Now, politics over migrants

We will strike when the iron is hot and expose the BJP government’s failure in responding to the biggest humanitarian crisis.’ Ostensibly wise words that came from Akhilesh Yadav, the SP president, when a journalist asked why the SP lay low through the crisis created by the long national lockdown. Uttar Pradesh, Yadav’s home and political turf, was the epicentre and the largest recipient (nearly 17 lakh on the last count) of individuals and their families who fled their places of work the country over, mostly on foot and bicycles, to the safety of their home states.

While Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal account for as many or more of the migrants in the organised and unorganised sectors as UP, the state is the gateway that helps them trace their paths back home. Therefore, it is the node in a network of logistics cutting through and intersecting the arduous tasks of receiving, hosting (if only temporarily) and seeing off the distressed people. The problem is not every Indian state is BJP-ruled. The dominant presence of the Opposition made the coordination with BJP-governed UP a challenge that smacked of politics, because no matter what Yadav claimed, the inescapable reality is that in the worst hour, the heartland can’t resist playing power games.

For a long time, as the travails of the walking class nearly overwhelmed the pandemic in the nation’s collective consciousness, UP’s Opposition parties, principally the SP and the BSP, were reticent, except an occasional anodyne tweet from Yadav. The only bursts of proactivism emanated from the Congress. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the general secretary minding UP, wrote missives to CM Yogi Adityanath, marking issues and raising demands that spanned the social and economic gamut.

After PM Modi unveiled a Rs 20 lakh-crore package to resuscitate the economy, Priyanka asked the CM to waive home loan interests and power and tube-well bills for four months, pick up the entire agricultural produce and not leave it to middlemen and private wholesalers/retailers, clear the dues to sugarcane growers and offer financial relief to carpet manufacturers and weavers. While the BJP is predisposed to dismiss a statement or a proposal from Rahul Gandhi as ‘flippant and ill-thought out’, grudgingly it takes Priyanka a little more seriously, although it conjures up her husband, Robert Vadra’s alleged corruption to tar her as well.

It was the Auraiya road tragedy on May 16 that resurrected the political polemics. A truck carrying migrants smashed into another vehicle, killing 24 of them. The accident brought into focus the logistical inadequacies inflicted both by the Centre and states by neglecting the migrants, not ensuring the basic travel means, and leaving them to their fate. The government and the CM had no defence to explain away their apathy.

Without censuring the CM, on May 17, Priyanka sought his permission to allow 1,000 buses from the contiguous states to ferry back the migrants to UP and facilitate their return, which she said would be managed by the Congress. She did not await his approval. She had 500 buses lined up in different places of Rajasthan that travelled up to Govardhan, near Mathura in UP. As Congress workers showed up to help the migrants, the local administration stalled the onward travel. Priyanka made a fervent video appeal to the CM to green-flag the journey but he brushed it aside as a political gimmick. Indeed, his response was crafted to hurt the Congress where it hit the most. ‘Those doing politics on this issue should think why people rejected them in the 2014 and 2019 elections,’ he said. The subtext of Priyanka’s gesture was political but she did not colour it as one. However, the CM’s statement construed it otherwise and projected it as ‘politics’. The UP media lapped up his version and alleged that the Congress had similarly politicised the Kargil incursion.

Priyanka may not retreat but the BJP is out to push the Congress into a corner. The bus episode coalesced with Rahul Gandhi’s interaction with the migrants at a Delhi underpass that evidently pinched the BJP so much that FM Nirmala Sitharaman labelled his visit as ‘dramebaaz’ at a presser dedicated to amplify the Centre’s next tranche for a stricken economy. Shortly after thwarting Priyanka’s border exertion, Adityanath ordered his bureaucrats to arrange 200 buses in each district for the migrants in addition to the 10,000 state transport vehicles already on the road. A knee-jerk move that, if put in action earlier, could have saved the lives of at least two dozen people in Auraiya.

What does the big picture evolving in UP signify? That Priyanka is in for a long haul, regardless of the state of the Congress’s organisation that’s bereft of grassroot moorings. Yadav might have tried to sound politically tactful. But he reminded the media that as the CM, he ticked off officials who misbehaved with the ‘aam aadmi’. The context was an Agra bureaucrat’s supercilious attitude towards a migrant in his city who was photographed dragging his child on a suitcase.

The BSP—the third angle of the triangle—is the most curious entity. Mayawati, its chief, went soft on the CM and castigated the officials for not implementing his directives. She virtually suggested that the Congress should mind its own business and attend to the migrant-related matters in its states such as Punjab and Rajasthan. Her words were music to the BJP’s ears that still dreads a scenario in which the SP and BSP could call a truce again and confront the BJP. Going by Mayawati’s postures and remarks, that seems near-impossible. The BJP still has the upper hand in UP against a fragmented Opposition.