JOIN USTwo weeks ago, on the opening day of the monsoon session of Parliament, the Union Minister of Labour Santosh Kumar Gangwar clarified that his ministry had “no data” on the number of migrant workers who had lost their jobs or had died on the way to their home states after the lockdown was announced in late March. Therefore, he added, the question of offering economic assistance to those who had lost their lives didn’t arise. There was little concern about how such vital data could have gone unrecorded, what his ministry would now do to make up for it, how every life lost was a failing of his government.
The labour minister’s callousness appears characteristic of most actions of the present Union government. Whether it is the new farm laws or the labour code bills or the Environment Impact Assessment notification, all of which are known to be detrimental in their impact, the government is showing no signs of reconsidering them. If it truly believed in their value, it must feel confident to invite a discussion on each of them in the legislature.
While draft bills can only benefit from extended deliberations before they become an Act, the central government is passing them swiftly into law without offering scope for discussion. These legislations have been held to be pro-business in their design. It is no surprise that modern businesses wish to work where regulations are few and workers and the environment can be played with at will. But governments should not let that be since the well-being of the country and its people takes priority. At least, this is what we expect democracies to be and each time a government acts contrarily, there is disquiet and resistance against it, signifying a continuing faith in a democratic polity.
So, even on this occasion, the farmers and organised workers, including those from outfits affiliated with the ruling party, like Swadeshi Jagran Manch and Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, have risen up in protest, adding to the several major protests seen in recent years. Last year, farmer protests stopped India from becoming a signatory to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Planning, which would have hurt rural livelihoods through the cheap import of dairy products, fish, rubber and pepper from Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. The anti-CAA protests followed soon thereafter. Besides, the lynchings of Muslims, the arbitrary arrests of social activists and intellectuals, to name only a few recent issues that erode the citizenship rights of Indians, also kept the polity under strain.
At a time when the country needs to see every possible effort in containing the pandemic and reviving the economy, why a government would want to push unwelcome laws is indeed baffling. Does the ruling party expect its actions to find new voter support? Or satisfy its voter support base? It’s hard to tell the thinking.
The CBI court’s acquittal of all those accused as conspirators in the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the Uttar Pradesh government’s crude response to the horrific rape and murder incident accentuate the moral crisis in Indian politics.
The recent bad turns in India’s polity have probably bewildered everyone who had felt certain that politics unfolded within tolerable limits, with the lack of a determined political opposition at the centre being a source of despair alongside. Bad times though throw up their own set of social duties to keep at in one’s sphere of activity. It obliges everyone to ask of themselves what these might be and stay morally active and make the electoral system respond to an ethically demanding society.