Sankarshan Thakur, Suhit K. Sen and Ipsita Chakravarty

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What Wasn’t Written

Sankarshan Thakur

A letter has recently been written to the people of India. It is from the prime minister, and it speaks of what he has done these past six years that he has been at the helm. The letter runs into several pages and is more than 1,500 words long, but there remain a few things it hasn’t been able to accommodate or speak of.

It makes no mention, for instance, of achchhe din, the portmanteau feel-good promise that became his pivot to power in 2014. It does not tell you in what garden the pledged golden bird — soney ki chidia — continues to elude our grasp.

It does not tell you that in the years since, India has been turned into an architecture of fractures wantonly and consciously wreaked; and that in the pursuit of fashioning these fractures, Indians have been encouraged to go after other Indians, liberally fed on lies and prejudice, exhorted by dog-whistling from the top and brazenly led to murder and mayhem by gas-lighter commanders possessed of run over the law. Indians have been killed for what they wear, what they eat, what they are called, what books they read, who they pray to. The killers have come to be treated like heroes of spectator sport; they’ve been garlanded and celebrated.

The letter does not tell you of this civilizational mission of excluding and Othering, at once merciless and joyous. It does not tell you a law has formally been passed as boost to its purposes.

It does not tell you that Kashmir, already woefully pellet-gunned, was jackbooted into prison, manacled, muffled, disabled, stripped of all rights and dignity. Just before that happened, elaborate, but covert, machinations had brought down a bolt that sundered India’s crown and reduced, for the first time, a province to two Union territories. It does not tell you that hundreds, including three former chief ministers, were incarcerated sans charge. It does not tell you that the pain of a populace became cause for lavish pleasure elsewhere.

It does not tell you of the disastrous consequences of demonetization, imposed with monarchic whimsy, a whole nation robbed overnight of access to rightful cash and forced to queue up for drip-feeds of financial sustenance. It does not tell you of favoured carpet-baggers who, around the same time, were plotting to decamp with purloined millions. It does not tell you of the woes of millions of farmers who marched long distances to be seen and heard until the soles of their feet gave and they fell and not a hand came to help.

It does not tell you of an economy in a shambles, its ratings downgraded, its minders clueless. It does not tell you the rupee is at its worst ever against the dollar. It does not tell you of projects that have profited a handpicked few and impoverished the many.

It does not tell you of the mindful plunder of institutional integrity and the evaporation of public faith in them — the autonomy of the Election Commission and the banking system, the conduct of investigative and policing agencies, the independence of the courts where appointments have been routinely fiddled and benches fixed to serve the ends of the establishment.

It does not tell you of the power-greedy, vandal politics that has prowled about, toppling and gobbling governments, making and unmaking the most cynical alliances; it is a dagger-driven politics whose tongue quivers with hatred. Its language is purposefully venomous and its actions treacherous. One day they could be sitting conferring with you across the table, the next they could throw you in jail.

It does not tell you that the lines between government and party, loyalty to nation and loyalty to person, have been sought to be cynically obliterated during this time, and a new ultra-aggressive, right-wing monotheism spurred. Democratic dissent has come to be renamed treason. Campuses and students have been violently targeted, labelled and persecuted on manufactured lies. It does not tell you that Dalits have been publicly and proudly whipped, often lynched, often driven to humiliation and suicide.

It does not tell you of the arrival of a dispensation that proactively, though quasi-covertly, promotes the apparatchik and aspiration of the Hindu rashtra, the very antithesis of what we, the people of India that is Bharat, had set out to be. It does not tell you that we now wish to be not a glowing contrast to Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s Pakistan but a humungous, and more menacing, doppelgänger of his idea. It does not tell you that the antithesis of the constitutional idea of India is proceeding apace.

It does not tell you that many of those convicted of sectarian murder have been afforded bail. It does not tell you that many others have been shoved into jail on preposterously antediluvian allegations because the regime deems their honest work and ideas antithetical. It does not tell you that a terror-accused has been eased out of prison and handed a ticket to Parliament. It does not tell you that the deifiers of Nathuram Godse, the murderer of Mahatma Gandhi, roam high and secure places.

