As migrant labourers from different parts of India trekked back hundreds of kilometres carrying their scanty belongings and dragging their hungry and thirsty children in the scorching heat of the plains of India to reach home in central or eastern parts of the country after the sudden announcement by the government of a complete lockdown of the country amid the spectre of Corona virus, questions were raised as to whether this ordeal could have been avoided through adequate arrangements of food and safe shelter for the workers at the places of their stay in the host cities and places of work. The employers of the migrant workers closed shop. The workers were also driven out of their rented shelters on the ground that they would not be able to pay the rent. Their paltry savings also were to dwindle soon. The fear of hunger forced the workers to opt for unimaginable journeys of hundreds of kilometres as all modes of transport had been suddenly closed down. Their choice was between the devil and the deep sea, between starvation and pandemic. India had not witnessed anything like this mass migration across the plains of the country without food or a night’s place of stay for sleep since the days of the Partition of the subcontinent. Yet while scenes of migrant workers walking in long processions caught the cameras of the journalists, it still requires to be asked: What lay behind these long marches? How do caste, race, gender, and other fault lines operate in governmental strategies to cope with a virus epidemic? If the fight against an epidemic has been compared with a war, what are the forces of power at play in this war against the pandemic? What indeed explains the sudden visibility of the migrant workers in the time of a public health crisis? India is in a complete lock down mode. This online publication by the Calcutta Research Group is based on contemporary reflections by journalists, social scientists and social activists, legal practitioners, and thinkers, which highlight the ethical and political implications of the epidemic in India – particularly for India’s migrant workers. This book is written as the crisis unfolds with no end in sight. It is a tract of the time. BORDERS OF AN EPIDEMIC COVID-19 AND MIGRANT WORKERS Edited by RANABIR SAMADDAR Calcutta Research Group Kolkata Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, 2020 Published by Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group IA-48, Sector-III, Ground Floor Salt Lake, Kolkata-700097 India, www.mcrg.ac.in Tel: +91 33 2335 0409 Email: [email protected] This publication is a part of the educational material for the Calcutta Research Group (CRG) programme in Migration and Forced Migration Studies. The programme is held in collaboration with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, and several other universities and institutions in India. Contents Acknowledgements v Introduction: Borders of an Epidemic By Ranabir Samaddar 1 1. Corona Virus and the World-Economy: The Old is Dead, the New Can’t be Born By Ravi Arvind Palat 24 2. Migrant Labour, Informal Economy, and Logistics Sector in a Covid-19 World By Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay 31 3. The Body in Surveillance: What to Do with the Migrants in the Corona Lock Down By Badri Narayan Tiwari 42 4. Hunger, Humiliation, and Death: Perils of the Migrant Workers in the Time of Covid-19 By Utsa Sarmin 48 5. Insecurity and Fear Travel as Labour Travels in the Time of Pandemic By Manish K Jha and Ajeet Kumar Pankaj 56 6. The Return of Bihari Migrants after the COVID-19 Lockdown By Anamika Priyadarshini and Sonamani Chaudhury 66 iv Contents 7. The Sudden Visibility of Returnee Labour By Rajat Roy 76 8. Glimpses of Life in the Time of Corona By Madhurilata Basu and Sibaji Pratim Basu 83 9. Migrant Workers and the Ethics of Care during a Pandemic By Ambar Kumar Ghosh and Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury 91 10. Social Distancing, “Touch-Me-Not” and the Migrant Worker By Ishita Dey 98 11. Bringing the Border Home: Indian Partition 2020 By Samata Biswas 104 12. Nouvelle Corona Virus and Gender Transgressions By Paula Banerjee 115 13. Epilogue: Counting and Accounting for Those on the Long Walk Home By Sabir Ahamed 123 14. A Report : How One State can Learn from Another By Swati Bhattacharjee and Abhijnan Sarkar 132 List of Contributors 138 Acknowledgements This is a hurriedly prepared collection of part reflections, part analyses, and part reportages as the Covid-19 pandemic rages on. I am grateful to the contributors who responded to an impossibly short notice of one week and generously gave their time to write out these pieces. In the process of initial discussions with the contributors on the possible themes of this collection, the plan behind