Bharat Bhushan - Migrant disaster in Covid-19 lockdown: Silencing NGOs has proved costly
The failure to assess
how migrant daily-wage workers would react to a sudden lockdown
suggests
that the present government may be on a journey without maps. How else does one
explain its inability to formulate a plan to protect this hugely vulnerable
section of the urban population?
Planning inputs should
have come from the bureaucracy, political parties and from NGOs and civil society organisations working in the informal sector. The bureaucracy failed
to alert the government to the possibility of the tragic migration back to the
villages. Worse still, as migrants walked, carrying their belongings and small
children, they were beaten up, baton-charged and frog-marched on interstate
highways and occasionally sprayed with chemical bleach like dead animals by an
insensitive system.
Did the government
seek the views of the bigger states like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, West Bengal,
Haryana, and Delhi which receive a large number of migrants or the states which
send them, like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra
Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Orissa? With the Modi government’s opaque
functioning no one knows if these stakeholders were consulted.
Had Prime Minister
Modi taken the Opposition into confidence on his plans to control the pandemic,
he might have had useful inputs from parties, such as the Left parties, that
are more sensitive to the marginalised. Perhaps even his own party’s MPs from
the affected states might have given him some inkling of the disastrous
consequences of hasty decisions. Admittedly, the Bahartiya Mazdoor Sangh, the
trade union front of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has been critical
of the Modi government’s labour policies for leaving out unorganised sector
workers from the ambit of social security programmes. However, its influence
over the government is no match for the corporate spell over it.
The Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) has no grassroots cadre of its own relying entirely on the workers of its
mother organisation the RSS. The RSS has a huge cadre – it holds meetings
everyday with about 70,000 shakhas (literally, branches or basic units) across
India. Could it be that the RSS is so focussed on wooing the urban middle
classes, that it has no time for footloose labour?
The RSS has experience
of dealing with disasters ranging from cyclones and Tsunamis to earthquakes.
But in all these natural disasters its relief intervention came after the
event. It has also been efficient where religion is involved. Thus its
supporters are good at preparing temporary shelters and proving free food to
Kanwariyas ferrying holy water from the Ganges to their village, for example.
It is perhaps at a loss on how to deal with unfolding policy disasters which do
not have religious overtones.
NGOs and civil society
organisations could have been key in bringing the policy sensitivity required
in the government. However, the Modi government has deliberately blocked all
channels of communication with them, squeezed their funding, especially from
abroad, and increased their compliance requirements disproportionately. It is
estimated that NGOs in India today have more reporting compliance requirements
than private companies that receive foreign revenue and remittances.
Restrictions on the
funding of NGOs and civil society organisations increased after the 9/11
attacks in the US as governments the world over took special measures to
prevent terror financing and money laundering. However under the guise of this
objective, India, and many other governments, throttled NGOs and civil society
organisations critical of their human rights record and development
agenda. Guidelines of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) were used for
‘policy laundering’ -- legalising increased NGO surveillance and regulation.
It was the United
Progressive Alliance government which drew up the Foreign Contributions
Regulation Act (FCRA) in mid-2010 to comply with the FATF guidelines. Some of
the NGOs were seen as being “political” in nature. The Modi government extended
this policy further cancelling the licences of nearly 24,000 NGOs between 2014
and 2017.
The NGO space was thus
opened up to be occupied by in-house NGOs and front organisations of the RSS.
However, RSS-affiliates have failed to populate this space effectively because
they lack the democratic perspective required for protecting human rights, and
because they are uncritical of the state’s development agenda. Their raison
d'etre is ideological advancement of Hindutva into all available
interstices in society and to silence voices that challenge them. In this
contest their competitors have been deemed “urban Naxalites” and with the State
invoking the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) against them. The
suppression of Dalit assertion from Bhima Koregaon to Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh
is also a reflection of this.
The result is that the
State’s civil society link is broken beyond repair. The Manmohan Singh
government was only able to keep up a dialogue with civil society because of
the creation of the National Advisory Council (NAC) under the Congress party
pressure. The NAC played a role in nudging the government to pursue the
interests of the poor and ensure transparency, accountability and democratic
governance. The NAC can be credited with the formulation of the National Rural
Employment Guarantee Scheme and minimum wages, The Right to Information Act,
several pre-legislative consultative processes, Lokpal, Grievance Redressal
Bill and the Whistle-blower Protection Bill.
The Modi government
has no such advisory body and the RSS cannot fill that space. There was no
Aruna Roy, Jean Dreze, or a Harsh Mander to advise Prime Minister Modi that
food, shelter and financial support for daily-wage earners had to be planned
before announcing the lockdown. The
Modi regime has lost out on the social wisdom that could have prevented the
unfolding tragedy. This wisdom neither exists in India’s stultified bureaucracy
nor amongst professional politicians.
When they are most
needed to aid the government efforts to control Covid-19, NGOs and civil
society organisation stand financially starved, organisationally weakened and
demonised. They have, however, begun addressing the fallout of the policy haste
of the government by running voluntary kitchens for the stranded migrants. However,
their slender means may not be enough to deal with the consequences of possibly
the largest post-Partition migration within India.
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