In India, lives inextricably linked to livelihoods

Imagine a bat out of hell flying into our living room and to get rid of it, we break down most of our house while we hide in the bedroom. As we emerge step by step out of the world’s harshest lockdown, we will see the shattered remains of Indian lives, and the smouldering fires of our economy. And we will also have many uncounted corpses across the country, not dead from Covid-19, but from hunger, exhaustion, malnourishment and other illnesses that we stopped treating during the panic over the coronavirus.

So what are we doing now, faced with the scorched earth and dashed hopes?

First, we are using the Railways to transport people back to their villages. Why we did not do so at the very beginning is a mystery. Instead of four hours’ notice for the lockdown, we could have given four days for the people to return home. We did not achieve social distancing in forcing migrants to crowd transport hubs, closed factories and relief camps. We might even have saved many lives by offering people the option of normal transport; perhaps even Jeeta Madkami, a 12-year-old girl who died an hour away from her village after walking for three days, from Telangana to her home in Chhattisgarh, may have lived.

Could we not have closed international airports by early March and saved our people this hardship, just let them go via rail and screened them on arrival? In the UK, that is more badly hit than India, public transport is reduced, not stopped. Even as Prime Minister Boris Johnson landed in hospital, the London tube continued to work with limited stops.

Next, we have divided the country into orange, green and red zones, in what appearsto be an Orwellian fantasy as described in 1984, where the Big Brother sets rules and demarcations and the people have to obey. Ah yes, there is also in that dystopian novel a process called the Two Minute Hate, when each day, the state and the people are encouraged to openly express hatred for politically expedient enemies. The process is designed to be a ventilation exercise and divert discontent against the omnipresent party.

But to jump back to India 2020, the bureaucracy is now tasked with the extra work of ensuring that movement between zones is restricted while the police will presumably be stationed at more borders besides liquor shops, railway stations and many other places where the migrants are getting restive.

The icing on the cake being offered to citizens brought to their knees is a surveillance app called Aarogya Setu. A state that has historically failed to provide any health guarantees for its citizens now wants to track their movements on the grounds of looking out for their health.

Even if we were to believe that the intention is benign, the government may know that most Indians do not have smartphones just as they did not have permanent homes with balconies in the city. A man in Gurugram actually sold his phone for Rs 2,500, gave the money to his wife to feed the children and then committed suicide during the lockdown.

Let’s presume the government went for the lockdown because it was spooked at what was happening in China and the western nations. But let’s also note that bailout packages and relief measures offered in India are miserly compared to what has come in the UK and the US, to name just two countries. We are clearly not the US, Italy, Spain, the UK or even China, where the death toll from the coronavirus is higher, but in none of these countries do so many people survive on a subsistence level, making the descent to starvation levels very rapid.

Now that data is suggesting that the death rate from the coronavirus is not that high in India and even in countries badly hit, the mortality rate may not be what was earlier estimated, why did we do what we did so abruptly at 8 pm on March 24? By May 5, India had around 50,000 cases and a death toll of about 1,700. There are many charts, data and expert opinion being solemnly presented before us that suggest that the virus, being highly contagious, has already reportedly spread in parts, but many of us are apparently asymptomatic.

Others suggest we may have an inbuilt immunity, while the third shade of opinion warning of millions dead has now been scaled down.

From the government side, meanwhile, there are repeated claims that ‘community spread’ has been slowed down, as if to find a good reason to have had a lockdown, now in its third extension. Even if that were true — and we can’t be certain as our testing levels are low — we were from the very beginning holding an umbrella and pretending we are controlling the monsoon. Even the Delhi Chief Minister has now said that we have to learn to live with the coronavirus.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post reports that a team of researchers used models to say that Israel could have controlled the coronavirus outbreak without a lockdown. The

24-page report argues that if lockdowns are being implemented to buy time till a vaccine is found, then they potentially protect people, but adds that ‘such an approach will lead to economic mayhem with many people dying from the consequences of economic and financial destruction.’

Besides, if Sweden succeeds in getting through the coronavirus epidemic without a lockdown, as it has attempted, then there’s all the more reason for us to realise we made a mistake and now need to get out of coma, unless the patient has died. So far, the virus seems to be following the same trajectory in Sweden as in other European nations with a large elderly population.

Remember that cute little question that TV anchors posited before their audiences when this horror show began: will it be livelihoods or lives? The simple answer is — in India, lives are linked to livelihoods. As no state will be willing to admit to starvation deaths, it would actually be a great journalistic project for the reporters to fan out to graveyards and crematoriums and collect data of the dead this year to get an idea of the mortality rate during the Indian lockdown.