Courtesy: Outlook India
The Fury of COVID-19: The Politics, Histories and Unrequited Love of the Coronavirus.
Vinay Lal. Macmillan India 2020
Ashoak Upadhyay
D
epending on your imaginary sensibilities you could read the news as déjà vu or an example of Time stopped or as Time cyclical; perhaps the more prosaic would read the ‘import’ of a new strain of Sars CoV-2 that causes coronavirus disease (COVID-19) by passengers flying in from Britain as evidence of the durability of the virus that has now mutated and promises to inject a fresh lease of life into the ongoing pandemic even as Indians cope with a life already altered by the old strain. Within a month to December 35, 000 passengers disembarked at various Indian airports from the United Kingdom. New Delhi promptly suspended flights from London but by then the concern was to track down passengers who might have brought the new variants with them; by January 05 in the new year 58 passengers had tested positive in various parts of the country. The strain that had been circulating in London turned out to be a global traveler. Its presence was confirmed in Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia, Italy, Sweden, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Japan, Lebanon and Singapore—thus far. The new strain has also been sourced to South Africa and the New York Times reported on January 04 to its hapless readers that the “…virus is still winning.”
Covid’s fury will not diminish it seems even with the news that science, its apparent nemesis is getting ready to arm humans with a vaccine that would, so goes the narrative, put paid to the dreaded virus that has upturned human lives. The irony is that this time around too the variant has come into this country from a developed country, the UK: in a larger context, globalization once again confirms its dubious distinction as a carrier of diseases. Nine months ago as governments around the world wakened to the portents of the virus with varying and often disastrously unmindful responses, popular conceptions among the poor in India, those domestic helps serving gated communities in Indian cities, courier service staff would identify the virus with the well off, the traveler coming in from ‘foreign’. Much against their instincts of self-preservation they would report for work. The narrative would change once governments introduced the idea of safe distancing and the tables would be turned with fingers being pointed at the poor as the carriers of the virus.
The Fury of Covid 19 could not be read at a better time than this even though Vinay Lal tells us that the book was written in July last year and covers events till that period. Lal’s book is not a report of events alone; as he makes clear early on, neither is it about the science of the virus; he wants to raise “questions that are more enduring and of greater social, political ethical, philosophical import than what may be conveyed only by a superficial consideration of the data.” At first glance, on reading this, the impulse might be to put it away, for fear that one might be holding in one’s hand a “paralyzing snore-monger”. But Lal’s hand is light and his forays into the questions he wishes to raise have a lightness of being that makes you want to read on even as the questions he raises are weighty and worm their way into your mind, if it is open enough. The idea that one should be reading a book on this mind-blowing pandemic that does not provide answers to light our way out of the unskinned darkness we are in, that it should raise questions more than provide answers should be reason enough for a journey into the text. Science, as the received belief system that underscores our age of modernity and its latest digital avatar, failed us; it needs to be questioned for its inability to prevent or leastways cure it before it became a pandemic; but to do this we would need to break through its self-reflexivity, the ‘scientism’ that turned it into a post-‘God is Dead’ god. And in order to do that we would need to look around us and take cognizance of the world we are in—a cognitive endeavor that would raise questions that would illuminate , hopefully, this current apocalypse of rampaging death-by-virus.
Lal contextualizes the events of 2020 to June in a way that opens the windows to history, sociology even literature and onto the highways of politics that pull the reader out of her cocooned fury. Lal begins to test the idea that ‘national histories’ can cast light on the pathetic follies with which many ‘developed nations’ dealt with the onset of the “singular and sinister exceptionality of the COVID-19” with the UK; the prime minster pulls out the self-aggrandising myth about the freedom loving English people and their inalienable right to go to the pub as an Englishness that could leaven the onset of lockdown conditions. In the bargain not only did he leave out those not born in England, mind you, which meant the other communities of the British isles such as the Welsh, Irish and Scots but the immigrants who have made the National Health Service a front-guard response to the virus but he downplayed the deadly impact of the virus on all those who bought into his myth of Englishness.
A similar trope of national-identity worked to permit the virus to spread in France and Sweden, the former’s President wearing the French love of liberty on his sleeve for all to see and the latter country parting ways with the more cautious approach s of its neighbours Denmark and Norway on the specious ground that its scientific community that had advised against masking or social lockdowns knew best. But as Lal points out, it is in the US that the current outgoing President Trump articulated an ethos of self-fulfilling folly of American bravado that as the New York Times was to comment as the death count spiked horrendously in the early months, “The world is taking pity on us.” The world’s sole super-power soon became the world’s biggest victim of the COVID-19.
