The Foot Power of the Footloose

Beyond the ideological blame game, beyond the political bickering what did migrants walking on highways during lockdown teach us?

- Pavan Malreddy

IN late March 2020, national highway numbers 19, 65, and 48 branching out of Delhi, Patna, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Kolkata were crammed with a different kind of traffic—instead of the rustle of rolling rubber on the scorching asphalt, a thud of marching human feet, a clatter of trolley suitcases, pushcarts, bicycles, and make-shift wheelchairs carrying the young and the elderly met the curious eyes of onlookers, let alone the news-hungry camera lenses.

The cars took a break from the roads; and the roads became migrant highways. The images travelled faster than the virus that put them there in the first place. From the Grand Trunk Road to NH16, these are the highways of footloose labour—to use the words of Dutch sociologist Jan Breman— of conquerors, pilgrims, traders, horsemen, migrants and vagrants.

Critics dubbed it as the greatest movement of people since the partition, some regarded it as a humanitarian crisis, but for many, it was a failure of imagination on the part of the policymakers. The images of the throngs of hungry bodies, swollen feet, dehydrated infants, and emaciated men carrying loads double their weight invited, among others, what John Rawls would call, moral feelings. Unlike non-moral emotions such as jealousy, rage, or spite, moral feelings are based on our inner impulse for justice, and have significant uses to public reason—indignation and guilt of those watching from the safety of their homes.

For scholars in mobility and migration studies, these ‘homes’ of ours are no more than the markers of