In the international media, the biggest COVID-19 story from India, till the frightening spike due a Tablighi Jamaat event, was the depiction of India's pandemic lockdown as having triggered a massive human tragedy or a humanitarian crisis. Both negative stories, belying the image of India and Indians as a responsible country and people, have become infamous episodes amid India's severest post-independence crisis. But the 'agent provocateur' for the two easily avoidable tales of horror are different.
The disquieting jump in the number of people who tested positive for COVID-19 was partly the result of the decision of Jamaat officials who decided against cancelling the conference despite growing apprehensions over large congregations even before the lockdown was announced. But, the spectacle of hundreds of thousands walking home, is the result of a clueless administration's decision to announce a nationwide lockdown without thinking through the implications of pressing the brakes on a behemoth as diverse and multi-layered as India.
Lack of planning
Crises always provide opportunities to global leaders to hold up the mirror to themselves to weigh if they actually are what their publicity machinery makes them out to be. The 'walking lakhs' have shown that the perception that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was an ace administrator and an astute planner was more a misconception than reality.
This the second time after demonetisation, announced in November 2016, that it has become evident within days of a dramatic public statement that the prime minister has not thought out his complete roadmap and timeline. The crisis precipitated by migration was certainly unanticipated. The administration has displayed little evidence of a plan and is literally using fire-fighting hoses (to spray bleach and further jeopardise people's health) and strong-arm tactics to deal with the situation.
This writer, living in the National Capital Region outside the city of Delhi had noticed on March 24, hours before Modi's second address to the nation in which he announced the complete lockdown, hundreds of people beginning to walk down the two highways that head out of Delhi in the northeastern direction. These highways pierce through Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, home to a majority of migrants in Delhi.
There was no effort to stop them even though Delhi and Ghaziabad had been under lockdown since the early morning of March 22, also the day of Janata curfew. The elementary question is, if this movement of people, with their belongings and children, was continuing unhindered and visible to everyone, was there no intelligence report regarding the movement of such a large mass of people in the middle of an emergency situation? Or, were reports filed by the field staff but no one deciphered the implications that an initial movement would metamorphose into massive human migration?
Inability to grasp ground realities
On March 29, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) vice president Vinay Sahasrabuddhe tweeted that he had been speaking with district BJP presidents of Madhya Pradesh. He realised there were "multiple dimensions" for the people to leave the cities where they had been working and living. These ranged from the "yearning for greater emotional security to be with their kith and kin, to seeking less cramped accommodation". He concluded that one explanation was not "fitting all!" But how did the government respond to this? It issued a common order: People who had hit and streets and were walking for hundreds of kilometres to reach their villages had to be stopped and quarantined for 14 days.
Inability to comprehend that the announcement of a lockdown, done as dramatically as demonetisation, would trigger such a huge human displacement, stems from little understanding of India's multi-layered reality. Modi’s centralised style of functioning, working with a small cohesive PMO only – for example, managing the present situation with less than a dozen small verticals – indicates corporatisation of government. It also shows the persistence of a wrong idea – in the formulation of a long time watcher in the Sangh Parivar – that 'Gujarat x 29 = Bharat'.
Aping the Congress
Part of the reason why the government lost sight of the ground reality was due to the absence of regular interface between the ruling party apparatus and government. The relationship model between the government and the BJP since 2014 has resembled the Indira Gandhi model where the party becomes completely subservient to the government. With grassroot leaders, heads of mandals or blocks, having lost relevance, they play no role in managing the crisis stemming from migrations. The BJP in its pre-2014 avatar termed itself a party with a difference and one with a mission.
Now it has been rendered into an election machine and instead of being wedded to principles (however repugnant critics may find these), the party is now focussed on the interests of candidates and securing their re-election. The inability to either sense a looming problem or managing it once the crisis set in, stems from this disconnect. This despite the fact that the BJP has a long tradition of 'sewa' or service as it is a core vertical of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It is not without reason that Bhayyaji Joshi, the current general secretary of the RSS, was previously the chief of the sewa activities of the RSS.
The government also failed to grasp that when Modi's announcement was made on March 24, the majority of migrants were down to the last bundle of currency notes and they had begun scraping the bottom of their barrel literally and figuratively. For most migrants, delay in wages often means buying essentials on credit. With their units shut, owners stating that wages would be delayed and local traders in no mood to extend credit, the migrants had little option but to return home. They were also driven by the fear of the virus that was whipped up by the first Modi address of March 19.
With trains and busses being shut and contributing to the sense of imminent national-level shutdown, people decided that walking was the best option. A CSDS survey reveals that 80 percent of daily wage earners and migrants earn Rs 10,000 or less. Of the entire migrant labour force in India, 50 percent were unable to earn as much as was required to meet their needs and faced constant difficulty in life due to this. Expecting the penniless to stay on along with families to feed, shows acute alienation of the government from people.
Reports coming from the rural hinterland of the returnees not being allowed inside villages and being maltreated and forced to stay in inhuman conditions in cramped quarters will create social cleavages in rural areas. Most regulations against the migrants returning home are likely to have been spelt out by the dominant castes and this sows the seeds of social rupture at some time in near future once this present crisis is in the past.
Some days ago, US President Donald Trump tweeted: "We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself." One does not know if he is following that path or not, it is in any case, his prerogative. But, as far as this government’s ill-prepared lockdown is concerned, the reverse migration of lakhs of workers shows that the cure is indeed turning out to be as worrisome as the problem itself, if not more.
(Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay is a Delhi-based journalist and author. His latest book is RSS: Icons Of The Indian Right. He has also written Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times (2013))
The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.