Chitrangada Choudhury, Aniket Aga: India’s Pandemic Response Is A Caste Atrocity // Hartosh Singh Bal: How Modi Failed the Pandemic Test
India has a sickness so serious, that even its response to the
Covid-19 pandemic betrays a fatal infection. Nowhere in the world has a
lockdown been as inhuman or imposed with such contempt for the lives of its millions of working
poor. The Modi government's turning of a health challenge into a human catastrophe and the approval of a large
section of India's elites can only be explained by casteism, which grades
people on a hereditary hierarchy of worth, and legitimises the brutalization of 'lesser beings'. The lockdown is in
effect a caste atrocity i.e. a wilful act of violence inflicted on marginalized
castes, and invisibilized in the name of halting a virus.
On Shramik trains, passengers complain of long delays – with little food or water
600 migrant workers in despair after finding their huts torched on returning to Bengaluru
Tragic: Migrant woman dies on railway platform, child plays beside body
Hartosh Singh Bal: How Modi Failed the Pandemic Test
Hartosh Singh Bal: How Modi Failed the Pandemic Test
Bharat Bhushan - Targeting labour laws: On whose behalf do states operate?
On Shramik trains, passengers complain of long delays – with little food or water
600 migrant workers in despair after finding their huts torched on returning to Bengaluru
Tragic: Migrant woman dies on railway platform, child plays beside body
Hartosh Singh Bal: How Modi Failed the Pandemic Test
On March 23, PM Modi
proclaimed he was locking down the country in four hours. Absent wages, work or
relief, millions were pushed to the brink, sparking an exodus which is yet to
let up or be officially acknowledged. When people have protested in sheer
desperation, the state has responded with teargas, thrashings and detentions.
Policymakers, the judiciary, media and academia - all dominated by the upper castes - call
these millions 'migrant workers'. But this anodyne term obfuscates how deeply
caste is intertwined with class, and how the lockdown has unleashed a mass
trauma being primarily borne by the Adivasi, Dalit and 'backward' castes of
India. Cutting across religions, they are the footloose millions who keep
India's farms, workshops and factories running, toil on roads and construction sites,
service the homes of the rich and middle classes, care for their babies, and
clear city streets and sewage lines.
Among them were the Adivasi workers crushed by a goods train, Roshan Lal, a Dalit electrician who committed suicide, and
12-year-old chilly-plucker Jamlo Madkam who collapsed after walking for four
days....
Hartosh Singh Bal: How Modi Failed the Pandemic Test
India has been under a
lockdown to stem the spread of the coronavirus for two months. On March 25, the
first day of the lockdown, India had 618 confirmed cases and 13 deaths. As India is easing the
lockdown now, it has more than 151,000 cases and more than 4,300
deaths - a much smaller number compared with the fatalities in the United
States and various European countries, with a much smaller population. The
cases rose from 100 to 100,000 in the United States in 25 days, in Britain in
42 days.
In India, which had
the longest and strictest lockdown, the rise in cases from 100 to
100,000 took 64 days. It may suggest the
success of the Indian government’s strategy, but the almost similar trajectory
of spread of the virus and fatality rates in Bangladesh and Pakistan suggests
that other factors have had a considerable role to play. Of the 30 countries
that have registered more than 25,000 coronavirus cases, India, Pakistan and
Bangladesh are among the countries with the
lowest levels of testing per million people, which raises questions
about whether statistics on the slow spread of the pandemic in South Asia are a
result only of the lack of testing.
But the low fatality
rates in South Asia seem to be real because no evidence has surfaced of
large-scale underreporting of deaths across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It
seems that a major factor explaining the lower fatality rates in South Asia is
demographics. The median age in India is 29 years, 23 in Pakistan and 27 in
Bangladesh, while the median age is 38 in the United States, 40.5 in Britain
and 45 in Italy....
Bharat Bhushan - Targeting labour laws: On whose behalf do states operate?
