For a fistful of self-respect: India’s working class deserves better

The Supreme Court is hearing a petition on insufficient night shelters for the homeless. Heading the bench of judges, Justice Gavai remarked if social security schemes for the poor are killing their initiative and turning them into ‘parasites.’ Because of such schemes, ‘people do not want to work,’ he said.

On the bad quality of shelters, Justice Gavai said, ‘Between a shelter that is uninhabitable and sleeping on the road, what is more preferable?’

In the same vein, the Chief of Larsen & Toubro, S N Subrahmanyam, recently said the working-class poor have a ‘preference for comfort’ and are not willing to travel for work.

These statements came just days after the Union Budget, where Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that the government was committed to inclusive development for a Viksit Bharat, guided by principles of ‘zero poverty, quality education, comprehensive healthcare, meaningful employment,’ and ‘the inclusion of women in economic activities.’

Many economists have challenged the sentiments and claims made by Gavai, Subrahmanyam, and Sitharaman with data-based evidence. This article presents some vignettes that reflect the daily struggles of millions of Indians.

About 10 days before the Union Budget, my friend Venkatesh and I were at Raichur railway station in Karnataka, waiting for a train to Vadodara, Gujarat. Our train was to depart at 11:10 pm, but we arrived over an hour early. The night was chilly and windy.

As we entered the station, we saw a frail woman in her mid-70s draped in what was once a white saree. She slouched beside a basket of flowers, still trying to sell them late into the night. Though people were milling about, she made no effort to solicit buyers—it was unclear whether this was due to choice or fatigue.

As it usually happens in stations, a mob of people formed a web around the ticket counter, jostling to buy tickets for the ‘general’ coach. In an inversion of socio-political and bureaucratic categorisation, a ‘general’ category traveller on Indian trains signifies the lowest economic rank in one’s ease of mobility. In most railway stations of reasonable importance, the high-ceilinged shaded foyer near the ticket counters doubles up as the shared bedroom for an array of strangers. Raichur was no exception. And like most stations, here too, drenched in bright white lights amid sounds of fury and resilience, working-class commuters entered into an unspoken pact to find spots to sleep. In consonance with the ongoing popular trend in small towns, one found uniformity in the kind of blankets they used: giant printed designs dominated by the colour red. They all literally seem to be cut from the same cloth. 

Sleeping on a mattress of newspapers, a man from inside one such blanket, a Bihari migrant worker, was coughing incessantly while another man lying on the floor a foot away was staring at the ceiling with unblinking eyes. At the ticket counter, a woman in her late 20s bought tickets for Pune for the ‘general’ coach. It is at least a nine-hour overnight journey from Raichur. With a dogged resolve, she walked over to her two children. The younger child, covered in a red blanket, was sleeping on a newspaper while the older child, around eight years old, sat next to her sister clutching a half-full jute bag. The belongings of all three of them seemed to have fitted in this one bag, with some space to spare.

A few metres away, two male migrant construction workers in their mid-40s were having a heated argument in Bangla. The younger of the two was livid as his phone charger got stolen. Unpacified, he promised to avenge his loss. The lone policeman patrolling the platform some distance away was gently hitting two sleeping workers on their feet with a stick and shouting at them. They woke up, zombie-like, with eyes that seem to have been gouged out of somebody with flaming feet. Another man with grimy, dishevelled hair, and draped in that familiar red blanket, was emptying garbage on the railway tracks only to be caught for his crime by the stick-wielding policeman. Meanwhile, the mystery of the stolen charger was solved. The ‘thief’ was an adolescent barefoot boy with scabrous feet and dried dirt covering his legs like expensive stockings. In the rest of the platform, a number of people with ‘reservation,’ i.e., reserved tickets, were inhabiting a capsuled world, scrolling on their digital devices, chuckling intermittently, but mostly with an expression of eerie stillness. 

It is unknown how the characters in the mise en scène of the station would respond to Gavai, Subrahmanyam, and Sitharaman. However, what is clear from the budget is that the affluent got tax cuts, the total expenditure as a proportion of GDP has shrunk, and this reduction is solely due to cuts in social security spending. In other words, people like me with ‘reserved tickets’ got concessions in the Budget, but the ‘general’ coach travellers, the old woman flower seller, the coughing men, the women with infants, the sleepless migrant workers, and the barefoot children forced to steal neither chose to stay at home due to ‘comfort’ nor got any relief in the Budget.

During all this, two things stood out for me. Looking at the collage of people on the floor, I marvelled at the unspoken referendum for print media to be kept alive, if at all, to provide ‘comfort’ as makeshift mattresses. And I could not help but recall two fossilised images adorning the centre of Raichur station who had given their lives for the upliftment of the downtrodden: a life-sized painting of an emaciated M K Gandhi outside a train and next to him a huge garlanded photograph of Dr B R Ambedkar in his characteristic blue suit. While they helplessly watched the scenes at the station with worry, there was an announcement: Rajdhani Express was arriving on platform 1 and Garib Rath on platform 2. 

Maybe poetry can rescue us even when observed realities and credible data are routinely ignored. And so, here is hoping that Gavai, Subrahmanyam, and Sitharaman read these lines and rethink their claims. These are from a poem called For a Fistful of Self-Respect, by Telugu poet Kalekuri Prasad that was brought to my attention by a friend, Prashanth: I’m the wound of the masses, a communion of wounds/For generations, I’m unfree in a free country/subjected to humiliations, atrocities, rapes, and brutal torture/Yet I rise—for a fistful of self-respect.

(The writer is a teacher at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru and is associated with LibTech India)