The idea of ‘national histories’ mediating the spread of the pandemic at times sounds thin even if the case of Boris Johnson waving ’Englishness’ as a foil to the virus sounds amusing. More closer home, it is not national history that determined the Modi government’s lockdown policy that led to the horrendous, unprecedented plight of migrant workers so much as growing authoritarianism; this reflected what Arun Shourie, a senior BJP leader put out to pasture by the strongman had once described as the ‘dark triad’ that marks out the personality of the prime minster. That allows him to treat his subjects as infantiles with no mind of their own; ‘Daddy knows best’.
The COVID-19 has certainly thrown received political wisdoms out of kilter. Lal reminds us of the way China, the most authoritarian state so far, managed to control the spread through draconian measure. Lal offers the example of South Korea too but it is a moot point if that country can be considered a democratic haven. On the other hand, so called democracies, the ‘freedom loving nations of the world’ rallied behind self-illusions to make a mess of their own lives.
More questions worm their way into our cognitive consciousness, inchoate as they may be at this stage as we read of the relative successes of Vietnam in dealing with the pandemic and most strikingly, Cuba. In a boxed essay, Lal expands on the hidden-in-plain-sight story of Cuba’s valiant and exemplary way it has dealt with this pandemic and those that hit the island and the world before. The American mainstream media, showered “gushing admiration” on New Zealand and its young female prime minster tiptoeing around the island off the coast of Florida it loves to hate. But Cuba had more cases and deaths. In Lal’s estimation both countries were successful in holding their respective death tolls and case loads constant [till the time of writing this book] but the odds were stacked against Cuba to begin with: a level of per capita income five times lower than New Zealand’s, double its population at 11 million ; a US-backed economic blockade “that has curtailed the supply of medicine, medical equipment, and other essential goods.” And yet, when the first cases of COVID-19 were detected as early as March Cuba already had in place a an elaborate plan to deal with it. As Lal tells us: “Indeed , it may be said that Cuba has been well prepared for such emergencies for decades, having shown the way to the rest of the world not only through its consistent commitment to public health care expenditures…” that some commentators have pointed out existed since the the revolution: expenditures in literacy, nutrition sanitation and housing for the working class. Lal cites one saying that “Che Guevara taught Cuba how to confront COVID-19” But Cuba has done more: if the US exports arms and false notions of democracy, Cuba exports doctors and health professionals, sending out such experts to Africa.
More than in any other country’s example that Lal cites it is in Cuba’s case that one can see the vital importance of ‘national histories’ shaping responses to the pandemic; it is in the lack of that awareness for a sound public heatlh-care system in countries such as India and USA, the world’s two largest democracies that you can the consequences of such lacks during this pandemic. In its March 2016 report The Lancet informs the reader that infant mortality in Cuba had fallen 40 per cent since the 1960s and that it was lower than that of the USA…despite its economy remaining flat and beleaguered by the world’s super-power.
National histories or national public policies also reflect political/social epidemiologies cutting loose from a narrow scientism that restricts a holistic diagnosis of epidemics. Lal quotes historian Frank Snowden to the effect that epidemic diseases ‘are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without warning. On the contrary, every society produces its own vulnerabilities To study them is to understand society’s structure, its standard of living, its political priorities.’ Social epidemiology tells us something of the vulnerabilities of the poor to the epidemic disease. Lal pulls out Friedrich Engels’ classic work of 1845 on the working class in England and its susceptibilities to deprivation, desolation and disease. The history of colonialism is replete with such afflictions visited on the poor; indeed as Lal points out , the history of British rule in India since the Crown took over in 1857 has been a history of famines and death, the Bengal Famine of 1843 being the last ignoble chapter in that history.
And yet there is a wonderful irony embedded in this political epidemiology. One would expect as Lal does that slums, favelas and other neighbourhoods of deprivation would be the obvious target of the pandemic. Yet Dharavi arguably the largest slum in the world with an area equal to Central Park in New York housing a population larger than San Francisco’s astonishes with its capacity to cope with the pandemic. Lal’s description of the ‘vice of discrimination’ highlights the fact that blacks and Latinos in the United States are the biggest target of the virus. Keeping in mind Frank Snowden’s description of political epidemiology that may not appear surprising. But turn to Dharavi slum and you are in for a surprise. When the pandemic’s implications sunk into the urban Indian middle class, the slum, like other densely packed enclaves was viewed as the crucible for the pandemic and in the burgeoning oral narratives, a holocaust was dawning.
