Exodus within India

In 1934, i.e. a long time ago, Tagore took exception to Gandhi’s characterization of that year’s Bihar earthquake as “a divine chastisement for the great sin” of untouchability. Tagore’s disapproval was shared by many then and has not been forgotten by historians. 

Others in 1934, however, agreed that the calamity was an apt time to confront an ugly reality. Wide destruction, the death of many, and the near escape of the rest seemed a good moment to acknowledge that untouchability was an enormous offence committed by many Indians and tolerated by the rest. 

Today, in 2020, those believing in an all-powerful but also all-loving God struggle to figure out why the corona virus is permitted to assault our world. All, however, may agree on one thing: in this afflicted time, we should ask the frankest of questions. 

People of different religious stripes claim that death leads to an interview where our Maker asks for a hisab of our lives. Even without imagining such an interview, the thought of death, which the virus has invited to all our minds, induces reflection. 

The isolation prescribed for minimizing the virus’s impact has already produced rethinking about what we usually take for granted, including the caring we receive from near ones, and the service that helpers provide. Before he was discharged from a London hospital where he had been admitted for the virus, a Briton of Indian origin, a devout Hindu, wrote down these observations: 

“The nursing staff looking after me… treat everyone with compassion and professionalism, including abusive patients. 

“Today is my birthday and I thought nothing of it. Just before the end of their 12-hour shift, before going home, however, our nurses, Maria and Mohamed, brought chocolate cake for all of the guys on my ward and sang me happy birthday.  That they would do this, joyfully, in the midst of Coronavirus, death, bile, blood, and multiple other very human afflictions, substances and materials, says something about the human spirit. If ever I doubted that there are angels walking amongst us, I just need to look at the NHS day-staff here. I’ve not seen their faces fully as they’re always masked in front of us.” 

Even if we haven’t been admitted to a hospital, similar thoughts of appreciation for acts by others have occurred to many of us, whether we are Indian or non-Indian, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist or whatever. At least for now, we’re valuing fellow humans more. 

Should we be satisfied with that? I would like to suggest that this can be an ideal moment not only for personal reflection but also for an honest look at India’s realities. I would like to suggest, further, that a candid picture was provided by the forced exodus of our poor, which began right after Prime Minister Modi announced the nationwide lockdown. 

The images will never leave us. Belongings balanced on head or back, many beginning a trudge of hundreds of miles. For the health and safety of “the nation”, millions across India forced to leave their urban “shelters” (if that’s a suitable word for the dorms, huts or holes where they lived) and walk, under the open sky, towards their distant villages.  

In our “social distancing” times, countless others of these migrant workers and their families tightly packed in bus terminals or equally dangerous buses, or doused with chemicals, or pushed into crowded screening rooms. 

Long after the virus has been subjugated, India may continue to be defined by images of the trudge. Was the trudge an aberration? Something unexpected? 

Let’s see the trudge for what it was: a sudden eruption from a social body sick for ages. Sick from harsh hierarchy and callous indifference. 

The trudge was if anything a gentler picture, yet one that none could miss, of the truth many of us would rather not see: the daily cruelty inflicted on this land’s undefended ones, much of the time our Dalits and adivasis, our religious minorities, our women. 

All know that a great many crimes against the weak remain unregistered, unreported, unpursued, unpunished. The cries of miserable victims or their loved ones mostly hit deaf ears. 

The virus may not be a divine chastisement for our sins. Yet we can use the quieter moments forced by it to reflect on these sins and resolve to shake free of their grip. 

If we have the courage, we can confess the alacrity with which, for our ills, we blame people of the “other” caste, religion or nationality. A preacher’s costly foolishness should warn all to be wary of excited enthusiasm. It feeds, instead, the itch to blame Muslims. 

The virus’s start in Wuhan suffices to confirm China as its conscious cause. This when all countries, including India and the US, want China to provide protective gear for health workers and ventilators for patients. 

Let the virus inject honesty into us. Let us confess our secret grudge that large sections of our people are around. We’d rather that they -- the slum-dwellers, the ghetto-dwellers, those with hourly wages, those easy to turf out, the Muslims, the Dalits, the transgenders, and others similarly despised -- did not exist. 

Will we repent and allow the virus to teach us that humanity is one, and we are interdependent? That ills occur not because certain castes, religions, races or nations exist but because, while heroic at times, all human beings are flawed and often foolish? 

If not an Almighty, future generations will judge what we did and didn’t.