While several migrants died on the journey home, the truth remains that lakhs of lives and mass deaths in rural India were averted due to the decision of not sending them home in the early days of the pandemic
Doomsday, said naysayers as the COVID pandemic came to India. Today, our nation has shown how to fight the virus on a massive scale. And win. A forthcoming book, A Nation to Protect, encapsulates India’s pandemic response from the top echelons of leadership and government. An excerpt:
19 May 2020
India | 60,855 active cases – 3,311 deaths
World| 25,11,431 active cases – 3,55,250 deaths
Meena Mukhiya (name changed) heard panicked noises as her husband Ravi Kumar Mukhiya rushed into their 100 square ft room in the Nehru Nagar chawl in Juhu, Mumbai. She shared the room with her husband Ravi, his two brothers, and her two-year-old daughter. The brothers worked temporary jobs as househelp and cooks in upper middle-class homes in the posh JVPD suburb of Mumbai.
After the lockdown was announced, all three brothers were asked to discontinue coming to work. For two months, they were paid their salaries; however, they had been forewarned by their respective employers that they would not be receiving any more. Cash crunch had begun to hit even affluent households and coupled with the uncertainty of when businesses would function at pre-COVID-19 levels, they simply could not afford to keep their staff on payroll.
Lockdown had been hard. The five of them had to be cooped up inside the teeny room. The enforcement on movement restriction by the next-door Juhu Police Station had been very harsh, with folks unable to leave even the narrow lanes which housed their rooms. Entry and exit points to the Nehru Nagar Chawl were blocked by policemen carrying lathis, who didn’t hesitate to use them.
The family was paying Rs 6,000 as room rent and with no income in sight, they had begun to grow increasingly frustrated and desperate to return to their village in Bihar, where the boys’ parents had a big farm with a large self-built house.
Over the years, the brothers had sent the savings to the parents in the village to build the family home. Her two-year-old had not had a cup of milk in over a month and the family was exclusively relying on the free rice, wheat and pulses provided by the government as their meals in the absence of any money available to buy other groceries.
Sometimes, the middlemen distributing the rice and pulses would cut corners and the grain would come mixed with pebbles or even sand. At other times, the middlemen would not come through with the grain. Desperation was at a peak. If at home, in the village, they would have no shortage of good food, farm-grown vegetables and meat and they would also be able to work in the fields and generate income out of farming.
Every day, there was a new rumour in the drain-lined lane housing their room about many people falling severely ill with the virus and being taken away by the government to quarantine centres. Sometimes, things would get serious when news would arrive that the person had not been able to make. Meena was worried about the baby’s health and was willing to take any risk to be able to go home.
Emotions were running high as this was the case in most rooms in the Nehru Nagar Chawl. In a tense situation like this, news came in via some boys in the chawl that the local police station had called and confirmed that the government had arranged for a train scheduled to depart for Bihar late in the afternoon to send folks like them back home. Her husband rushed in and asked her to immediately pack the essentials and the baby and leave as soon as possible so as to make the long, 45-minute walk to the Bandra Terminus Railway Station. They didn’t have any further details of how many trains were arranged or the timings or the scheduled trains; and in the case with so many unknowns, they decided to follow the flock.
Most migrants living in the chawl had also set off towards the Bandra Terminus Station. Hundreds of them rushed out of the chawl, outnumbering the lathi-yielding policemen who were stationed there and began to brisk walk. Most were not even carrying bags with them, which Meena found a little odd, even in the heat of the moment. She had managed to tie the baby’s essentials and some water in a cloth which she carried over her shoulder. They made their way to the station by foot in the absence of any available public transport.
As they arrived at the station, they found that no such train was scheduled to depart for their home state and they had just fallen for a false rumour. Like Meena Mukhiya and her family, thousands of other people from chawls in various parts of the city had also fallen for similar fake news, and walked to the same station. Dejected, she sat with her daughter on the side of the platform while Ravi and his two brothers, Basant and Shyam, dived into the angry crowd demanding the police, who had arrived at the scene to disperse them, give answers.
The media, considered essential services, began to aggressively track the story and by mid-afternoon, chaotic images of hordes of angry mobs collected at the station began to appear on various news platforms. Bandra East, Mumbai’s western suburb, where the crowds collected, was already classified as a red zone, with high positivity rate. Dispelling all COVID-19-appropriate behaviour of masks and social distancing was a step back for the city in its fight against the virus.
Not only did it throw light on the unfortunate plight of this vulnerable community, but it also exposed the incapability of the state government to act quickly in the interest of the city. Several things could have been done to avoid this: the migrants should have been better provided for by the state government, which was headed by Uddhav Thackeray of the Shiv Sena in an alliance with the Congress and the NCP.
On the day itself, it was rather odd to see that none of the crowds making their way to the station were stopped by the Mumbai Police. It was only after the mob got out of control at the station, did the police arrive at the location and lathi-charged. Naturally, it leads one to ask: if the media was able to follow the story since morning, why wasn’t the police?
Even if we work on the assumption that the cops did not receive the intelligence of such an event taking place, police were stationed all over the city in order to enforce lockdown. Why didn’t they act? There were reports in the media that the rumours were spread by local police stations. Were folks instigated to come out on the roads for an underlying political agenda? [……]
Now, coming back to the Mumbai episode with an understanding of the prevalent media narrative of the time, there were several pertinent questions to be asked. Could one draw a conclusion that the Shiv Sena-led government wanted to instigate and create an episode displaying migrant desperation which would continue to push the anti-government media narrative? Were the cops asked to deliberately ignore the crowds walking to the railway station? Was any investigation conducted to find out if the rumours of a planned migrants’ train were ignited by the police as many media sections reported?
While several migrants died on the journey home, the truth remains that lakhs of lives and mass deaths in rural India were averted due to the decision of not sending them home in the early days of the pandemic. In national interest, the government took on the attacks and didn’t budge on their decision to start migrant movement from the cities until they were fully prepared.
The author is a strategist specializing in political communication. A Nation to Protect is her third book.
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