BJP is singularly anti-poor, decisions clearly prove

The arbitrary way a nationwide lockdown was first announced with a mere 4-hour warning; the way migrant workers’ issue was handled and the tragic train accident on Friday morning in which 15 migrants were killed while sleeping on the track exhausted by walking back home from Maharashtra to Madhya Pradesh exposed absence of a concrete game plan of the Narendra Modi- led BJP government at the Centre in combating the COVID-19 situation.

It also marked a fundamental lack of understanding of how the poor and the marginalised in this country live. Over 80 per cent of Indian families live in a single room, many cramped in slums and spaces where social distancing is a misnomer. The poor people like the migrant wage labourers do not even stock up for a week as they can’t afford to do so.

They work throughout the day and buy essentials to tide them over the next 24 hours in the early evening with the money they have earned during the day. When economists and experts asked the government to make arrangements for the migrant workers to return to their villages, the government turned a blind eye to them for over a month. The migrants started walking towards their homes in desperation, many perishing in the course of the hundreds of kiliometers they had to traverse.

While Indians stranded abroad were ferried home by airplanes for free, the migrant poor were left to fend for themselves. It was only in the first week of May that the Centre announced the running of special trains to take the migrants home. But the circular of the Ministry of Railways dated May 2 made it clear that the workers would have to pay for their tickets and that the state governments were responsible for collecting the same.

Then, after Congress president Sonia Gandhi announced that state units of the party will pick up the bill, within hours, the Centre announced that it would foot 85 per cent of the travel expenditure, leaving the remaining to the state. But even that was not true. BJP national general secretary (organisation) BL Santhosh made it clear that the Railways already subsidised 57 per cent of passenger fare and that since trains will carry one-third of passengers and return empty, this accounted for another 28 per cent.

The maths behind the 85 per cent thus became clear. The utter lack of sensitivity of the BharatiyaJanata Party (BJP) towards the plight of the poor got exposed again earlier this week when Karnataka’s BJP government cancelled trains for migrant labourers following a meeting between the state’s realtors and Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa. Since migrants propel the engine of growth, different industries are afraid that many of them would not return to work after the economy re-opens.

The Karnataka government has reduced the migrants to bonded labourers by making sure they cannot leave and have to take up work to survive in the cities and towns.

This is an unprecedented and unparalleled decision in a modern, democratic society and reveals the BJP’s collusion with the exploitative quasi-feudal crony capitalist class. Prime Minister NarendraModi may shed crocodile tears for the condition of the poor every now and then but each move of his government and his party points towards the fact that the BJP is an enemy of India’s poor and impoverished people.