Dalit-Online
Daily e news paper
Editor: Nagaraja.M.R.. Vol.16.....Issue.47............19/05/2020
Editorial : Hunger Death due to Corona Lock down
- Wake Up Modiji , NHRC Chairman & CJI
Refer :
DEPOJ/E/2020/02420.
MINHA/E/2020/06034
DARPG/E/2020/09352
Our Honourable Prime Minister Mr.Modi has taken right decision to enforce countrywide lock down , to prevent spread of Corona virus. Corona warriors - doctors, nurses, paramedics, safai Soldiers, police all have done a commendable job. Our heartfelt respects, salutes to them all.
However few police personnel behaved like demons – they brutally kathie charged innocent poor people to death for violating lock down. The same police let off rich guys violating lockdown actress sharmila mandre car holly ride in Bangalore, illegal liquor transport meant for higher police officers, marriage of politicians, etc. Police didn't have guts , nerves to punish the guilty.
Government didn't provide food to migrants, foot path dwellers. Authorities just made show off of food distribution in city centres to get press coverage.
In india most of the real poors don't have BPL card, Jan Dhan accounts. However cronies of politicians, rich persons doing money lending to the tune of lakhs of rupees, earning thousands of rupees rental income have submitted fake income certificates and illegally got BPL card , opened Jan Dhan accounts. Even some old age pensioners are rich, undeserving.
Financial aid transferred to Jan Dhan accounts, old age pension accounts and ration provided is reaching undeserving persons. As a result poor are suffering more and dying due to hunger.
Rich people , cronies of politicians have illegally secured BPL ration cards and enjoying benefits of it, while utterly poor are denied the same. Your corona management is a sham, people have died due to hunger. We offer conditional services to legally apprehend unfit BPL card holders , are you ready ?
Honourable Chief Justice of India & NHRC Chairman , you didn't show the needed alacrity to address the issue of migrant labours inspire of PILs. The inhuman attorney general who takes hefty pay cheque from tax payer's money was arrogant and termed them as petitions from PIL factory worthy of dismissal. Actually AG deserves dismissal from his post.
PM, CJI, NHRC Chairman, AG you are all responsible for these hunger deaths, lathi charge deaths, death due to lack of medical care and you are literally murderers of those innocents.
India has enough food grain stock but still poor die due to hunger. It is mismanagement of food distribution. You have to learn lessons and show commitment to duty. Food is needed for life of a human being. Right to life is a human right of every individual. You are violating poor's human rights.
Hereby , we urge you to :
1. To clearly identify poor with measurable parameters.
2. To weed out undeserving beneficiaries of BPL Card, old age pension, jan dhan account.
3. To recover money from illegal beneficiaries.
4. To legally prosecute responsible corrupt public servants who aided them in their crimes.
5. To legally prosecute police personnel who brutally lathi charged innocents causing murders of commoners.
6. To legally prosecute rich guys who violated lock down norms.
More than 300 Indians have died of the coronavirus, and nearly 200 of the lockdown
A cost-benefit analysis of India’s coronavirus lockdown must take into account the deaths caused by the lockdown itself.
SHIVAM VIJ
in a modified form for another two weeks, here’s another statistic we need to think about: at least 195 people have died of the lockdown.
Had the lockdown been better planned and more judiciously thought out, many of these lives could have been saved.
The dataset of 195 deaths (and counting) has been created by researchers Thejesh GN, Kanika Sharma and Aman. It has been collected from credible news or social media reports from across India, many of which are listed on this Twitter thread.
The human cost of lockdown
Of these, 53 deaths were caused by exhaustion, hunger, denial of medical care, or suicides due to lack of food or livelihood.
At least seven people were killed in violent crimes, such as people turning into vigilantes and attacking others for violating the lockdown.
Migrant labourers wanting to return home were forced to walk hundreds of kilometres on highways that speeding vehicles were expecting to be empty. At least 35 migrants were accidentally run over.
It is well known that alcoholics can die of delirium tremens, withdrawal symptoms or driven to suicide if suddenly denied alcohol. India’s lockdown shut all alcohol stores. At least 40 people have died or committed suicide because we don’t consider alcohol as an essential commodity.
