Refugee” in own country within a notice of few hours, hundreds of deaths of migrant labourers in starved stomachs while indulging in hundreds of miles of “Long March” including the chilling demise of 12-year-old girl Jamalo Makdam of Chattisgarh, “Chemical shower” in Uttar Pradesh to “sanitise” the “untouchables”, “gifts” of baton-charge if the stranded group demand arrangements of return home, allegation of charging Railway tickets from the jobless poorest of poor, “mysterious” cancellation of trains at the last moment emitting foul odour of builder-government nexus and if they prefer to walk home get ready to be shredded to pieces under running trains! Mockery and irony doesn’t end here!
After all the “topping in the cake” remains continuous advertisement of “India will lead and show a new path to the entire world in this global war against COVID-19. We are fortunate to have been blessed with such sensitive and hardworking leadership of Narendra Modi”(sponsored by Who’s Who of BJP and NDA Government)! What a brutal sprinkling of salt upon burning wounds with absolutely no visible public gesture to console the victims with compassion and empathy!
Far from begging apology for the instant lockdown (rather much delayed lockdown without providing any sort of window for the migrants to return home) posing unfathomable hardship to our poorest of poor nation builders finding themselves hungry homeless jobless overnight, far from condoling hundreds of tragic deaths while forced to indulge in “Long March”; we are noticing gimmicks of petal-showering at astronomical expense, sermons of “Be Self-reliant” directed at the economically hardest hit rural folks and shameless beating of one’s own trumpet of achieving “stupendous success” in fight against Covid-19! What a barbaric show-off of pride and audacity!
Stay at “home”, Bang plates on “balconies”, “Download” Aarogya Setu app — each and every statement clearly brings to the fore who the target audience are/were leaving scores of our hapless labourer brothers and sisters fend for themselves without livelihood and homes in alien territories in a notice of just few hours!
Seen from this naked class-biased attitude, it is highly expected that our poor labourer citizens, be of migrant vintage or domestic, would be awarded step-motherly treatment! What a sense of “indebtedness” towards the class which run our wheels of economy, build our mansions and do all the “dirty” works so that the privileged can succeed in maintaining their “social status”! And just when they required an umbrella of minimum security, they have been evicted from their “homes” directly by the exploiting landlords or forced to leave their “homes” indirectly for “Long March” towards their villages after getting snatched of livelihood with not a grain to eat and getting rendered the status of “Stateless citizens”!
Hunger has now driven them out from the heartless cities in search of minimum safety back home! But after termination of lockdown, again that very hunger will bring them back to approach those very factory units, construction sites and landlords who had evicted them so heartlessly!
The pandemic has not only blatantly exposed the extremely sorry condition of billion of citizens of this much-projected “elite” and “mighty” India (Mars Mission, Mass Yoga, Bullet trains, Gigantic statues failing drastically to hide it) in front of the international community; but has also exposed the hypocrisy and class-consciousness of Indian polity and society.
