“Epidemics resemble great warnings from which a statesman in the grand style can read that a disturbance has taken place in the development of his people.” Rudolf Virchow, recognised as the father of epidemiology, made this observation in the mid-19th century. The developments of the last two months indicate how astoundingly relevant this observation is to the present day.
So how has India, and the Indian media specifically, responded to this “great warning”. Today, when the COVID-19 story jams the airwaves and all that newspapers have is news on the virus, it is difficult to imagine that it took us over two months to pay it the attention it demanded.
When it first appeared in news space around the third week of January, after China confirmed the human-to-human spread of the novel coronavirus, it remained something of a curiosity. Indian air authorities began screening travellers from China around mid-January onward, but that was still very much an “airports” story. As the tentacles of the disease spread across China, the Indian media, by and large, considered it very much a China problem. There was both smugness and complacency that marked the early coverage, with an added tinge of racism. It seemed at that point that the coronavirus would remain confined to China’s borders and wouldn’t dare venture across to the land of its “vegetarian” neighbour. The hashtag, ‘NoMeat_NoCoronaVirus’, actually trended on Twitter on the morning of February 2 (see The Wire story of February 2, ‘No Meat, No Coronavirus’ Makes No Sense‘), early evidence of the misinformation that would soon proliferate like the virus itself. The lockdown of Wuhan was considered in some media coverage as a sign of totalitarian excess, while others berated the Chinese leadership for acting too late and with secrecy, putting the world at risk. But these were academic questions largely speaking.
Look at the number of “great warnings” that actually came our way. By January 30, India was reporting its first case, but the alarm this should have caused was largely absent. The Ministry of AYUSH responded by suggesting ayurvedic, homoeopathic and unani treatments, without citing any research findings to back up its gratuitous advice. This was the first of many loose suggestions that circulated freely in the social media space yet raised no red flags in mainstream media coverage. Amitabh Bachchan may have emerged the official ambassador of the most bizarre remedies purporting to beat the virus, but let’s not forget that the ‘cow urine-is-a-cure‘ phase that the country passed through. Perhaps because it was sponsored by members of the ruling party and its affiliates, it occasioned no conspicuous media outrage as it should have. It was Mamata Banerjee’s police that displayed the spine to make the first arrest of an organiser of a cow urine consumption event, but this didn’t happen until the third week of March, after the country had recorded a steadily rising graph of COVID-19 cases, some of them resulting in death. If any evidence is needed on the danger of spurious remedies, one just has to look at Iran, where AP has just reported that nearly 300 people have been killed and more than a 1,000 rendered seriously sick for consuming methanol after social media reports claimed that it cured those suffering from the disease.
BJP member Narayan Chatterjee at the cow urine drinking event. Photo: Video screengrab
There was also a fair degree of congratulatory coverage over Kerala’s legendary healthcare. As three patients who were among the first to show signs of the disease recovered and were discharged, the highly premature chorus that the state, because it had defeated Nipah, will now defeat COVID-19 too, rang out. Such euphoria is also dangerous in times of pandemics. While there can be no disputing that the health system in Kerala is streets ahead of most states (‘Caught Between Outbreaks, Kerala’s Model for Public Healthcare Lauded’, March 21), the COVID-19 challenge calls for circumspection, not congratulations, because it is only just unfolding and holds consequences that cannot be predicted, only imagined.
Coming back to the Virchow formulation, let’s now examine how the “statesman in the grand style” did during this crisis. Here there was more of the “grand style”, than the “statesman”, I would say. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ability to persuade has never been in doubt, evidenced in the concerted manner the steel plates came out on balconies at 5 pm sharp, helped by astute behind-the-scenes media manipulation. A television programme I was watching around that time was interrupted by the announcement that the mandatory clapping will now take place, and sure enough the air in the drawing room was filled with sound of applause that transported one to a Modi election rally instantly. Meanwhile, hidden and not-so-hidden influencers did their job. Accompanying a tweet from Saina Nehwal, who has incidentally joined the BJP in search of pastures greener the sporting field no doubt, was this tweet from Narendra Modi himself: “Let us heed these important words of our champion shuttlers. #IndiaFightsCorona https://twitter.com/ajay_289/status/1240693832368287745”. Then came Nehwal’s tweet: “I pledge that I’ll strictly follow Janta Curfew this Sunday frm 7am to 9pm so that we strengthen India’s fight against the Corona Virus.This will bring us together and we’ll stand strong as a nation in this critical time! @narendramodi #IndiaFightsCorona”.
