Best of times for the rich and the worst of times for the poor

A pandemic should by definition be a great leveller. But every passing day in India proves it is not.

The Coronavirus began as a disease affecting international travellers, who could afford foreign and air travel. If the Indian government had screened these travellers adequately and quarantined them on time, the spread of the disease could have been greatly contained in the early days of this year.

However, even if its action of locking down the virus came late in the day, one would have thought this arbitrary shutting down of the economy, unlike Demonetisation a few years ago, might affect both the rich and poor equally.

But even as some economic offenders from Mumbai found it easy to persuade top cops to issue them permits to cruise from one city to another during the lockdown, the poor migrant workers were left stranded, without food or water, without wages and often without shelter.

The Wadhwans, the defaulting builders, had a top cop claiming they were family friends and issuing them passes to drive out of Mumbai, but the migrant workers, some of who might even have been working on their building projects, seemed orphaned with no one caring not just about their welfare but even how they could get back home.

As builders were given permission to resume construction activities, Karnataka government decided to cancel trains from the state to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar after builders met the state chief minister BS Yeddyurappa. Suddenly there was realisation among the rich and the privileged that their earnings and profits depended on the sweat and blood of the poor migrant workers. If they all went home simultaneously, construction would come to a halt and businessmen would probably go bankrupt.

It is stunning that a democratically elected chief minister could even think of treating people as bonded labour or as slaves of the rich. Tejaswi Surya, the BJP MP who caused a diplomatic crisis a couple of weeks ago by tweeting about the sexual lives of Arab women and who is now getting troublesome even for the government,which has asked Twitter to take down some of his tweets, was at it once again. He gave the depraved and despicable act a typical BJP spin – cancelling the trains was a bold move, he said, that would help migrant workers realise their dreams.

Dreams? What dreams? When all that they had dreamt of in recent days was to return home to their loved ones! There was so much outrage, amid Congress President Sonia Gandhi's offer to pay for the fare of the migrants if the government insisted on charging them, that the Karnataka government had to withdraw its decision and restore the trains and the Union government stopped charging fare.

But the second incident was even more horrifying. Migrant workers walking to Madhya Pradesh from Jalna in Maharashtra fell asleep on the railway tracks and were run over by a goods train. Why were they walking on the railway tracks in the first place? Because if they had taken the roads and highways, unlike the Wadhwans, they would have been taken in or been beaten up by the police. And they slept on the tracks because in view of the haphazard actions of the Union government, they did not think any train would be rolling on the tracks and run them over.

Both the Karnataka and Maharashtra incidents, deliberately or inadvertently, are also the result of the failure of other state governments to address the issue. Most of the returning workers are from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Their home states would have an enormous problem on their hands if all the workers returned simultaneously. Apart from the fact that there would be no work for these returnees, I do not think the states would be able to handle the consequences of the spread of the virus, considering these migrants have not been physically distancing themselves in their cramped shelters and perhaps might not even have tested for the virus.

While, after Sonia Gandhi's offer to give free passage to the migrants, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar intelligently topped that up with an offer of Rs 500 to every returning worker, all that UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath could do is refuse to accept the returning workers and insist they not be sent back from their host states without testing and only after treatment in case they tested positive.

I suspect that is why Yeddyurappa unthinkingly tried to cancel the trains and that is why Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, in his address after the railway track incident, cautioned the migrant workers against their hurry - the states of their origin have to agree to sending trains for them and the Centre ultimately needs to permit their travel by trains, he said without naming or blaming anybody per se.

The bottom line is that these workers were unwanted and uncared for by their employers for six weeks. Suddenly while some of them were in a position to restart work, they wantedto forcibly hold the workers back - as also happened in Telangana a couple of weeks ago when workers agitated against being forced back – they seem to be unwelcome in their home states.

So will the roads – or Railways – take these migrants home where they belong - a natural yearning as in the John Denver song – or will they be treated as pariahs by both their home and host states? For when you are poor, you can be unwanted in more ways than one.

The rich will simply not care. And this is a government of the rich by the rich and for the rich, as we know by now.