Another 39 people have committed suicide because they feared getting the coronavirus infection, thanks to the panic created by the lockdown, or because of loneliness or being quarantined. Yet another 21 deaths were caused for miscellaneous reasons.
These are just the reported deaths, the real numbers would likely be much higher.
Dying to prevent coronavirus deaths
Take a moment to think about the absurdity of this: Indians died due to measures that were meant to save them from dying.
It is clear that the lockdown is being extended, though thankfully it seems it will be more nuanced, targeting hotspots differently from other areas that haven’t seen any Covid-19 positive cases yet. There is likely to be limited opening up of the economy. These efforts will remain risky considering we still aren’t testing aggressively enough.
If the Narendra Modi government had prepared early on, starting in February, for aggressive testing, indigenously made testing kits, had manufactured more PPEs at war footing instead of exporting what we had, we wouldn’t have needed a mindless lockdown.
The harshest lockdown in the world that closes public transport, trains and flights, prevents people from travelling for emergency reasons, and makes it difficult for people to even feed themselves — this isn’t the humane way to deal with a national health crisis.
What’s the point of living?
The lockdown is meant to save our lives from the coronavirus. But for some, it made life so difficult that surviving the virus was pointless. They took their own lives.
One such person was Rambhavan Shukla, 52, who hung himself from a tree branch because he couldn’t find labour to harvest the wheat crop on his farm in Banda, Uttar Pradesh. Instead of facing a year of financial ruin, he cut short the misery.
Another example is that of Aldrin Lyngdoh, a young man from Meghalaya who was sacked and kicked out by a restaurant he worked at in Agra. In his suicide note, he said the owners of the restaurant, which is ironically named Shanti Food Centre, knew they could get away with anything since one of their relatives is a minister in the UP government.
Lyngdoh committed suicide because he was an orphan with no one to look after him, and nowhere to go. Not that he could have managed to reach Meghalaya amid the lockdown even if there was someone there to support him.
Before the virus can kill you, there’s the police
What sort of a pandemic-prevention lockdown makes it difficult for people to get medical help? Enforced by the trigger-happy police officers through lathis, this lockdown has been so cruel it wouldn’t even let ambulances pass in some places, such as in Mangaluru, where two people died as a result.
In Maharashtra, the police assaulted an ambulance driver for allegedly ferrying passengers rather than patients. The officers took a bribe and let the ambulance go to the hospital so that the driver could be treated for assault injuries. The driver died anyway. He was hit hard on the head with a lathi.
These Manto-esque incidents make you wonder if this lockdown was about saving lives or just asserting the might of the state on hapless citizens?
A 29-year-old Dalit man returned from Gurgaon to his village in Uttar Pradesh. He claimed he had undergone a Covid-19 test and had tested negative. He was still humiliated and beaten up by a police constable so badly that he committed suicide. Who needs the coronavirus?
All other patients are free to die
As our healthcare system gears up to save lives from Covid-19, people unable to use that system or see through a brutal lockdown may please go home and die anyway.
In Madhya Pradesh, a state without a health minister amid a pandemic, a hospital set up to help the victims of the continuing Bhopal gas tragedy kicked out the very patients it was meant to serve. The hospital was readying itself for Covid-19 patients. Munni Bee, 68, died for want of care. No other hospital would take her.
It’s as if India is already making the dark choices about which lives it wants to save and which lives are expendable. What cause of death makes for headlines less troubling for the political establishment? Which statistic should be allowed to rise?
Let them eat lockdown
It is a shame that in a food surplus country, we let people die of starvation, such as these two people in Bellary, Karnataka; or this 11-year-old Dalit boy in Bhojpur, Bihar; or this daily wage labourer in Cyberabad, whose body was found by the police.
Not everyone waited for starvation to kill them; some cut short the agony with suicide, like Sagar Deogharia in Odisha. The government is carrying out a “detailed probe into the incident,” of course.
The lockdown has meant there is no work for daily wagers, and hence no food. So they travelled back home where getting food might have been easier. Some died just trying to reach home. Like a group of migrant labourers in Jammu and Kashmir died of the cold, their bodies found under five feet of snow. They took a dangerous mountainous route to reach home thanks to the lockdown.
