The long march undertaken by migrant workers has reminded India of its poor but how long will this awareness last?
One can argue that this is not the time to discuss the view, however credible, that the 21-day lockdown has been imposed without adequate thought to its consequences, particularly on the poor. The emphasis now, the argument may continue, should be exclusively on repulsing the COVID-19 invasion which has brought India to a standstill and threatens to play havoc with its life. There is a point in this, as there is equally a point in the contention that the subject needs to be discussed threadbare both from the viewpoint of ensuring accountability on the part of the authorities and the need to avoid in future the mistakes that have been made.
While leaving such a discussion for a post-Corona time — which, one hopes, is not far away — one needs to focus on a related question: How is it that few could anticipate the post-lockdown trudge of hundreds and thousands of migrant daily wage workers, often with their entire families including women and children in tow, to their village homes hundreds of miles away? Anyone familiar with the Indian tradition of family and community support, which survives in a great measure in rural areas despite erosion in urban societies, should have known that the first instinct of starving labourers, without work and shelter and facing uncertain futures, would be to go back to their village homes, with which most of them retain close ties.
The reason is simple: The poor have vanished as an active presence in the consciousness of those who now set the agenda for discourse in India. This was not always so. Mahatma Gandhi’s abiding concern for the poor and making their well-being the touchstone for all action has been reflected in his iconic observation, “Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man you have seen, and ask yourself if this step you contemplate is going to be any use to him.” He also stated, “Poverty is the worst form of violence.” Equally well-known is his theory of trusteeship, the essence of which he expressed succinctly when he said, “Supposing I have come by a fair amount of wealth — either by way of legacy, or by means of trade and industry — I must know that all that wealth does not belong to me; what belongs to me is the right to an honourable livelihood, no better than that enjoyed by millions of others. The rest of my wealth belongs to the community and must be used for the welfare of the community.”
The presence of a socialist influence in the Indian National Congress as early as the 1930s was reflected in the formation of the All-India Congress Socialist Party in 1934 under the chairmanship of Acharya Narendra Deva with Jayaprakash Narayan as secretary. The Congress had a number of important socialist leaders like Sampurnanand, Achyut Patwardhan, Ram Manohar Lohia and Minoo Masani. After Independence, the socialists left the Congress and established the Praja Socialist Party, Socialist Party and the Samyukta Socialist Party respectively and their leaders like SM Joshi, NG Goray, Madhu Limaye and George Fernandes played important roles in the country’s politics. Anger over exploitation and the suffering of the poor was, perhaps, the most powerful driving force behind Karl Marx’s intellectual and political exertions and the programmes of the Communist Party of India, Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the various Naxalite groups.
For a long time after Independence, the Congress remained oriented towards a moderate, albeit nebulous, form of the ideology. After Parliament had accepted in 1954 the establishment of a “socialist pattern of society” as the aim of economic development, the Avadi session of the Congress, adopted, in January, 1955, a resolution calling for the “establishment of a socialistic pattern of society where the principal means of production are under social ownership or control” and there is “equitable distribution of the national wealth.” Later, Indira Gandhi, who nationalised banks, insurance, coal mines and abolished the privy purses of the princes, rode to a massive victory in the 1971 mid-term elections on the slogan of Garibi Hatao (Remove Poverty).
The shift towards a change in the party’s political and economic trajectory, however, became manifest from the early 1980s. The launch of the “economic reforms” in 1991 saw, in effect, the defenestration of all talk of socialism. The emphasis was now on the market economy and unleashing the animal instinct of Indian entrepreneurs. As in most cases, economic change had its cultural and social consequences. Poverty has ceased to be of concern to the middle class, which enjoys unprecedented purchasing power and which sets the agenda for discourse in the country, constituting over 30 per cent of the population.
The instinctive tendency to look away has been reinforced in its case by the dynamics of a market economy where the driving force is sales, the volume of which is critically linked to revenue and the quantum of profit. Its cutting edge advertising seeks to boost sales by projecting products as not only covetable in themselves but their possession as a measure of a person’s worth. With advertising dominating media, particularly television, the latter shaping people’s mindsets as never before, conspicuous consumption as a means of showing off, has assumed an unprecedented universality. It is almost a new religion that worships wealth and possession and not the character of a person. There is no time for the poor who are reduced to invisibility and are often looked down with contempt as failures.
There have been other changes. The poor and the alleviation of their poverty no longer occupy the centrestage of the political discourse in India. They have now been taken over by issues like the terrorist threat to the country, the Ram temple, the Citizenship Amendment Act, the National Population Register and the National Register of Citizens. One reason for this is, of course, the advent of Hindutva politics and its concomitants. Another is the Congress’s new orientation. It does refer to the poor from time to time but that is mostly en passent. Even otherwise, the decline in its political fortunes gives a cry-in-the-wilderness dimension to its pronouncements. Equally a factor has been the decline in Marxism’s political appeal given its abandonment in Russia and China and the decline of Left politics in general in India. The result: Loss of visibility by poor. The long march and its horrors have made them visible again. But for how long?
(The writer is Consultant Editor, The Pioneer, and an author)
