Backstory: Rotis on the Railway Track, Styrene in the Air

At least 16 migrant labourers were killed early morning after a cargo train ran over them in Maharashtra’s Aurangabad district. The workers were walking back home to Madhya Pradesh when the incident occurred.

1. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was “anguished” by the loss of lives in the accident. “[I] have spoken to Railway Minister Piyush Goyal and he is closely monitoring the situation,” he tweeted. Union Home Minister Amit Shah said he was “pained beyond words”

2. India has recorded 3,390 new cases of the infection in the last 24 hours. As of Friday morning, the total number of cases in the country has risen to 56,342 and 1,886 patients have died.

3. Rahul Gandhi said the states, and not the Centre, should identify the red, green and orange zones. He also urged the Centre to decentralise the fight against the coronavirus.

4. Seventy-seven inmates and 26 police personnel at Mumbai’s Arthur Road prison tested positive for Covid-19. The jail is one of the most overcrowded prisons in the country.

5. The Karnataka government said it will resume special train services for migrant workers. However, disillusioned by the government, many of them have begun walking back to their hometowns.

6. Air India released its schedule for flights bringing back Indians from abroad. Twenty-three flights are on the list, from May 7 to May 13.

7. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said the pandemic keeps unleashing a “tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering”.

Scattered rotis on a stretch of railway track between Badnapur and Karmad stations near Aurangabad are mute testimony to an unspeakable tragedy. They were part of the precious food stocks of a group of migrant workers making their way home on foot from Maharashtra to Madhya Pradesh. Sixteen of them were mowed down by a goods train on the early morning of May 8. It was early in the morning too, on May 7, that plumes of toxic gas emerging from the LG Polymers plant in Visakhapatnam resulted in the deaths of 12 and grievous injuries to thousands. Both developments indicate how, under the all-enveloping folds of India’s COVID-19 crisis, innumerable other catastrophes have unfolded, or wait to unfold.

The Aurangabad tragedy (‘Aurangabad: 16 Migrant Workers Killed by Goods Train, 5 Injured’, May 8) was yet more evidence of the gargantuan mishandling of the lockdown, announced with a four-hour notice, on March 25. It left hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in a policy void: jobless, homeless, hungry, without transportation and patently helpless. When more definitive accounts of this period emerge, the callousness of the authorities and its brutal coercive apparatus will be writ large on the pages. The mainstream media’s failure to perform the role of critical observers and hold the government to account will also be taken note of for sure, as indeed their shabby attempts to divert public attention and create a blanket of false complacency by claiming state-mandated rituals like the beating of thalis and lighting of lamps as inspirational and healing.

Spectacles of gratitude, with defence helicopters showering rose petals on medical staff, have hardly lifted the burden from the shoulders of these embattled professionals struggling to cope with the swelling numbers of patients and a rising death toll. But blanket media coverage of this puerile exercise, strongly criticised by former naval chief L. Ramdas and Arun Prakash, also a former naval chief (‘Military Should’ve Been Asked to Help Migrants, Not Just Shower Rose Petals‘, May 8), was yet more evidence of how unquestioning loyalty to power leaves the media incapable of functioning as guardians of a democratic republic.

Today, the early optimism of the COVID-19 curve being flattened under the watch of the world’s most charismatic leader has dissipated somewhat, but where does that leave those still searching for ways to go home, even as state governments either bar their departure or their entry (‘Migrant Workers Hit Roads in Surat After Odisha Govt Cancels Three Trains’; ‘Why Bengaluru’s Migrant Construction Workers Are Marching Home’, May 8). Leaders like BJP’s greenhorn MP Tejasvi Surya, who tweet that workers need to remain where they are in order to restart their lives and “kickstart economic activity”, betray the instincts of slave-owners.

The framers of our constitution would have never have imagined that the right of every citizen to return to their homes would need to be set down in that document, but today even such a basic presumption is in jeopardy. Many responded to the Aurangabad tragedy with comments about the “foolishness” of sleeping on the tracks. This is the New Indian for whom the lockdown has only meant a period of enforced leisure and some extra snacking.

It is the same lot who will applaud the “labour reform” introduced by the Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh governments (‘Adityanath Govt in UP to Suspend Key Labour Laws, Workers’ Rights for Three Years’, May 7). The note of unquestioning approval of this in the Times of India editorial of May 9 indicates that these so-called pragmatists are willing to see their severely underprivileged fellow citizens reduced to leading sub-human lives, in order to provide “meaningful uplift to businesses brutally set back by the lockdown”. Note how the term ‘brutal’ is used to describe the situation of business, when the real brutality is about states exempting investors from an entire section of the Factories Act, 1948, so that they are no longer required to ensure that their workers have proper ventilation, lighting, toilets, sitting facilities, first aid boxes… This is the unravelling, in one stroke, of the gains made by the working class over generations of struggle.

As BJP-ruled states fall over each other to wave the magic wand of “labour reform”, they may actually end up attracting more investment than their counterparts trying to resist such draconian measures. In the long run, this could mean a general undermining of internationally accepted labour laws across the country.  The demands of the powerful corporate lobby are insatiable. The TOI editorial, championing the lobby, argues that the liberalisation of 1991 has run out of steam and India needs further market reforms of labour, land and capital. Everything, in short, should be up for grabs under the blanket of the COVID-19 crisis.