive citizenship and those who care for our elderly, and unevenness should be excused because it
rights from urban local bodies, or our children. (p 111) was put together in just two weeks. But
● what was the point of the haste when the
contours of the pandemic were still hazy
and the monster had not been revealed in
The case studies of Ahmedabad and Surat in the all its ugliness? Perhaps a sharper focus
Aajeevika Bureau report expose the underbelly of and fewer essays written with the calm of
reflection could avoid the overlaps.
the predatory labour market fostered by neoliberal The Aajeevika Bureau report on
policies and are a damning indictment of Modi’s the other hand is an unflinching look
at the political economy that fosters
vaunted “Gujarat model of development”. The and flourishes on the casualisation and
report contends that since states are organised by informalisation of labour and offers the
ethnicity and language, citizenship finds its basis clearest explanation of why the migrant
worker remains invisible. Abandoned by
in political communities with a shared history the state and their employers, the migrant
based on linguistic, ethnic, religious and cultural workers face a bleak future. Always on the
brink of starvation, without wages and
commonalities. As such circular migrants often find without work, what are their prospects?
that the everyday process of exerting their citizenship They are at higher risk of exposure to
the virus, the report warns, because they
rights is as fraught as it is in the context of face “physical and mental insecurity, and
international migration. Perhaps, that’s why residents the brutality of the structural violence
manufactured by our exclusionary urban
of Moria, Europe’s largest migrant camp in Greece, spaces”.
appeared more assertive about their rights during the What is the prognosis then? Samaddar
predicts that in the chaotic post-crisis
lockdown than migrant workers in Gujarat world “the old pattern of hegemony, will
●
lose its last bit of legitimacy”. There will
be major shifts in global production and
their workers’ rights for employer It’s a chapter one lingers over for its use the hub and spoke design of global value
provided welfare benefits, remaining of some intriguing art as illustrations. chains is unlikely to continue because
a casualised, mobile, temporary and One of the biggest disappointments is “the virus has exposed the vulnerabilities
stigmatised population. (p 18) the chapter titled “A Report: How One and fragilities of the present system which
State can Learn from Another”. It is cannot isolate the shocks” (p 3). With
The reflections in the CRG essays generally accepted that Kerala’s approach practically every aspect of the welfare
revolve around four themes that and policies on migrant workers, officially system, from public health provisioning
constitute the “borders of the epidemic”: referred to as “guest workers”, has blazed to scientific research being subjected to
implications of the pandemic on the a new trail in labour welfare. For example: privatisation, the winner will be the one
global economy; labour, especially who can demonstrate better capacity
migrant labour; public health and the care The Kerala Migrant Workers Welfare to reorganise society in the face of this
economy; and how social faultlines widen Scheme 2010 provides a registered disaster.
in the time of an epidemic. migrant four benefits: accident/ The questions politics will face,
Ishita Dey’s “Social Distancing, medical care for up to Rs 25,000; in Samaddar surmises, is “what kind of
Touch-Me-Not and the Migrant Worker” case of death, Rs 1 lakh to the family; society will be able prevent the outbreak
is a dilation on the theme of middle- children’s education allowance; and of another epidemic in a better manner?
class hypocrisy and its self-serving use termination benefits of Rs 25,000 What will be the new policies and new
of migrant labour in the time of the after five years of work. When a modes to reinforce and widen the social
pandemic. Dey points out that the new worker dies, the welfare fund provides bases of care and protection? What will
surveillance mechanisms serve to deepen for the embalming of the body and be the new politics of responsibility?”
the ostracism and social stigma the air transportation. In other words, Samaddar puts forward a radical
workers have always faced. Although the the state provides the same facilities proposal: of a society based on collective
lockdown has prescribed social distancing, to migrant labour as it does to its practices to help the health of all people
they run the risk of being infected because residents. (p 136) beyond divides of caste, class and occupation
they are compelled to ‘defy’ the dictum and without the large-scale expansion of
and stay in ‘touch’. ‘Not touching’ is However, this is merely a cursory forms of coercion and surveillance. What
impossible given the harrowing situations listing of the measures without any he refers to as the “collective care of the
they face: the jostling at bus stands, analysis of how it addresses specific self ” — a new type of “public power
crossing the barricaded borders, and life concerns. or republican authority” (p 12) which
in overcrowded slums. Everyday terms Badri Narayan Tiwari’s essay “The values care as the guiding principle of
have loaded meanings for the migrant, Body in Surveillance” discusses the organising society. n
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37