Headed for home, evacuees ask: What’s our fault in this?

New Delhi: Their faces covered with masks and their heads with skull caps, a row of men carried their belongings in trolleys, handbags and trolleys as they drudgingly

New Delhi: Their faces covered with masks and their heads with skull caps, a row of men carried their belongings in trolleys, handbags and trolleys as they drudgingly walked towards a green DTC bus parked nearby. A row of tricoloured poles ensured they kept to one side of the street, the other carriageway reserved for government authorities – all of who wore hand gloves apart from the masks.

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As they stepped into the bus, they left their bags in the front and silently occupied one seat after the other. They hardly spoke to each other and they perspired heavily as they waited for the bus to move – it took them nearly two hours before their wait ended – as a driver decked in a decontamination suit loitered outside.

Less than 100 metres down the street, another group of men emerged from a six-storey white building and waited near two tents set up right outside. When asked to step forward, they submitted themselves to thermal screening, their contact details and waited for the signal to walk towards the bus.

This process would go on from Tuesday morning until late evening. A similar evacuation exercise was carried out on Monday, and on a smaller scale a day before that.

“I had arrived from Muzaffarnagar 25 days ago with the intention of doing social service. But now I feel I have committed a crime,” said a bus occupant after he had unsuccessfully asked his co-passengers for drinking water.

That man, who didn’t want to identify himself, was among hundreds of pilgrims and guests who were stranded at the Markaz in Nizamuddin – barely 100 metres from the Nizamuddin police station – in the wake of the nationwide lockdown due to Covid-19. Many of those who were evacuated have tested positive for the virus and a few others have succumbed to the disease – making Nizamuddin one of the hotspots of the virus in the city.

They had arrived from across the country for religious activities over the past few weeks, continued to stay here as the pandemic turned worse and found themselves stranded once the lockdown was over.

On Tuesday, a two roads leading to the Markaz were sealed and only government officials were allowed to pass through. The main road leading to the Markaz itself was divided by tricoloured poles – one side to be used by the evacuated pilgrims and the other by government officials.

Such was the fear of contamination that sanitation workers spraying sanitisers inside the buses frequently received requests from health officials and journalists to spray on their clothes and shoes. The policemen from the police station requested them to spray their cars and motorcycles. Their colleagues, meanwhile, went about spraying the disinfectant at the gates and windows of the other houses in the Nizamuddin neighbourhood.

In the adjoining lanes, civil defence volunteers walked around with a list of local residents who were suspected of having been in contact with the Markaz residents.

But these volunteers said it was a futile task. “We are looking at people who may have visited the Markaz, but the Markaz occupants themselves had been to several places,” said Suraj Kumar, one of the volunteers.

Local residents concurred with Kumar’s guess. Afzal Khan, a homeless man who worked at a roadside food stall and lives in a park near the Markaz, said that visitors from the place had been visiting the park until Saturday. “Five-six of them would take a walk in the park and play with our children. They would then walk to the nearby Humayum’s Tomb,” said Khan.

Other residents in the adjoining neighbourhoods said that the Markaz occupants would roam around in their streets until Friday. “Our delivery boys had been delivering food at the Markaz until Friday. They would approach the gates, collect the cash, handover the food and leave,” said Zuhaib, owner of a Biryani restaurant nearby.

The evacuated people, in their limited interactions with journalists from inside the confines of the buses, insisted that they weren’t to blame for the mess. “When the lockdown was announced, I visited multiple tour and transport shops in the neighbourhood to ask for any way to get to my home in Luckhow. They all refused to help,” said another evacuated man who didn’t identify himself.

He said that since the lockdown was announced, he and the others in the Markaz wore masks, kept a distance from each other and hoped to get back to his home. “Our religion teaches us to follow the law of the land. Is it our mistake that the lockdown was announced when we were in the Markaz? Why weren’t we forced to evict the premises much earlier when there is a police station right next to the Markaz?” the man asked.

A statement issued by the Markaz officials on Tuesday said that when the ‘Janta Curfew’ was announced for March 22, the ongoing program was discontinued immediately, but the sudden discontinuation of rail services left hundreds of them stranded in the premises.

According to their statement, there were about 2,500 pilgrims in the Markaz at that time and about 1,500 of them managed to leave the city some way or the other in the immediate wake of the lockdown. Yet, about 1,000 of them were left behind, they said. Scores of these included foreigners – those who had arrived from countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar.

Their statement said that the first formal notice from the police had arrived only on March 24, when the city was already under lockdown and a similar restraint was set to be imposed across the country.

While senior police officers authorised to speak to the media remained tight-lipped about their apparent failure to evacuate the Markaz before that, another police officer on condition of anonymity said that they were cautious in dealing with a religious gathering. “We were sceptical that any attempts to disperse the gathering at the Markaz would be met with a resistance that we faced in Shaheen Bagh and Jamia,” said the officer.

But, Fuzail Ayyubi, the legal counsel of the Markaz in this matter, said that the visitors had come in before any of the restrictions came into place.

“The pilgrims stay here for a few days and the depart to other areas of the country. This is a round-the-year feature. After the lockdown was announced, several letters were written to the local authorities to help send these people back, but no action was taken,” said Ayyubi, adding that the Markaz can accommodate 4,000-5,000 people on any given day.

Some of the evacuated men HT spoke to said that they had arrived at the Markaz as late as on March 22, the day of the Janata Curfew. “We were let into the Markaz and we thought it was a safe, secluded place,” said one of them.

Earlier, on the day of the Janata Curfew, an HT team had come across half-a-dozen pilgrims headed for the Nizamuddin Markaz from Anand Vihar railway station where they were briefly stranded in the absence of any public transport.

This was during a period when the Delhi Government had already limited the number of social gatherings to a maximum of five at any place.

The police and other officials involved in the evacuation process also said that the data on the number of people stranded in the Markaz was heavily downplayed. “They hid the real figures from us. So far, we have already sent 34 buses, each occupied by 34 pilgrims. Many pilgrims are still being brought out,” said a police officer.

Parveen Kumar, a civil defence volunteer, said that when he had visited the Markaz on Friday with some health officials, the response he received from the Markaz officials was that they didn’t need help from outside.

“They weren’t willing to let us take the details of the occupants. They said they would manage on their own. When we spoke to the occupants, some of them complained of cough and fever. That is how some of them were found positive,” said Kumar.

Local residents, meanwhile, said that they are doing everything at their end to fight the infection. They are making their own sprays and standing guard outside their homes in shifts in this neighbourhood which includes the upscale Nizamuddin West and the adjoining Basti.

At the Basti, which houses around 30000 people, the local RWA has been making announcements in the mosques asking people not to panic and maintain all the rules of the lockdown.

“We had made teams of residents, who would stand guard on the streets to ensure people don’t step out. Now the area is almost sealed but we still have the groups actively guarding the place. We started doing this since the cases emerged,” said Mohammad Umair, a social activist and resident.

But the residents, while blaming the police for not acting on time despite being in close proximity to the Markaz, said that while they were not panicking about the situation, they were still anxious.

SM Umar, the general secretary of Nizamuddin West RWA, said that they have issued circulars their WhatsApp groups, urging people to step out only when urgently required. “Soon after the lockdown, we decided to make our own disinfectant to spray on all houses and corners. The civic agencies do it only on selected days. We have divided ourselves in small groups to carry out the sanitisation work every day,” Umar said.