The dilemma with migrants in India

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The dilemma with migrants
Provide income and food support; communicate perils of travel

Hindustan Times

Migrant workers gather in large number at Bandra, Mumbai, April 14, 2020(Zoya Lozba/HTPhoto)


On Tuesday afternoon, just hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the extension of the lockdown for another 19 days, hundreds — some reports indicate thousands — of migrant workers made their way to Mumbai’s Bandra (West) station. They had been waiting for the lockdown to end — and had assumed that they could return home. Some reports say this assumption was based on an erroneous news report about special trains. With restrictions in place, including on inter-state bus and rail travel, this was not to happen. The same day, in Surat, hundreds of textile workers staged a sit-in, demanding that they be allowed to return home. This yearning is not new. Soon after Mr Modi declared the lockdown on March 24, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers began making their way home, some walking long distances to do so.

These large congregations of workers — at close proximity with each other — are disturbing. They represent a sense of desperation, which is emerging from economic suffering and emotional anxiety. They also undermine the principle of social distancing, for one infected person in any of these gatherings has the potential of infecting hundreds, who may then come in contact with hundreds of others. It requires one incident to begin another chain of transmission, which can set back India’s efforts in the battle against the pandemic.

And that is why a two-pronged approach is necessary to allay the anxieties of migrant workers. The first is recognising that they are economically insecure, without incomes, and often, without food. As Kerala finance minister Thomas Isaac pointed out, without income support, compliance with the restrictions will be low. The government needs to immediately expand its cash transfer measure — and include workers in the unorganised sector, perhaps even incentivising those who stay in camps for migrant workers, at least till May 3. The partial lifting of restrictions in areas less vulnerable to the infection after April 20, as notified by the home ministry, will help a segment of workers. But they need more direct financial and food support. There is a second element. Many workers are anxious to return home because they are frightened — of the disease, of staying alone in the city, of the fate of their families back home. Travel will mean a high degree of risk because social distancing norms cannot be enforced in trains and buses. Travel is also difficult because their home states are not receptive to these workers, given the fear that they may spread the infection in villages. These are all real constraints, but the issue requires more sensitive communication — and the announcement of measures which allay their anxieties and encourages migrant workers to stay where they are.

The dilemma with migrants

Provide income and food support; communicate perils of travel

www.hindustantimes.com

 

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How Unfortunate, Migrants Treated As Black Holes And Black Boxes Of Corona Chronicles

A trauma is a physic wound that goes beyond the physical to damage the soul. It carries shades of stigma. It is usually confined to the backstage of most disasters and is constructed as an afterthought. The trauma of the coronavirus pandemic faces a similar fate.

As India sees itself as a middle-class society, it defines itself in middle-class terms. The whole idea of the lockdown was seen as a disciplinary exercise, an attempt to redefine life as a timetable. The middle class lives by timetables. It is a mindset and a way of life. When timetables are frozen, the middle class goes into confinement and its certainties are destroyed. With the lockdown, the upper middle class discovers boredom, isolation, anxiety, leisure and, of course, work from home. Yet the middle-class mentality displayed a complete indifference to the marginal, the migrant, the nomad—and the trauma induced by the coronavirus begins with these very categories.

The trauma of the informal society accelerated at the very moment the national lockdown was announced, when the worker faced the very temporariness of its citizenship and being. The migrant discovered he was marginal, suspect and jobless. Haunted by vulnerabilities, he had to face hunger and humiliation. He was treated as a mass organism and was sprayed with chemicals at the borders. The middle-class tourist also discovered this underside of life as he rushed borders that had been shut down, confronting the police that had fused the migrant and the tourist in his mind. Suddenly, the ordinary Indian faced fear, anxiety and aloneness as he found there was no sense of homecoming. The migrant as an ambiguous creature was trapped in a liminality that bureaucracy refused to understand. The Bihari workers who had left their ration cards home found themselves confronting a hunger that left them helpless. Sadly, their anxiety and fear found no narrative, and the mental woes went backstage. Added to the indignity of treatment, they also found the absence of their place in the emerging narratives. They were the black holes and black boxes of the corona chronicles. The migrant discovered that some disasters are more equal than others. For example, cyclones and floods have rituals of response and narratives, but the coronavirus had a few explanatory myths to make life easier.

