The greatest exodus since the partition of India as workers take hard road back home
On the outskirts of Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh, Nidhi Patel and her husband, Vikas Patel, centre right, both migrant workers, carry their children as they walk home to their village.
Breaking News March 27 2020
ABP NEWS
You will be shocked to see a large number of people at Delhi's Ghazipur border amid 21-day long lockdown in India. You may wonder where they were headed during self-isolation period and how come they were unafraid of Coronavirus. Well, these are migrant workers who are headed home on foot. Their main motive is to get food and money which they are unable to amid lockdown as most of them are daily wagers.
Mar 28 2020 Migrants' exodus: Government's damage limitation and control
Hindustan Times
The mass exodus of migrant workers from Delhi to their hometowns due to the Covid-19-induced lockdown has caught the Central as well as the state governments off-guard. The Centre has announced a three-pronged strategy to take care of these workers' immediate needs. However, can the government salvage the situation and maintain the efficacy of the social distancing effort?
March 28 Coronavirus lockdown: India grapples with migrant workers' exodus
Al Jazeera
Elizabeth Puranam reports from New Delhi, India.
The world’s biggest lockdown is having a significant impact on millions of migrant workers in India.Unable to work and faced with the government shutdown of all buses and trains, many have resorted to walking hundreds of kilometres to return to their home states.
March 29 Coronavirus fear grips workers in India
Sky News
Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in India have joined a mass exodus from major urban centres back to their homes in the countryside as states close their borders.
This story in the Guardian specifically references partition in order to represent the scale of the current turmoil brought about by a socially irresponsible government regime, based on the worst kind of identity politics, religion and nationalism.
Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi and Manoj Chaurasia in Bihar (Mon 30 Mar 2020):
Mamta looked out at the road ahead, barely visible in the night, and a dark thought crossed her mind: what if she and her family could not make the journey back to their village? What if her four children, including her eight-year-old disabled son, Sumit, heavy in her arms, died here on the side of the road?
“The road seemed endless, we had no money for food and my children just took short breaks sleeping on the ground,” she said. But gritting her teeth and pushing hunger and exhaustion away, Mamta kept on walking.
It would take her six-person family almost five days on foot to make the 125-mile journey from Gurgaon, a satellite city to the capital, Delhi, to their village, Sidamai in Uttar Pradesh, as part of an exodus of millions of migrant workers and families last week unlike anything seen in India since partition.
It followed the announcement last Tuesday night by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, that for the next 21 days the entire country of 1.3 billion people would be under lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Shops, factories and restaurants would all be shut and people would be confined to their homes for all but essential activities.
While it was met with approval by experts and health professionals, the lockdown has already proved catastrophic for India’s millions of migrant and daily wage workers, who earn their salary hundreds or sometimes thousands of miles away from home and live a hand-to-mouth existence.
With no way to earn money and feed their families for at least three weeks, millions decided last week to head back to their villages in order to survive.
Mamta, 35, and her husband, both workers at automobile factories in Gurgaon that were shut during the lockdown, suddenly found themselves without a salary and no way to pay their rent or to buy food.
“To survive, we had to go back to my village; we had no choice,” she said. She described the five days that the family walked, starting out on Wednesday evening and finally arriving in Sidamai on Sunday afternoon, as “more terrible than anything I ever could have imagined”.
They had nothing to eat except a dozen puri, fried Indian bread, that she had prepared with leftover flour before they left. The children wore through their shoes and their legs swelled up, meaning they often burst into tears out of pain. The family walked through the night, only stopping for short one-hour breaks.
“The only thing that kept us moving was that we had nowhere else to go,” said Mamta. “But even though we have arrived in the village we have no money for food. I don’t know how we will survive. Hunger will kill us before coronavirus does.”
‘There was so much violence’
Fulendra Kumar is among those migrant workers still walking. He set out last week from the industrial city of Ludhiana in Punjab and has already travelled on bus and foot 750 miles over the past week to reach Bihar, but still has another 200 to go before his final destination: the village of Araria.