It does not tell you that Jawaharlal Nehru, the architect of modern India, the most complex but most stable of post-colonial democracies, has been reviewed by rogues, his legacy lavished with unsavoury and mostly untrue puffery. Nehru, in the lexicon of the ‘Rediscovery of New India’, was born in a brothel and died of syphilis, having spent most of the intervening period playing playboy.

It does not tell you that these last few years have seen the inspired, and paid, eruption of a toxic propaganda machine that specializes in inventing lies and farming out disinformation that is of both Nazi and Soviet grade. This machine is helmed by the likes of Amit Malviya, the chief of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s IT cell, whose daily dabbling in fakery is legion. Such that he often snares senior ministers into endorsing his false claims and embarrasses them into having to publicly revise and recant. But Malviya and his troll cohort have proceeded regardless; unashamed and persuaded, in goblian fashion, that their diabolical litany of lies and falsification will eventually rule public perception. Cut. Paste. Concoct. Manufacture. Repeat the lie. Ridicule the truth. That’s been the credo of the ruling dispensation, fired by innumerable social media engines. For many of which the anthem is ‘Go to Pakistan!’

It does not tell you how small all of that has rendered India’s perception abroad. It does not tell you the poor notice the ruling confederacy routinely earns for its bully mien. It does not tell you how pitifully friendless India has become in its own neighbourhood, and how ineffectual. It does not tell you that hyper-chested ultra-nationalism has not secured the nation’s borders any more than they were; the fabled stare was of dubious effect, it scared nobody off their bellicose intentions along our frontiers. Not the Pakistanis. Not the Chinese. Not the Nepalese.

There are far too many things that letter does not tell you than there is space to accommodate here. It does not, for instance, tell you of the inept and heartless handling of the health and humanitarian crisis which has now risen to our gills. But that story is on the front pages.

(The author is Delhi-based National Affairs Editor of The Telegraph. Article courtesy: The Telegraph.)

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Looks Like India Flattened All the Wrong Curves

Suhit K. Sen

The World Bank has joined a roomful of institutions, and individuals, which have made dire economic predictions for the ongoing financial year. According to it, the global economy will shrink by 5.2%, while India’s GDP will fall by 3.2%.

Obviously, no one in particular is to blame for the emergence and spread of Covid-19 and, similarly, no one disputes that the Indian government would have had to lock down the country at some point for some duration and to some extent. The devil, however, is in the detail. To give away my conclusion at the beginning, the Modi regime botched the exercise so completely that it almost seems maliciously intentional. It probably isn’t, but it certainly is criminally wilful.

Industrialist Rajiv Bajaj’s observation that the government flattened the wrong curve may sound uncharitable, but it isn’t wildly off track.

Let me review the Indian government’s actions against the Covid-19 timeline since the beginning of the year to get a rough sense of the Modi regime’s monumental, and actionable, incompetence. At the very beginning, the regime appeared to have been enveloped in a somnolent haze—as far as the Covid-19 outbreak was concerned. It wasn’t really in a stupor actually, as we shall see, it was just distracted by more pressing concerns.

We can begin with the day the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak, which had started to rapidly spread within China, a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’. That happened on 30 January. Though the Covid-19 outbreak was designated a pandemic by the WHO only on 11 March, on 24 February, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had stressed that the world should focus on containment, “while doing everything [it] can to prepare for a potential pandemic”. In other words, by then the alert had been well sounded.

Around the world, though many things remained unclear, it was abundantly clear that the new virus was making waves. China was being overwhelmed in January. On 23 January, Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province were locked down. Covid-19 had spread outside China, in the region, by early February. On 23 February, South Korea had announced the highest level of alert.