preparing the collection became clearer. Ideas about the implications of the pandemic for world economy and the possibilities of global restructuring of power, the cutting lines of race, caste, and gender in the landscape of gender, the new ethical issues of life in a post Covid-19 world, and above all the place of labour, particularly migrant labour, in what is called the war against the virus became clearer. I am equally grateful to the Calcutta Research Group (CRG) members who went through the pieces and gave me editorial advice – again literally completing the task in two three days. They are all veterans of this research collective. Because of them CRG is what it is. To Ria De I am grateful for the cover design. Finally, my thanks go to Kusumika Ghosh, Utsa Sarmin, and Samaresh Guchhait who helped me in preparing the copy for this online publication. We got enthusiastic responses from others also. These contributions will come in duly. They will be published in CRG research paper series, Policies and Practices. I request the readers to ignore the imbalances in this volume, and its rough and ready nature. These reflections had to be readied within a total of two weeks – from the genesis of the plan to the publication of the book all made under lock down condition of the city. The writers from other cities also wrote in similar situation. The collection is a response to the time. Therefore it is not surprising that the notion of time dominates these reflections. The time of Corona virus, the time after, the time before – in this way the shadow of the time in which the contributors have written these pieces looms heavily on these. The immediacy of pieces is evident. However at the same time the sense of a longer time is also there. I wish the collection had this double vi Acknowledgements imprint of the time more clearly. After all, is not an epidemic like a great war carrying the two marches of time? The reflections revolve around four themes: implications in terms of global economy and as its logistical aspect, labour particularly migrant labour, care and care economy, and finally race, caste, and gender as fault lines of protection in the time of an epidemic. There are two reflections on the first theme. Chapter one by Ravi Anand Palat on “Corona virus and the World-Economy” discusses crisply the implications of the pandemic for global capitalist economy irremediably weakened by the US political and economic system. Yet as he points out, the outcome is not clear. Will there be a new system, a new economy? Chapter two by Ritajyoti Bandopadhyay, “Migrant Labour, Informal Economy, and Logistics Sector in a Covid-19 World” carries further the discussion on economy, and taking the instance of the urban region of Chandigarh-Mohali argues that the issue of informal labour sits at the heart of a logistical reorientation of economy, whose future is now uncertain in the wake of the pandemic. Therefore it is no wonder that with the sudden announcement of a lock down of the country labour vanished overnight. The following five chapters reflect on the second theme. They focus on migrant labour. Chapter three by Badri Narayan Tiwari, “The Body in Surveillance: What to Do with the Migrants in the Corona Lock Down” discusses the ambivalence of the prevailing political and the economic order towards the migrant worker’s body, which is valorised when it is found to be a source of foreign exchange earnings and/or stable income in India’s poorer households, but becomes a concern when it is thought to be a carrier of a disease, even though the body of the comparatively affluent frequent flyers may be the primary carrier of the disease. As Badri Narayan Tiwari asks: What to do with the body except keeping it under surveillance? Chapter four by Utsa Sarmin on “Hunger, Humiliation, and Death: Perils of Migrant Workers in the Time of COVID-19” takes forward the discussion on migrant labour and shows that India’s efforts to fight the virus have brought further perils to the lives of hundreds and thousands of migrant workers in the form of hunger, humiliation, and in some cases even death. Chapter five by Manish K Jha & Ajeet Kumar Pankaj, “Insecurity and Fear Travel as Labour Travels in the Wake of the Pandemic” maintains the focus on the conditions of migrant labour and discusses how insecurity and fear accompany the labour on move haunted by loss of jobs and the despair to reach homes hundreds of kilometres away. Chapter six by Anamika Priyadarshini and Sonamani Chaudhury, “The Return of Bihari Migrants after the COVID-19 Lockdown” is a fascinating study of the returnee labour in Bihar. The authors show how fear, anxiety, and insecurity, indeed every aspect of human life, mark the issue of return of the migrants to their villages and towns.