However unconventional it may seem to say this, but Covid 2019 and the 1943 Bengal famine were both examples of violence by hunger by the state on poor and homeless people of India.
It’s important that influential people living in the West, particularly those born in India, know that the general lockdown imposed in India on 24 March 2020, to supposedly, fight the spread of Covid 19, rendered 300 million people jobless in Delhi and other towns.
Who were those people? They were the cursed breed of daily wage earners, called migrant workers. Such a loaded word! Every year, poor farmers from all over the country migrate to Industrial towns, looking for work. All they get is daily wage work as contractual labour in factories and workshops. They are ironically the bulwark of our Industrial production and urban services.
After a country-wide lockdown, they were not allowed to go home to their villages. No trains or buses were plying, and state borders within the country were sealed. Unbelievably, so desperate were they to get back that they travelled on foot for hundreds of kilometres. But they were turned back from the border of the next State. The claim of governments that they were stopped to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in the villages, defied logic. They had not yet contracted the disease. In fact, they got it only after losing their jobs and homes; when they were forced to take to the roads in hordes to get free food, given by private charities. A plate of khichri, doled out by the government, once a day, was not enough even for bare survival.
The 1943 famine of Bengal; in which more than three million Indians died, is an apt metaphor for this scenario. The famine was not caused by drought but by the deliberate policy of violence by hunger of the British government. Vital supply of grain was diverted from Bengal to the military and civil services needed for the war effort by the British. Even rice imports sent as aid were not allowed into Bengal. At that time an imperial government ruled over us, so we could call it genocide of an annexed people through what was, planned policy failure.
What happened in 2020, post Covid-19 was policy failure too which followed the same edict of violence by hunger. Only this time we had our own, not a colonial government, voted in by us, in a free country. So the violence by hunger was not against an annexed people but our own rural populace. The modus operandi was simple. Make no organised plan to deal with the repercussions of the lockdown on millions of migrant labourers; who were certain to lose their jobs and homes in the cities.
The lockdown was at last lifted on May 31, 2020 and workers were allowed to go back to their villages. But no amenities were provided for travel. Trains were not only few and far between, but irregular, delayed for hours for inexplicable reasons and believe it or not, even losing their way. People had to crowd at the stations for days, often without food and water. Casualties were a daily occurrence.
When the migrant workers reached home after arduous journeys, they were put into quarantine for 14 days. The conditions were beyond belief. They survived lack of food, water, ventilation and medicine purely because of their crazy will to reach home, even if to collapse with hunger and exhaustion there. Not that jobs were freely available in the villages! The only work available was under MNREGA, which offered a pittance in return for a full day’s work, and could only provide temporary relief.
The reason they had left their homes and families initially, was precisely because there were no jobs in the villages and farming could not support life. Now they were back in the same quagmire. They would be forced to migrate again and turn into contractual labourers. Thus, the Pandemic has left a far more enduring and life-threatening impact on rural India, much more than on the urban or Western world.
Looking ahead
The key question we need to ask in India is, do we have a planned solution for combating rural penury? Can we complete the work that Nehru set out to do but could not, because of inadequate development of small and medium sized industries in rural areas? The State has to make detailed plans for multi-linear development of villages. Whether it is productive farming, poultry or small industry; all of them require finance, which no small farmer has. As long as the public finance institutions believe in ‘outsourcing’, the farmers would remain at the mercy of loan sharks, charging high interest rates and possessing their land in case of default. The massive loan waivers worth lakhs of Rupees to big borrowers versus no mercy for small borrowers is just another example of policy geared to punish those with no cushion.
Private capital investment without the partnership of farmers would lead to unemployment and forced migration again and again. Unless we recognise the plight of rural India laid bare by the Pandemic, violence by hunger would remain a permanent aftermath of it and after the Pandemics to come. No doubt there would be many more.
Surely this should be a matter of priority for all of us; bureaucrats, politicians and policy makers, not just writers, recoiling from this genocide of another kind; State Violence by Hunger!
Mridula Garg is a Hindi writer and Sahitya Akademi award winner.
