Presentation on India to panel discussion on 'Farmers' struggles from India to the US'

I’d like to start with an event which at first sight seems to have nothing to do with the farmers’ struggle, but I’ll explain how it does. After the countrywide lockdown was imposed in the last week of March 2020, life came to a standstill. But by April, there was a massive exodus of migrant workers from towns and cities thoughout India, tens of millions of them, trekking back hundreds of miles to their home villages, mostly on foot, a few on bicycles, a few catching lifts from trucks for part of the way. They encountered searing heat and brutal treatment from the police – beatings, being locked in stadiums converted into open-air prisons, sprayed with chlorine disinfectant – but still they persisted.

So who were these people, and why were they undertaking this journey in the midst of a lockdown? In fact, these were family members of some of the very same people participating in the farmers’ struggle: small and marginal farmers, and especially agricultural labourers. Unable to make a living in their villages, they’d migrated to towns and villages looking for work, and the only employment they’d been able to find was unregulated and extremely exploitative, often through labour contractors, and with absolutely no security. Some of them slept in their workplaces, others got together and rented a small room in a slum, packed together like sardines. When the lockdown was declared, employers suspended production and contractors vanished, often without even paying workers for the work they had already done. Living from hand to mouth with hardly any savings, what could they do? Those who lived at their place of work were booted out at once, those in rented accommodation soon followed. With public transport suspended, they decided to walk to their villages.

But hadn’t they left their villages precisely because they couldn’t make a living there? An interviewer asking this question got this answer: ‘If we’re going to die anyway, we’d rather die with our families at home.’

The Covid-19 Lockdown in India: A Predictable Catastrophe for Informal Labour

The first case of Covid-19 in India was detected in Kerala on 30 January 2020, with two more on 2 and 3 February. All three were students who had returned from Wuhan. By then it was common knowledge that the virus was spreading around the world. The World Health Organisation had declared a global health emergency, but the Indian government made no move to restrict international travel, test arrivals for Covid, or ensure that the infection did not spread. On the contrary, the main preoccupation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was hosting Donald Trump, and especially organising the ‘Namaste Trump’ event in Motera Stadium in Ahmedabad in the PM’s home state of Gujarat, ensuring that more than 100,000 people attended the event and lined the streets from the airport to the stadium.

By 4 March, 26 more people had tested positive: one who had travelled in the United Arab Emirates, others who were either Italian tourists or had returned from Italy, and those who had come into contact with them, including family members. More people who had travelled to Iran, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, Oman, the United States, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, Greece, Qatar, Spain, Russia, the UK, the Netherlands, Finland, France, Indonesia, Germany, Ireland and the Philippines tested positive in the first three weeks of March. By this time, local transmission was taking place.    

The first response to the crisis from the government was Modi’s address to the nation on 18 March announcing a ‘Janata curfew’ on Sunday 22 March from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., during which only essential workers would be allowed to leave their homes; at 5 p.m., people were asked to come out on their doorsteps or balconies and clap or ring bells to express gratitude to frontline staff. Then, at 8 p.m. on 24 March, he announced a three-week total lockdown beginning at midnight, in just four hours. There was panic buying as people rushed to the shops to stock up on essentials, throwing social distancing to the winds. But the worst impact was on informal workers, especially inter-state or intra-state migrants. As transport shut down and they lost their livelihoods and were evicted from their accommodation, tens of millions of them trecked back to their villages on foot, on bicycles, or in any way they could: desperate journeys over hundreds of miles. The sheer scale of the exodus and the heart-breaking scenes, including of hundreds dying of exhaustion, dehydration, starvation, accidents and police brutality, compelled the mainstream media (apart from BJP propaganda outlets) to cover what was happening.

Labour and Globalisation: Union Responses in India

 Introduction

The first major shock of what subsequently came to be called globalisation in India was the economic liberalisation programme initiated in July 1991. The Congress government headed by Narasimha Rao, faced with a crisis resulting from foreign exchange reserves sufficient for just a fortnight’s imports, undertook some of the measures recommended by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in the late 1980s. The new policy included abolition of licensing procedures for manufacturing investment (which had popularly come to be known as a corruption-ridden ‘license-permit raj’), reduction of the high import tariffs on most goods (but not consumer goods), liberalising terms of entry for foreign investors, and liberalising capital markets (Balasubramanyam and Mahambare, 2001). It would be a mistake to see these changes simply as being imposed on India. Many of them were designed to encourage the expansion of big business after what were perceived as decades of stagnation, for example by removing restrictions on mergers and acquisitions, encouraging businesses to seek finance abroad, and sparking a wave of expansion into new sectors which had either barely developed (e.g. telecom), or had until then been reserved for the public sector (e.g. banking). 

The next milestone was the birth of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on 1 January 1995, with India being a member from the beginning. This involved new pressures, for example to eliminate quantitative restrictions on imports, simplify and reduce tariffs, reduce export constraints, reduce the number of activities reserved for the public sector and small-scale sector, further liberalise the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) regime, and address the fiscal deficit (cf. WTO, 2002). The process of integrating India more closely into the world economy has been more or less continuous since 1991, despite changes of government, and the world economy itself has globalised rapidly during this period.