And Dharavi coped wonderfully managing to contain the pandemic in its early march despite density, not distancing defining .”the possibilities of life.” Lal quotes international media reports such as Washington Post and Al-Jazeera that found activists seizing the initiative to provide food and help for even those that tested positive. The city municipal authority of course took credit for early detection and patted itself on the back for its four Ts—Tracing, Tracking, Testing, Treating. But intriguing questions remain: within a few months, Dharavi should have been the most favoured site of the virus—safe distancing was impossible, sanitation ditto with 80 people sharing a toilet, lack of running water, washing hands frequently laughable. The most plausible and convenient explanation which the urban middle class, skeptical of official self-congratulatory communiques, could rustle up, was—herd immunity. Dharavi residents had antibodies that warded off the onslaught of the virus. Lal’s brief account of the assistant commissioner of police assigned to the ward in which Dharavi falls is too brief to offer anything other than a tantalizing clue. According to Kiran Dhigavkar, the strategy was to chase the virus not wait for people to report it. It worked and Lal tells us the WHO showcased that strategy for other similarly dense regions.
That story is still unfolding. The virus may have been confronted with the support of the local population and a committed official response evidenced in Kiran Dighavkar’s stellar role but as the need to revive the local economies of the vibrant informal sector in Dharavi was felt by October. The risks increase as migrant workers make their way back; the next phase had to be planned so as to prevent the seeding of new cases as far as possible. Bloomberg Business Week reported that nearly 6,000 young female volunteers stepped forward to help Dighavkar’s team engage in the four Ts.
In Dharavi the front line of the strategic plan to confront the virus, as the local enterprises open, are women, mostly from within the slum itself.
In Dharavi something more profound and sustaining has been happening. Lal’s observations on the hazards of social distancing in countries such as USA and India where the pandemic exacerbates extant segregations have been touched upon by commentators in India who had petitioned the government to use the phrase ‘safe distancing’. As he notes, in his chapter on Distancing in India, “Much of Indian society has already been hobbled by certain constraints on touch; the virus breathes possibly a new and repellant life into the idea of touch.” “The inferior is very much himself the virus.” He hopes that “the protocols of distancing do not create both new pretexts and registers of discrimination.”
Anecdotal evidence and media reportage confirm his fears and the full story has yet to be written but may not be. Lal takes comfort in the supple and pluralistic Indian traditions to allow varied readings of not just the fear of touch but social distancing. He draws our attention to colonial British civil servant R.E. Enthoven writing on Kathiawar region of Bombay Presidency in which he describes what he calls ‘Disease Deities’ and a tradition that has the lowest castes, those that clean latrines as guardians of he deity protecting the inhabitants from cholera.
But does not Dharavi also offer a glimpse of that supple and pluralistic tradition that creates the space for its residents to cope well enough with the pandemic? Known for its heterogeneity of communities and castes living cheek by jowl, among places of worship that reflect the multiplicity of faiths and at times the site for communal riots too, Dharavi’s residents have been able to get together to fight a common enemy with the only weapons they have on hand: a cooperative and communitarian kinship strong enough to create a grassroot public-health nurturing environment.
The Fury of COVID-19 traverses terrains that expand fields of inquiries for future scholars, scientists and historians not to mention philosophers; the ramifications that this pandemic will have on the way we live and the way we ought to in the future. But equally we will have to expand our knowledge of the present from the attenuated vision we have of it: as a condition defined by capitalism, consumption and an idea of progress as telos of history. Lal engages in some critical inquiry into the defining vectors of our apocalyptic condition brought on by the pandemic: ‘viral’ capitalism, the role of the WHO and the notions of science, modernity and progress. Modernity was meant to represent the elimination of disease, the age of a new dawn but the dawn of the 20th century ushered in a new global unification through war and disease. The idea that science was supposed to have eliminated disease turned out to be fantasy and Lal points to Laurie Garrett’s 1994 work aptly titled The Coming Plague about newly emerging diseases. AIDS was just the beginning wrote Jonathan M. Mann at the time director of the Harvard AIDS Institute in a preface to the book: “[it] may well be the first of the modern, large scale infectious diseases.”
