From Dandi March to the migrant exodus: A century of ‘walking the nation’

In 2018 too, farmers’ organisations in Maharashtra had undertaken a long march from Nashik to Mumbai to draw attention to agrarian distress. Through a very physical display of their abject conditions, which have lead to high numbers of farmer suicides, they were said to have been successful in communicating the trauma induced by flawed governance.

A few years later in March 2020, migrant workers undertook long arduous walks to their hometowns from major cities after an unplanned nation lockdown was imposed following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Commentators called it a moral protest that revealed the callousness of the regime. It was argued that the Indian state has long stripped migrant workers of welfare rights and had failed to address inequality and redistribution through policy.

In both cases, the hardship caused by walking long distances was seen as an act that raised a moral critique of the state. The legacy of Gandhian tactics was frequently invoked, but others also brought up the memory of the trauma of Partition refugees walking across the newly drawn up border.

This year, too, around mid-March, farmers from Nashik set off on foot for the Maharashtra legislative assembly in Mumbai to highlight agricultural distress following unseasonal rainfall...

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