By Ishan Shahi
Introduction
Through a narrative reconstruction of the events leading up to the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in India on March 24, 2020, and until the second wave of COVID-19 hit the country, this paper highlights that, irrespective of the trigger event, institutional incapacity, and the choices made by political authorities can significantly intensify the impact of disasters. In doing this, the paper follows the literature that traces the relationship between ‘natural’ disasters and events of massive historical consequence, with the decisions taken by political authorities and the institutional capacity of the particular society in dealing with adversity.
The paper emphasises that events like the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on society should be regarded as hazards/disasters with natural origins, as failing to do so enables those in positions of political authority to circumvent accountability. It is thus necessary to examine emergencies of inaction and incapacity with the same level of attention and sophistication as exceptions of state excess, such as wars, suspension or subversion of the constitutional order, and suspension of civil liberties.
For this, I am examining three works that explore the relationship between tangible political decisions and policy directives, and how these have made a bad situation worse. The first is Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which traces how crisis events, such as wars and natural disasters, have been used to impose massive privatisation drives on populations in conditions of helplessness that would otherwise have resisted these actions. Ilan Kelman’s Disaster by Choice, shows how actions of political authorities transform natural hazards into disasters. Collapse by Vladislav Zubok is the third work from which I draw upon; it differs from the other two in that it only traces a series of political choices that intensified a crisis in the soviet economy to a level that led to the death of 5 million people across the former Soviet Union and its collapse and the remaking of the global order.
The first section of the paper engages with the three works mentioned above to establish a theoretical framework that helps us examine the narrative reconstruction of events outlined in the timeline in the next section. In the third and concluding section, I will outline why it is necessary to view disasters as political phenomena, ensuring that institutional capacity to deal with these events can be developed. The natural origins of any hazard are not used as carte blanche by personnel and institutions with political power and responsibility to protect the lives of people, not just as a matter of moral and political obligation, but also from the logic of governmentality and ensuring the well-being of the population as a facet of state power.
This essay has steered clear of the still unsettled controversy regarding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, as its arrival and initial spread in India were not something the government could have done much about. Whatever the causes or intentions behind the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, they do not alter the actions of the government and their interpretation after the pandemic began spreading in India.
Section I: From Hazard to Disaster
As mentioned earlier, the three major works that we examine here are connected by their examination of the actions taken, choices made in the face of natural hazards and political and economic crises. These choices intensified the initial risk and impact to a catastrophic extent. While this is a common thread that runs through the three works, each of these books make specific arguments that extend beyond this commonality. This section will examine the arguments of each of these works and highlight the common theme that extends across them.
The starting point for Kelman’s work is the 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He demonstrates how the impact of the earthquake, from which Haiti has still not recovered, was compounded by human actions both before and after the disaster. Haiti’s history of colonial exploitation and foreign intervention in its domestic affairs had already compromised its ability to cope with natural hazards like the earthquake. These had created conditions of deep inequality and haphazard planning such that, despite a known history of earthquakes, the Presidential Palace and UN office of the country had collapsed like a wedding cake, and the country’s United Nations head had died(Kelman, 2022).
While global resources were mobilised to conduct rescue and reconstruction efforts in Haiti, they were not without significant shortcomings:
“Governments and organisations pledged around US$13 billion of aid and delivered perhaps half. Remittances and individual donations are harder to track and they provided support to people who had lost everything except their own lives. The people’s continuing desperation did not stop the political shenanigans. Days after the earthquake, the US military took over airport operations at Port-au-Prince, sparking a backlash from countries and agencies whose aircraft were unable to land. As the political fights brewed, Haitians were left needing the basics.” (Kelman, 2022)
As time dragged on, the promised housing was never built, and the UN soldiers tasked with the reconstruction and rescue operations also introduced a Cholera epidemic for which the United Nations apologised and offered compensation only in 2016. Kelman examines disasters from a framework of vulnerability and choice, where the choices made by people, particularly those in positions of power before and after the occurrence of a trigger event, create disasters that have catastrophic impacts. He then goes on to show how people in both resource-rich and poor societies have made choices that have allowed them to reduce their vulnerability to disasters. He cites examples from Bangladesh’s community-based program for early warning and mitigating the impact of cyclones, as well as Japan’s building codes, which mitigated the effect of the 2011 earthquake; however, the unpreparedness for the tsunami resulted in the Fukushima nuclear accident (Kelman, 2022).
