At one pm everyday, when many of the middle class people wake up to have their brunch owing to their routine turning upside down in the lockdown, Satnam, who looks like in his mid 40’s rides his old Bajaj scooter and comes to the labour chowk of Subhash Nagar. He carries with him a big steel tin box full of homemade food for around hundred people. The sound of his old scooter whose production stopped years ago, and the music of “satnam waheguru” which he continously plays on loop on his small Chinese phone marks the arrival of Satnam for many who wait for him to have their first meal of the day.
It has been over 40 days since I have been observing him distriburing food to the needy, roughly a week after the lockdown started. After long, I finally asked him about his everyday inspiration which drives him for this work. He didn’t mind my presence much and answered without being conscious that ‘how can I eat when so many are unable to do so and when the governance fail we have to ensure justice for people’. He told me that he along with his wife and mother prepares food for one hundred people everyday which according to him ‘is what Guru Nanak has taught’ and one, ‘can do only as much as we can’. Satnam didn’t discriminate between people on the basis of religion or caste and was doing what Guru Nanak has taught ‘Vand Chhako’ i.e. to share what one has and consume it with community. Like Satnam, thousands of common people and Gurdwaras today have been serving langars, preparing tons of food every day for lakhs of workers and poor who are unable to feed themselves amidst countrywide lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. Ever since the lockdown was announced, many people, civil society groups, and NGOs in every nook and corner of the country are doing the same. Helping the needy with whatever they have.
The purpose of the long prologue was to highlight two things. Firstly, that we need compassion as a principle and it is compassion and love for our fellow beings that keeps the world going. Secondly, that compassion devoid of any talk of justice means a little and the former must not obscure the larger idea of justice. The entire coronavirus pandemic lockdown has caused unspeakable sufferings to the poor especially the workers of the country. The level of shock was raised everyday with the gutting images of the workers floating everywhere on the social media which left all of us bereaved. One image replaced the other with each passing day, so did the mourning. Be it the initial images of the young boy in the green shirt whose videos surfaced crying over food, or thousands of workers walking back home barefooted. From the images of laborers in large cement rollers to the human debris scattered on the railway tracks, to the man carrying his old mother on his back and walking to his village, the list is endless. The everydayness of the violence happening around us has indeed made our senses blunt, thus moving away the call for justice further away.
It
has been over fifty days since Government of India announced a lockdown of the
entire country. The poor and workers were left on their own in a situation
which proved out to be hundred times worse than the demonetization. The
pictures of workers walking back to their villages from the cities which left
them to toil on their own speaks volume of government’s apathy and failure. It
was only because of the efforts of common citizens and many other civil society
groups and religious bodies that helped the government by mollifying people’s
anger.
Sadly, there has been a little questioning of the government’s complete failure in handling of the pandemic and so far no accountability has been fixed. The rapid changing grammar of politics is now manifesting itself. Positions of responsibility have now seized to be positions of accountability and have just turned into positions of power. Now there are no calls for taking responsibility of any events and quitting positions but rather what we have is only announcements of enquires which dissolves in the air with the changing headlines. Now with the changing levels of shock, how do we imagine justice for our people?
In these times when the ruling party is actively advocating for communal apartheid against Muslims and is aggressively putting an end to all labour laws which stood for the safety and protection of the workers, it is important to ensure that the fight for justice does not take a back seat. Justice and compassion should not be taken as exclusive categories but something that actively inform each other. Workers and poor should not just be taken as mere figures for statistics or unaccounted numbers. They are alive and human, treating them as chattels who need one time food and throwing them in shelter homes with no dignity is dehumanizing and unjust. Borrowing again from what the wise man said above, when governance fail we should fight to ensure justice. But the question is that how do we ensure that the fight for justice goes on even after the images in the social media and the headlines changes.
Kawalpreet Kaur is a student activist based in Delhi. She completed her Law from University of Delhi.
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