 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. I am Paranjwai Goa, Thakurtha and with me here is Professor Balveer Rora. He's chairman of the Center for Multilevel Federalism and a former professor of political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He taught political science there for 37 years between 1973 and 2010 and he was also the rector of the university. Thank you Professor Rora for giving me and the viewers of NewsClick your time and I'm growing heavily on your recent post in Facebook where you start your post by saying who is the chief strategist at the helm combining inputs from epidemiologists to economists and you've used very very harsh words you said Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi has so far provided comic relief from clanging pots and pans to candles to petals being showered by aircraft and helicopters of the Indian Air Force. Are you saying that there is nobody who is a strategist or are you suggesting that Mr. Narendra Modi the Prime Minister of India is unable to strategize and therefore is only providing comic relief diverting attention if I may use that phrase getting people their thallies and their thallies and lighting candles and vias to showering petals. I'm saying a bit of both in the sense that we have to understand two major things that we are living through one is the lockdown which is very harsh which is implemented with bigger often ruthlessly and the other is that we are confronted with the pandemic where the experts know little about the disease they are learning as it progresses and they are telling us what they know. On the other hand the economists are worried that the global economy will slip into a recession that it will take a long time to pull out. So what I was hinting at in the sentences that you mentioned was that lockdown is an administrative measure. The Ministry of Home Affairs in its own wisdom and ways does it. On the other hand you have the medical experts who themselves are fishing around finding their way globally and it's not just here looking at the way each of the other countries is handling. To make sense of all this you require vision you require political statesmanship you require acumen you require an overall view of how to balance the pros and the cons and that can't be left to bureaucrats. The experts are on tap they should never be on top and what we know of the cabinet is that there are very few ministers who make the cut. So hence the question is it the Prime Minister himself who is leading us through what is in my view the most difficult phase that we have crossed that we are crossing since partition in terms of the mass migration, the destitution, the popularization, the hardship that people are having to face. You've written you've described the PM KS fund as a slush fund of no use to the suffering and the party which once proclaimed the oneness of India I presume you are the Bharti Janta party has paradoxically managed to fragment it by pursuing petty electoral calculations to divide and rule. It has used federalism to settle political scores in the process weakening the nation more than ever before in its independent history as we head into the worst economic recession we've known in living memory it is the lack of leadership which is being felt which is being cruelly felt in New Delhi. A lot of people are arguing that you know whether it was announcing the lockdown at that time the Prime Minister himself was right up front when it comes to withdrawing easing the lockdown it seems he is now not up front anymore we have these statements being issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs but most importantly since you have been studying federalism in the Indian context and you're the chairman of the center for multi-level federalism the states are broke the states are complaining they don't have enough money and the lockdown and the secession of economic activity has worsened their finances they owed money by the union government yet the state governments are being asked to bear the burden of the problems not just of the migrant workers but trying to revive economic activity at one level and at the same time ensure there's no widespread starvation food is provided to everybody who needs it so the responsibilities are with the states but the central government seems to be less than willing to be generous in helping the state governments is this a correct way of looking at the present situation I think you've hit it on the head the core issue here is that this battle against the coronavirus is being fought by the states at the state level they are the frontline in this combat and they need all the support simultaneously the lockdown has whittled away many of their sources of income of revenue and the center has not been able to give them their dues for the GST that was coming to them now in this situation I think the problem that we face is that on the one hand you have a huge fund which the prime minister has set up a parallel to the national review fund which has all the clearances it counts for CSR it counts for it counts for the foreign it is allowed to receive foreign contribution none of which is available to the state state ministers relief funds so the problem here is that it has created suspicion it has created apprehensions as to why what is this fund used for going to be used for what use it is it if at this time of need it is not coming forward to help the people and here I would like to say a little further I think democracy under this lockdown may be suspended to the extent that assemblies are not meeting but we must remember that we are still a functioning democracy democracy has not been abrogated the emergency provisions have not been invoked and the states are full partners in the federal system I think a white paper on the part of government is needed to dispel all the suspicions all the mid apprehensions the government should come clear with its version with the truth because the white paper is supposed to put down in black and white the truth as the government sees it for example I give you the the whole controversy about rail fares at one time government said 85 percent is being paid by the center 15 by the states then you saw a host of persons showing their tickets that they themselves these migrants out of their meager savings paid for tickets and when it came up in court the government was not able to stand by this figure so who is paying in that context the opposition party because as I said we are still a democracy offered to pay if the government all the PM cares fund was not paying so in that context I'm saying that it would be good for democracy it would be good for the functioning of our federal system if all these things were put together in a white paper why I say that the federal system is being used as a fig leaf as a pretext there is an attempt at what I have called political distancing you are familiar with social distancing which I think is an obnoxious term I think it's more physical distancing that you want stay one or two feet away from three feet away from someone political distancing is when the center distances itself from the negative aspects of this lockdown and tries to pass on the burden to the states the responsibility to the states each time the prime minister has come before the nation and talked about the suffering and he has on two or three occasions what he has said is he has asked for forgiveness that it was not his fault they were others who were doing it and that Shama now when people are starving when people are walking miles there's this girl from who walked tried to walk from Telangana to her name is Jamalo Maktab she she was at the age and she had gone to Telangana to pick chilies as they do and and she had been walking and walking and died of exhaustion not very far from our home I mean if I could just intervene here I mean you are saying the shame and scandal of migrant workers trudging back home will remain a blot on republican memory for a long time surpassing by far the suffering caused by demonetization at least then the population