Varanasi police on Wednesday intercepted a container truck and proudly declared later they had “caught” 47 migrants, including women and children as young as five, trying to pass through the city during the nationwide lockdown, the choice of word betraying social attitudes to the less privileged.
Insult was served up in another form too elsewhere in Uttar Pradesh the same day.
The railways provided stale food to migrants when a Shramik Special train from Mumbai halted at Chandauli railway station on the way to Danapur in Bihar.
The migrants threw the food on the platform.
In Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s parliamentary constituency, police intercepted the container truck on Wednesday evening in the city’s Chuakaghat area.
The truck, coming from Mumbai, was carrying migrants heading back to Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Bihar. “We saw a container truck going towards Varuna Bridge and apprehended it,” Awadhesh Pandey, circle officer, traffic, said. “On opening it, we saw men, women and children hiding inside. We caught them traveling in the container, which had the licence to transport only essential commodities.”
Among those “caught” — as if they were people fleeing from justice — were 15 women and eight children.
The police booked the migrants and the truck driver for breaking social-distancing norms and sent them to a local quarantine centre for 14 days. The truck’s owner, sources said, would be arrested soon.
One of the migrants later shared with reporters their experience of official high-handedness. “We crossed Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh and over 20 districts in between. Police checked the container at many places and saw us but allowed us to continue because they had sympathy for us. But here in Varanasi, they caught us, ignoring the fact that there were eight children below five years of age with us,” he said before being taken to the quarantine centre, requesting not to be named.
“It is not that Varanasi police is smarter. They are more cruel than police of other districts.”
Ram Prakash Gautam, the driver who was returning with the truck from Mumbai, said the owner, Mohammad Afizullah, had asked him to pick up the migrants on the way back to Uttar Pradesh.
“When I was returning from Mumbai after unloading a consignment there, Mohammad Afizullah, the owner of the truck from Siddharthnagar (east Uttar Pradesh), asked me to bring the migrants from Mumbai for anything between Rs 3,000 and Rs 3,500 (each),” Gautam, who is from Sant Kabir Nagar, also in east Uttar Pradesh, said.
Gautam said among the migrants in the truck, 29 were from Mau, Azamgarh, Ghazipur, Gorakhpur and Deoria, all in east Uttar Pradesh. Sixteen, he said, were from Nalanda, Rohtas, Bettiah and Aurangabad, all in Bihar, and two were from Ranchi, Jharkhand.
In Chandauli, the railways provided stale food to the migrants when the Shramik Special train halted at the station on Wednesday afternoon.
“The railways charged Rs 940 from each passenger and had promised lunch, dinner and two water bottles to each. We received the food packet at Chandauli railway station. On opening it, we found the food had gone stale and giving off a foul smell. Railway officials also informed us there was no drinking water and we should use the tap water available on the train. All the 1,200 passengers threw the food on the platform,” Ram Kumar, a passenger, said.
Himanshu Shukla, station director of Mughalsarai Railway Junction, under whose jurisdiction Chandauli station falls, hardly showed any regret. “The food was cooked according to the scheduled time of the train, which reached the station late. The truck, which was taking water to the railway station, was stuck somewhere and couldn’t reach on time,” Shukla said.
The Shramik trains have no scheduled arrival time, all the more reason authorities need to take extra care to ensure the food doesn’t go bad in the summer heat.