Klein’s work is focussed more on the machinations through which the neo-liberal vision championed by the likes of Milton Friedman and his followers. This vision entails the withdrawal of the state from all social functions like healthcare, education, and provision of public goods like electricity and water supply and the handover of these to private hands. This transfer has in many if not most cases happened in the context of emergencies like natural disasters, wars, political coups during which civil liberties remained suspended. While the election of Ronald Reagan in the USA is seen as a watershed moment in neoliberalism’s ascension to the status of global hegemony, Klein traces its origins to an earlier moment: Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile (Klein, 2007).
Klein focuses on how these policies are introduced in conditions where the population of a country is in a state of shock from a natural disaster or political emergency and the people are unable to react to the radical changes being imposed on them, including the literal shocks given to likely dissidents and protesters during the Pinochet regime. The more immediately pertinent example that Naomi Klein shows us is that of the displacement of New Orleans’ residents from public housing and opening it up to private developers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The natural event provided a trigger for property developers to spring into action and acquire land that had previously been used for public housing.
This shows how the trends of increasing privatisation and concentration of wealth and public resources which is the part of the accepted ideology of the ruling class, are not suspended for the sake of compassion during periods of crisis like natural disasters. Instead they go into overdrive so that particular projects which would have been met with the intense protests in another period can be pushed through without any significant pushback from a population which is struggling to protect it lives, livelihoods, and belongings.
Zubok’s work is the most political in the sense that the origin of the disaster narrated in this work is entirely political in nature. With no natural trigger event but a series of political choices that were made during a socio-economic crisis that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the political chaos that emerged, ultimately resulted in 3.4 million premature deaths of working age men in Russia during the 1990s (Zubok, 2022). The indecisiveness and lack of political tact of Mikhail Gorbachev led not only to the failure of the reforms that he had initiated but also to the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Zubok’s monograph shows how Gorbachev’s idealism and indifference to the functioning of the Soviet economy and polity created a situation where every step he took resulted in one mishap after another. The instinct of self-destruction shown by both Gorbachev and later Yeltsin was encouraged and cheered on by the Western press and leaders, who managed to get the Soviet and later Russian leadership to effectively sign off on the pillaging of the states they headed. This process came to a stop only during the late 2000s.
As we proceed to the next section, it is essential to keep in mind the threads outlined here.
Section II: Timeline(s)
The COVID-19 pandemic reached India in 2020, with the first confirmed case being detected on January 30, 2020, in Kerala from a student who had returned from Wuhan, China. In the following months, as cases began to spread, the Prime Minister called for a voluntary Janata Curfew from 7:00 AM to 9:00 PM on March 22, 2020, and again on March 24, 2020. A nationwide lockdown was announced for an initial period of 21 days, commencing on March 25, 2020.
At that point, the coronavirus had claimed 12 lives and a total of 564 infections (Hebbar, 2020). While the lockdown was intended to allow the government time to ramp up healthcare infrastructure, the public messaging conveyed that the virus would subside after the 21 days of the lockdown, with the Prime Minister invoking the 18 days it took for the mythical Mahabharat battle to be won (Tiwari, 2020). The first phase of the lockdown had a severely crippling effect, especially on the informal and, to some extent, even formal sector of the economy, as most governmental, commercial, and industrial activities were ordered shut, with a few exceptions for essential services. Crucially, all means of long-distance transportation, both public and private, were closed down, except those transporting essential goods(Bhalla, 2020).
The lockdown rules were amended periodically through sequential lockdowns and unlocks. As the Public Distribution System (PDS) depends on the beneficiary’s domicile, seasonal migrants could not fall back on this safety net. In this scenario, the workers were forced to move from their place of work back to their villages. It was an arduous task, as all forms of public transportation were closed down, leading people to walk or cycle with their families hundreds, even thousands of kilometres on asphalt in the Indian summers.
The total number of migrants who returned to their home states, as reported by the government, was over 11.4 million. This number was the estimate provided by the Ministry of Labour and Employment in response to a question raised in the lower house of parliament, based on the number of people who used public transportation.
While official numbers were not available, India witnessed an estimated 971 non-COVID-19 related deaths between March 25 and May 1 2020, of which 96 died on trains (Paliath, 2021). The extent of the hardship and instances of resistance by migrant workers during the initial lockdown have been documented in a report by the Migrant Workers Solidarity Network(Migrant Worker Solidarity Network, 2020).
During the peak of the first wave, the country was recording 90,000 cases of COVID every day. As the peak of the first wave of the pandemic began to subside, the government relaxed the restrictions and started patting itself on the back. They had managed to convince themselves that the worst of COVID had passed and that the country had done remarkably better than most first-world countries.