But despite the ubiquity of the pandemic it might behove us to look beyond our noses, to rid ourselves of the idea that the Present we know is the only one we have, or that the discourse that relies on the idea of Science and Utilitarian based notions of progress are the only options available to a world of diminishing natural resources, warming seas and climate changes now noticeable perhaps even by those who felt the climate changed only when they opened their fridge doors. So Lal raises some key epistemic questions relating to our levels of consumption, the need to respect not conquer nature and to realise that man’s folly in attempting to dominate nature kills it and us. Lal’s recount of the pandemic’s positive impact on non-human life is a morality tale worth pondering: animals roamed on deserted streets; the air in densely polluted cities got cleaner as fuel emissions lowered dramatically, residents in Jalandhar Punjab reported seeing the Dauladhar range of the Himalayas, 200 kilometres away for the first time in 30 years.
In a book chronicling the fury of a pandemic of singular and sinister exceptionality perhaps Lal could not have expanded on the questions that these glimpses of a kind of pre-lapsarian world evoke, with any forensic detail. But he does offer the reader clues for a collective examination of the culture of acquisition and conquest over other forms of life that have defined western societies since the Industrial revolution and provided the hegemonising metonymic discourse of well-being for developing ones. The coronavirus’ deadly spread and toll offers us a vivid example of ‘distancing,’ from nature, an alienation by which we have “turned our planetary existence into a battleground with other species over land and resources”
The issue is: will we pick up the clues?
Of course the jury is out on this one and on a lot more. From the perspective of the new year and the news that the vaccine is round the corner, are we in a better position to visualize a post-COVID-19 future than Lal was when he got down to writing his concluding chapter ‘Politics and Society After COVID-19’? Our first impulse would be to say yes we are and we bet that life will come around to being normal, well, give a few tweaks here and there. Perhaps we will forget this episode in human existence as an apocalyptic nightmare from which the vaccine enabled us to waken. The isolation and lockdowns have turned us into ‘connoisseurs of the unavailable’ in Mukul Kesavan’s evocative phrase; we will get to our feasts of grossness as Tagore described modernity’s follies. Perhaps Lal anticipated such a scenario of forgetfulness; being a historian he cannot but offer glimpses of human behavior that forms part of our dubious legacy. From the plague that struck Athens in 430 BC and the Black Death in Europe in the fourteenth century historians Thucydides and Barbara Tuchman respectively drew the woeful conclusions that the people had learnt little from the cataclysms that swept through their lives; people were not chastened.
Lal steps away from crystal ball-gazing; he cautiously adheres to the middle path–there is much to fear and cause to be hopeful. There is the fear of a growing regime of surveillance among countries across the world. The idea of lockdown appeals to authoritarian states and as in India, it may be used as a pretext for unrelated lockdown or clamp-downs, to lock up dissidents, populations. But it’s not just governments that are using the pandemic to experiment with new forms of surveillance. So are private firms. As remote working catches on surveillance techniques are slowly going to dissolve the distinction between home and the office, the private and public space and put paid to that search of work-life balance that heightened labour productivity was supposed to promise. Whether remote teleworking becomes the new normal or not, employers are already furiously shopping for new surveillance gizmos to turn their employees into 24-hour work drones. More than anything else, this radical shift in the employer-employee relationship may affirm the singular and sinister exceptionality of the current pandemic.
Lal’s wistful hope for a better world, a chastened world that will veer away from its reckless follies remains just that at the moment. But as Jeffrey Schnapp wrote around May: “pandemics are accelerators of long term societal trends…” The aftermath of the Black Death in Western Europe bore this out as it paved the way for the Renaissance. Loosened the hold of the Church and ushered in the first flush of modernity. The signs of systemic changes in work places and, in the exercise of political power at least are already evident.
And hope? The biggest change one can only hope for is a widespread acceptance of an idea of healing through humility: much as the nurses and health professionals need to be applauded for their magnificent work, Lal avers that “we are called upon to nurse this earth back to health—something that can only begin with the recognition that, as a species we are likely less ‘essential’ than we have imagined ourselves to be.”
One couldn’t hope for a more profound takeaway from the fury of COVID-19 than this epistemic leap.
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