The present Indian government is proud of its many achievements, one of which is the claim that it was one of the first countries to rescue its citizens from overseas when Covid-19 first struck. So why is the government refusing to bring back migrant labourers stuck jobless in the United Arab Emirates when the UAE not only wishes to repatriate them but has also offered to fly them back to India? These are Indian citizens; their security and health are India’s responsibility, one that cannot be palmed off on to another country unable to take it. The Narendra Modi-led government’s unbending attitude towards those believed to be non-citizens was displayed too recently in the context of the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act to be forgotten. Why should other governments be expected to be lenient to non-citizens when India is so quick to threaten deportation for those who cannot prove their citizenship? The Indian government should immediately bring the workers home and then put them in quarantine and conduct whatever tests necessary. It cannot force other governments to take care of them — or not — until the lockdown is lifted in India, as the Indian government has said. The UAE has threatened to impose strict restrictions on recruitment from the countries unwilling to take back their citizens during the coronavirus crisis. Those to suffer, now and later, are workers who must leave their country to earn because they have no option. They are the occasion for a politics conducted without their participation.
The government’s lack of compassion for migrant labourers within and outside the country is reflected in its lack of planning for them in the time of a worldwide crisis. It seems that government institutions are quite taken aback that migrant labourers want to go home, as though they are not supposed to be expressing an immediate, normal response to a sudden crisis that has left them and their families at home helpless. The violence that recently erupted twice in Surat, again at the Bandra railway station in Mumbai, in Hyderabad and other places comes from the desperation of thousands of people wishing to return to their villages, workers without wages, barely fed and often herded together at a time when social distance is a matter of life and death, faced with a government that made no arrangements for their return. Workers obviously do not figure in the Modi government’s list of concerns.