Migrant tales about perils of bad messaging

The government’s response to the still rampaging Covid-19 pandemic appears to have been seriously handicapped right from the start by wrong messaging on the virus and how to deal with it. Clearly, the concerted bid to overawe people into complying with the hasty and brutal lockdown has proved counterproductive compounding the crisis. This has stigmatised the virus and also frightened people out of their wits triggering an unprecedented exodus of migrant labourers from cities to their rural homes even as uncertainty mounts on the surging infections and fatalities despite the nearly two month long lockdown.

A big miscalculation by the government was to treat the pandemic like a breakdown of law and order that could be quelled with a show of force. The Prime Minister’s initial promise of subduing the virus within three weeks by waging a Mahabharata-like epic battle along with propagating dramatic rituals like utensil clanging, lamp lighting and air force jets showering flower petals suggested a muscular confrontation even though the enemy remained invisible. They made great optics enhancing Modi’s image as the supreme leader. But they also gave the impression that the lockdown was a magic bullet to kill Covid-19 instead of what should have been explained as a limited and specifically targeted containment measure.

This is evident from the manner in which the Home Ministry and the police brandishing the lockdown as a mighty anti-virus brahmastra dominated the public psyche. There was little attempt to prepare people for a long haul. Nor was the community mobilised like in Kerala drawing on battles against previous epidemics and successful public health missions to reduce maternal and infant mortality.

People have lived in India for long with a variety of diseases and epidemics killing many. They may have understood if told without hype the special measures needed against Covid-19 even if it meant public inconvenience and disruption for some time. Unfortunately, the propensity of the current regime and its leader to deliver shock and awe messages prevented such a sensible approach.

The government knew it lacked the overwhelming authority of the Chinese state that allowed the drastic lockdown of Wuhan, the first epicenter of the virus. Nor could the country emulate the stringent self-isolation measures in certain European countries with far less population density. Yet the stringency of the Indian lockdown imposed overnight was touted as a grand success even though it was palpably meaningless in the teeming urban clusters.

The collapse of such flawed messaging has not taken long. Just as suddenly as the Covid-19 bogey was raised, the government has now overnight changed the messaging to how people must learn to live with the virus. The lockdown is being dismantled in fits and starts but there is no realisation of the damage and trauma it has already inflicted. Instead, there is now fresh hubris about how India would emerge from the pandemic as a self-reliant industrial behemoth leading the world.

The biggest blow to the credibility of the government’s messaging has come from the surging number of infections and fatalities just as the near two-month lockdown is being relaxed. Official spokesmen have sought to take credit asserting that the numbers would have spiralled far higher had it not been for the rigorous lockdown. But such claims appear specious as the rate of growth in both infections and fatalities among India’s south Asian neighbours and indeed in many parts of Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe are quite similar if not lower.

Yet regardless of whether people accept the government’s spin on the efficacy of the lockdown there is widespread confusion about the abrupt somersault in Covid messaging. Most people cannot understand how the near hysterical emphasis on staying locked up with virtually everything shut down at a time when there were just a few hundred infections and a handful of fatalities can be suddenly replaced with the far more lackadaisical approach to the virus as it spreads in leaps and bounds on a daily basis. Most interlocutors on behalf of the government shy away from properly explaining the change in tack because it would inevitably mean the admission of the abject failure of its initial messaging.

There is desperate need for the government to revise its communication strategy both to combat the pandemic and restart the crippled economy. To start with, it has to urgently remove the stigma attached to Covid-19 and treat it like yet another disease or epidemic even if with special characteristics. The infamy around the virus has reached ludicrous proportions. For instance, the owner of a major department store in a prominent South Delhi colony market after being hospitalised with the virus was inflicted with such a stream of abusive emails from his erstwhile clients that the residents’ welfare association president of the colony had to appeal for the display of sympathy rather than hostility.

The government also needs to swiftly defuse the continuing panic over the pandemic and uncertainty most evident among migrants to big cities from villages. A coconut vendor in Delhi, after several weeks without livelihood, was not ready to seize the opportunity to go back selling his wares to residential houses after the lockdown was relaxed. He was determined to go back to his Bihar village home because ‘the mahamari will kill everyone and I want to die with my family.’

Ironically, the entire purpose of preventing the migrant workforce from going back from cities and towns to their villages so that the infection did not spread to the countryside has badly boomeranged. Spooked by the government’s Covid bogey, their livelihoods snatched away and brutalised by the corona police, hordes of migrants are rushing home, many of them now carrying the infection which they perhaps did not do so when they were prevented from doing so when the government first raised the alarm and pulled a plug on their occupation.

In many ways, the huge blaze of adverse publicity across the world on the way India has treated its migrant workforce is the most piquant illustration of the perils of bad messaging.