Shantanu Thakur
(A retired IAS officer Santanu Thakur can be reached at thakur.santanu@gmail.com)
Down the ages, telling photographs depicting human misery have time and again shaken the world. The black and white photograph of a homeless mother with her hapless children burying their faces on her shoulder during the Great Depression in the United States of America had touched human hearts the world over. She was a mother of seven and she struggled to survive with her kids catching birds and picking fruits. The photograph, taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936, had made it to the front page of most major newspapers and changed people's conception about migrants. There have been many such photographs over the years. Kevin Carter's now iconic photo of a vulture preying upon an emaciated Sudanese toddler near the village of Ayod in southern Sudan, is now a part of history. Photos of the George Floyd inhumanity are not going to be the last of them either. The pictures of the "mushroom cloud" over Nagasaki; the horrific photos of the Bhopal gas tragedy and several others have haunted human conscience all through. The photo of a weeping Rampukar Pandit by a roadside in Delhi was widely shared across all media and has turned into a symbol of the migrant worker tragedy in the country. This was just one of the several heart-rending stories including that of a train running over a group of fatigued migrant labourers who had fallen asleep on the tracks – so tired that they could not even hear the train hurtling towards them.
Someone has said that the thing called human conscience lies embedded under layers of survival- instinct-induced indifference and as human civilization fast tracks on a road to nowhere, this layer of conscience plummets further. Years of frustration over being unable to bring about changes; a numbing indifference that forms out of it, adds further layers over sensibility and conscience conveniently takes a back seat - till, maybe an earth-shattering calamity turns the applecart upside down. The age of instantaneity invites depthlessness and even religiosity becomes a commodity sold by all sorts of brand gurus and distributed through television channels and self-help pocket books. Much before this all-pervasive pandemic came over us like a Biblical plague; things were beginning to change in our social interactions for quite long. In the sixties and the seventies the elderly in the neighbourhood as well as in the extended towns were familiar with almost all families to the extent that some senior person you didn't quite know would accost you on a street and enquire how you fared this time in your maths paper. He knew about your strengths and weaknesses from the parental interactions. That kind of a situation is unthinkable now. Somewhere down the line, life took a plunge towards mere creature comforts - the refrigerator, the television set, new-fangled gadgets began to take up more space in our homes and in our minds – pushing us more and more into our shells. Social distancing has been silently creeping in all along and it takes an upheaval to wake us up now to the universal values of compassion and fellow-feeling. Swami Vivekananda had touched the minds of people all over the world when he had asked: Do you feel? Do you feel that millions are starving today, and that millions have been starving for ages? For how long is human compassion supposed to be a mere lip-service expression of conscience soon to be swept under the carpet till the next catastrophe? Remember how long ago Dylan had sung that soul-searching hit when the answers we still seek today were imagined to be blowing in the wind all around us, but hardly seen?
The pandemic has suddenly hit us hard to take stock of how thick-skinned we have become in our sensibilities towards each other. The privileged amongst us can retreat to the banality of our lives on social media, but the teeming others who are deprived of even the basic amenities find themselves stranded on streets and railway tracks without food and shelter; with no connect to a parental sarkar. The apathy of the State was all too visible towards the plight of our own helpless migrant labourers left totally directionless. Had the media not exposed the tragedy unfolding, most of it would have gone unnoticed; whatever follow-up care came from the Government was too little too late – despite the much-flaunted disaster management preparedness. The point here is not to be too critical of a machinery in crisis, but, to stress that systems need to be more sensitive and imbued with empathy. We need to be much more concerned because we now know that the plight of the poor and the marginalized can effortlessly slip out of the dominant consciousness. The tragic stories of our migrant workers walking back to their homes, some dying before they could reach, tear open the façade of our social security structures and the fact that policy changes in the sector are the crying need of the times – "sociological consciousness seems more pertinent than ever." (Crisis and the Sociological Imagination by Prof. Maitrayee Chaudhuri.)
The problem is universal; not confined to our land alone. There has been a steady erosion of human values everywhere. All this could probably be traced to some disjoint, some delink between wealth and ideal. Although the earlier Communist countries have embraced the forces of market economy opening up the winds of trade to raise GDPs, adequate shrinking of disparities have not yet been visible in most countries. A healthy, balancing ballast of wealth creation and all-inclusive growth is a necessity in economic policy – as much as a healthy balance with the environment and ecology. If we neglect the clear writing on the wall for too long, nature itself will force us to the crossroads for a decision on our sustained survival.
Large swathes of homeless, insecure migrant workers are a matter of shame anywhere. Islands of prosperity in a sea of poverty was said to be an unwanted achievement years earlier by well-known economic analysts. Mahatma Gandhi in his various essays on equitable distribution of wealth and, for the build-up of the rural economy, had an action plan of his own. But planners in independent India paid only half-hearted attention to his ideas and gradually, as we moved into even more half-hearted market economy, such thinking got to be considered as out-dated altogether. A school of thought has for long gained ground that Gross Domestic Happiness is no less important than the GDP. Neighbour-nation Bhutan had recognized this ahead of us; but a concern for a spiritual, happy state of wellness for mankind has always been a priority for this mountain nation. At the end of the day, a nation should be able to hold up its head high in righteous pride at a reasonably dignified collective lifestyle for all its citizens. The lines from the saintly bard continue to ring down the corridors of time: "into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake."