<nettime> Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal

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Arundhati Roy: â??The pandemic is a portalâ??

https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca


The novelist on how coronavirus threatens India â?? and what the
country, and the world, should do next


Who can use the term â??gone viralâ?? now without shuddering a little?
Who can look at anything any more â?? a door handle, a cardboard
carton, a bag of vegetables â?? without imagining it swarming with
those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads
waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs? 

Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending
their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of
ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack
epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist
or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not
â?? secretly, at least â?? submitting to science? 

And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by
the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings
and the silence in the skies?

The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million. More
than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number
will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved
freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the
terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in
their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not
profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed
the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls,
biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data
analytics, and struck hardest â?? thus far â?? in the richest, most
powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a
juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us
to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to
help fix it, or look for a better engine.

The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of
war. They donâ??t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally.
But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than
the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers
needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter
jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch
the New York governorâ??s press briefings with a fascination that
is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories
of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses
having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats,
risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being
forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctorsâ??
dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And
we think to ourselves, â??My God! This is America!â??

The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes.
But it isnâ??t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been
careening down the track for years. Who doesnâ??t remember the videos
of â??patient dumpingâ?? â?? sick people, still in their hospital
gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners?
Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate
citizens of the US. It hasnâ??t mattered how sick theyâ??ve been, or
how much theyâ??ve suffered. 

At least not until now â?? because now, in the era of the virus, a
poor personâ??s sickness can affect a wealthy societyâ??s health.
And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly
campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid
for the White House, even by his own party.

The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down
the track for years

And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended
somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and
capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists? 

In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in
Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by
hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly
discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law it had just passed in
parliament.

The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only
days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade,
Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier Jair Bolsonaro, had left
Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be
accommodated in the ruling partyâ??s timetable. There was the official
visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the
month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in
a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a
great deal of time.

Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya
Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which
it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist
campaign, replete with threats of physical violence and the shooting
of â??traitorsâ??.

It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to
Delhiâ??s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs
of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the
working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops,
mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the
attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were
killed. 

Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated
bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking
drains when government officials had their first meeting about
Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of
something called hand sanitiser.

March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the
Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and
installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health
Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later,
on March 13, the health ministry said that corona â??is not a health
emergencyâ??. 

Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation.
He hadnâ??t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France
and Italy. He told us of the need for â??social distancingâ?? (easy
to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and
called for a day of â??peopleâ??s curfewâ?? on March 22. He said
nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but
he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and
bang their pots and pans to salute health workers. 

He didnâ??t mention that, until that very moment, India had been
exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of
keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals.

Not surprisingly, Narendra Modiâ??s request was met with great
enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and
processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed,
men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters
threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim
organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus
and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers.

On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from
midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown. Markets
would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be
disallowed. 

He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister,
but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the
state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this
decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with
zero preparation and with four hoursâ?? notice? His methods definitely
give the impression that Indiaâ??s prime minister thinks of citizens
as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but
never trusted.

Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists
have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But
surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or
preparedness that turned the worldâ??s biggest, most punitive lockdown
into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles.

As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame
â?? her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her
callous indifference to suffering. 

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly
illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the
construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes
enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began
to extrude their working-class citizens â?? their migrant workers â??
like so much unwanted accrual. 

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of
impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women,
children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere
else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march
home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra,
Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur â?? hundreds of kilometres away.
Some died on the way.

Our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens
like so much unwanted accrual

They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps
they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would
infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but
they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity,
as well as food, if not love. 

As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the
police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young
men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the
town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with
chemical spray. 

A few days later, worried that the fleeing population would spread
the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for
walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced
to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.

Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of
1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this
current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even
still, these were not Indiaâ??s poorest people. These were people who
had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The
jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in
the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing
long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days,
the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view.

When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I
frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi
and Uttar Pradesh.

The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known
numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had
resulted in the opposite â?? physical compression on an unthinkable
scale. This is true even within Indiaâ??s towns and cities. The main
roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in
slums and shanties.

Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the
virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming
unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the
people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who
had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one manâ??s words
especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned
to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border.

â??Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us.
Maybe he doesnâ??t know about usâ??, he said. 

â??Usâ?? means approximately 460m people.

State governments in India (as in the US) have showed more heart
and understanding in the crisis. Trade unions, private citizens and
other collectives are distributing food and emergency rations. The
central government has been slow to respond to their desperate appeals
for funds. It turns out that the prime ministerâ??s National Relief
Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money from well-wishers is
pouring into the somewhat mysterious new PM-CARES fund. Pre-packaged
meals with Modiâ??s face on them have begun to appear. 

In addition to this, the prime minister has shared his yoga nidra
videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream body
demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of
self-isolation.

The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps one of the asanas could be
a request-asana in which Modi requests the French prime minister to
allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and
use that â?¬7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support
a few million hungry people. Surely the French will understand.

As the lockdown enters its second week, supply chains have broken,
medicines and essential supplies are running low. Thousands of truck
drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and
water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting. 

The economic crisis is here. The political crisis is ongoing. The
mainstream media has incorporated the Covid story into its 24/7 toxic
anti-Muslim campaign. An organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat,
which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was announced,
has turned out to be a â??super spreaderâ??. That is being used to
stigmatise and demonise Muslims. The overall tone suggests that
Muslims invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form
of jihad.

The Covid crisis is still to come. Or not. We donâ??t know. If and
when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with, with all the
prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class completely in
place. 

Today (April 2) in India, there are almost 2,000 confirmed cases and
58 deaths. These are surely unreliable numbers, based on woefully few
tests. Expert opinion varies wildly. Some predict millions of cases.
Others think the toll will be far less. We may never know the real
contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that the
run on hospitals has not yet begun.

Indiaâ??s public hospitals and clinics â?? which are unable to cope
with the almost 1m children who die of diarrhoea, malnutrition and
other health issues every year, with the hundreds of thousands of
tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the worldâ??s cases), with a vast
anaemic and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor
illnesses that prove fatal for them â?? will not be able to cope with
a crisis that is like what Europe and the US are dealing with now. 

All healthcare is more or less on hold as hospitals have been turned
over to the service of the virus. The trauma centre of the legendary
All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is closed, the
hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees who live on the
roads outside that huge hospital driven away like cattle.

People will fall sick and die at home. We may never know their
stories. They may not even become statistics. We can only hope that
the studies that say the virus likes cold weather are correct (though
other researchers have cast doubt on this). Never have a people longed
so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.

What is this thing that has happened to us? Itâ??s a virus, yes. In
and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than
a virus. Some believe itâ??s Godâ??s way of bringing us to our senses.
Others that itâ??s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the
world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing
back and forth, longing for a return to â??normalityâ??, trying to
stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture.
But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it
offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for
ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and
imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a
gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our
prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our
dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly,
with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to
fight for it.

Arundhati Royâ??s latest novel is â??The Ministry of Utmost
Happinessâ?? 

Copyright © Arundhati Roy 2020



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