A carefully researched analysis carried in The Wire, ‘It’s Essential to Sift Through Hate-Driven Misinformation on Coronavirus’ (March 25), drives home the point that it is through influencers that misinformation circulated this time: “Some of the fastest travelling misinformation has come from public figures airing unenlightened views. These highly influential social media influencers (included) Amitabh Bachchan, Rajinikanth, Pawan Kalyan, Mohanlal as well as a number of lower-level celebrities…”
The writer of the piece, ‘Modi’s Moral Science Lecture for a Nation Facing a Crisis’ (March 20) profiles the prime minister as a “patriarch”, who “remains mostly silent and distant but always has everyone’s best interest at heart and is available to dispense good advice”. Such framing also “taps into a deep yearning among many Indians – not all of them bhakts – for stable ‘Indian’ values and certitude in a fast changing world, and especially during moments of crisis.” However, there is a problem when patriarchs deploy propaganda. As the article, ‘It’s Dangerous to Be Taken in by Propaganda in the Time of Corona’ (March 21), argues “propaganda never allows the most important questions to be raised in the midst of a crisis.”
The bald fact is that ‘In India, Neither Tokenism Nor Panic Can Help Counter this Unique Crisis’ (March 27). The piece just cited observes that class and caste aspects were embedded in the lockdown process now underway. This theme was unpacked in another piece, ‘Social Distancing and the Pandemic of Caste’ (March 24).
More than beating the thali, filling the thali should have been the first step; strategising on health care delivery, while protecting our men and women at its forefront, before we got down to “social distancing’, should have been the way to go. Unfortunately food and health delivery came as add-ons (‘Modi’s Silence on Essential Supplies During 21 Day National Lockdown Sets Off Panic’, March 24), after a nation-wide panic among those dispossessed by the virus (and the government response to it). Consequently, we were witness to the tragedy of hundreds of thousands on the streets fleeing for their villages on the only available means of movement – their feet – even as the police occasionally thrashed them for doing so.
Returning to Virchow, it seems we have failed, not just to heed “great warnings” about this epidemic but to read the “disturbance” that has taken place in the “development of the people”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi holds up a placard advocating social distancing during his address to the nation on March 24, 2020.
Stories you did not find
The media’s back-to-back coverage of the COVID-19 crisis cannot be faulted. It is possibly the most significant crisis the world, and this country, has ever had to face. But under that enormous cloud, are stories that need to be kept alive. One of them is about the aftermath of the Delhi pogrom. The Central government’s studied lack of even the most cursory response to this cataclysm will remain a permanent blot on it, but at least the rest of society cannot afford to look away.
Apart from the endless chase for a modicum of compensation, police repression is serving to heap distress upon distress on the affected people. The Wire piece, ‘Delhi Riots: Amid Reports of ‘Haphazard’ Detentions, Minorities Panel Seeks Police Report’ (March 21) revealed how Delhi’s Minorities Commission is “getting information that arrested youth are being pressurised to own up or to implicate others in crimes they apparently did not commit”. By the way, will someone please explain why the National Minorities Commission, that self-proclaims itself to be ‘An Organisation to Safeguard the Constitutional and Legal Rights of Minorities’, didn’t find it necessary to issue even a statement on the Delhi violence? Also, why is it that no media platform has taken this pretend commission to the cleaners for not intervening? Could it be because it is now packed with members who are only too happy to window dress, in order to access the perks and bungalows that come their way?
Many other important developments have also disappeared. The shabby police action accorded to Shaheen Bagh was one such. They may be able to blackout the anti-CAA-NPR-NRC slogans around the site, but not the legacy of those “women protesters and their mass of supporters (who) stayed peaceful despite every level of provocation…(who) held their ground through the horror of the riots in North-East Delhi, which began as vigilante mobs raided smaller sit-ins, the mini-Shaheen Baghs” (‘Farewell to Shaheen Bagh, as Political Togetherness Yields to Social Distance’, March 24. Also read, ‘Our Fight Is Still On’: Shaheen Bagh’s Spirit Remains Unbroken’, March 24).
Heavy police deployed in the Shaheen Bagh protest area to control the situation. Photo: Ismat Ara
As for young Amulya Leona, she has spent more than a month in jail (‘Amulya Leona Has Now Spent a Month in Jail for Saying ‘Pakistan Zindabad’, March 20). The Wire is one of the few publications to bother to quote a lawyer in this case: “senior human rights lawyer B.T. Venkatesh had told The Wire that her statement had nowhere expressed ‘disaffection’, a pre-requisite to attract sedition. Pakistan is not an ‘enemy state’ and Amulya had nowhere uttered a word against India”.