On 28 February, WHO raised the global risk of the spread of Covid-19 from “high” to “very high”. By then there were 4,691 cases of Covid-19—including 67 deaths—outside of China, in 51 countries. India had recorded its first Covid-19 case on 31 January. Though the progress of the disease by late February had been minimal, the situation had become serious enough for many people to be checked and isolated, often in batches. Especially, people arriving from outside the country.

The reason for constructing this timeline is to establish, yet again, that the Covid-19 situation was getting grimmer through February and by the time March arrived no one should have been left with much legroom for complacency. The Modi regime, however, remained exactly that. It seemed to have been jerked out of a deep slumber only in the middle of March when on 19 March it suspended incoming international arrivals with effect from 22 March for a week (later extended). It had closed border check posts from 15 March. Then, on 22 March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi instigated the cringe-worthy farce of the “janata curfew”. Two days later, a lockdown was announced at four hours’ notice. It lasted, in most of its essentials, till 17 May—almost eight weeks—before it began to be relaxed.

The first point to note is that through February and the first half of March, the government seemed to be oblivious. It barely took note of the fact that a global pandemic of obvious virulence had broken out, breached the country’s defences and had begun to spread. There were a number of proximate reasons. The ruling party had been hammered in the Delhi elections, following which its cadres had got busy with the violence in Delhi and creating mayhem, after which, willy-nilly, the Centre had to “contain” that situation. On top of that, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had been busy organising a self-indulgent show big enough to satisfy two super-inflated egos to impress visiting United States President Donald Trump. Barely had the dust settled, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had to devote its energies to unseating the Madhya Pradesh government.

Given these distractions, it’s not surprising that Modi and his regime were too occupied to give the matter of the pandemic much thought, which certainly does explain why the lockdown was imposed without any planning in the kind of grandiloquent style that is Modi’s trademark. There are two principal points to be made here.

First, there was no reason for the imposition of a blanket lockdown of exactly the same severity across a country of continental magnitude. When China was struggling with what was then an epidemic, with no precedent to fall back on, it hadn’t done so, though in the midst of the panic, it would have been understandable. It imposed lockdowns of graded severity in different places. Regions that had not been affected were barely locked down at all. We shall return to this point.

Second, if Modi and his acolytes had just taken a day or two off from their enormously important distractions to do some thinking, for a change, they might just have realised that a lot of people—most importantly migrant labourers—would be stuck in places of work without any work or earnings. It might have further dawned on them that it might have been a half-way decent idea to give these people a fortnight or so to organise return trips back home. That would have saved a lot of people a lot of unnecessary hardship. But since enough has been written on that, we’ll drop it this time.

It might, however, also have occurred to the regime that, given what was happening in many other countries by then, it would be a good idea to let people go back to their homes before the infection started to spread and before the rate of spread of a virus with uncontainable transmissibility picked up pace. In other words, if people who needed to travel had done so before the lockdown was clamped, they would have spread the virus minimally.

Instead, as we know, the geniuses who run the government decided to let the migrant labourers, and others, start returning to their homes only in May (in packed trains), by which time, despite the lockdown, Covid-19 was spreading fast. In the last phase of the lockdown, this meant that people returning to their homes started spreading the virus further and faster, often to areas previously uninfected. By the time the lockdown began to be eased, thus, its purpose had been completely stymied.

Now, with the lockdown all but lifted, we can look forward to a phase of a high-velocity spread of Covid-19, which can hardly be prevented by fresh rounds of lockdowns. It is in this context, that Bajaj’s comment is significant. Modi’s lockdown has indeed flattened the GDP curve, leaving space for the pandemic curve to climb.

Had the regime allowed people to move back to wherever they wanted or needed to be, the infections may not have taken off steeply from the middle of last month. But that’s only a part of it. If the Modi government had tackled the problem in a more federal spirit, it is possible that the GDP curve wouldn’t have been flattened as badly as it has been. In other words, had it started consulting with chief ministers from, say, the beginning of March about a possible lockdown sometime in the course of the month, it might have been possible to start mapping the spread of the disease and putting in place necessary systems from then.

