Migrant worker Dayaram Kushwaha carries his five-year-old son as they walk along a road in Delhi during a nationwide lockdown on 26 March. (Danish Siddiqui/REUTERS) In a speech on 25 March 2020, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi referred to the 21 day nation-wide lockdown he had announced a day earlier as a war. When supreme commanders make a declaration of war, they almost always focus exclusively on the enemy; the casualties that the war is inevitably going to produce, however, do not figure in such declarations. This absence does not necessarily mean that those who are vulnerable do not understand what war would entail to them. The prospects of becoming war casualties dawned tragically on tens of millions of migrant workers in many cities across India.When Narendra Modi – the supreme commander of the nation, the sovereign put in place by the citizens through the means of electoral democracy…

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