The teaser for Anubhav Sinha’s upcoming movie Bheed was released yesterday (March 3) and has garnered praise and criticism alike. The movie starring Rajkumar Rao and Bhumi Pednekar talks about the plight of migrants during the Covid-19-induced national lockdown of 2020, when lakhs of migrant workers were trying to return from cities. Shot in black and white, the teaser shows visuals of huge crowds of people (hence, Bheed) trying to find their way home on foot, cycle, overcrowded buses or in whichever way possible as they are accosted by the police and authorities along the way. Throughout the teaser, there are constant parallels being drawn with the trauma and displacement caused by the Partition of 1947. From showing similar visuals to the background commentary which goes as far as to clarify that the snapshots shown are not from the Partition but from 2020, the teaser is blunt when it comes to telling the viewer how bad the migrant crisis was. “Ek baar phir hua tha batwara, 2020 mein (The Partition happened once again, in 2020)," the narrator says. However, this framing, especially the parallels drawn to the Partition, has also invited significant criticism. Critics have accused Sinha of sensationalising the issue by invoking the Partition, which was undoubtedly one of the largest human tragedies in history. Critics also pointed out that the teaser “portrays India in poor light” and that while it is important to tell the story of the plight of migrant workers during the national lockdown, the teaser’s sensationalism points to the filmmaker’s “vested interests”. So, how bad was the migrant crisis? After the first national lockdown was announced, in March 2020, the hapless migrant worker trying to find a way home became a symbol of the lockdown’s human cost. Newspapers were filled with pictures of caravans of migrant labourers walking hundreds of kilometres along highways, across shuttered cities, running out of food, and often harassed by unsympathetic policemen. The scenes were chaotic with train stations and bus depots overcrowded and private transporters allegedly engaging in profiteering. While the government tried to maintain supplies and keep essential services running, the sheer scale of the reverse-migration from the cities, sparked by a near-complete economic shutdown, soon got out of hand. Also, the lockdown was implemented with next to no notice, adding to both the panic and the authorities’ own unpreparedness that made the situation worse. What exactly was the scale of the crisis? How many people were impacted? According to the 2011 Census data, India’s internal migrants (inter-state as well as intra-state), account for nearly 37 per cent of the country’s population (over 450 million people). While there is no official data for the inter-state migrants in the country, estimates for 2020, made by Professor Amitabh Kundu of Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS) based on the 2011 Census, NSSO surveys and economic survey, show that there are a total of about 65 million inter-state migrants. As many as 33 per cent of these migrants are workers. A huge chunk of migrants engage in casual or informal work with conservative estimates by RIS (from 2020) pegging the percentage at close to 60 per cent of all migrant workers. Many of these are daily wagers, whose livelihood was brought to a complete standstill by the lockdown, hence prompting the massive exodus from cities. The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), done under the aegis of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), released a report titled, “Migration in India 2020-21”. The report, which surveyed a total of 1,13,998 migrants, shows that 51.6 per cent of rural migrants left their urban settlements in the aftermath of the pandemic. Answering a question raised in Parliament on February 2, 2021, Santosh Kumar Gangwar, MoS (IC) for Labour and Employment, noted that a total of over 11.4 million migrant workers had returned to their home state after the lockdown. What was the role of the police? A fact which has irked some critics of Bheed’s teaser is the portrayal of the police as violent and abusive towards migrants. Snippets show a policeman lathi-charging at a crowd of migrant workers, barricading roads as well as “washing/disinfecting” a group of people using a strong hose. Professor Tariq Thachil of Vanderbilt University has worked on India’s circular internal migration. Notably, his research has underscored the pre-eminence of the police in shaping the urban experiences of migrants, relative to their rural lives. In one study, he found out that 33 per cent of respondents in the survey personally experienced violent police action within their past year in the city, compared to a mere 5 per cent in their home villages. While the police were definitely not singularly at blame, the migrant crisis and the authorities attempts to “handle” the situation showed some of Indian police’s failings. Videos of police “misbehaviour” went viral during the lockdown and testimonies of returning migrants were filled with accounts of both violence and apathy from the police force. A study by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative titled ‘Policing During India’s Covid-19 Lockdown’ says “The requirement to immediately enforce the lockdown meant state governments deployed their police in large numbers, with no time to orient and sensitise the police to the unique challenges, set limits on its enforcement role or put in place proper internal monitoring and accountability processes.” This was contributed to by the legal framework within which the authorities were acting at the time, which was focussed on achieving strict adherence to the lockdown without necessarily being cognisant or sympathetic to circumstances that people were facing. Being in the lowest rungs of India’s social hierarchy, migrants often bore the worst of the imposition of the lockdown with no recourse or legal remedy available to them. And what about Partition comparisons? There is no doubt that Anubhav Sinha does sensationalise things for dramatic effect. The music, the black and white visuals chosen, the serious sounding narration – all add to the drama of the story Sinha is trying to tell. Notably, the teaser does not give a glimpse of the film’s protagonists, rather focusing on the nameless, faceless migrant worker to set the context for the story Sinha wants to tell. That being said, the plight of migrants post India’s unplanned and ill-conceived lockdown was indeed sad. Many of the visuals shown reflect what was really happening on the ground. With regards to comparisons to the Partition, there are definitely some similarities in terms of scale. Even looking at only government data, one can mount a comparison to the refugee crisis that followed the Partition (with commonly accepted data pegging the number of refugees at around 15 million). The 2020 crisis was undoubtedly the worst such crisis since the Partition. Sinha’s parallels evoke a strong sense of history for the viewers who are viscerally able to understand the sheer trauma of the migrant crisis using the metaphor of the Partition. However, the brutality of the Partition in terms of communally fuelled violence is fundamentally different from any internal migrant crisis. At least a million people were killed in religious violence that followed the Partition. The world has seen few other human tragedies at the scale since then.
