The Dark Hour - India Under Lockdowns

By Amir Peerzada, Anoo Bhuyan, Kalpish Ratna and 6 more

Born and brought up in Kashmir, Aamir Peerzada is a BBC Journalist based in Srinagar. He has previously worked with NDTV as a reporter and producer, where he went on to produce several award-winning documentary films.

Anoo Bhuyan is a multi-media journalist from Bengaluru, living in New Delhi. She closely covered the COVID19 pandemic in India. She has worked at The Wire; Outlook Magazine; IndiaSpend, The BBC and NPR, and comments on public policy at a number of Indian and foreign publications.

Surgeons Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed write together as Kalpish Ratna. Their book A Crown of Thorns—The Coronavirus & Us was published in August 2020. Their forthcoming book is titled A Pandemonium in Pakshila.

MG Radhakrishnan has four decades of experience in journalism. He is currently the Editor of Asianet News channel, based in Thiruvananthapuram. He has earlier worked with India Today and Mathrubhumi and has authored four books.

Namita Bhandare is a journalist with close to 30 years of experience with publications such as India Today, Sunday and Hindustan Times. In 2013, she was appointed India’s first gender editor for Mint. She is on the editorial board of the news website, Article-14. She writes almost exclusively on gender issues, including a regular column for the Hindustan Times. She lives in New Delhi.

Pooja Dhingra is the founder of the Le15 chain of patisseries and café. She is an INK Fellow, and hosts an extremely popular podcast called #NoSugarCoat. She has authored three books - The Big Book of Treats; The Wholesome Kitchen; Can’t Believe It’s Eggless. She lives and works in Mumbai.

Omkar Goswami is an economist, who has taught in India and abroad for 18 years. He was at Business India earlier, and was the chief economist of the Confederation of Indian Industry. He is also the founder of CERG Advisory, a consulting firm and author of three books, and over 70 refereed articles. He loves reading, music, films and escaping to the mountains when he can.

Saba Naqvi is a Delhi based journalist and the author of four books, mostly recently Politics of Jugaad and Shades of Saffron: From Vajpayee To Modi. The former political editor of Outlook magazine, Naqvi is now a columnist and a familiar face on television as an election analyst and commentator.

Soutik Biswas is the India Correspondent, and Features of Analysis Editor of BBC News Online. He is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Reuters Fellow at the University of Oxford.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9788195256679

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Contents

Editor’s Note by Chirag Thakkar

1. Casting a Long Shadow: How Covid Impacted Gender in India

Namita Bhandare

2. A Health Reporter in a Pandemic

Anoo Bhuyan

3. The Doctor Who Saw 23,000 Covid-19 Patients

Soutik Biswas

4. Besieged Hope

Aamir Peerzada

5. Coming Home: Finding Myself in the Midst of a Crisis

Pooja Dhingra

6. In the Mirror, the Beast: Lockdown Tales

Saba Naqvi

7. Getting Out? Or Trapped Yet Again? Covid and India’s Economy

Omkar Goswami

8. Kerala: The Unique Pendulum

M.G. Radhakrishnan

9. ImmStim, Anyone?

Kalpish Ratna

Notes on Contributors

Editor’s Note

CHIRAG THAKKAR

Over a year and a half of the pandemic and still going, only a lot more nightmarish, deadly and devastating; of uncertainty and despair; moments of hope and the illusion of the return of normalcy; 70 days of lockdown in 2020 – one of the harshest and longest in the world, and then some in 2021 in various shapes, duration, and size; the largest migration of people on foot since the bloody partition of India and Pakistan; over four lakh dead to the deadly virus, at least ‘officially’ recorded and still counting; the underreporting of cases and deaths, now, an open secret;¹ a broken healthcare system and a seemingly absent state. These are just some of the ways to describe over a year of the Covid-19 pandemic that wreaked havoc on this planet’s peoples.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to the people several times since the virus spread throughout the world, usually at 8.00 p.m., and everyone paid attention, or those with radio devices, smart phones and television sets. Over time, these addresses were seen ‘without any real value,’ only gathering irk, humour and rage² on social media.³ At a mere four hours’ notice, the nation was sent into a lockdown, we were told, to curtail the spread of the virus and help the health infrastructure in order to cope for what was to come. A year on, the one question everyone’s asking is How did the Indian state fail so terribly at preparing for the second wave?⁴

