By Matters India Reporter

New Delhi, May 8, 2020: Social activists in India on May 8 expressed anguish over the death of 16 people after a train ran over a group of migrant laborers in the Aurangabad district of Maharashtra.

“Saddened deeply. It’s a clear sign of cruel discrimination of the poor,” says Father Anand Mathew, a social activist in Varanasi, reacting to the incident that occurred around 5:15 am on May 8.

According to the Aurangabad police authorities and railway officials at the Nanded division of the South Central Railway, 14 laborers were killed on the spot, while two succumbed to their injuries on way to hospital.

All were aged between 20 and 30 and hailed from Umaria and Shahdol districts of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. They were working at a steel firm in the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation zone in Jalna district.

According to the authorities, the laborers left Jalna at 7 pm on May 7 and walked on the road until Badnapur and then moved to the track. They decided to stop after walking around 36 km and fell asleep at the accident spot.

Father Mathew, director at Varanasi’s Vishwa Jyoti Communications who is engaged in humanitarian activities in eastern Uttar Pradesh, says such mishaps make him wonder if a government exists in India.

The mishap, he says, is part of “a strategic game” to annihilate the poor and the marginalized.

The Indian Missionary Society priest also pointed out several incidents of “cruel discrimination of migrant laborers” such as police atrocities on those walking hundreds of kilometers to their homes, train mowing those on the tracks, and railway charging the migrant passengers huge sum.

Such incidents convinced him that the democracy in India “is of the rich, for the rich, by the rich, and clearly, specifically against the poor.”

“The system may be just a cruel joke for those in power, for the elite and rich, but it is a saga of terrible neglect, hunger and murder of the poor, due to selfishness, self-centeredness and greed of the rich,” the priest bemoans.

“The migrant laborers died not because they were sleeping. They died because those who had the responsibility to provide transport for them were asleep,” he asserts.

Another activist, Jesuit Father Irudaya Jothi of Kolkata, says he is too “overwhelmed” by such shocking incidents happening almost daily.

“We certainly blame the irresponsible government, who could not provide the needed trains to these hapless people to go back their homes,” said the priest, an official of the West Bengal unit of the Right to Food and Work Network.

Father Jothi shared his frustration through WhatsApp messaging. He says he is “tired of all symbolisms” of the federal and several state governments.

“Instead of throwing flower petals on hospitals the government should have used the resources to reach the stranded migrant workers to their home,” he adds.

On May 3, Indian Air Force and Navy helicopters showered flower petals on hospitals across India treating Covid-19 patients. The Indian Air Force planes conducted flypasts as a gesture of gratitude to doctors, nurses and other workers on the frontline fighting the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The gesture was greeted with anger and ridicule by Twitter users, just like Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s request to Indians to bang vessels on March 22 in a similar sign of gratitude and the mass exercise of lighting candles in a demonstration of solidarity on the evening of April 5.

According to Father Jothi, such gestures “make a mockery of the power entrusted” to those in power, who have taken for granted “the power of resilience of the poor and exploited.”

Meanwhile, the police in Aurangabad are counseling four survivors of the mishap, who are in shock.

The police said the migrants had assumed that trains were not running because of the coronavirus lockdown and exhausted from walking a long distance, slept off on the tracks. The mishap took place some 360 km southeast of Mumbai, the state capital.

The tracks were strewn with footwear and other personal belongings. Even the chaptis the migrants carried for their journey were seen on the tracks.

The Railway Ministry tweeted that the loco pilot of goods train had tried to stop the train but eventually hit the sleeping laborers.