When did the COVID-19 pandemic begin? It’s difficult to say, but on the fifth anniversary of the outbreak, two dates stand out for us in India: March 11, when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, and March 24, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi, employing the metaphor of war, announced a total lockdown within four hours, which in turn upended the world as we knew it.
In many ways the malign repercussions of the pandemic continue to mark our lives – through our memories of those who died in this period and the experiences of those who had to desperately scramble in order to live. Data suggests the pandemic deepened poverty levels in the country considerably, with migrants and informal sector workers being the worst hit.
Pandemic as ‘Infodemic’
This was a period that saw an unprecedented generation of information and the WHO used the term “infodemic” to describe the phenomenon. In India, much of this was actually misinformation/disinformation routed through both legacy media and social media. An August 2020 study by the advocacy group Avaaz noted that “content from 10 ‘super-spreader’ sites sharing health misinformation had almost four times as many Facebook views in April 2020 as equivalent content from the sites of 10 leading health institutions such as WHO”.
In India this information came to be infused with public religiosity, caste and communal hate, and plain irrationality which furthered a receptivity in audiences to myth, superstition and unproven claim-making.
Religious traditions like the veneration of the healing properties of cow dung and bovine urine were endorsed as potential cures, as was the water of the Ganga. A quote from “eminent river engineer Prof U.K. Choudhary” that this was because the Ganga had “a significantly higher proportion of bacteriophages”, was widely circulated, with mainstream media also reporting it. Interestingly, the bacteriophage theory was given another outing more recently during the Mahakumbh!
Building up the saviour figure
The centralising saviour figure of Narendra Modi was made to loom large over the country largely through the media. Such exercises in what scholars have termed as “mediated populism” became intrinsic to the government’s management of the pandemic. On April 3, 2020, the nation was sought to be energised even as the immense distress of migrant workers was playing out on the streets, with the prime minister instructing citizens to switch off their electricity supply and light candles in the dark the following Sunday – at 9 pm for 9 minutes exactly.
Instructions like these (as indeed the earlier injunction to make some noise to salute health workers and chase away the virus) had a seemingly mantra-like quality to them, an impression sought to be deepened by sycophantic television anchors and the BJP’s IT influencers. So scrupulously were these instructions followed that those who failed to conform sometimes faced vigilante attacks. By May, the Niti Aayog’s calculation that 14-29 lakh cases and 37,000-71,000 deaths had been averted because of the prime minister’s timely lockdown was publicised, a claim repeated in parliament that September. It was a claim the media did not bother to fact check.
Right through the pandemic every effort was made to emphasise the prime-ministerial aura, a trend that became more pronounced as the 2020 Bihar elections drew closer. One of the claims made during this election campaign, which the ruling alliance of Janata Dal (United)-BJP went on to win, was that the state would soon be free of the virus under Modi’s dynamic leadership. Once again, in 2021, in the crucial lead up to five assembly elections, it was his face that appeared on vaccination certificates with the strap-line: “Together, India will defeat COVID-19”, although the Election Commission of India was constrained by pressure from the opposition to remove this from certificates issued in poll-bound regions.
Media briefings were organised to put out content the government wanted propagated but over time these were replaced by virtual meets which required journalists to send their queries in advance. These were either cursory answered or quietly ignored. The pandemic was also cited as the reason for cutting down on other transparency measures such as parliament’s Question Hour. The entire Winter Session of parliament in 2020 was dispensed with for the same reason.
Controlling the media narrative
The drive to control both data and the public narrative led the government to approach the Supreme Court for an order to ban the media from reporting on the disease without official clearance, with the solicitor general terming journalists in court as “vultures” and “prophets of doom”.
This drive to clamp down on media freedoms resulted in the use of several draconian laws and penal provisions against them. Sevanti Ninan, in a analysis for The Telegraph, pointed out that not only was the Epidemic Diseases Act and the Disaster Management Act evoked, no less than 14 Sections of the IPC and Sections of the IT Act, the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the Motor Vehicles Act and the provisions of Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, were used against reporters, some of whom faced arrests and even police torture.
The label of “fake news”, which was later used to justify state censorship had by now, become common nomenclature, as concerted attempts were made by the Union government to shift responsibility for failing migrant workers to state governments and the media. In September 2020, to take one example, the government claimed in Parliament that it was “fake news” that had triggered the migrant crisis. When questioned on the number of deaths of migrants during this period, it initially prevaricated, claiming that it had no data. Later the admission was made that 97 deaths had taken place on the Shramik trains that were run to help stranded migrants from May 1, 2020.