The slum, usually throbbing with life and activity, had completely emptied out. With the lockdown began the police crackdown on all the little shops and dhabas. The daily-wage worker found he had no employment. He had to wait day after day to watch the scene unfold. Joblessness, hunger and uncertainty haunt the informal economy. As a woman in a Chennai slum told me, “A few woman as domestic workers hold on to their jobs, but what about our men who hang around and wait?” Waiting is the trauma that the rich do not understand. Waiting empties identity, breaks confidence and questions competence. Waiting is greeted in silence because it is cloaked in anonymity. The slums fester in a trauma of waiting and uncertainty, yet the media had little place for them. It celebrates ‘work from home’ for corporate executives.

One has to face the stark uncertainty of what is called civic life today. A lockdown creates a Hobbesian policy, a set of authoritarian territories patrolled by cops and clerks. The police handle all such challenges by reducing it to a law-and-order problem, where everyone is by definition suspect. They lathicharge people thoughtlessly, including even those returning from official responsibilities. The terrifying indifference of cops is complemented by landlords creating a web of stigma around patients, doctors and social workers. The landlord is convinced that all of them are infectious and wants to extern them. This places doctors and social workers in an ironic situation. The sadness is that both the trauma and the authoritarianism of the city go unreported.

Opinion | How Unfortunate, Migrants Treated As Black Holes And Black Boxes Of Corona Chronicles

During corona times, the migrant discovered he was marginal, suspect and jobless. Haunted by vulnerabilities, he had to face hunger and humiliation, writes academician Shiv Visvanathan

www.outlookindia.com

 

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To be fair, while trauma, unstated and unreported, haunts the informal economy, it is beginning to haunt the middle-class as well. Here time is a major factor because the certainty of timetables is what defines middle-class identity and stability. A housewife complains that people had little place for her fears; she told me she suffered from the guilt that she might infect someone innocently. She also complained she gets haunted by fears that are further exaggerated by the rumours and reports from the street. One of them mentioned the story of a mob attacking a man merely because he coughed obsessively. The ordinary cough, once a mark of everyday presence, now becomes sinister. She also added that old people now feel vulnerable as they have been statistically singled out. Vulnerability and susceptibility now become marks of stigma.As a 70-year-old man put it, “I felt hard as a rock, but now people treat me as a question mark.” Worse, old people, especially those with senile dementia, now appear obsolescent. They feel apologetic in the presence of company, clear that time is no longer on their side.



Our society has few narratives or myths to make sense of the trauma of mass death.

Yet, what includes all citizens is that the coronavirus has created an ecology of death, mass death, around the Indian city. An individual death is understandable, but mass death creates fear and trembling of a different kind. It has an apocalyptic inevitability that puts a stop to ordinary life. This everydayness of mass death is measured with the banality of weather reports as newspapers announce body counts for the day. The word exponential has a magical quality of fatalism. People feel helpless and sense that the virus could claim one and all. Mass death creates a deep sense of trauma and our society has few narratives or myths to make sense of it.

Vulnerability, violence, non-being, an ecology of indifference and uncertainty, create wounds that are not visible but real, and whose force corrodes the human being by making him feel less than human. India needs to take mental trauma seriously and systematically. We have to consider trauma medically and psychologically as part of the violence of our lives, and respond to it professionally and ethically.

Trauma is more than loneliness and isolation. It is a festering wound that needs society to help it heal. Care, community and communication are the basis of cure. Our society must learn to listen to suffering again. The tragedy is, trauma is still an embarrassment, a taboo word. One hopes the virus brings all these narratives into the open. Democracy needs to look systematically at the travails of the worker, the homemaker and the patient as it does for the voter and the consumer.

Opinion | How Unfortunate, Migrants Treated As Black Holes And Black Boxes Of Corona Chronicles

During corona times, the migrant discovered he was marginal, suspect and jobless. Haunted by vulnerabilities, he had to face hunger and humiliation, writes academician Shiv Visvanathan

www.outlookindia.com