SATURDAY, APRIL 27, 2024
Sujay Gupta
A supermarket outside Caranzalem was about to be shut, its masked workers getting ready to pack up and head home, with thoughts of sanitising themselves and gingerly meeting edgy families as they returned from their duties.
As the lights of the store are turned off and the area is enveloped in darkness, a shadow of a frail man emerging from the darkness gets slowly visible. The ‘figure’ isn’t old but the face is lost staring blankly, with despair looking at just a glimmer of hope, only just. “I worked on a construction site. I have no food, no money, and a family in Karnataka, who I can’t go to. I am begging for some food and money”, the figure said, lips moving, eyes blank and hollow.
This has been played out across Goa, and while this is only a microcosm of scenes played out at the Bandra Station in Mumbai and the ISBT bus stop in Delhi, their agony of being left on the streets, with no homes even as staying at home was the clarion call from the Prime Minister to the local sarpanch resounds loudly. These are people running from poverty. These people who initially left home and contributed to the prosperity of their new lands and homes.
The concept of home has been a subject of great debate, with several contrary narratives. It ultimately boils down to whether you have left home to find new ones, or returning because the new homes have rejected you or you are forced to flee because home has become hell. Or it could simply mean that your time and need to be away is over and you need to or want to return.
The relationship between man, movement, and habitats is never in sync. For a Palestinian, it’s a lifetime of struggle to call the land of his ancestors his very own, for a Syrian, it’s all about leaving the debris and devastation of Syria and finding refuge in Greece or Italy. And for a seafarer from Goa, the right to be returned home from the sea is a right of passage, fundamental and immediate.
Added to this right is a duty that the government must not only get them back but also ensure that their loss of livelihoods, with no certainty of getting back to work, must be compensated by the state.
These assumed rights are further espoused by their city fathers, their village heads, and their MLAs because each seafarer is not alone. He has an entourage of family members who are voters who play a big part in every election, big or small. This is why, there are more MLAs in Goa who have made statements, posted video messages, and emerged from quarantine to demand the return of seafarers than they have for Goan restaurant owners, small businessmen, shopkeepers, musicians and bands who live off weddings, parties and events.
It’s not difficult to see why. Just one post on Facebook is a story in a frame. On the gates of a home in a village in Goa, there was a placard addressed to the “Sarpanch, panch or MLA” stating that it was a seafarer’s home and his entire family of 26 voters would be ‘in quarantine' during future elections, stay at home and not vote for them, because enough efforts were not made to get that seaman home.
This isn’t quite an argument against any action to get seafarers home when they are stranded at sea. This is about different yardsticks and the motives governing the state’s response towards one group of people who are out of their homes and stranded and need to return and migrants from other parts of India stuck in Goa, who need to do exactly the same - return home.
It is not humanity but politics which is dictating responses by those elected and in power. Why else would MLAs make demanding compensation for taxi drivers who are out of business a priority above all else? Simply because the mild but implicit threat mentioned on the placard hung outside the gate of a seafarer, is also being made by each tourist taxi operator. The message is clear. They should be paid from the taxpayer's money when the workforce of the entire country is in peril or else they could be a hindrance in the political progress of their coal leaders at different levels, on whose voters they are in power.
So what is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander. A seafarer needs to return home because he is stuck outside his home. But a migrant from Jharkhand has to be on the streets, in a town far away from home or in camps where claims of food and a place to sleep are dodgy, because his return to his village, may cause the CoronaVirus to spread in their native palaces.
Well if seafarers, rightly so, are tested twice before they return home, why can’t migrants be tested before entering their villages. Some, however, have had the “honour’ of being sprayed with disinfectants though, as a part of community sanitization.
It is a measure of the hypocrisy in both governance and society that it took a former Dean of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Jagdeep Chhokar and Gaurav Jain, an advocate, to move the Supreme Court for a direction to the Centre to allow stranded migrant workers to return home after testing them for COVID-19.
They stated in their petition that “migrant workers gathering at various bus terminuses across the country in large numbers was a testament to the fact that they were distressed, didn’t want to be lodged in shelter homes and wanted to return home.”
If a migrant is one who has left his land, village, town, and country to go elsewhere in search of a better life and livelihood, then what really is the difference between the multitudes at Bandra in Mumbai or the Delhi bus terminus, and NRIs or Indians working abroad (and this includes seafarers). For one class of people planes are sent to bring them back, and the another class is treated with lathis.
But the argument goes beyond that. One cannot underline enough that the catalyst for action is all political because there are different approaches to handling different groups of Indians stranded abroad. While the seafarers have many political Godfathers, we are yet to see any political support for a group of 28 researchers of the Indian Atlantic Expedition from the National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research (NCPOR), Vasco da Gama in Goa quarantined in Cape Town in South Africa, crying for help. They incidentally reached out to Herald to highlight their plight.
Goa’s sole member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Council of Ministers Shripad Naik met the External Affairs Minister of India, S Jaishankar to ask his Ministry to initiate steps to bring back Goan seafarers but he hasn’t said a word on the stranded researchers in South Africa. No call has come from local politicians of Goa either. These research scientists, in all likelihood, are not voters.
Many in power and outside have exposed themselves in their actions, or inactions towards migrants in Goa and by the stark difference in the manner of their response to different classes of people facing a similar crisis.
The shamelessness is stark. From the poder to the paddy cultivator to even the coconut plucker and toddy tapper, to the waiter or even the cook in an ‘authentic Goan’ shack, to those who go on boats and cast their fishing nets in Goan waters, are migrants. They will find a way to return their native places and if they chose not to get back to Goa when the world opens up, Goa will be literally left helpless. It is only then that the folly and the shortsightedness of our actions will be realized.
But the hollowness of it all is out in the open and naked, as most of us are indoors in places we call home and do all we can to deny others to go back to places they call home.
At times one should surely wonder where the virus really lies.