At the beginning of the year 2021, there were signs that things were improving; a promising spring was around the corner. Two Indian pharmaceutical companies had made headway in vaccine research and manufacturing, cases were at an all-time low and the first two phases of vaccinations were in full swing. Only everything came crumbling down. In January 2021, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Prime Minister Modi took digs at the world for warning India in early 2020 that it will be the world’s worst covid-affected nation with an alarmingly high number of deaths. He gloated, prematurely, of India’s supposed victory in conquering the covid battle.⁵ He then went on to boast about how India is leading the world in vaccine security by selling vaccines and medicines to 150 countries in need. Alas, India ran of vaccines and medical care for its own people soon after.⁶

The Union Health Ministry outraged people on more than an occasion. As early as March 2020, it said that ‘Covid-19 is not a health emergency.’⁷ The head of planning in India in late 2020 said that India had way ‘too much democracy’ for reforms.⁸ With the second wave, as the nation struggled to breathe, literally, owing to the severe oxygen crisis with millions infected and denied access to emergency healthcare, the health ministry gaslit federal states saying that they were asking for too much oxygen and that the said ‘demand should be kept under control⁹ and that states shouldn’t behave like ‘crybabies’.¹⁰ It took various Delhi-based hospitals to take the Centre to court demanding that the latter fulfill its role in supplying oxygen as an extension of the Constitutional Right to Life. The Supreme Court took matters in their hands; many saw this as too little, too late.¹¹

The Centre appeared to want to take credit for vaccination drives – the Prime Minister’s photo prominently displayed on vaccine certificate, but when the cases went up, the Centre conveniently blamed the states. People, too, were blamed for being irresponsible and the cause behind the widespread cases. The Central government, headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), never did once acknowledge that it errored in publicly supporting and greenlighting super-spreader religious events like the Kumbh Mela that were attended by millions of Indians and conducting political rallies in states of West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Assam right through a devastating second wave of the pandemic, believed to be caused by the mutated Delta variant of the virus.¹²

Even as the dead were being mass buried and cremated round-the-clock,¹³ India’s then Health Minister who was also the Minister of Science was recorded celebrating the fact that India’s death rates were lower than many countries in the world, even if the cases continued to rise. As early as March 2021, he declared that India was in the endgame of the pandemic. He also officially launched a dubious, herbal drug Coronil that falsely claimed it could cure covid¹⁴ – discredited by the WHO – alongside one of India’s leading Hindu, right-wing entrepreneur-yoga guru, Baba Ramdev. A few weeks ago, the ministry greenlit a research project investigating the benefits of cow urine and cow dung in – believe it or not – curing cancer and diabetes.¹⁵

Over two summers, India woke up to the same cycles of news: people falling sick in hordes, a shortage of beds, medicines, emergency wards, ambulances, testing kits, information, systems, and oxygen. Many died on roads after unsuccessfully looking for somewhere to get themselves and their loved ones treated for hours, days on end. Countless people went out of work, schools, homes, land, assets. Morgues, crematoriums, burial grounds ran of space, and streets, parks, terraces became sites of burial and cremation. Abandoned bodies floated on the Ganges and Yamuna. Businesses shut down; India’s poor got poorer. Depending on what class, caste, gender, and location you belonged to, you experienced the same great leveller, albeit differently.

During the first wave, one class of people was left to invent ways to keep busy such as making banana breads or Dalgona coffee, another was being run over by speeding trains in the scorching summer of the first lockdown.¹⁶ The virus did not see colour or identity. The second wave of the pandemic ruptured through this class divide and veil where the rich, middle-income and the working classes, alike, could not find a bed when they needed one. The uber rich, if they had the chance to, were able to fly out of the country in private jets just in time before the second round of localized lockdowns and travel bans on Indians flying into various parts of the world.

At the beginning, lockdown was an unfamiliar experience. Nobody really knew what was in store for them. Week after week, new tasks were given to people such as clapping, lighting lamps and banging pots and pans from balconies to amuse themselves for having survived a part or a dress rehearsal of a curfew coming. It truly was the unbearable orchestra of the balconied. On India’s streets played out a very different tune – millions and millions of people walking on foot back to their villages, turned homeless, jobless, hungry and destitute overnight. A people forgotten by their own.