Media as fount of communal propaganda
Old communal fault lines were revisited, including those over the consumption and handling of food. The fear of a “corona jihad” being launched by Muslims against Hindus gained traction for a while, as evidenced in slanted stories of contamination of fruit and vegetables sold by Muslims vendors. Innocent vendors trying to eke out a living in hard times were verbally or even physically attacked, and had their carts overturned. An old image of a delivery boy opening a food tray from the Philippines was recirculated to claim that delivery personnel were spitting into food packages. In smaller cities like Surat and Shivamogga, where the Hindu rightwing had a dominant presence, such propaganda led to public calls to boycott Muslim vendors.
Also read: Coronavirus Communalism Has Made a Grim Picture for Indian Muslims Grimmer Still
Why did so many fall prey to hate campaigns? An obvious reason was the lack of a proper understanding of the air-borne nature of COVID-19 transmission. But what was decisive was the successful way communal forces could exploit the fear, ignorance and pre-existing prejudices to scapegoat an entire community. A well-known instance was the systematic targeting of the members of Tablighi Jamaat, a Sunni Muslim organisation which happened to hold a mass gathering in early March. When a preacher succumbed to COVID-19 and several members tested positive for the disease, the worst of anti-Muslim prejudices surfaced, fed by a tidal wave of unsubstantiated news reports of Jamaatis misbehaving with nurses, defecating in hospital wards, stripping themselves naked and insisting on being served biryani. The few attempts to counter such propaganda were too insignificant to make a difference.
The demonising of Jamaat members, specifically, and Muslims in general, persisted throughout the months of the pandemic. Several television channels resorted to using labels like “tablighi virus” to drive the message home. A news agency like ANI, responsible for supplying media content to numerous media institutions, were repeat offenders, with several of their fake tweets having to be taken down after police denials.
Many of the trends highlighted here came to mark Indian journalism in lasting, indelible ways. In fact, so normalised had they become that audiences and the general public could no longer remember a time when the mainstream media was relatively free, fair, secular and critically engaged.
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Animal farm
Most of us were introduced to Vantara, a 3,000-acre conservation and rescue centre owned by the Ambanis, about a year ago through an obsequious, carefully curated interview that Rahul Kanwal conducted with Anant Ambani for India Today. That conversation conducted against the luxuriantly verdant setting of Vantara which has magically emerged in the arid environs of Jamnagar where the Ambanis own a gargantuan oil refinery. Kanwal pulled all stops in that special feature to showcase the young Ambani scion as a man given to good works and animal welfare. He even succumbed to the temptation of having a bit of a laddu being specially prepared for the elephants – a gesture, you could say, to fearless journalism!
Going by the Kanwal rendition, Vantara was all about sweetness and light. But the perception correction was not long in coming. A month later Himal magazine came up with a rigorously conducted two-part investigation, ‘The costs of Reliance’s wildlife ambitions’, by M. Rajshekhar, independent journalist and author of Despite the State. That series raised serious questions about the nature of the national and international trade in wild animal and, more specifically, the manner in which Vantara had sourced the animals it had “rescued”. More recently these questions acquired an international dimension shortly after Modi formally inaugurated the facility, when a South African animal rights group demanded an inquiry into how Vantara could import large numbers of wild animals from that country into Jamnagar in apparent violation of CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species).
The story came to be subsequently carried in a few Indian newspapers. If that in itself was something of a small miracle, it is what happened to the stories later that is of greater interest. AltNews carried a comprehensive analysis of how many of them were quietly scrubbed off websites. According to AltNews, “Interestingly, at the time of this article being written, Deccan Herald, The Telegraph and The Tribune have taken down their stories and the reader is met with an ‘Error 404’ or a ‘Page Not Found’ message upon clicking on the link to the articles.” The case of Financial Express was possibly the most intriguing. While the original story was removed, care was taken to direct readers to a piece written by its desk that claimed that Vantara was a model for animal welfare. The URL of the story however remains unchanged, providing a glimpse into the angle of the original report!
Newslaundry/The News Minute also carried a story about how NorthEastNow, which had carried a report critical of Vantara also got legal notices. It needs to be noted that many of the elephants and other wildlife taken to Vantara come from the Northeast.
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Readers write in…
Did CM Stalin really say that?