One of the big stories that should have figured more prominently in the news space actually has to do with prisoners. Across the country, our crowded bastilles are witnessing an explosive situation due to their inmates worrying about possible exposure to COVID-19. The media have allowed the lid to be kept fairly firmly on this chaos. There are untold numbers of prisoners who find themselves incarcerated for reasons that have nothing to do with crime. Surely in times of a pandemic, shouldn’t their cases be reviewed and they themselves released? The list would include prisoners of conscience, those detained because of arbitrary citizenship laws, and all those young people clamped with the reprehensible Public Safety Act in the Valley, a hugely draconian state law that remains in use despite the state itself having been disappeared.
The other subject that got buried in the COVID-19 avalanche was the goings on in Madhya Pradesh that saw one government biting the dust, as another emerged, buttressed by the bottomless treasury that the BJP now brings to its politics. It’s striking how even the customary media hand-wringing over this scenario of aya rams vaulting over gaya rams is now not to be observed. The Wire analysis notes that the “preferred response in Indian political discourse is: nothing. So a government falls until another one rises by the same methods of the one before and the one to follow” (‘Jyotiraditya Scindia’s Switch Raises Questions That We Sidestep at Our Own Peril’, March 12). In fact, the media discourse goes one step ahead: it quite gleefully, anticipates the same manoeuvres being played out in Rajasthan and Maharashtra.
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A requiem for newspapers?
As reports of newspapers failing to reach households across the country proliferated post-lockdown, either because of police excesses or irrational fears that they could be potential carriers of virus, one did worry about the long-term impact of this disruption. The piece, ‘Can newspapers survive the coronavirus fallout?’ (March 25), seemed to confirm that niggling fear. It also noted a paradox at the heart of this situation: “If things don’t improve post mid-April, the very business model of newspapers will be threatened. At the same time, this is the time when we really need newspapers and a free press”.
Having said that, don’t know if I approve of The Times of India for its touchy response to The Print (‘Times Group Sends Legal Notice to ThePrint for Article on Coronavirus and Newspapers’, March 27). This is just one more instance of media leviathans guarding their waters zealously against the forays of cyber minnows. Yet they think nothing of drawing content from these very players without even an acknowledgement. The Karan Thapar interview with former R&AW chief A.S. Dulat, about an impending rapprochement with Farooq Abdullah, appeared in The Wire first (‘‘Kashmirs Don’t Want to Die Cheaply’ Says Former RAW Chief on Absence of Mass Protest‘, March 15), but it was never acknowledged as a source. Play fair, Big Daddy!
Ex RAW chief A.S. Dulat. Photo: The Wire
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The feeling of standing at the edge of the COVID-19 abyss came in through in many mails I received over the last fortnight. The Wire reader, Deepak Jha, writes: “Taali and thaali is important for unity but this is not the solution…The question arises: Why hasn’t India tested enough? Why did awareness campaigns start so late? Why don’t we have enough isolation wards? Why are testing labs so few in number given the population? That this situation prevails in a country where more than four thousand people die because of tuberculosis every year, shows the seriousness of the government about achieving health for all. We therefore need to start questioning the government on this situation, if we are a rational society. Today we are dealing not just with a health crisis but an economic one. For nature, everybody is equal – and this is the lesson that the coronavirus has taught the world.”
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Sometimes the crisis has had painfully personal consequences. Kanishk Rathore, an IIM graduate, reveals his own recent history: “I work as a Manager-Marketplace, E-Commerce, for HIDESIGN. I joined on March 2, 2020, after leaving my well paying job in Delhi. On March 21, I was asked to resign by the company’s founder and HR director. There has not been a lockdown in Puducherry, yet the organisation has started laying off employees even after the request by the CII and government not to do so. This is an injustice to more than 120 employees, including myself, since we are rendered economically unstable and jobless at a time when a pandemic has overtaken the world.
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I thank an alert reader, Muralidharan Vishwanath, for pointing out an error in my last column, ‘Backstory: Only Unbiased Journalism, Not Riot Videos, Can Bring Justice on Delhi’s Violence’ (March 14), in the line “Two, hate speeches were not, going by their chronology, linked to anything that any BJP politician said – presumably the speeches and slogans raised by Kapil Mishra, Anurag Mathur, Parvesh Verma, Ajay Singh Bisht, or even Shah himself, could not be faulted…” The second name should have read as ‘Anurag Thakur’, the current minister of state for finance. Apologies for that error.
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