Jyoti Mukul - The Great Shutdown

To Erick Masseys mother

CONTENTS

W HEN CONFINEMENT IS INVOLUNTARY, it can work as a push factor for needing to move even more. The COVID-19 pandemic, its pain in the death and in the disease itself, has the force to overshadow the moment when life came to a standstill in India and millions decided to take to the road because of economic distress. Loss of life due to the disease, however, will be just another number unless it comes with a chronicle of why it happened, how it happened near us and whether those happenings had anything to do with how India lived through those days, months and years. Conscious of the fact that many authors, globally and in India, would be able to chronicle COVID-19 from a medical lens, and others would be able to comment on the 2020 Indian lockdown and the migrant crisis from the expert perspectives of an activist or a labour specialist, it was necessary to take up a subject that was not only different but more importantly, chronicling something that was mundane and yet, was at the heart of both the contagion as well as the migrant crisis. The snapping of transport links needed a work to itself. It was the single most important factor which differentiated the national lockdown of 2020 from the localized lockdowns that India witnessed in 2021. If 2020 was harsh because of the ineptitude of the Union and state governments in handling a pandemic, it was also because governance failed each day to anticipate the next crisis. Rightfully, the 2020 lockdown was compared to the 2016 demonetization of currency notes, not just by commentators but also by a politically aware Ekdashi Kumar of Bihar, who just withdrew all his cash from an ATM machine when the lockdown started in Bengaluru because he did not want to run out of cash and add to his woes.

The book was conceived the moment the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) decided that the Indian Railways would no longer carry passengers and that airlines would be grounded. The almost 68,000 km-long railway network is the only means of travel for people who work outside their home states and cannot afford air travel. Long-distance buses have also become an option in the past decade but these are arduous journeys, usually undertaken only if a confirmed railway ticket is not available because of travel at short notice, or if it is cheaper to travel by road than by train. Besides the Indian Railways, other long- and short-distance travel links were also snapped in 2020 within the span of a few days, some before and some after the railway shutdown. The decisions taken by the states and the Union governments for other modes of travel to prevent a contagion needed to be chronicled. Mentioning all decisions of each state, however, would have yielded similar results. The approach, therefore, was to capture the Union governments lockdown directives on all activities which were not permitted, broadly, and on transport sector, specifically. Some state government decisions prior to the national lockdown have been included to give an idea of the build-up to a complete shutdown.

Though the tales and travails of individuals caught in the lockdown are important, the focus of the book is not the reverse migration of the labour force, or what some people call the going away of the guest workers (India is the only country which calls its own people migrants, even if all they are doing is moving from one state to another). The book instead goes into how the sudden cessation of transport operations for a billion-plus people created not just uncertainty of movement, but also the emotional crisis of being separated from family back home at a time when an unknown disease could have claimed their lives. It was, however, neither possible nor appropriate to take the people out of the story. Besides, restricting the narrative to just government notifications, decisions and Prime Minister Narendra Modis addresses to the nation ran the same risk as journalistic reports: it could easily be termed one side of the story, apart from becoming banal.

It was, therefore, important to analyse the governments decisions minutely, and also record the voices of those severely impacted: some already heard but many gone unheard. Conversations with such people have been conducted largely over phone calls, though their pain, as well as the stubborn belief of some that there was nothing called COVID in India was palpable even through the airwaves. I do not believe there is anything like corona. We stayed back with 400 people in one place last year (2020) and nothing happened to anyone. Then, I came home and later went back to Bengaluru. We have only heard about corona; we have not seen it happen, said Jitendra Yadav of Ballia district in May 2021 (chapter 11), even after he learnt of people dying in scores after contracting fever in neighbouring villages during the second wave (chapter 11).

Some authentic first-hand accounts from published news and feature reports have also been interwoven with the government directives to give a sense of the unprecedented situation in 2020. This also breaks the mundane tone of government directives, which sometimes begin with a DO number or phrases like inter alia, and can put off even an avid reader. DO is short for demi-official, and indicates a personalized letter to an officer on a specific aspect of a decision already taken or proposed to be taken, while inter alia is Latin for something as simple as among other things.

The 2020 lockdown in India was undoubtedly among the most stringent in the democratic world, and even perhaps brutal. There were many cases of policemen fatally hitting people for violations both during the stricter 2020 lockdown and during the more relaxed localized lockdowns of 2021. Thirty-two-year-old Lal Swami in West Bengals Howrah went out to buy milk on 25 March 2020, the first day of the national lockdown. Policemen on duty there were dispersing people in the market to prevent crowding and, as is common in India, the baton-wielding constables used force inconsiderately. One of them struck Swami, already suffering from heart ailments. He suffered a cardiac arrest and later died. Faisal was just seventeen.

Lockdowns in more evolved democracies were debated and protested against openly. For instance, Governor Tony Evers of Wisconsin state of the United States issued Executive Order 72, declaring a health emergency on 12 March 2020. A day later, the states Supreme Court struck down a stay at home order, numbered 28, issued by Andrea Palm, secretary-designee of the Department of Health Services (DHS). This case is about the assertion of power by one unelected official, Andrea Palm, and her order to all people within Wisconsin to remain in their homes, not to travel and to close all businesses that she declares are not essential in Emergency Order 28, the court said. Order 28 said the transgressor could face imprisonment for thirty days, a $250 fine or both. But the court observed that she broke the law when issuing Emergency Order 28 since emergency rule procedures were not followed, and that she exceeded her authority by ordering everyone to stay home, closing all non-essential businesses, prohibiting private gatherings of any number of people who were not part of a single household and forbidding all non-essential travel.

The Wisconsin case was filed by the Republican legislature of the state, which was politically opposed to restrictions. Seven days after the Wisconsin Supreme Court order, a group of seventeen petitioners, including salon owners, a pastor, a protest organizer and a candidate for Congress, petitioned a federal court on 20 May 2020, saying the local orders infringed their First Amendment rights.