“I worked in a snack factory in Ludhiana, but after lockdown the factory closed down and we faced starvation as we didn’t have enough money,” said Kumar, speaking as he took a rest in the city of Patna.
Over the weekend, there were similar scenes of chaos at Delhi’s Anand Vihar bus station, as hundreds of thousands of migrant workers gathered in an attempt to get on one of the limited buses still running. The crush of human bodies was the antithesis of the social distancing ordered by Modi, and the police responded by beating up workers who tried to board the buses.
Crowds try to board buses out of the capital, Delhi.
Among them was Rama, 45, a daily wage worker who usually polishes office floors, who was attempting to get back to his home village of Gorapur in Andhra Pradesh.
“My work has totally stopped so I have no money to survive and I have not eaten since yesterday, so that is why I needed to go back,” said Rama. “But I was not the only one. The bus station was full of people like me, desperate to get out, and it was like hell.
“There were crowds and everyone was being crushed and pulling each other out of the way, there was so much violence and police were charging at us with lathis [wooden rods].”
He added: “For buses that had seats [for] 100 people, 200 people would be trying to cram in, people were sitting on top of the bus and hanging out of the windows. We were all desperate to leave because we cannot survive in Delhi under this lockdown.”
The daughter of a migrant worker sleeps on the road near India’s capital.
The crammed mass of people at Delhi’s bus stations and widespread migration of people across states and borders over the past few days has horrified India, both in terms of the hardships foisted on the already impoverished migrant workers and because it can only worsen the spread of coronavirus.
Currently there are about 1,000 known cases here, but testing remains low, and many suspect the real figure to be much higher. In a bid to stop people moving, on Sunday night the government ordered all state borders to be closed, and police began arresting those walking on the highways or who reached state borders on foot. Many migrants who did reach the Utter Pradesh border were also hosed down with a chemical solution by police.
In an effort to house the tens of thousand of returning migrants, schoolhouses and government buildings have now been turned into quarantine centres across the country. But in some places the situation has turned violent.
Last week, a 50-year-old shopkeeper was killed by a group of four migrant workers at Chak-Udaipur village in Jharkhand’s Palamu district. “The shopkeeper had objected to free movement by the migrant workers in the village but they turned furious and killed him,” said Palamu district’s superintendent, Ajay Linda.
Migrant workers who have made it to their villages have often found they are no longer welcome. In several villages in Bihar and Jharkhand, villagers put up barricades at the entry points and hung posters, warning the migrants against entering the village before a health check.
“We took this decision as outsiders’ entry to the village could put everyone’s life at risk,” said Umesh Singh, 60, a schoolteacher from the village of Baniya-Yadupur in Bihar. “This is very dangerous time and we can’t ignore this.”
Partition of India
The Partition of India of 1947 was the division of British India into two independent dominion states, India and Pakistan by an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. India is today the Republic of India; Pakistan is today the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh.
The prevailing religions of the British Indian Empire based on the Census of India, 1901
The partition involved the division of two provinces, Bengal and Punjab, based on district-wise non-Muslim or Muslim majorities. The partition also saw the division of the British Indian Army, the Royal Indian Navy, the Indian Civil Service, the railways, and the central treasury.
The partition was outlined in the Indian Independence Act 1947 and resulted in the dissolution of the British Raj, or Crown rule in India. The two self-governing countries of India and Pakistan legally came into existence at midnight on 15 August 1947.
The partition displaced between 10–12 million people along religious lines, creating overwhelming refugee crises in the newly constituted dominions. There was large-scale violence, with estimates of loss of life accompanying or preceding the partition disputed and varying between several hundred thousand and two million. The violent nature of the partition created an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between India and Pakistan that plagues their relationship to the present.
Among princely states, the violence was often highly organised with the involvement or complacency of the rulers. It is believed that in the Sikh states (except for Jind and Kapurthala) the Maharajas were complacent in the ethnic cleansing of Muslims, while other Maharajas such as those of Patiala, Faridkot, and Bharatpur were heavily involved in ordering them. The ruler of Bharatpur is said to have witnessed the ethnic cleansing of his population, especially at places such as Deeg.
