https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/08/india-leaders-coronavirus-lockdown
Miramar beach sprawls desolate outside my home in Panjim, the capital of Goa. April is domestic tourist season in India’s smallest state, usually characterized by crowds. I’m accustomed to winding through masses of people at sunset. But now there’s almost no one. I find myself feeling like Charleston Heston at the end of the original The Planet of The Apes: “You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” That sentiment persists in the privations caused by the world’s strictest lockdown. At 8pm on March 24, prime minister Narendra Modi announced India would shut down in four hours. Even as he spoke, chaos exploded across the country. Panicked mobs besieged the shops. Then, as buses and trains were summarily cancelled, millions of migrant workers took to their feet, streaming towards home in scenes that uncannily recall the Partition photographs of Margaret Bourke-White. In Goa, things started badly. We’d already been in curfew for three days when the PM spoke. The administration reassured citizens – by most measures the most affluent and best educated in India – supplies would never be disrupted. Everything shut down nonetheless. The hashtag #GoaStarving proliferated on social media, as civil society scrambled to stave off disaster. Only then did instructions come from New Delhi to reopen grocery stores. Just across the river from me in the picturesque hamlet of Penha de França, the Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Vikram Patel was caught up in the melee. He told me, “As a person who was lathi-charged while queuing for food, I have first-hand experience of the state’s response. The constantly changing announcements on social restrictions, the abandonment of government responsibility to secure supply chains, the threatening of desperate people with military-style responses, and the crushing of small businesses which define rural life in Goa, speaks volumes not only of a fundamental loss of compassion and trust, but also – considering the population of 1.4 million has only 7 reported cases - a complete absence of science or logic.” Patel pointed out, “what is happening in Goa is a microcosm of the events in the country, where the deaths of 1000 people every day due to respiratory tract infections, mostly afflicting the poor, have failed to raise an eyebrow for decades, while this new virus, which has killed barely seventy-five people in two months, led to the most dramatic curtailment of people’s lives and livelihoods since 1947, implemented with little advance notice or planning across a continental country. We have clearly fallen prey to panic about the devastation the virus has wrought in some foreign countries, and this suggests that those advising our government have omitted the first lesson of public health, which is that context matters.” The singular circumstances Patel refers to loom increasingly daunting in India, with no obvious solutions in sight. The livelihoods of the 85% of workers who comprise the informal economy are catastrophically disrupted. They may never be restored in the global recession the IMF has already called “a crisis like no other…way worse than the financial crisis of 2008-2009.” Already, there are clear warnings of food riots. With regard to the actual virus emergency, the evidence is discouraging. By some measures, over 60% of Indians live in urban settlements, including four of the 20 most densely populated, and 21 of the 30 most polluted cities in the world. None of these are conducive to WHO guidelines about social distancing and meticulous personal hygiene. Further, an estimated 1 billion people lack reliable year-round access to clean water. How will they rigorously wash their hands several times every day? There are some bright spots. The west coast states of Kerala and Maharashtra (together home to 150 million people) are managing the crisis markedly well, with clear communication and empathetic leadership. Meanwhile, despite the lack of clarity due to the lowest testing rates in the world, there appears to be an anomaly in the speed and severity of COVID-19 infection in India, prompting theories varying from the prevalence of BCG vaccination and the pre-existing ubiquity of coronaviruses, to tropical climactic conditions. But even if Covid-19 mercifully spares India the kind of havoc it has wrought in Italy, the unsustainability of the country’s post-liberalization economy now stands conspicuously exposed. Its main engine - the vaunted “demographic dividend” of millions of instantly replaceable young workers - has decamped, virtually en masse. When travel restrictions are lifted, even more will leave. Economic history tells us wages shot up after the ruinous Black Death plagues in medieval Europe, when employers became desperate. Something similar could happen here now. Over the telephone from New Delhi, social activist Harsh Mander told me, “Look at the footage of the exodus. Everyone is under 35, strong-bodied, wearing jeans. Our new economy was built on these people. Now they have been completely thrown under the bus. Why would anyone obediently watch their children starve for some abstract notion about keeping an invisible disease at bay? You have made them completely lose faith in the word of their government. The entire imagination of this lockdown is to keep 300 or 400 million people in the middle class safe, on the back of intense suffering unleashed on the rest of the population.” Mander gave me chills when he drew comparisons to the 1943 Bengal Famine, which cost between two and three million lives during the last decade of colonial rule in India. As famously analyzed by Amartya Sen, that agonizing episode was caused by systematic policy failures rather than any food shortages, and exacerbated by Churchill’s cynical decision to hold back available supplies. “This is also a huge man-made crisis,” Mander told me with great regret, “It is true that Indians have been innured to levels of inequality that we should have ended a long time ago. But here is the absolutely stark breakdown of solidarity, amid the misguided notion that the middle class can protect itself by abandoning 70% of our own people. We could have avoided this violence, the complete annihilation of poor people, if we had just worked together to think of how to approach the problem. But no conversation was possible.” I was still mulling this over at 9pm on Sunday, which is the time the prime minister urged the nation to switch off lights, and burn candles to demonstrate solidarity in the fight against the coronavirus. Within minutes, my Twitter feed spilled over with images and videos of the exercise gone awry. In one that showed up repeatedly, I watched as an enthusiastic young man inadvertently set his own hair on fire. The leaping flames were only extinguished after a brutal pummeling by his friends. Those scars will never leave him. It struck me as an acutely appropriate metaphor. (NOTE: an edited + slightly abridged version of this original text is in the Guardian link.)