Most recently, on March 16, the Congress Government had lost its majority in the state of Madhya Pradesh, and the BJP was about to install a government in that state (on March 23rd). These riots coincided, perhaps not coincidentally, with Donald Trump’s visit to India on February 24th–25th. One of these protest sites was threatened by a Hindu nationalist BJP leader and subsequently attacked, leading to communal riots in Delhi starting February 23 that left 53 people dead, of whom more than two-thirds were Muslims. The Act and the groundswell of response had generated recurrent tensions. The Citizenship Amendment Act, which sought to grant citizenship to all refugees of non-Muslim origin from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, had met with sustained protest around the country.
The preceding months and weeks had been far from placid. The Indian government appeared to be located, to put it baldly, between a rock and a hard place. On March 11, the World Health Organization stated that COVID-19 represented a global pandemic. Countries all over the world were entering lockdown. Matters accelerated after that, as the infection moved into community transmission: by mid-March there were over a 100 confirmed cases, and over 1000 by the end of March. It took till March 6th for the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to launch its COVID-19 awareness program. An ominous silence then prevailed for all of February, until March 4 when a further 22 cases came to light. The patient is stable and is being closely monitored.”īy February 3, this had risen to three cases, all students at Wuhan University. The patient has tested positive for novel coronavirus and is in isolation in the hospital. “One positive case of novel coronavirus patient, of a student studying in Wuhan University, has been reported in Kerala. On January 30, 2020, a brief press release issued by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in India read: The lockdown meets all international standards so far the relief package none. It is this conjunction of visibility and invisibility that drives the Indian response.
They will blend into the surrounding landscape they are not news, though the intrepid statistician or economist will pick them up as the months go by. These lost lives, through violence, starvation, indebtedness and extreme stress, both psychological and physiological, are invisible, in the sense that they are-and will continue to be-diffuse in space, time, cause and category. But for India, a developing country with great sectoral and occupational vulnerabilities, this dramatic reduction is more than economics: it means lives lost. In advanced economies, the cost of achieving this reduction in visible deaths is “merely” a dramatic reduction in overall economic activity, coupled with a far-reaching relief package to partly compensate those who bear such losses. Governments everywhere are propelled to respect this visibility, developing countries perhaps even more so than their developed counterparts. While our main themes-ranging from the philosophy of lockdown to the provision of relief measures-transcend the Indian case, our context is deeply India-specific in several senses that we hope will become clear through the article.Ī fundamental theme that recurs throughout our writing is the enormous visibility of COVID-19 deaths worldwide, now that sensitivities and anxieties regarding the pandemic have been honed to an extreme sharpness. Our goal is to provide an interim report on the Indian lockdown provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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