Praveen Verma



Suddenly, the idiot box started buzzing with religious caricature via Ramayana and Mahabharat and how the Pradhansevak’s 21 days oath will take this country away from all the misery!..  The social media was .. congested with pictures and videos of people spending time by pursuing their various hobbies (from washing dishes, gardening and trying out cooking classes to forcing themselves into yoga).  .. The surety and commitment towards its citizens, which should have come from the government was left on the shoulders of Hindu mythologies through television! …. There was no communication or guidelines at any level (national and local) which could be helpful for the workers, their livelihood and their bleak future. Working-class people were left to be on their ‘Aatm’ (self) to remain ‘nirbhar’ (dependent).

 Nitesh gave me a panic call, ‘bhaiya can you arrange food for 13 families?’ I could sense the urgency in his hurried voice with a dry throat. I asked him for details and assured him to get the cooked food delivered. From that day on we started distributing food to the people of Subhash Camp Settlement in North Delhi where more than 150 families live in small spaces crammed in between a big drainage and a railway line. Some 30 odd families left the settlement within a few days and the remaining people and families were left confused, puzzled and anxious by the announcement of the lockdown. This was already early April 2020, three weeks after the lockdown was announced. Nitesh got my contact number from social media where we asked people in need to get in touch with us. The calls started pouring everyday from early in the morning till late in the night. 

 The lockdown was announced on 24 March 2020 when the Pradhansevak's famous 8 pm segment appearance on television worried everyone. His recent history of flirtation with the TV didn’t go down so well with the common person’s life, lest we forget the demonetisation and the misery thereafter. The whole country shut down from midnight. Markets, offices, factories, industries, transportation, everything was shut!  

 Suddenly, the idiot box started buzzing with religious caricature via Ramayana and Mahabharat and how the Pradhansevak’s 21 days oath will take this country away from all the misery! #WeShallOvercome. The social media was becoming congested with pictures and videos of people spending time by pursuing their various hobbies (from washing dishes, gardening and trying out cooking classes to forcing themselves into yoga). 

 This was the time where the working class, mostly employed in the informal sector was puzzled, out of a job, savings and their livelihood and lay hanging in utter uncertainty. The surety and commitment towards its citizens, which should have come from the government was left on the shoulders of Hindu mythologies through television! In reality, however, it left the migrant workers lurching in distress. There was no planning before and even after this announcement and it created chaos, confusion and anxiety among the informal workers. They were not taken into consideration when the announcement was made. There was no communication or guidelines at any level (national and local) which could be helpful for the workers, their livelihood and their bleak future. Working-class people were left to be on their ‘Aatm’ (self) to remain ‘nirbhar’ (dependent).

 During that time some of us who were in Delhi and have been involved in various social concerns previously in different capacities, met and decided to work in solidarity with the workers. Food is the most basic need and where the state fails to intervene, civil society needs to. We planned to run a kitchen for the distressed migrant workers in Delhi – a place where we could get together in such a critical time, cook food and distribute it in working-class areas. We called ourselves Mazdoor Dhaba (worker’s kitchen). We started cooking a week after the lockdown was announced on 28 March close to the Delhi University campus in north Delhi. 

 We didn’t have to look for migrant workers. Hundreds, if not thousands, were already on a long walk from their respective places. Many of them wanted to reach the bus terminals, as inter-state bus services were open with restricted use. However, thousands and thousands of workers were clueless in the absence of clear information guidelines. Police were deployed in large numbers to prevent people from moving on highways. Yet families with adolescent children and old people were walking all the way from Punjab and Haryana. . All kinds of workers were walking and were looking to reach the bus terminal somehow. There were workers who had already walked for more than 250 km to reach Delhi to go back to a place they call home. The kiln workers, construction workers, factory workers, waste workers and daily wage earners working in Delhi, Haryana and Punjab were spending nights under the sky with uncertainty. During the first few days, there was hardly a street or road in Delhi where one wouldn’t see migrant workers walking towards their home.  

 

This situation did not deter the migrant workers to come forward and join the relief work themselves. … They came forward and we started a community kitchen run by the Mazdoor Dhaba at Subhash Camp…  This one was unique in a way that the cooking and distribution of food was done by the community itself.

This is what we conceptualised as Mazdoor Dhaba – solidarity among working-class people, rather than philanthropic work which has a top-down approach. After Subhash Camp, a third such kitchen was started in Wazirpur Industrial Area.

 We started distributing food to these migrant workers. It was not sufficient for all of them. However, we kept at it. A call for monetary contribution was given (both online and offline) where a lot of like-minded people from across the world contributed to Mazdoor Dhaba’s effort to eliminate hunger in this dire situation. With each passing day we increased our cooking and widened our distribution areas. By moving out from the comfort of home, where the privileged class could enjoy solitary confinement, one could see the situation in working-class neighbourhoods in Delhi-NCR was turning from bad to worse. Even the government, let alone us, could not understand the magnitude of this crisis. The government’s effort was far from sufficient to fulfil the demand. Every day a new set of people from various neighbourhoods would contact us for food and dry ration. And so, we began providing dry ration kits to the neighbourhoods where we could not provide cooked food. 

