Migrant Workers And the Right To The City
Prabudh Singh
“The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere! The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place also.”
— Frederick Engels, The Housing Question, 1872
Take a road to the periphery of a city and one can see several newly built and under-construction housing complexes. Billboards across the road boast of how some housing complexes provide a more luxurious and affordable deal than others and so on. Rotating blades of outdoor units of air conditioners on a high-rise tower assure us that its inhabitants are comfortable indoors. A shopping complex here and there boasts of the brands it offers for consumption. Cameras, barricades, and security guards at every entrance invoke life into the concrete structure by constructing a gated community of the secured residents inside. Side by side, one can see a building still in its incubation, with concrete pillars and steel pipes protruding themselves further and further into the sky. Surrounded by a make-shift boundary wall, a group of men and women can be seen welding pipes and injecting concrete into this building. Their shanties, covered with tin sheets and plastered with used banners of Holi-Eid-Diwali greetings from a political party, bear a pungent smell and an odd sight. However, it is expected that these men and women will eventually be removed to make way for the gentrified propertied class to come in. The propertied class will then have a new address in the official records, a new home for their belonging, and a city to lay claim to. The men and women who built the city with their sweat and blood in the first place are mere temporary blots on the beautiful landscape, hidden around the bends of the balcony and glass windows.
Standing on these balconies of vertical hierarchies, the propertied class claps, bangs utensils and lights candles to fulfil their desires of amusement. On the road below, working men and women in thousands walk on foot back to their far-away villages, carrying their miserable belongings and scanty packets of food grains. When they came to the city, the migrant workers not just came with an economic interest to earn some cash income. They also upheld their dignity and aspirations to find a place in the urban socio-polity, to ‘make it to the city’. Despite living precarious lives and thus fear of the contractors, police and the propertied class, the migrant workers shared their sense of belonging to the nation and the nominal rights it bestows. But hunger consumes all ideals and crushes one’s spirit. Incomes were stopped, ration stocks went dry and the state rendered them helpless. Even the propertied class, whose homes they had built, did not offer them shelter. Their long walks are neither a political rally nor a pilgrimage, but a retreat after betrayal.
A substantial section of the citizens of the new housing complexes are also migrants, from villages, towns and other cities. This is the section who is the protagonist of upward social mobility of the new middle class. It shapes itself in the image of and re-shapes the meaning(s) of being urban, metropolitan, cosmopolitan, and so on. But the stark difference in its story of migration and the struggles of the migrant workers lies in the class divide which separates them, the propertied class and their servants. This material class divide is further entrenched by the psycho-social hatred towards the working people, perpetuated through everyday social interactions of the middle class. “Keep an eye on the domestic help as these people tend to be thieves”, is an example of how children are socialised by their parents. Thus, instead of empathy and solidarity, apathy and hatred find a fertile ground in the dwellers of the gated communities. Looking at images of migrant workers suffering might evoke a moment of pity and sadness, but seldom it leads to introspection and critique of the wealth inequality at play.
Back to the Village
During Constituent Assembly debates in 1948, Ambedkar had made a famous remark that villages in India are “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism”. Ambedkar was also glad that the Constitution had discarded the village and adopted the individual as its unit. In the eight decades that have followed, the ideals of modernity enshrined under bourgeois democracy have given way to individualistic neoliberal ethos. The cities are continuing to fail its part in nation building, and are fast emerging as hedonistic sites of capital accumulation. The national polity centred around such neoliberal ‘development’ has gained centre-stage, and the social welfare state is increasingly portrayed as bad economics. As David Harvey puts it – “the neoliberal protection of private property rights and their values becomes a hegemonic form of politics, even for the lower middle class” (Harvey 2012, 15). Rights bearing citizens are being replaced by the ideal type of a tax paying consumer. Public expenditure on food, healthcare and education becomes a burden on the tax paying consumer, as he ought to buy it from the market to fulfil its social role. This increasing privatisation of public goods and public spaces has become a hallmark of our cities.
On the contrary, although being shaped around caste and communal fault lines and oppressive social relations, villages still offer a sense of community belonging to its members. Community-based politics and shared social spaces provide a sense of security. In the present time of crisis (a moral crisis of society – much more than that of a pandemic or economy), migrant workers desperately seek a sense of security available to them only in their villages back home. Although migrant workers will have to forego incomes from the city in days to come, restoring dignity and care is what is needed to heal.
References
- Engels, Frederick, The Housing Question, 1872
- Harvey, David, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, Verso, 2012
Prabudh Singh is PhD research fellow in sociology at Ambedkar University Delhi. He can be reached at prabudhsingh7@gmail.com.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and are not necessarily the journal’s.
Follow us for regular updates!
Telegram
t.me/studentstrugglein
Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/studentstrugglemonthly
WhatsApp
https://chat.whatsapp.com/BvEXdIEy1sqIP0YujRhbDR