That would have allowed the governments to impose coordinated, graded and staggered measures in accordance with need and applicability. If proper systems had been put in place, these several lockdowns could have been calibrated. The severity of proscriptions could have varied dynamically according to necessity—which includes inter-regional movements of people and commodities.

For this to happen, the Modi regime would have had to work on the federal principle. Decisions should have been taken by the state governments on intra-state questions in consultation with the Centre, while the latter could have had the important role of coordination and deciding on issues that affected more than one state. It could also have monitored the situation.

Unfortunately, this regime fancies itself as being beyond established norms. So it laid down the rules, without regard to situational complexities, and left it to the state governments to get their hands dirty and do the real work—without even giving them federally mandated funds to meet a literally unprecedented public-health crisis. Once in a while, of course, it sent out crack squads, not to assist, but to flex muscles.

In the process, it has achieved its probable objective: creating situations in which it can put political antagonists at a disadvantage. But it’s not the adversarial state governments who have lost the most. Those who have lost the most are the people, common and uncommon, but in the most unnecessarily merciless and destructive way, the poor and those least able to cope.

The recovery will be slow for everyone as the projected GDP figures suggest. Months at least, if not years, certainly not weeks. It is to be hoped that when their time arrives, the poor, whose mandate Modi has so unconscionably betrayed, will remember this and clamp on the BJP the harshest possible of lockdowns.

(The author is a freelance journalist and researcher.)

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No, Mr Home Minister, Migrant Workers Did Not Start Walking Home Because They ‘Lost Patience’

Ipsita Chakravarty

In an interview with CNN-News 18, Home Minister Amit Shah spoke of the impatience of migrant workers. After the Centre declared a nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus, some people “lost patience and started walking”, he said. But the government still swooped in and helped ferry walking migrants home in buses and trains. Shah admitted that some untoward incidents did happen, but that was only for “five or six days”. With this, in a few calm words, Shah exemplified the vast government apathy to the plight of the poor during the lockdown.

Here are a few realities that Shah and the Centre persistently choose to unsee, if not cover up.

First, migrant workers did not walk because they were impatient. They moved because they were out of jobs, they did not have enough to eat and they could not pay rent. Many were daily wage workers who lived on what they earned in a day. According to a survey by the Azim Premji University, 80% of urban workers lost their jobs during the lockdown and 61% of urban households did not have the means to buy even a week’s worth of essentials.

Second, even as hunger rose, government measures to provide food and income support fell miserably short. Upon closer inspection, financial “relief packages” proved to contain little additional government spending over the existing welfare schemes. Meanwhile, as thousands starved, grain rotted in government godowns.

Third, when the government did allow Shramik trains and buses to ferry workers back home, getting a seat was a bureaucratic nightmare. Those who did manage to board trains found themselves in hellish conditions, with little food and water as delays ran into days. Between May 9 and May 27, almost 80 people on special trains died of starvation and heat sickness, according to data from the Railway Protection Force. Many chose to spend their dwindling funds to hire vehicles, instead of waiting for government transport to take them home.

Finally, migrant distress was not a matter of a few days. For five weeks, the government banned all inter-state travel and did little to help migrants who wanted to go home. Many faced police beatings as they tried to walk it. In at least one case, migrant workers were stranded at the state border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. Many migrants did not leave right away. Some stayed behind, trusting the government, only to starve. Others bided their time till May. With the lockdown extended and their savings running out, they decided to leave for home. Well into May, there were migrants walking home.

Despite the extraordinary privations migrant workers have had to endure over the past two and a half months, there have been few protests. By and large, they accepted the logic of a lockdown that even epidemiologists consider “draconian” and “incoherent”. They quietly paid the price for a virus control measure that never took them into account. Contrary to Shah’s assessment, millions of migrant workers have shown remarkable patience with the government.

(Ipsita Chakravarty is a Scroll.in staffer.)