A mail from an advocate of the Madras High Court, Aakash Johannes Russell:
“I recently came across an article and interview in The Wire titled ‘Stalin’s Advice to Immediately Have Babies Thoughtless, Reckless’: PFI Executive Director’ (March 4)…
“The interviewer, a ‘widely acclaimed’ journalist, starts the interview with the words “Yesterday the Tamil Nadu Minister for Information Technology and Digital Service told us that the prospect of the delimitation in 2026 was creating alarm and panic. One response from the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu is to call upon newlyweds to immediately have children. He presumably wants them to have as many as they can and as quickly as possible. But in a country with a population of 1.4 Billion, is this wise or reckless advice? Does it treat women as baby producing factories, rather than individuals with a right of choice and finally is this the right response to delimitation?” Thereafter the video runs for another 20 minutes.
“The Wire which claims to maintain a high standard of journalism has to explain when and where such advice was rendered by the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. It cannot set its defence on a sarcastic jibe made by the TN CM on delimitation. That cannot be interpreted as advice to newlyweds in Tamil Nadu. The article and video have misled the people and also have made a mockery of the genuine concerns of Tamil Nadu regarding delimitation. This clearly shows that The Wire, like most Hinglish media houses, cannot comprehend Tamil and is part and parcel of Hindi imperialism. If The Wire claims to have any ethics, it has to apologise for spreading misinformation through this interview.”
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Failing the economy
Wire reader, Sushil Prasad, of Gachibowli, Hyderabad, wrote in response to the piece titled, ‘India’s Young Entrepreneurs Aren’t Hungry and That’s a Reason to Worry’, March 3 (edited for size):
“Mr Sanjaya Baru has raised a very important aspect of the functioning of Indian economy and society in this article, but I am unable to agree with his analysis.
“Employment, investment, or equitable growth is directly linked to the kind of investment a country makes. Moreover, for investments to take off, two preconditions are essential. First, entrepreneurs should have confidence that they would get adequate returns. Second is the availability of easy and reasonably priced external funds to supplement and leverage the promoter’s capital.
“We seem to have failed on both counts. Trust is the basic glue which holds society together and builds confidence, essential for animal spirits to emerge and encourage entrepreneurs to make productive investments. The result of the emergence of the strategy of fostering continuous friction between different social groups as the primary means for maintaining political power, is that the level of trust has naturally reached a very low ebb in our society. Naturally, this has resulted in adversely impacting the willingness of our entrepreneurs to invest.
“The main source of external debt funds in India is the banking system, which is essentially broken due to poor governance…No political dispensation wants to let go or reform the banking system since its control gives them tremendous power. Moreover, no reform in the banking system is possible as long as DOFS (Department of Financial Services) exists in its present form, since it provides humongous control rents to its mandarins with no equity stake. Both these conditions hit our informal/MSME sector especially hard — the sector which not only generates the bulk of our production, employment, and exports but provides the very foundation on which the economy rests, especially our organised sector.
“The assumption that supply of and demand for credit are dependent merely or even largely on interest rates is simplistic and fallacious since it ignores a critical determinant: the terms of credit. This can vary in terms of security, purpose, structure, tenor, price, risk, etc. The primary instrumentality for determining the terms of credit is the banking system, which due to its broken governance systems has been unable to evolve a conceptual framework or associated processes to evaluate and determine the various terms of credit…
“The broken governance of our banking industry is reflected in all parameters of its functioning–not just their extremely limited success in lending, with the most important being their neglect of the supply side of their functioning, ie, garnering deposits. Term Deposits as per percentage of total deposits of the banking system has steadily come down from around 66% as of March 2016 to 61% by March 2024. This is largely because returns on bank deposits have rarely been positive in real terms over long periods in the past. Bad quality lending directly impacts the ability of banks to pay adequately on the deposits they raise. Moreover, the virtually complete lack of focus on Savings, has led to not only our level of Savings as a percentage of GDP falling, but also to a fall in levels of financial savings.
“Without first addressing both these issues, namely rebuilding trust in society and reforming our banking system, there can be no succour. From the article, it also appears that Mr. Baru does not appreciate the critical role played by financial markets and institutions in supporting the real economy, and fostering growth with equity. The phenomenon Mr. Baru describes in his article of the younger generations in business families not taking interest in manufacturing is part of a universal trend. It can be compared to a trend described by Thorstein Veblen of the initial generation of robber barons producing the next generation of the nouveau riche, who then lead the way to the next generation of aristocrats.”
Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in.
