Why India's melodrama over walking migrants is good
5 min read . Updated: 24 May 2020, 09:02 PM ISTCapitalism is the best way to end poverty but it takes so long that we need a heart to speed up the process
You may find it hard to believe now, but it was patriots who started and transmitted the lament over the plight of “the migrant". Fans of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) triggered it on 28 and 29 March, when a large number of migrant labourers appeared to leak out of Delhi’s quarantine and began to move like a pall of human gloom towards Uttar Pradesh. They were then chiefly men, walking with their bags. The middle-class lament began on social media, and other media strongholds of the BJP, to make the Aam Aadmi Party government of Delhi look incompetent.
There are bits of circumstantial evidence that point to the political origins of “the migrant crisis". One is the spread of the spurious news on 28 March that Delhi’s AAP government had cut electricity supply to migrants, and that state government buses were ferrying labourers to a bus station to get rid of them.
If you key in the terms “migrant crisis" or “migrants walking" on Google’s search analytics site, Google Trends, you will see that searches in India for these terms spiked around the time those migrants leaked out of Delhi. Google Trends analysis is usually a good indicator of how a news cycle, or some form of community hysteria, begins.
The transmission of the political lament over “the poor migrant" appears to have backfired on its originators.
The “migrant" in India always did mean the poor labourer. Even egalitarian jazz-lovers in places like Bombay referred to themselves as “cosmopolitans", and when they used the word “migrants", they meant the provincial rustics who had come from north Indian states. Even so, today, “migrant’, is entrenched in the middle-class conscience as a poor labourer--a victim, to many, of the covid-response of the BJP-led government.
Conscientious Indians have reacted strongly to ‘the migrant crisis’. The news of poor people walking many miles back home, even though demonstrating that they can now afford suitcases with wheels, disturbed humanitarians. The news of Indians dying while walking broke hearts. They framed all such news as consequences of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s response to the pandemic. When people were run over by trains; when they died in road accidents, they became “migrants" killed by the “apathy" of the government. Even the visual of a mentally disturbed man eating a raw dog on the road became a story about a “migrant eating a dog because of Indian government".
The same phenomenon has taken hold of the ongoing cyclone calamity. A man who appeared mentally unstable took shelter from the rains in a trash dump; journalists captured his images and called it the plight of the poor.
Suddenly, Indian journalism and its readership seem filled with Prince Siddharths who have just discovered there is poverty in India. And this is excellent.
It is a sign that a new generation or a new society is not comfortable with low standards for life; that it will overreact in horror to things that did not surprise their parents.
What does calm objectivity on poverty signify? What is the meaning of any analysis that shows, correctly, that the poor were poor even before covid, that terrible things happened to them, and they sometimes did terrible things themselves? Of what use is objectivity in the war against a catastrophe like extreme poverty?
Yes, maybe the humanitarian response to the plight of “the migrant" was born of political malice against the BJP. Yes, there are charlatans among the posh young and they are naive to think that a man eating from a garbage can is a new phenomenon, or that a poor man, in his right senses, will never eat a dog raw in the middle of a road. Yes, people are seeking meaning to their pointless lives in social lament. Yet, all these are crucial steps in the process of eradicating extreme poverty. All advanced societies have gone through this process that involves beautiful people parading their goodness. The pursuit of the rich to fill their empty souls with meaning is at the heart of all reformation movements.
I have no doubt that the honest selfishness of material greed is the most efficient way of eliminating poverty, but it takes too long, like evolution. The time unit of economics has to be the span of a childhood. What morals and naive humanitarian lament contribute to society is the speed of poverty eradication.
Even the political origin of the “migrant" issue in the final days of March points to something good. It is a sign that the central preoccupation of Indian politics remains its war against poverty.
You may argue all this has been going on for decades—those rich people with hearts, their bad poems of anguish, those beautiful but suicidal youth in non-profits, those politicians who claim they will end poverty. But that is the point. Their charades were not all useless. Capitalism may have had an outsized and unsung contribution to enriching us, but without the overarching principle that the very purpose of the lucky is to care for the unlucky, very few would have been enriched by capitalism and most of the new middle classes may not have formed.
What is different today from the previous generation is that laments of conscience travel much faster and wider, and they have far greater political power than before.
In a world where people do not have the mental capacity to be objective about anything, in the age of hysteria, what is so bad about deploying hyperbole to lament the many old ways in which the poor die?
Manu Joseph is a journalist, and a novelist, most recently of ‘Miss Laila, Armed And Dangerous’
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