It's foot-in-the-mouth season for the Congress. Digvijay Singh, P Chidambaram and Rahul Gandhi have made statements that have been derided by one and all. No one takes Digvijay Singh seriously anymore. Rahul Gandhi is not known to wear a thinking cap. But it is the suave, Harvard-educated, lawyer Chidambaram who is a cause for worry. Not only we have at hand a Union Home Minister who talks first and thinks later like Digvijay, he is also a grossly uninformed demagogue like Gandhi. Chidambaram is living proof of the fact that education and the allied degrees don't make you a literate person for real.
Chidambaram, a migrant himself in the land of Delhi, needs to be told that the history of human civilisation is that of migrations. They perhaps don't teach these things at law or business schools. This statistics graduate also needs to be told that few in Delhi actually belong to the city — it is the land of migrants.
In his hurry to offer an explanation for the worrisome criminal activities in Delhi, he was quick to pass on the buck to the migrant labour in Delhi. Clearly, he is a man who does not think much. The reporters he was speaking to were slow coaches too. They ought to have thrown a fact at the minister which he would have found hard to dodge — that the victim of the gangrape in question too was a migrant.
Any socio-economic connection between migrants and crime cannot and should not be dismissed altogether. The charge against the minister, however, is one of vacuous generalisation. One could have taken Chidambaram a tad more seriously had he enlightened us with his understanding of the lumpen proletariat.
It would be worthwhile if the minister would look at the findings of a study that were released on Friday. The survey conducted by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) has now revealed that 70 per cent of migrant women in Delhi hail from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. While better job opportunities are the major reasons to migrate, some women cite better education for their children as one of the reasons. A majority of the women are found to be employed in the unorganised sector. The problem with the ASSOCHAM study is its survey sample itself.
A 2008 survey by voluntary organisation Mobile Creche had found that Delhi is home to 600,000 migrant labourers, a third of them being women. Most of these women were unwilling citizens of Delhi — they had migrated because they had no choice. These women, few of who earned more than their husbands, had migrated solely because their husbands had chosen to do so. Is Chidambaram aware of such women? Or about the lives they lead? Of their daily travails and State-inflicted tribulations? Probably not.
What he also would probably not know is that most of these migrant labourers work on construction sites in Delhi. These people are here because of the development drive unleashed by the government of which Chidambaram is a minister. He also needs to be told that nearly 60 percent of migrant construction workers, have migrated to Delhi from another city, and not their home villages. They migrate not because they love Chidambaram's insensitive Delhi, but in search of livelihood. This fact ought to have been a no-brainer, but then this minister clearly is a man of limited cerebral faculties.
So these migrant labourers are the reason for Delhi being the crime capital of India? Does Chidambaram have numbers to corroborate his whimsical statement? Has any study been conducted that come up with figures that prove that most of the criminal activities being perpetrated in Delhi are the handiwork of migrant labourers? Be it so, then such criminals must have been identified in the study? If such criminals have already been branded, then why have such people not been rounded up? The minister will have to scratch his balding pate considerably to come up with credible answers. The fact that he has retracted it does not absolve him from making such an irresponsible statements. Nihilist men don't offer reasons, they shoot off justifications. Little wonder that he has already found a friend in Bal Thackeray.
With such ill-informed, insensitive men at the helm of Home affairs at the Centre, it is little wonder why this country is in such an anarchic state. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere. And the ceremony of innocence is being drowned by this man. He is full of such passionate intensity.
