A patchwork of actors has responded to the twin crises of hunger and disease in Gurugram. Their actions demonstrate the place of politics in both creating and addressing a humanitarian crisis. This article has been originally published in Pandemic Discourses.
“In times of crisis, we need to bind, not bicker. The COVID-19 crisis is a humanitarian crisis, not a political crisis. Hence, it is imperative that no one politicise this issue. ” These were the parting words of the top judges of the High Court of Gujarat, one of India’s most industrialized states, passing orders in late May on a case questioning the efficacy of the state government’s COVID-19 response.
The High Court’s words are not surprising given that India, like many other nations, has couched its response to the coronavirus pandemic in military terms, framing the virus as an enemy and calling for concerted efforts to “fight” and “defeat” it. The war analogy has made it easier for the Government of India to get widespread buy-in for a heavy-handed top-down lockdown. The obsession with fighting a common enemy caused the state to overlook the economic distress that such a lockdown would cause to the nearly 90 percent of the Indian workforce in the informal sector with sub-optimal or negligible access to social security. Moreover, it has sought to subsume the vital efforts of a variety of civil society actors, both in implementing disease control mechanisms as well as in providing relief to the economically distressed, into a citizenship of altruistic service to the nation; hence the “bind, not bicker” advice of the court.
There is a certain fallaciousness in the way the court positions the political and humanitarian as opposed to each other. Instead, it is apparent that the humanitarian disaster has been a consequence of certain political choices and governance arrangements. Further, what appears as altruistic service by citizens and civil society should also be seen, in a democratic context, as a deft negotiation between personal and public interests. Despite the centralizing impulse of the state during the lockdown, local governance practices that are deeply located in context and map onto pre-existing power structures have had a significant role in crisis management.
The political crux of the migrant crisis
“Not only was the administration in Gurugram caught unawares by the distress conditions that emerged during the early days of the lockdown, it had no estimates available of how many migrants lived in the city despite their ubiquity in the city’s public life.”
To illustrate the above points, let me draw on the experience of Gurugram (formerly known as Gurgaon), a city of 1.5 million located in the Gurugram district of the state of Haryana right across the border from Delhi, where I am actively involved in civil society. In Gurugram, like elsewhere, the district was the chosen governance unit for local management of the lockdown with the district collector, a career bureaucrat, in charge of executing national and state-level decisions. The police implemented mobility restrictions much in the same way as in a curfew, which people usually associate with violent law and order breakdowns like riots. The elected city government worked under the district collector, much like any other line department of the district, exhibiting the poor status of urban local self-government in India; in contrast, local governments in rural India have played a significant role in COVID-19 relief efforts.
Gurugram is a significant employment hub, home to large multinationals and Indian corporations as well as a cluster of small and medium enterprises engaged in textile and automotive manufacturing. Gurugram attracted large numbers of knowledge migrants from various parts of the country, many of whom have bought property and made it their home, contributing to the city’s exponential population growth between 2001-2011, during India’s economic boom. An equally significant number of low-skilled rural migrants from India’s impoverished regions circulate through the city with the sole purpose of earning wages to support the rural households to which they are tightly bound. Scholars have acknowledged that this kind of migration is a key strategy of rural livelihood diversification in India’s highly segmented labour market.
Not only was the administration in Gurugram caught unawares by the distress conditions that emerged during the early days of the lockdown, it had no estimates available of how many migrants lived in the city despite their ubiquity in the city’s public life. The invisibility of migrants is directly linked to electoral politics, something that the Citizen Charter that Gurugram’s civil society had released ahead of state assembly elections had pointed out in October 2019 while advocating for an inclusive approach to planning. Local politicians have no incentive to push for their enumeration since migrants vote in their home locations. Over the lockdown period, the majority of migrants have returned to their native places to wait out the crisis. It is unclear whether the prospect of workers abandoning cities like Gurugram will change political strategies towards migrants, going forward.
Citizen-state intermediation and everyday politics
It was clear from the outset that the district administration’s unwavering focus would be on implementing the mobility curbs and managing disease spread. To extend these efforts into the community, a wartime institution called the Civil Defence – originally intended to protect civilian life and property through non-combat interventions and later redeployed into disaster management – was pressed into service. The Civil Defence team was rapidly expanded by drawing volunteers from the community, chiefly from among resident welfare associations (RWAs), which are collectives that usually represent elite neighborhoods. Whereas RWAs implemented lockdown rules within elite residential areas, Civil Defence teams were empowered to move around the city’s less prosperous localities to enforce the lockdown through dialogue and, if necessary, through police involvement.
Not unlike in China, where a “thick network of territorial institutions and authorities” such as resident committees played a prominent role in lockdown implementation, in Indian cities like Gurugram the state extended its eyes and ears through RWAs and volunteer taskforces like the Civil Defence, giving them extraordinary privileges and powers of mobility and surveillance. For instance, RWAs were tasked with informing the administration about travelers returning from affected countries, so that quarantine stickers could be pasted on their doors. They became conduits of information from the administration to their communities, and channeled to the administration demands from residents for movement passes or complaints about the delivery of essential services. Interestingly, RWAs also went against administrative orders to protect the interests of the communities they represent. When the administration shifted its focus to reinstating livelihoods for informal workers, many RWAs responded to elite residents’ fear of possible infections by refusing entry permissions for domestic workers, reflecting not just unequal power relations but also deep-seated prejudice against lower classes as carriers of disease. In contrast, the role of intermediation was assumed, often through threats of violence, by politically connected local villagers who rent properties to migrant workers in the city’s urban villages.