Several reports claimed some returning migrants without access to extra rooms quarantined atop trees for the safety of their loved ones in the villages. People cycled, hitched rides, hired trucks, autos, vehicles, and walked for miles only to get back to the safety of their homes. Late in the year, when the monsoon sessions of the Parliament convened, the minister of state for Labour and Employment stated that the government had neither idea nor data about the number informal labour workforce died during this great reverse migration. The minister went further to say that there was ‘no question’ of compensation.¹⁷ On the other hand, state governments with non-BJP parties in power such as Maharashtra and Kerala started education and trust fund schemes to support children orphaned in the second wave. The largely invisible, unprotected and underpaid population of the country had no one to speak for them. As months progressed and hunger struck again, many found their way back to cities for wages and work. With the second wave hitting, and micro, localized lockdowns announced in several states, the same cycle repeated itself and we were back to square one. India never did step out of the S0S mode and it’s been two long summers of panicked, precarious living.

It isn’t that a developing or a middle-income nation like India does not have the money for healthcare. It isn’t our poverty as much as it is the poverty of the country’s elected leaders’ political will, the poverty of imagination and the apathy of successive governments to prioritize healthcare. There is money to spend on a grand spectacle for the Namaste Trump event hosted by India to hour Trump’s visit.¹⁸ There is money – billions of dollars – that is being allocated from the exchequer for a new residence of the prime minister and vice-president along with a new Central Vista to house a brand new Indian Parliament and other buildings of the government, deemed ‘essential work,’ even through the second wave, by India’s courts.¹⁹ Only early this year, Prime Minister Modi became one of the few handful people on the planet after Saddam Hussein and Kim Il-Sung to have commissioned a sports stadium named after him while he is living and serving office.²⁰

When we commissioned the writers in this volume sometime in the middle of 2020, the idea was to tell a plurality of stories of how the national and localized lockdowns and the pandemic affected different Indias. Even years later, when we look back at this experience, we hope this book offers us a source, a document to remember what we bore witness to. Despite our best efforts, we were not able to represent all and every kind of voice in the collection, but we hope you find those voices and stories in the diverse media you access and consume. Each writer in this collection brings with them their unique perspective informed by their location, how they see the pandemic, how it affected them and their worlds.

Anoo Bhuyan recounts what it means to be a health reporter in a pandemic in an evocative first-person account of keeping tabs on press releases, mining through countless reports and opaque government data. Soutik Biswas painstakingly tails a doctor for over a year in Indore in Madhya Pradhesh, recounting the horrors of being a frontline worker and treating covid patients, while bearing witness to the sheer volume of loss of lives and then getting infected himself with covid. Namita Bhandare’s essay looks at how the lockdowns and the pandemic disproportionately affected women folx, children, the informal working classes and members of the LGBTQ community. M.G. Radhakrishnan details the pendulum movement of Kerala’s success and failure in containing the pandemic.

Pooja Dhingra writes of, in first person, her experience of being an entrepreneur whose café business was hit severely by successive lockdowns and what the future holds for her career. Saba Naqvi details how the pandemic came as a disastrous bolt to India’s Muslims who were central to a rising social movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC) right before the first lockdown was imposed. She recounts how the immediate aftermath of the Delhi riots and the subsequent pandemic of 2020 led to a large number of Muslims from northeast Delhi losing their lives, livelihoods, homes, assets and dignity. Surgeons Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed co-write under the pseudonym Kalpish Ratna making a move against the discourse of Covid-19 so heavily centred on the vaccine and the virus, arguing instead for a need to refocus on the key arena and combatant – the human body itself, of which, still, so little is known. Omkar Goswami meticulously unpacks the data against the effectiveness of the first lockdown, and human and economic impact of the successive lockdowns in India. Aamir Peerzada writes from the ground of Kashmir’s experience of the pandemic, of being in a lockdown within a lockdown following the abrogation of Article 370 that revoked Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status.

