Raising Hell: QandA: Checking On India

It wasn’t so long ago the world watched as India made international headlines as the last horror story in a global pandemic. A reckless mismanagement of the situation in a nation of 1.36 billion meant the number of new Covid-19 cases spiked from around 17,000 a day February to over 400,000 a day in March. While the official stats suggest the country has turned the corner, with over 28.2 million cases in the country of 1.36 billion people, 332,000 people have died — though these numbers will be out of date by the time this goes live.

India is a working demonstration of what is now a tired observation that Covid-19 is a DDoS attack on a country’s healthcare system. In the words of Brown University Professor Mark Blyth, “an economy as a wholly owned subsidiary of the healthcare system”. With Melbourne now in lockdown thanks to a break in quarantine originating in South Australia and a total failure of the federal government to handle the vaccine rollout, Australia would do well to learn India’s lessons.

A fortnight ago, I spoke to Indian writer Sayantan Ghosh about recent events in the country. Sayantan grew up in Calcutta, but lives and works in New Delhi where he is a senior commissioning editor at Simon and Schuster. Though I am a little late — owing to my recent workload — I am running the transcript of our chat now as a reminder of just how quickly things can go from bad to worse.

This interview has been lightly edited for style and length.

Royce Kurmelovs: What is happening in India right now?

Sayantan Ghosh: We witnessed a catastrophic collapse of our healthcare system, despite the herculean efforts of our doctors, nurses, and medical workers. Primarily this was caused by lack of preparation, underestimating the magnitude of damage this virus could cause, and rampant spreading of misinformation both by citizens through social media as well as by several elected ministers and public servants. Most of us have seen so many deaths in the past few weeks, that we haven't yet had the time or energy to even sit back and process them.

RK: How are things where you are?

I am currently in Calcutta, at my parents' house. Things weren't as bleak here earlier as it was in cities like Delhi, Bombay, and Bangalore. But elections were being held in West Bengal, and because of that most political parties took out massive rallies where thousands of people gathered to support their respective parties and leaders. This seems like the most obvious reason why the virus managed to spread so quickly all across rural Bengal in the past one month or so. Hospitals filled up quickly, medicines and injections doctors were prescribing became too difficult to procure, and ICUs became near impossible to find for critical patients, simply because there were too many of them. However, the SOS calls and messages have gone down considerably in the past few days, lockdowns are imposed in most places across the country which is helping bring the numbers down considerably.

RK: How was India's second wave allowed to get so big?

The Kumbh mela where lakhs [hundreds of thousands] of people were allowed to gather to celebrate a religious occasion while a pandemic was in full swing across the country was a shameful administrative failure. We later got to read in the news that almost 99 percent of the attendees tested positive. I have already talked about the irresponsible political rallies in Bengal which worsened the situation here. Furthermore, a general casual attitude of the general masses who, out of some strange case of both stubbornness and ignorance, refused to abide by the safety protocols despite constant reminders from both the central and state governments.

RK: There was an article in The Atlantic by journalist Vidya Krishnan who wrote about the class dimension of the current crisis. What do you make of this?

It's undeniably true. The first lockdown of 2020 which was hastily announced, created unimaginable chaos among migrant labourers who struggled to find their way back home. Countless people with their families walked back to their native villages, often thousands of miles away from the metro cities where they work. Tragically, many succumbed during their journey too. Even now, when several volunteers have been working day and night to respond to SOS messages, whether on the ground, or on Twitter and WhatsApp, and trying to reach out for help, this is mostly only reaching those who have the access and understand social media in order to use it to seek help. And that's a negligible number of people if the entire population of India is considered. In the past year we've heard many philosophical statements like ‘the virus doesn't differentiate between people’. While that isn't untrue on paper, it still sounds like bullcrap because the facilities which are available to the various sections of our society have very clearly been determined by class and caste.

RK: We've spoken about this in brief, but can you explain a little why people are reluctant to name-names of government officials right now?

Because many who do, examples are made out of them. And especially during a pandemic, no one has the bandwidth to deal with additional harassment, both offline and online by trolls. Plus there's the lack of empathy among several elected representatives at the centre, who mock, undermine, and insult people's hardships in new ways every day. When one has to fight fresh battles each day simply to survive, where is the energy left for anything else?

“We have seen bodies floating in the Ganga river — a sight none of us will ever forget in our lives. We shouldn't.”

RK: How have people been organising to help?

Volunteers have been working non-stop on the ground, both organised by political institutions as well as individually to assist people in distress. It's been heartening to see so many people coming together to contribute in whatever way they can. From generating leads online to amplifying requests to actually physically delivering oxygen cylinders to people's homes, this is possibly the biggest public-led movement I have witnessed in my entire life.

RK: I saw the other day you said of the pandemic: "we don't want to be a superpower. We just want to breathe and see all the people we love alive." Can you talk more about that?

It was a simple wish, an appeal — whatever you may call it. To forces in power who promise us a land of honey and milk every time there's an election around the corner, that we don't need flying cars or another highway to survive. All we want is for our healthcare and education systems to be more robust, so that people don't die like cattle again simply because there isn't enough oxygen available in the hospitals to keep them alive.

RK: What do you want those outside India to know about the situation?

That things are grim, much harder than they can imagine even after following the reports and articles coming out of India. Only those who are dealing with it first hand know the extent of the horrors. Things are slowly improving now, but that's also something we can only say about the cities. In villages and smaller towns, things seem to have gotten much worse in the past few weeks. Even in a big city like Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh we have seen bodies floating in the Ganga river — a sight none of us will ever forget in our lives. We shouldn't. These things need to be talked about more, not just here but outside too. If the awareness about what's happening on the ground spreads far and wide, the administration too will be more answerable. And that's the need of the hour — not cow urine medication or yoga, but strengthening the medical system of the country which empowers our doctors and health workers. Nothing else but saving lives should be on the list of priorities now.

Before You Go (Go)…

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