Four years ago, an airborne virus stopped the world in its tracks and changed life as we knew it. We entered the spring of 2020 in the fog of an emerging epidemic — scared, confused and isolated. To protect ourselves, we were told, cultivating hostility was key. People were to be eschewed. Hands were to be washed until they turned coarse, every available surface vigorously sanitised and groceries disinfected. The norms caught up with scientific wisdom, eventually. The virtues of personal responsibility continued to be extolled. Meanwhile, political leaders across the world abdicated their duty in brazen ways. How you experienced the pandemic depended on who you were.
In India, each new phase of the epidemic brought with it new evidence of an impetuous government that did not seem to care for its people. The unabated vilification of Muslims, a hastily-implemented lockdown that imperilled tens of millions of migrant workers, and the deaths of at least 1.5 million people marked the first wave of COVID-19. During this period, the US-based Pew Research Center estimated that the number of people who were poor in India — with incomes of less than $2, not even Rs 200 a day — increased by 75 million.
Within a year, by January 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered a triumphant speech at the World Economic Forum. He counted India “among those countries which have succeeded in saving the lives of the maximum number of its citizens”. Soon after, even as there were multiple warnings of a looming crisis, political parties held massive election rallies in West Bengal. Millions of devotees congregated at the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar. The lexicon of the pandemic had a nifty phrase for gatherings such as these: super-spreaders. When the second wave arrived in April, it seemed almost inevitable. But even then, the lack of preparation was staggering.
The state could have marshalled the considerable scientific knowledge at its disposal and heeded the advice of its own experts. It could have braced for the emergency by bolstering its healthcare system. It could have steered an effective mass vaccination programme. Instead, it played catch-up and left people to fend for themselves.
It was a season of mayhem. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who did not suffer a loss, did not scramble to find oxygen for a loved one or a stranger, did not experience the weight of realising that a patient who needed to be in a hospital would languish without treatment instead. Death was everywhere and there was not enough space to contain it. Parks and rivers morphed into sites for funerals when crematoriums and burial grounds could no longer suffice. Dignity was a luxury for another time.
Comprehending the scale of the tragedy would require an accurate accounting of its toll. But we don’t even know how many people died. According to official estimates, about 4.8 lakh people had died by the end of 2021. Estimates by the World Health Organisation (WHO) suggest that the figure was ten times higher and COVID-19 killed over 47 lakh people between 2020 and 2021, either directly or indirectly. No other country appeared to have missed counting as many deaths. The Indian government rejected the findings of the WHO report.
Modi’s triumphalism has returned. At recent rallies in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, he deployed the pandemic for electoral gains, declaring at one point, that his government “ensured the well-being of all and worked with the spirit of ‘Nation First’.” It is a claim that beggars belief.
The trauma, grief and pain of the pandemic altered the shape of countless lives. Its horrors could be a distant fever dream. But they formed part of a macabre reality, one that demands our careful attention, now, more than ever, as it ebbs into the footnotes of our collective memories.
Three years after the second wave of COVID-19, eight journalists reported from varied regions in the country – Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Maharashtra Bihar, Karnataka and Kerala – to document its after-life. The journalists re-visited villages along the banks of the Ganges, where bodies floated on the river and were tossed onto its shores. They examined the crippling toll of health-care debts on bereaved families as well as survivors; reported on the continuing exploitation of India’s crematorium workers; and shed light on the plight of children who lost their parents to COVID-19.
These stories scrutinise aspects of the pandemic that have been overlooked, laying bare a system that battered its people. They also remind us of that radical act of defiance: the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Read the series here.
Nikita Saxena is an independent journalist.