Notes

1. Hannah Ellis-Petersen, The Guardian , ‘We’re burning Pyres all Day’, 1 May 2021; last accessed 28 June 2021 theguardian.com/world/2021/may/01/were-burning-pyres-all-day-india-accused-of-undercounting-deaths

2. Lauren Frayer, National Public Radio , ‘This Government Has Failed Us’: Anger Rises In India Over PM Modi’s COVID Response’, 11 May 2021; last accessed 28 June 2021 https://www.npr.org/2021/05/11/995446333/this-government-has-failed-us-anger-rises-in-india-over-pm-modis-covid-response

3. Wire Staff, The Wire , ‘When You Say Nothing At All’: Social Media Reacts to PM Modi’s Latest Speech’, 21 April 2021; last accessed 28 June 2021. https://thewire.in/government/narendra-modi-covid-speech-social-media-reactions-twitter-instagram

4. Mashal Mujib and Hari Kumar, The New York Times , ‘Complacency and Missteps Deepen a Covid-19 Crisis in India’, 25 May 2021; last accessed 28 June 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/world/asia/india-covid-vaccine-variant.html

5. Quint , ‘In January, PM Modi Had Expressed India’s Victory Over COVID-19’, 23 April 2021; last accessed 28 June 2021 https://www.thequint.com/news/india/in-january-pm-modi-had-expressed-indias-victory-over-covid-19

6. Samanth Subramanian, Quartz , ‘Why is India, the world’s largest vaccine producer, running short of vaccines’, 6 May 2021; last accessed 28 June 2021. https://qz.com/2004650/why-does-india-have-a-covid-19-vaccine-shortage/

7. Press Trust of India in The Hindu, ‘COVID-19 is not health emergency, no need to panic: Health Ministry’, 13 March 2020; last accessed 28 June 2021 https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/coronavirus-outbreak-union-health-ministry-press-conference-in-new-delhi/article31061163.ece

8. The Indian Express , ‘We are too much of a democracy…’, 9 December 2020; last accessed 28 June 2021 https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-needs-more-reforms-states-must-take-lead-niti-aayog-ceo-7096894/

9. Janhavee Moole, BBC India , ‘A nightmare on repeat – India is running out of oxygen again’, 23 April 2021; last accessed 28 June 2021 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-56841381

10. Srishti Jaswal, Article 14 ; ‘In Court: Tushar Mehta Jibes, Blocks. Outside: No Oxygen & Death’, 28 April 2021; last accessed 28 June 2021 https://www.article-14.com/post/in-court-tushar-mehta-jibes-blocks-outside-no-oxygen-death

11. Janhavi Sen, The Wire, ‘ Nine Things BJP Leaders Said Recently About the Pandemic – But Shouldn’t Have’, 19 April 2021; last accessed 28 June 2021

12. Ramanan Laxminarayan, The New York Times , ‘India’s Second Covid Wave Is Completely Out of Control’, 20 April 2021; last accessed 28 June 2021

13. Sunil Kashyap, The Caravan, ‘ Poverty, panic and panchayat polls led to mass burial of bodies along UP riverbanks’, 30 May 2021; last accessed 28 June 2021 https://caravanmagazine.in/health/uttar-pradesh-ganga-river-bodies-buried-floating-covid

14. Scroll.in , ‘The catastrophic cost of junk science, bogus information and the Hindutva inferiority complex’, 1 May 2021; last accessed 28 June 2021 https://scroll.in/article/993255/the-catastrophic-cost-of-junk-science-bogus-information-and-the-hindutva-inferiority-complex

15. Mohana Basu, The Print , ‘Harsh Vardhan wants ‘significant’ progress on cow science front before PM speech on 75th I-Day’, 13 April 2021; last accessed 28 June 2021 https://theprint.in/india/harsh-vardhan-wants-significant-progress-on-cow-science-front-before-pm-speech-on-75th-i-day/639274/

16. Press Trust of India in The Indian Express, ‘ Over 8,700 people died on tracks in 2020 lockdown – many of them were migrants’, 2 June 2021; last accessed 28 June 2021 https://indianexpress.com/article/india/over-8700-people-died-on-tracks-in-2020-lockdown-many-of-them-were-migrants-7341473/

17. Outlook , ‘Govt: No Data Available On Migrant Deaths During Lockdown, So No Compensation’, 15 September 2020; last accessed 28 June 2021 https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/india-news-govt-no-data-on-migrant-deaths-during-lockdown-so-no-compensation/360342

18. GQ India , ‘India has spent Rs 130 crore on these 10 things as preparation for President Donald Trump’s visit’, 19 February 2020;