Footnotes of history
If the lockdown continues in its present form, it is bound to kill more people — through starvation, unemployment, stigma, government indifference, and police brutality.
But the government doesn’t have to worry much: these are poor, voiceless people whose deaths will be reported as stray incidents. Nobody will light diyas or bang pots and pans in their honour. They are collateral damage in the war against coronavirus.
They won’t even count as footnotes in the history of India’s response to the pandemic. Unless you can find a Muslim-bashing angle, these lives aren’t outrage material on prime time.
Sufferings of Migrant workers
Mr. Pandit, a construction worker, was stuck in Delhi for three days and could not see his dying son in Bihar.
Rampukar Pandit, who became a snapshot of India’s migrant tragedy with his photograph sobbing by a road in Delhi, is back in Bihar, broken at not being able to see his son before he died.
“We labourers have no life, we are just a cog in the wheel, spinning continuously until we run out of life,” the 38-year-old said.
The construction labourer, who worked at a cinema hall site in Delhi, was spotted weeping as he talked on the phone by the side of the Nizamuddin Bridge in Delhi by PTI photographer Atul Yadav on May 11. The powerful image of the distraught man, struggling to reach home in Begusarai, almost 1,200 km away during the lockdown, was widely shared across all media. Mr. Pandit had been stuck there for three days before help arrived.
When the photograph was taken, he said he was anguished at the thought that he might not get home on time to see his baby. Shortly after the photo was taken, his son, who had not yet turned one, died. “I pleaded to the police to let me go home but none helped,” he told PTI over the phone. “One policeman even said, ‘Will your son become alive if you go back home. This is lockdown, you can’t move’.”
A woman in Delhi and a photographer — he did not know Mr. Yadav’s name — were his saviours, he said. “A journalist asked why I was so upset and tried to help me by taking me in his car, but the police did not allow him. The woman gave me food, ₹5,500 and booked my ticket in the special train, and that’s how I reached home.”
“The rich will get all the help, getting rescued and brought home in planes from abroad. But we poor migrant labourers have been left to fend for ourselves. That is the worth of our lives,” he said. “Hum mazdooron ka koi desh nahin hota (We labourers don’t belong to any country.
Mr. Pandit, who also has three daughters, said he had named his son Rampravesh, as his name also has a Ram in it. “Will a father not want to go home and even mourn the death of his son, with his family?”
Mr. Pandit, who moved to Delhi’s Uttam Nagar during his childhood along with his uncle to eke out a living, still hasn’t managed to meet his family.
“I reached Begusarai from Delhi by train a couple of days ago. We were then taken to a nearby screening facility and kept there overnight. In the morning, a bus took us to a school just outside Begusarai town, and since then I am here,” he said.
He still doesn’t know when he will be reunited with his family.
Mr. Pandit is now at a quarantine centre on the outskirts of Begusarai. “My wife, who is unwell, and my three daughters, are waiting for me. The wait just doesn’t seem to end,” he said.
Fortunately, he has found a friend in his hour of grief.
Ghanshyam Kumar, 25, his neighbour in his village Bariarpur, is also quarantined in the same school.
“I work as a labourer in Kanpur, and reached the U.P.-Bihar border after taking a bus, and from there a train. At the station, I recognised Rampukar. Grief tears us apart, and sometimes unites us too,” he said.
Edited, printed , published owned by NAGARAJA.M.R. @ # LIG-2 No 761,
HUDCO FIRST STAGE , OPP WATER WORKS , LAXMIKANTANAGAR , HEBBAL
,MYSURU – 570017 KARNATAKA INDIA Cell : 91 8970318202
WhatsApp 91 8970318202
Home page :
http://eclarionofdalit.dalitonline.in
https://dalit-online.blogspot.com
Contact : editor@dalitonline.in , editor.dalitonline@gmail.com
Dalit-Online at 11:52 AM
Share
No comments:
Post a Comment
›
Home
View web version
About Me
Dalit-Online
View my complete profile
Powered by Blogger.
No comments:
Post a Comment