Resilient? No, Hungry

Why is it that the Indian middle-class and elite are okay in the belief that our poor are resilient? Maybe we have mistaken their patience for resilience and if the COVID-19 lockdown has shown anything, the builders of our capitalist dreams are hungry for food with a deep longing for their families and all our perceived conviction in their resilience does is perhaps helps us sleep peacefully at night

- Abhinay Lakshman

The hopes and dreams of some 94 lakh people (by the most conservative estimates) across India were crushed brutally, when until March 13, the Government of India had been denying the seriousness of COVID19 as a public health emergency and suddenly, in a few days, it started publicising the importance of social distancing to contain the then-slowly increasing number of infections. With barely a four-hour notice, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced that a nation of over 1.3 billion would be going under a 21-day lockdown, leaving the builders of our capitalism and middle class in a lurch they are yet to find a way out of.

When Indian authorities had finally decided to pull up their bootstraps and put in place measures to contain the spread of the novel Coronavirus, the tens of crores of migrant workers who had come to metro cities to build our homes and places of business, started with a sense of uncertainty that did not take long to convert into hope before leading towards utter helplessness and a desperation to be with their families and loved ones during a pandemic that has quite essentially brought the entire world to a standstill.

There is a reason the Indian middle-class and elite are able to sleep peacefully at night while lakhs die trying to walk thousands of kilometres home - just to be with their families. There is a reason we believe the poor will get through this and that is because our history of poverty has somehow led to a thought process where a large part of the society truly believes in the resilience of our poor — with a conviction that no matter what comes their way, India’s poor are resilient enough to come out the other side. Maybe it is time to introspect why we so deeply believe that our poor can take whatever we throw at them.