were at home and confident of earning their livelihood even now there's no word above from above whether migrants should stay put or go home then you say then you point out the utter chaos that's happening and how different states have reacted differently Kerala Karnataka you've talked about UP and Bihar and and the point is that the same government that sacked the the Delhi government's top officials are the Indian administrative service officials for arranging transport for migrant labor are now charging them their real fare so at a time when we are arguably in a situation where we are today seeing the biggest internal migration not just in Indian history surpassing what happened in the middle of the forties but perhaps in the history of human kind this kind of internal migration that we are seeing within India from one state to another it's perhaps unparalleled in the history of humankind and in in response to that the the the response of the government of India in Delhi has been put it very mildly inadequate some would say their inaction would even be described as criminal what are your views so I think the sheer scale of it and I would say muddle thinking and a knee jerk reactions you rightly pointed out that initially they came down with a heavy hand and punished Delhi government officials for arranging transport so that these workers could go home now they are walking on railway tracks just this morning 15 of them died because a good strain ran over them the the sheer brutality of this mass movement of people with no help with sun blazing with the the poor girl died probably of dehydration I want to say that I made this comparison with demonetization at that time the central government used all the means and the agencies at its command to implement demonetization it used the national highways the toll booths were accepting the money the petrol pumps were expecting accepting the money the railways were accepting the money it used all the instruments at its disposal today I asked what are the central instruments that are being used to fight this battle the states are on their own now the railways are being pressed in the armed forces were brought in but for what they should have been building field hospitals they should have been building confinement centres they should have been helping the migrants they could have ferried them in army trucks back to their homes they could have distributed food they could have provided them cooked food drinking water and so on and so forth yeah uh professor Arora I want to take you back to the forties and I want to draw a few parallels and I want to have views on the parallels that I'm doing I'm drawing three sets of parallels 1943 the great Bengal family my parents both came from East Bengal there was food in the go downs in the granaries yes food had gone to for the the armed the the allied forces who were fighting the the second world war but there were great things called famine where estimated I would say 50 lakh people 5 million people are supposed to have died that happened in 1943 in 1945 we had Stalin and Roosevelt and Churchill all coming together to defeat Hitler the second world war ended in 1947 we had the partition of India we had the bloody Hindu Muslim riots that preceded it and even continued after the 15th of august 1947 the parallels look at what the tensions between china and and the united states some would say we are in the middle of a third world war except that the the complexion the manner in which it's being fought is very very different through through technology through trade and and and when you look at the kind of divide between Hindus and Muslims many people argue that the divide between Hindus and Muslims today are wider and deeper than they have been since the 40s so i'd like your views on on on these points that i've on these parallels that i've tried to draw yes i think these are interesting parallels to take the first one the Bengal family people died and there was food in the in the go downs sorry to interrupt you today the food corporation of India has three times more than three times the amount of of rice and and and and wheat that that what we would call our buffer stop yes yes please continue quite right so the food is there now look at the situation as you earlier pointed out the armed forces could have been used to distribute food the food is there how is it been how is it reaching the hungry NGOs are asked to take from these go downs on payment mind you so it's charity the you're depending on charity the state is not fulfilling its primary purpose of seeing that the hungry are fed they are charged and then they take it and they distribute it the same NGOs that the government has been i don't think persecuting is a wrong word it's a too stronger word the licenses have been withdrawn totally arbitrarily and now we are back to asking them to step in the other parallel that you raise 47 i was a small child born in Lahore when partition took place now i will only compare it because i want to leave aside the communal carnage angle because that raises a whole host of issues i own i'm only talking about the scale of the migration from one side to the other from India to Pakistan and from Pakistan to India and that movement in those days when independence was barely dawning where our services were being divided where the officers were being asked to choose between the two new formed nations we managed to bring things under control and keep functioning keep the constituent assembly functioning and drafting the constitution during those trouble times and they produced a wonderful document which we can be proud of and which is our main state the point i'm making is that democracy continued to function and the problem was tackled by the state machinery today the state machinery is only coercing and repressing and is not at all trying to bring sucker and relief and help to the populations that need it so your parallels are interesting and we come out very poorly in comparison with what we have the nation has gone through in those years what's going to be the political fallout of this the situation that we're currently going through what would happen if you could kind of sum up your thoughts you've seen the attempt to politically distance you know the government of India wants to distance itself and all the responsibilities are with the states and they are being completely strapped for resources to fulfill their role and then at the same time you talk about the state machinery being coercive and repressive and not being able to provide sucker and relief to those who need them the most so where do we go from here and what is going to be the likely political fallout populations which have been affected our fellow citizens are likely to remember what their experience has been when the state governments are up for reelection and if the governments have handled it well they will presumably reward them otherwise they will punish whether it will have repercussions at the national level because this whole thing has been masterminded from the center and controlled with special missions inter ministerial teams going to the center to the states also the the whole idea of micromanaging who shall open what on which day and at what time in this vast country so the only example that is cited is that people forgot demonetization and voted the government back to power if the elections are still a long way off but I think that was a different situation this has caused hardship and misery which will continue beyond the disease as the economy tries to pick up will these workers go back easily to start the industries that they have abandoned will the labor that you need who have built all your cities are leaving running away for their lives will they want to go back and work so I think this will have long term implications which will be with us for a few years more. Thank you so much Professor Balveer Arora for giving us your time for sharing your thoughts and views with the viewers and listeners of NewsClick. Thank you very much once again and keep watching NewsClick.