I was on a call with a distant relative a couple of days back, discussing all and sundry, when the conversation eventually, and obviously glided to the morbidity of current times. Except, morbidity for her was on a slightly different tangent. “Life has become so tough,” she said. “My world’s turned upside down.”
Now while I understand this pandemic has scared the daylight out of all of us, I was particularly intrigued by her emphatically toned ‘my world’. I asked her if someone close to her was diagnosed COVID-positive.
Sounding her mopey best, she replied “Nahi, but meri maid nahi aa rahi na. Ab sab kaam khud se karna padta hai” (No, but my help hasn’t been coming, right. So I have no choice but to do all the chores myself). I paused, offered my condolences, excused myself and hung up.
But come to think of it, times sure as hell are tough for a country where every middle-class family’s survival depends on the help, who is more often than not, and very impassively, referred to as ‘naukar‘, the ‘servant’, because their servitude is the pride (read dependency) of every Indian household, that can afford to employ their services.
Yet, the lack of empathy for their plight bemuses me. Majority of the part-time help today has no means to make ends meet, for their employers don’t deem it necessary, or even proper, to pay their monthly wage amidst the lockdown.
Talking of empathy, or the lack of it, there’s a larger than life figure, who, with his tacit rejection of compassion, is assertively leading the nation by example. For a country run by a man who’s been riding his high horse since even before he wore the crown, consumed by the timely reassurance from his ideological and political groupies and self-attained complacency, it’s no surprise that over a hundred million migrant labourers have been left at the mercy of their own fate.
Every address that begins before the announcement of the next lockdown, must include songs in the glory of the government, all of India’s achievements and all things laudable, all presented as victories of the last 6 years, (much to the chagrin of Nehru), as long as it doesn’t touch upon the status of hapless daily wage earners. Else, wouldn’t that just prove the naysayers right and fizzle all the josh out of them believers?
But really, what makes the Prime Minister exclude as much as a mention of these migrant workers from his address? Why are his devout followers choosing to be oblivious to his lack of preparedness to handle the crisis, so much so that they’re nonchalantly, and shamelessly if I may, blaming the deceased for ‘sleeping on railway tracks’ and for walking miles (and dying) before they reach home?
Benjamin Franklin once said, “The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.” I’m sure the old lad had little vision of how his statement would be apropos of India’s socio-political dynamics three centuries later. But no better reasoning explains the unfettered faith in the potentate, who with the power of his oratory and whataboutery has successfully yanked out any empathy left in most of us.
For a man who chooses to squander OUR hard-earned money on a futile flower-shower, instead of providing the most basic aid to the needy with that money, it’s no surprise that most people and most being his ardent followers, do not even want to spare a thought for the ‘other world’ replete with hunger, hopelessness, and helplessness.
And if at all Mr. PM, his zealots, and his sycophants were waiting for a rubber-stamp for their apathy, and their deficiency of morality, the Supreme Court with its verdict only further reiterated the absence of any moral quandary.
As of today, the plight of migrant labourers and their position in the hierarchy of priorities is nothing but a reflection of a nation that’s bereft of any empathy and tirelessly shameless temerity to blame those on the bottom-most rung of power. We have failed those who constitute the country’s workforce, not just with our actions, but with a gaping void in our souls, that’s sure to suck us in when the only thing constant is our existential angst and despair.