 The unplanned lockdown, even as it had no plan for ensuring food and ration to people, also did not halt the rising cases of coronavirus. This meant that along with the increasingly dire need for food each day, we also needed to maintain safety protocol at the cooking places to keep everyone safe, and more importantly to keep the food safe.    

 The situation of food in regard to the migrant workers would have been much worse had it not been for the number of civil society groups working in Delhi-NCR. This situation did not deter the migrant workers to come forward and join the relief work themselves. One such initiative started at Subhash Camp where Mazdoor Dhaba distributed cooked food to migrant workers who were mostly in hospitality and footwear industries in and around Lawrence Road and Wazirpurpur Industrial Area. They came forward and we started a community kitchen run by the Mazdoor Dhaba at Subhash Camp. It was the second such initiative from Mazdoor Dhaba after the one at Delhi University campus. This one was unique in a way that the cooking and distribution of food was done by the community itself. Further along, they began distributing food to other settlements as well consisting mainly of waste workers and construction workers.  

 This is what we conceptualised as Mazdoor Dhaba – solidarity among working-class people, rather than philanthropic work which has a top-down approach. After Subhash Camp, a third such kitchen was started in Wazirpur Industrial Area. Mazdoor Dhaba was different from many other civil society groups doing relief work during this period in the sense that we were grounded in building solidarity.


Packing food packets at the community kitchen at Subhash Camp


 However, it was not easy to participate in the relief work and convey Mazdoor Dhaba’s message about solidarity with workers among the wider masses. Almost everywhere we distributed food and ration, people thanked us and blessed us for our ‘noble' cause. ‘Aap log itne mushkil samay me logo ki madad kar itna acha kaam kar rahe ho’ (even in this difficult time you people are helping people in need, you are doing a great job). We heard this several times and often found that this tag of noble cause comes with a certain moral compass which can be tricky at times. Most often this moral compass had religious or spiritual connotations. In this challenging time where the present regime is hell-bent on sharpening the social divide, this moral compass can be dangerous. Right-wing organisations do follow this moral compass where inaction, inability and irresponsibility of the State can be tackled with this moral compass, more often termed as ‘seva’ (service/care/duty). It is then on us to take up this dialogue with the migrant workers and to forward this message of building solidarities with and between working classes through whatever social media reach we have.

  


May Day at Workers’ Dhaba

Indeed, it was working-class people living in cramped neighbourhoods who were the most affected during the pandemic. Without any social security, pension or health insurance they were left with nothing and joblessness added into their vulnerability. Adding to this, the language coined by the government – ‘social distancing’ – widened the distance between various social classes. In this situation sweepers, mostly contractual workers, faced social stigma at its worst. Chait Ram, a contractual sweeper who comes to Delhi from Haryana everyday for work, spoke of his experience: “People don’t let us stand in front of their houses or the corners of the streets where we used to sit and have tea or smoke after work. They never respected us but during a pandemic there was hatred towards us, as if we are terrorists or so.” Jeet, another sweeper, added: “We are not given much safety equipment such as gloves, masks, hand sanitisers from our office (MCD) but we are asked to work in the neighbourhoods and colonies where many such cases of corona are coming out and we have to go back to our families at the end of the day. What if something happens to me and through me to my family and children? Who will take care of them? We don’t even get our salary on time, forget about pension or any health insurance.”

 Rahman, a waste worker from Bihar points out  their precarity, “Industrial factories have not opened. Our livelihood depends on the factories and we can’t even take our cart rickshaw to the road to collect the garbage, if the police see us they beat us. Many of the waste workers had been beaten in the last few days of April. We live on railways land and the officers come to take rent from us. How will we give the rent when we don’t even have much to eat? We could not go home as the fare was not in our budget. We, like many families here, could sustain because of the food and ration provided by Mazdoor Dhaba.”

 Social distancing was a joke for most of the migrant workers who live in cramped conditions throughout the year. “The government has asked people to stay back at home? Why are you roaming around in the jhuggi”, I asked Omprakash, a waste worker, living in a settlement close to the railway line. “First, the government should provide us a home, only then one can stay there”, he replied jokingly. 

 One needs to understand that the migrant workers to whom Mazdoor Dhaba was providing food were the ones who couldn’t afford to go back home via various means. An entire transportation market emerged during the lockdown where every migrant worker was charged somewhere close to Rs. 2,500-3,000, compared to Rs. 500-600 in normal times, to go back to Bihar, Uttar Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh.

 It is no coincidence that most of these workers remain outside the various social schemes run by the government. The claim to the city often comes with documents, which most of these workers do not have. Only a ‘valid document’ can claim citizenship benefits if there are any. The State was both ignorant of the conditions of its citizens and pushed them to the margins knowingly.  The gap between state’s actions and reality was captured and served by initiatives such as Mazdoor Dhaba, which was able to provide close to 3000 meal packets per day in different settlements and neighbourhoods consisting of migrant labour along with provision of dry ration kits. 

 

Praveen Verma is a doctoral student at the Department of History, University of Delhi and a member of New Socialist Initiative