British Indian Empire in The Imperial Gazetteer of India, 1909.
British India is shaded pink, the princely states yellow.
The Partition was a highly controversial arrangement, and remains a cause of much tension on the Indian subcontinent today. According to American scholar Allen McGrath, many British leaders including the British Viceroy, Mountbatten, were unhappy over the partition of India. Lord Mountbatten of Burma had not only been accused of rushing the process through but also is alleged to have influenced the Radcliffe Line in India's favor. The commission took longer to decide on a final boundary than on the partition itself. Thus the two nations were granted their independence even before there was a defined boundary between them.
Some critics allege that British haste led to increased cruelties during the Partition. Because independence was declared prior to the actual Partition, it was up to the new governments of India and Pakistan to keep public order. No large population movements were contemplated; the plan called for safeguards for minorities on both sides of the new border. It was a task at which both states failed. There was a complete breakdown of law and order; many died in riots, massacre, or just from the hardships of their flight to safety. What ensued was one of the largest population movements in recorded history. According to Richard Symonds, at the lowest estimate, half a million people perished and twelve million became homeless.
However, many argue that the British were forced to expedite the Partition by events on the ground. Once in office, Mountbatten quickly became aware that if Britain were to avoid involvement in a civil war, which seemed increasingly likely, there was no alternative to partition and a hasty exit from India. Law and order had broken down many times before Partition, with much bloodshed on both sides. A massive civil war was looming by the time Mountbatten became Viceroy. After the Second World War, Britain had limited resources, perhaps insufficient to the task of keeping order. Another viewpoint is that while Mountbatten may have been too hasty, he had no real options left and achieved the best he could under difficult circumstances. The historian Lawrence James concurs that in 1947 Mountbatten was left with no option but to cut and run. The alternative seemed to be involved in a potentially bloody civil war from which it would be difficult to get out.
Conservative elements in England consider the partition of India to be the moment that the British Empire ceased to be a world power, following Curzon's dictum: "the loss of India would mean that Britain drops straight away to a third rate power."
Venkat Dhulipala rejects the idea that the British divide and rule policy was responsible for partition and elaborates on the perspective that Pakistan was popularly imagined as a sovereign Islamic state or a 'New Medina', as a potential successor to the defunct Turkish caliphate and as a leader and protector of the entire Islamic world. Islamic scholars debated over creating Pakistan and its potential to become a true Islamic state. The majority of Barelvis supported the creation of Pakistan and believed that any co-operation with Hindus would be counter productive. Most Deobandis, who were led by Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani, were opposed to the creation of Pakistan and the two-nation theory. According to them Muslims and Hindus could be a part of a single nation.
In their authoritative study of the partition, Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh have shown that the partition was not the inevitable end of the so-called British 'divide and rule policy' nor was it the inevitable end of Hindu-Muslim differences.
Others differ in their assessment. For example Shashi Tharoor, an elected member of India's parliament and who chairs its Foreign Affairs Committee. He is the prize-winning author of 16 books, including, most recently, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did To India, that has a clear political edge and, in no uncertain terms, results in blaming British rule.
A cross-border student initiative, The History Project, was launched in 2014 to explore the differences in perception of the events during the British era, which led to the partition. The project resulted in a book that explains both interpretations of the shared a history in Pakistan and India.
A Berkeley California based non-profit organization, The 1947 Partition Archive, collects oral histories from people who lived through the Partition and consolidated the interviews into an archive. A 2019 book by Kavita Puri, Partition Voices: Untold British Stories, based on the BBC Radio 4 documentary series of the same name, includes interviews with about two dozen people who witnessed partition and subsequently migrated to Britain.
In October 2016, The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust (TAACHT) of India set up what they describe as "the world’s first Partition Museum" at Town Hall in Amritsar (in Punjab state). The Museum, which is open from Tuesday to Sunday, offers multi-media exhibits and documents that describe both the political process that led to partition and carried it forward, and video and written narratives offered by survivors of the events.
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