Actor-politician Prakash Raj on Thursday, 4 June, said the distress of migrant laborers due to coronavirus lockdown was a result of “lack of empathy and vision.” He added, their wounds will hurt for a long time and that it is “deeper than flesh.”
In an interview with The Quint, Raj, who has helped at least 40 migrant laborers return home, said that the situation could have been avoided if there was a “good leader and good system” that thought about such people, before declaring the lockdown to curb the spread of the infectious virus.
“We need to question, we need to introspect, we need to understand because these wounds are going to be deeper than flesh. They are going to hurt for a long time.”Prakash Raj to The Quint
‘We’ve Left Them on Roads’
The actor, who has worked in multiple film industries, said that while people who have homes can be in a lockdown, no one thought about the homeless.
“We ourselves are also responsible as citizens because we never realised that they were there. Human race is like rats. There is no vision, there is no empathy, there is no thought process of what is happening. This is sad, isn’t it? Any good leader, any good system should have re-imagined the future and understood the repercussions. We’ve just left them on the roads.”Prakash Raj to The Quint
“When I walk down to the street and see people walking, they say they are going from Bangalore to Nagpur to Lucknow. They are saying they will walk. They have just lost all trust in us,” he added.
Raj said that while there is no one person to blame for the crisis, the pandemic has exposed the frailties of the system in India.
“There is no one person to blame. As a collective society, we need to understand during the pandemic, that how the systems we thought were very strong – coronavirus has not attacked the system but it has exposed the system and if we don’t realise, we have lied to ourselves in totality.”Prakash Raj to The Quint
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)