Enough of the cheap theatrics. We need brains. We need heart. We need accountability – By Arundhati Roy

I’ve been following the elite media’s and the elite establishment’s sudden and heartfelt discovery of the tragedy of the “Faceless migrant worker”.… Some of the very same people who now appear to be in shock were cheerleaders while labour protection laws were dismantled, and a huge campaign was mounted to violently appropriate the land and resources of the rural poor and push them out of the countryside.

It was not something that just happened. It was a planned policy that was implemented over decades in which the poor were simply airbrushed out of the picture. … We live in a country in which 63 billionaires hold more wealth than the Union Budget outlay for a year. If you can consider emergency labour laws that make starving, semi-enslaved, traumatised people work a 12-hour day, you can have some emergency laws for the wealthy too. 

And you can put a system in place that makes sure that food and money gets to the millions of people who need it. We need to plan how we are going to live in a future that hardly bears thinking about. We need brains. And we need heart. And we need accountability. Enough of the cheap, stupid theatrics.