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Jodi tor dak shune keu na ashe
tobe ekla chalo re,
Tobe ekla chalo, ekla chalo,
ekla chalo, ekla chalo re.
…
If no one responds to your call then go on alone.
And if there is no one to speak out, and if they turn their face and are afraid,
then open your heart and speak only you. Speak alone, speak alone.
If every one goes back and none accompanies you in the difficult path,
then tread the thorns with bloody feet alone. Tread alone, tread alone.
If there is no one to light the lamp, and if every one shuts his door in the stormy dark night,
then burn the ribs of your heart with the thunder fire and burn alone, burn alone.
(Jodi tor dak/Ekla Chalo Re – Rabindranath Tagore, in The Music of Hindostan, p. 94).
The world has seen several “long marches,” some forced and some politically expedient or to make a statement against injustice. The Trail of Tears march of Native American tribes, from the southern US to points north was a notoriously brutal relocation of several American Indian tribes that resulted in much suffering. Similarly horrific was the march of Armenians in the Ottoman empire in what is called the Armenian Genocide March.
The best known political march is probably the Chinese Long March, undertaken by the Red Army, in the 1930s. India has seen its own examples of marches, like the storied Salt March by Mohandas Gandhi but there have been hundreds of lesser known marches to press for various rights, like the farmer’s march of 2018, and many other Dilli Chalo kinds of marches.
To the long list of long marches, we have now added, rather unnecessarily, a Forced Long March – that of migrants heading back to their homes, on foot, since all forms of (long distance) public transport were suddenly stopped under the Covid-19 lockdown measures. This was done even as the migrants in various migrant hubs were just about taking in the catastrophic effect of Covid-19 on lives – and on livelihoods. For mostly daily-wage earners and other precarious workers like them, businesses shutting down meant a sudden and total loss of income. Staying on in the expensive migrant-hubs suddenly seemed an impossibility, with their razor-thin savings, if any at all.
Now many migrants are using the one form of locomotion that has not been taken away from them, walking, to try to get back to their homes. Since no one listened to their stories and plight, they just decided to ekla chalo the road.
A lot of the migrants are criss-crossing India on foot, arduously trekking to their homes, hundreds of kilometers away. In the north, the historic Grand Trunk Road (GT Road) is, as always, serving as a lifeline for those who must traverse its storied route to their homes east and north. They stream out from Delhi into the neighbouring city of Ghaziabad and then on to points north to Uttarakhand or east to other parts of UP and Bihar. Still others trudge westwards from Delhi to their villages in, say, Sawai Madhopur, Rajasthan. We have now created a “Dilli Se Chalo (Let’s head out of Delhi)” mass movement instead of the more well-known “Dilli Chalo (Let’s head to Delhi).”
This unfortunate result of the sudden lockdown was not entirely unpredictable. Of course, some national level decisions can be very hard to gauge for their impact. With the cases of Covid-19 slowly inching up on a country like India with a weak public health infrastructure and inherent difficulties of social distancing, there is reason for some tough decisions so as to avoid a full-scale contagion. Countries with allegedly better healthcare systems, like those in Europe and North America have a ballooning crisis on their hands. 1.3 billion people in India is a cause for concern, just in terms of numbers.
Yet, this needless emergency is also a colossal failure in the basics of administration, planning, governance – and leadership. All of which, we are told, are marked by qualities of foresight, scrupulous attention to detail, ensuring backup plans, understanding “dependencies” and “stakeholders,” and carrying everything out with clear and seamless communication.
It is not necessary that in an effort to avoid one disaster, one ends up creating another. This betrays the real distance between policy-makers and the people. There are simply no excuses. The state machinery completely messed up in the manner it announced and managed the lockdown. Even the prime minister did not think it worthwhile to lay out any details of the post-lockdown logistics, especially the fate of migrant workers and the availability of essential items. Panic ensued even as the speech was winding down. And then the PM very helpfully tweeted, “Do not panic.”
All the political experience of the ruling party from the prime minister down, all the expertise of the bureaucrats around the PM and various ministers, all the wisdom in public domain from so-called “management experts” came to nothing; in fact, they all managed to cause immense human suffering. What a fall from grace and the high-horse of the “Gujarat model.”
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.