How insensitive have we become to plight of COVID migrant labourers.

A post is viral in the social media that decries all the hue and cry being raised in the media over the plight of migrant labourers. The poor have been enough and it should stop now. The middle classes have been hit just as hard but none talks of them.  just as hard but they dont cry for help. Nor should the poor do. 

 The import of the message has discomfited me. I feel it needs a riposte, hence this post. Who sent it is not germane. Knowing his age , gender and party affiliation would have helped in putting his solicitude in proper perspective. But the fact is , I simply don’t know. Notwithstanding, it shouldn’t be too fatal a flaw in grasping the mindset that mutated into this message for to read without comprehension is a deep affront to any author. And to speak of one so enlightened anonymously is equally an unpardonable abuse of his considerable scholarship. So let’s call him Shehe. 

 

 Shehe is schmaltzy, sickened by the clamorous brouhaha surrounding the poor. Drenched in a tempest of state largesse, nonetheless, they wear their poverty on their sleeves and needlessly cry, he decries. Once they walk home, a MGNREGA bonanza awaits them. Shehe just falls short of giving his personal guarantee to that effect. He frankly has no pretensions to savoir faire. 

 

 Shehe wonders free grains, free gas, free Corona tests, free from taxes, what more...? Even with all these subsidies before Corona rudely uprooted them , most had just about managed to live in survival mode. Now, sans livelihood, shelter, savings, could they , without any state support ? US is shelling out $300 billion in cash to families. Let him work out how much it tantamounts to per person. UK pays 80% of wages of employees to employers to restrain them from job cuts. Australia too has a wage subsidy package that grants $1500 per fortnight to six million workers as Job Keeper payment. Singapore is doling out $600 to every nine adult out of ten as solidarity package. Even our bete noire ,Pakistan , ladles Rs 3000 per month over the next four months to the poor five million. All this in addition to ongoing schemes. Maybe this data will give him something to masticate. 

  Shehe isn’t sentient about migrant labourers losing jobs and livelihoods, being evicted by landlords, being disowned by states , being disfellowshipped by locals apathetic to , if not abetting in, their bedraggled , torturous, heart-wrenching exodus, on foot for thousands of kilometres in scorching heat, without food and water , to lands where they once belonged but where they may now not find a ready embrace. To build life anew. It doesn’t embitter Shehe that their’s isn’t a Maoist ‘Long March’ to power and glory but one to a bleak uncertain future, to a darkness that is a creeping, enveloping shroud. As GDP contracts, Shehe’s assurance of jobs under MGNREGA looks increasingly a blank cheque drawn on a bankrupt bank. 

  The poor don’t deserve any sympathy, even less his empathy. And that is Shehe’s breezy, swashbuckling final verdict. 

  Shehe begrudges none speaking out for the middle classes, among them the temple Brahmin making do without dakshinas and offerings to the deity. They are even more distressed but take it on the chin. Because they have to maintain an up to date living. Can’t be seen as cry babies. Implying, poor too should bear it with a grin and all hullabaloo should die down. 

  He opines, the Middle Classes have loads of liabilities , towards instalments for education loans, car/bicycle loans ,home loans plus family maintenance. Now that the govt is without taxes for 40 days it has no money to pay salaries. The Middle Classes will have to bear the burden of taxes too. Why is this class being excessively solicitous of the poor , he asks. As if their own distress is not enough ! 

 He reminds me of this quote. 

 “The rich and poor truly are from different realms: one has adapted to become an expert in material forfeit ; the other has forfeited all they are to material, and thus is enslaved ,by it.” .... JKMcfarlane. 

  Does he realise that the edifice of luxurious living is laid on the sweat and toil of labour class ,the only factor of production that creates the surplus value embedded in modern conveniences. The middle class can draw on future incomes in the present to avail it, to pay astronomical school fees that is so huge that one month’s fee suffices to feed two families, he admits. The poor can’t even draw what they have earned, for rare is the contractor who timely pays full wages. The social media is awash with stentorious homilies to stay at home. Yes, they can for they all belong to the middle classes that have the financial backbone to survive for months without earning . The poor must earn daily to survive. They do the ‘dirty work’ for the comforts of the classes above them. They must not only survive but remain hopeful of upward mobility for the other classes to stay put or move up. Given limited resources the state cannot support people at all coordinates of the economic spectrum. It has to be then the poor . It’s as simple as that.

 In colonial times there were only two classes - the Macaulay class of brown sahib (bhadralog) and the brown skinned (toilers -labourers and peasants). Upward social mobility wombed the middle class. Lack of empathy for it from one in the middle class ,therefore, seems so unnatural and contrived. Is it so ? 

  Fine if the post is a stray, random, atypical musing of a budding social thinker , let a hundred flowers bloom. But if held by many and vociferously adumbrated, it holds ominous portents. For it necessarily entails accentuating inequalities, a recipe for civil strife written in the history cookery book.