Will stale speeches, promise of relief package help starving migrant workers walking miles to reach home?

The visuals constantly coming in of our hungry and thirsty workers fleeing, dying, thrashed and humiliated by cops, more than hit you. In these recent weeks we have reduced our precious workers to such pathetic conditions! They have been rendered weak and bruised by the utter callousness meted out to them.

Tell me, was the lockdown planned keeping in mind that two-thirds of our country’s population which finds it difficult to survive even during the unlocked state? Our farmers, tillers and millers, labourers, daily wagers, small time traders and shop keepers remain alive only and only on the basis on their daily earnings and if that’s snatched they cannot go on for long. No sir, they cannot be kept alive on those stale speeches, nor on those ‘breaking news’ bulletins that relief package is reaching them! When and where!

Our people are dying not because of the coronavirus but because of no food, no water, no empathy, no proper planning for their survival --- that is, survival of all those who are destined to be still breathing the polluted poisoned air!

Correct me if I’m wrong but the fact is we are becoming far too thick-skinned to be reacting to our workers’ plight. Yes, we, the middle class are becoming not just thick skinned but just too selfish! Even today, I have heard upper middle class people say that they are getting all the stuff they need so where’s the problem! The problem is in this wretched, third-class, thick-skinned thinking! They haven’t ever been exposed to hunger and the dying, either in real life or on the big or small screens. Even the feature films made in recent years barely focus on the plight of the workers and farmers and the migrant workers! Why?

In fact, several years back, a former bureaucrat, Parvez Dewan, had researched on what our Bollywood films and television serials were portraying vis-a- vis communities and the different sections of our society. And his findings brought to the fore real shockers as the visual media’s portrayals were so far away from the ground realities and the dark truths. Space constraints will come in way if I were to write about the lopsided portrayals of the different communities but if one were to focus on the village life and villagers, they are more than often shown, in the visual media, as though all’s going fine in villages and rural belts and the villagers are happily dancing around rivers and rivulets and waterfalls!

Mind you, with this untimely death of our migrant workers, the very roots of heritage and civilisation could also stand shaken. After all, rural India is the real India, which has been a witness to the various stages of history and culture and the genuine Indian-ness. Perhaps, it would be relevant to mention that our leading artist MF Husain understood our rural people’s grounded wisdom and the basic culture of the land ingrained in them right from birth.

In fact, during an interview with me, MF Husain had told that he was planning to make a film on the “subtle comedy culture of India” and the target audience for this film would be the urban rich and the upper middle class residing in the big cities and metropolitans. Nah, not the rural folk. His rationale being – “I’m planning to make a subtle comedy which will be a part of our culture… I would say with great confidence that eighty per cent of the people in rural India do know and can appreciate the different aspects to our culture, because it’s part of their everyday life and living and it comes naturally to them... It’s the elite living in big cities who are ignorant.”

I recall rather too vividly that when I had asked Husain sahib that since our rural people sit battling for the very daily survival so how can they even think of cultural strains to just about anything, he had then tried explaining that our rural people are far ahead in terms of the culture ethos of the land because it all comes naturally to them. They are close to the ground realities of the land. It’s inborn in them. They don’t have to go and get admitted in schools and formal training centres to learn the arts and crafts and the classical moves to the traditional arts. Simply because it’s in them, in their psyche, in their very being!

What I’m trying to put across is the fact that with the untimely death and decay of our migrant workers and the mazdoors and all the other majboors of the day, we are also trampling upon and killing our vast traditional culture ingrained in them and connected with them!

These two lines of Ahmed Rahi aptly express their plight:

“Our lives were spent in despair; hope had begun to stir in our hearts

We thought our destiny would change, but alas, we were deceived.”

Today, I sit very sad and forlorn, reciting this verse of Sahir Ludhianvi (tucked in the pages of ‘Anthems of Resistance’ (India Ink/ Roli Books) by Ali Husain Mir and Raza Mir.)

“If there is a reason for my angry songs, it is this

That when I see the hungry farmers

The poor, the oppressed, the destitute, the helpless

My heart cannot participate in assemblies of pleasure

Even if I wish, I cannot write dreamy songs of love.”

In these Lockdown times, do think of our formally imprisoned

And as we sit in this informally semi- imprisoned lock down state, the least we can do is to think of all those who sit formally imprisoned in the prisons of the country. Not to overlook the fact that almost 75% of the country’s imprisoned population comprises the under-trials who are yet to be proven guilty, so technically innocent yet imprisoned they are!

In these corona-ridden times, open prisons should come up as swiftly as possible. Also, the under-trials be dealt with as compassionately as legally possible.

In fact, whilst on prisons and imprisonment, years back, during the course of an interview, I had asked the then President of India, Giani Zail Singh, how did he cope when he was imprisoned during the country’s Independence struggle.

And as always he came up with the most uncomplicated of answers, “Never left walking …not even in that imprisoned state. Walked even in the prison cell if the authorities did not let me out of the cell …Walking kept me alive!”