Helping those who have been abandoned by the state is now a crime, it seems, at least in the eyes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who went to great lengths in parliament to blame the Congress and other opposition parties for allegedly committing the “paap (sin)” of facilitating the spread of COVID-19. “During the first wave, when the country was in lockdown,” he said, “the Congress went to Mumbai railway station to scare innocent people. They pushed labourers to go back to their states and spread coronavirus. You pushed labourers into crisis.”He then blamed the Delhi government for “going around slums in jeeps and announcing on microphones that whoever wants to go home, buses have been arranged.” Infections, he said, then shot up in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab as a result.Leaders of opposition parties have condemned the prime minister’s statements, and rightfully so. If sending migrants home was a crime then Modi seems to have forgotten his own ‘complicity in it’, for it was the Union government, after all, that ran special shramik trains to transport workers back home. Shramik trains started by the government in order to transport migrant workers. Representative image. Photo: PTIThe prime minister also side-stepped the reason behind the migrant exodus — a 21-day lockdown that he himself imposed with only four hours’ notice, thus leaving lakhs of daily wagers and labourers with no choice but to try and go back to their villages and towns. The migrants didn’t want to go home, they had to, with no work and no money to or buy their food or pay their rents.Those who saw with their own eyes hundreds of thousands of migrant workers walking down the highways, desperately trying to catch a bus or a shared taxi back home to their villages will never forget the sight. Images of exhausted children draped over suitcases being pulled by parents, labourers wearing plastic bags on their feet for shoes, workers getting beaten by police and sprayed with DDT on the highways moved concerned citizens everywhere to try and help the migrants in distress as best as they could.But there were also those who simply couldn’t understand why the migrant workers had to go home. I remember losing my temper at a rich friend who asked me with oblivious innocence, “But why don’t they just stay in Delhi till the lockdown ends?” I tried to explain that not everyone has the security of a roof overhead, a healthy bank balance or the luxury of not being able to work for a period of time.“Yes, but surely they can manage for three weeks,” he countered. Also read: Modi Speech Dodges Economic Distress, Rewrites Govt’s COVID Record to Blame Congress, AAPIt is very difficult, I have realised, to try and explain the problems of the poor to the well-to-do. But there are others who still have the milk of human kindness running through their veins. At the height of the migrant exodus, Zartab, an entrepreneur friend, messaged me at three in the morning and said, “I can’t sleep. I can’t see bear to see these families walking down the highway with kids. We need to help them.”I told him I agreed. The next morning we sent out a WhatsApp message asking everyone we knew to help us hire buses for the migrants so they wouldn’t have to walk home. The response was overwhelming. Friends and strangers came forward and donated generously and over the next one month we managed to send close to 1,500 migrant workers back to their homes in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in hired buses. We called the project, ‘Destination Home’. Migrants on a bus home. Photo: Rohit KumarA friend who is a theatre personality donated water bottles for each bus journey and her friend, a Buddhist nun, provided freshly cooked meals for each trip. That blistering summer, we saw the very best of human compassion and the very worst of government apathy. Through it all, Zartab kept his rozas and did not eat during the days or touch a drop of water till iftaar time in the evenings. While seven and a half years of the reign of Narendra Modi reign have shown us quite clearly that the prime minister seems to have little understanding of the meaning of raj dharma or the duty of rulers, and seems to possess little (if any) empathy, for him to demonise opposition parties and others for trying to help the migrant population of India in their time of deepest crisis is a new low. The people of India need to seriously start thinking about alternatives to a political party whose actions and policies have repeatedly let them down in their darkest hours.Rohit Kumar is an educator with a background in positive psychology and psychometrics. He works with high school students on emotional intelligence and adolescent issues to help make schools bullying-free zones. He can be reached at letsempathize@gmail.com.