A world gone viral ...... During the pandemic, neither panic nor illusory hope is useful

Labourers rest inside mosquito nets at a footpath during ongoing nationwide Covid-19 lockdown, in Kolkata, Thursday, April 23, 2020. PTI

Samantak Das, TT, 24.04.20: Nearly a month into our nationwide lockdown, no one seems to have any but the vaguest idea of where the Covid-19 pandemic is headed in India. Basic baseline data are either missing, or disputed, or widely perceived to be fudged. Where West Bengal is concerned, doctors and nurses, who are most directly engaged in the battle against the virus, have written to the highest authorities of the state expressing their dissatisfaction with the absence of clarity in noting and reporting the number of confirmed cases in the state, and the perceived lack of personal protective equipment for those who need them the most. Predictably, and tragically, such statements have become grist for political mills, with Opposition leaders blaming the state’s government and its chief minister for a host of ills, from deliberately misleading people for narrow electoral gains to the oft-repeated charge of “minority appeasement”.

Elsewhere in the country, the Central government’s staggering folly in choosing to go ahead with a Rs 20,000 crore plan to redesign New Delhi’s Central Vista has come in for widespread condemnation, while the artfully named PM-Cares (Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations) Fund, which seems to have no oversight built into its structure, and which replicates the already-existing Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund, is drawing flak for what it lacks by way of transparency and accountability. Even as institutions from Central universities to banks to corporate houses seem to be falling over each other to contribute to PM-Cares, ordinary government servants are expressing their resentment at what they see as arm-twisting tactics to extract a day’s salary from their pay cheques from now up to March 2021. In other words, the usual mix of opportunism, callousness and contempt for the ordinary person on the street — and in the village and in the slum — that has been the defining feature of our political leadership from since I can recall.

Such contempt is perhaps most vividly and chillingly displayed in the ways in which the unplanned lockdown has already begun to take its toll: migrant workers are dying on our nation’s highways, while the crops they would have helped harvest have begun to rot in the fields. With every passing day, India’s poor are falling deeper into immiseration, and it is anybody’s guess when the 300 to 350 million Indians who live below the poverty line will be able to regain a semblance of dignity. It seems only a matter of time before Covid-19-led farmer suicides start appearing in our newspapers and on our television screens.

Even the privileged, and enormously lucky, minority (among whom I should count myself, and, I suspect, you too, dear reader), housebound in relative comfort in their urban dwellings, are beginning to show the strain. Granted, there are heart-warming stories of strangers reaching out to each other in their time of distress; of voluntary organizations providing relief to those who need it the most; of students and neighbourhood clubs collecting provisions and medical supplies for those who cannot afford them; of universities making sanitizers and distributing them for free; the list can be considerably extended and provides genuine cause for cheer in these gloomy times. But, increasingly, the fractures and fissures in our civil society are widening and beginning to threaten the stability of our social existence. Consider the following snapshots. A nurse with two small children evicted from the house she had been renting for seven years. An empty building earmarked for doctors and nurses not being allowed to be so used by local residents, fearful of falling victim to Covid-19, with the government quietly acceding to the local people’s wishes. A young woman, a victim of domestic abuse, not finding paying guest accommodation, in spite of searching desperately for days, and being refused entry into a hostel by the hostel’s boarders for fear of contracting the dreaded disease. In every instance, the refusal to allow a human being entry into a space perceived as belonging to ‘them’ by others is not only shocking, but also a sad commentary on how our much-boasted-about sense of ‘Indian hospitality’ crumbles when faced with the merest whiff of a threat. What makes such actions even more reprehensible is the fact that in none of the instances was a Covid-19 positive case. To make matters even worse, those who were most vociferous in their opposition to the presence of such ‘outsiders’ in their midst were allegedly educated and, indeed, self-declared progressive individuals, supposedly well versed in the nature and character of the novel coronavirus.

Basic epidemiological studies tell us that 60 to 70 per cent of all the inhabitants of a place (however one defines place — whether as a neighbourhood, or a state, or a continent, does not really matter) have to be infected before we can begin to talk of immunity from a viral disease for the population of that place as a whole. Immunity can happen when one gets naturally infected and recovers, which will happen in 97-99 per cent of Covid-19 cases, or is immunized against the infection with a vaccine. Since a vaccine is unlikely to be available before a year to 18 months, as individuals living in the midst of a pandemic, we have basically got to wait to be infected, and then recover. Neither panic nor illusory hope is of any use. But panic seems to be gaining the upper hand, primarily because our leaders are not being straightforward in sharing with us data and other vital information, including the steps being taken for treatment and socio-economic support for those affected by the virus. In the few places where this is happening, such as in Kerala, or in Germany, where the government is taking the general populace into confidence, there are already indications that the outbreak is gradually coming under control.

So, as some commentators are asserting, has the lockdown been of benefit, in spite of the huge cost in terms of the economy, not to speak of human suffering? This is a question that offers no easy answer. While, on the one hand, the doubling rate of confirmed Covid-19 cases in India has risen from four days, at the beginning of the lockdown, to eight days, at the time of writing this, on the other hand, it is still half the doubling rate for the world as a whole, which is now sixteen days. That is to say, just as was the case on March 25, our numbers are still rising twice as fast as the rest of the world taken together. More importantly, we do not seem to have ‘flattened the curve’ to any significant degree — yet. Irrespective of when that happens — and happen it will, sooner or later — we, as a nation, and as a society, not to speak of each one us individually, will still have a long way to go before we can even begin to think of returning to something resembling ‘normal life’. What that new normal may be like — whether we regain a degree of social cohesion and solidarity or sink into the chaos of divisiveness and strife — will depend upon just how we respond to the pandemic, not at some post-lockdown date, but here and now, today.

The author is professor of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, and has been working as a volunteer for a rural development NGO for the last 30 years.