Solidarities and ruptures in relief efforts
Regardless of the deep disconnect between the rich and poor in Gurugram, a large number of disparate civil society actors responded to the unfolding crisis of hunger. Disaster response in India is usually spearheaded by large non-government organizations (NGOs) and the state, but the mobility restrictions of a pan-India lockdown engendered a highly localized response and put forth unique challenges. Local NGOs, citizen groups, worker collectives, corporations and individuals with no previous experience in disaster relief per se, threw themselves into relief work, innovating processes and forging collaborations to distribute ration and cooked meals to those in need and aid migrant workers to get home.
“The exclusion of large numbers of the poor from electoral politics of the cities that they live and work in lies at the heart of India’s migrant problem.”
On the face of it, the many altruistic efforts and the extraordinary collaborations between civil society organizations (CSOs) demonstrate the effectiveness of the war narrative in addressing the pandemic. But upon closer look, the variegated strategies and multiple negotiations involved in relief work become visible. For instance, actors navigated the interface with the state—an important one, given the stringent nature of the lockdown—in very different ways. Some initiatives focused on their essential skillset, such as preparing food or making masks, and leaned on ‘official’ routes like the Civil Defence team for deliveries, which required special logistics to minimize disease exposure. But many NGOs and citizen collectives preferred to remain autonomous, developing end-to-end solutions and collaborating with embedded individuals or collectives to ensure reliable delivery. These diverse approaches reflect the complexity of NGO-state relations in India, characterized simultaneously by mistrust and inter-dependence. Despite this, efforts by influential citizens to create collaborative interfaces bringing the state and multiple CSOs together through WhatsApp groups to ensure coordination and increase efficiencies, were largely welcomed.
In contrast, corporations took the middle ground. Since 2013, when India legally mandated corporations to set aside funds for social development, corporations have emerged as significant funders of development programs in the country. Living up to their expected role in the crisis, Gurugram’s corporations cut checks to state relief funds and donated relief materials to state-led initiatives, but many also offered direct support to NGOs whom they trusted to be effective on the ground.
As the scale of distress increased, civil society also played a significant role in advocating for a systematic state-led response, involving the release of food grains from public stocks to migrants, who are ineligible for the public distribution system when they are away from home. Models were available from the adjoining states of Delhi and Rajasthan that had done so with some success. In fact, accelerating relief to migrant workers was an important strategy in retaining workers for a rapid post-COVID economic recovery.
The state government announced a “distress relief scheme” on April 14, 2020 – a move likely aimed to pacify industry, concerned about losing labour – but failed to get the scheme off the ground. Cumbersome processes for registration and verification, and faulty delivery mechanisms that fell prey to political infighting, revealed the poor capacities of the local state, which could not simultaneously perform disease management and relief delivery efforts. A report in late April by a citizens’ collective in the city pointed out that while the administration tracked coronavirus cases closely, identifying hotspots and cordoning them off into containment zones, there was no such concerted effort to alleviate distress in spatially concentrated hunger hotspots in the city. The strain of enduring multiple consecutive lockdowns without reliable safety nets has eventually resulted in a mass exodus of migrant workers from Gurugram, posing questions about the city’s economic sustainability in the near future.
Governance complexity and the post-COVID local state
Like Gurugram, cities across India—characterized by density, income inequality, spatial segregation and informality—have been the epicenters of disease as well as hunger during COVID-19 times. Implementing a top-down lockdown and dealing with its unintended consequences required far more state capacity than local and district governments possessed—hardly surprising given that the decentralization project remains incomplete in urban India.
The gaps have been filled by the voluntary participation of multiple civil society actors—individuals and collectives—embedded within state institutions, as extensions of the state, in collaboration with it or autonomous from it. The ability of these actors to negotiate between public and private interests, forge collaborations and exert pressure on the administration to do its duty, are all encouraging signs of a healthy democracy that continues to assert itself despite the techniques of surveillance and authoritarianism that the state uses. At the same time, the exclusion of large numbers of the poor from electoral politics of the cities that they live and work in lies at the heart of India’s migrant problem.
Gurugram’s story exhibits how, in the wake of this pandemic, conventional politics has aided the creation of a humanitarian crisis, while everyday politics and citizenship has enabled local, context-specific solutions to emerge, albeit in messy ways. These rich, localized experiences complicate the simplistic narratives offered by national leaders to ensure the support and cooperation of ordinary citizens. They also highlight the need for the post-COVID policy to focus on building the capacities of the local state, so that it can be a much stronger bulwark against future disasters.
Mukta Naik, a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, India, is an architect and urban planner. Her research interests include housing and urban poverty, urban informality, and internal migration, as well as urban transformations in small cities.