This did not mean that day-to-day political operations came to a standstill. On September 24 2020, the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020; the Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and farm Services Act 2020 and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020, received the assent of the President and were signed into law. The three laws purport to provide the option to the farmer to sell their crops outside the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee system to private players, remove limits on stockholding and close the option for the farmers to approach the courts if the private buyer refuses to pay them; instead, they would have to approach a mediation committee headed by the sub-divisional magistrate. These changes, the farmers allege, were a precursor to the effective removal of minimum support prices at which the government procures food grains and the corporate takeover of the agrarian economy.
The protests exploded in November 2020, with farmer organisations from the states of Punjab, Haryana, and Western Uttar Pradesh leading the charge. The farmers approaching the borders of Delhi were met with police violence and water cannons, leading to days of intense confrontation between the Delhi Police and the farmers. Subsequently, the farmers settled in mass encampments on different borders of Delhi with Haryana, Panjab, and Western Uttar Pradesh. After a series of meetings with the government, which had no meaningful outcome, the farmers announced a protest march into Delhi on January 26 2021. The march ended with police violence and vandalism by protesters. While television news figures described this as the watershed event that would lead to the protest fizzling out, it had the exact opposite effect, with the numbers at the protests increasing and the protest expanding to other parts of the country.
The protest continued till the Prime Minister announced the repeal of the farm laws in November 2021, and the laws were repealed the next month. This brought the protest to an end, but the attempt to push the farm laws through during the pandemic deprived the government of the institutional and political capacity it needed elsewhere. This also resulted in large-scale congregations, which only added to the ballooning number of COVID-19 infections.
After the first wave had peaked, the restrictions on movement and congregation were relaxed. During this period, various elections were also held, and a set of extremely contentious farm laws were passed by September, which led to massive protests being organised around the capital city of Delhi from November 2020 onwards. On January 16, 2021, the vaccination campaign began, initially targeting healthcare workers and the elderly. By February 2021, daily cases had fallen below 9,000. However, the daily number of cases soon started to rise, on 8th April 2021, when the Prime Minister declared that the country had been able to stand up to the pandemic with limited resources and infrastructure and did not need vaccines to defeat COVID-19 (Hindustan Times, 2021).
The second wave of COVID-19 began in the first half of February 2021 (Pandey & Nazmi, 2021). Despite the government’s boundless optimism, the second wave of COVID-19 hit India with such ferocity that the government was effectively paralysed, and whatever existed of the medical infrastructure failed to cope with the pressure of mounting cases. The second wave of COVID-19 in India, to the extent it was recorded, was the largest faced by any country in terms of daily infections and mortality. The total number of infections recorded on May 6, when the second wave reached its peak, was 414,280. Correspondingly, the highest official figure for mortality was 4,529 on May 18.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the government did not acknowledge that community transmission of the virus was taking place in India. While at this point, this seems like a moot point, it is not a matter of mere terminology as it also determines the approach of the healthcare system towards the spread of the disease(Dasgupta & Priya, 2021).
The collapse of the public healthcare infrastructure was a characteristic of the second wave of COVID, as seen in the widespread shortage of oxygen and the incapacity of cremation and burial centres, and the underreporting of deaths in official figures. The government had invited tenders for 162 oxygen plants in October 2020, and by the third week of April 2021, only 33 had been installed and operational (Lalwani & Saikia, 2021). The lack of oxygen also led to the emergence of nascent oxygen black markets, where oxygen cylinders were sold at a significant markup. With the rising death toll, frames of electric crematoriums began to melt in cities (PTI, 2021a), and even the ad-hoc crematoriums started by district administrations had very long queues.
In Delhi, pet crematoriums were also introduced for the cremation of those who died during that period (Anand, 2021). With the rising death toll, the sight of burning pyres and long lines of corpses to crematoriums became a source of embarrassment to the governments at various levels, and they invested their energies in covering up the crematoriums (Tripathi, 2021). Especially during the second wave, underreporting was common for the statistics of the dead and the infected. The official number of the dead was so low that a visit to the crematorium (Biswas, 2021) and a comparison to death certificates issued (Desai, 2021) exposed the extent of undercounting. When alternative estimates by international media were released, exceeding the government’s data by multiple times (Gamio & Glanz, 2021), they were strongly denied by the government (PTI, 2021b).
Another gruesome visual of the period was dead bodies floating along the river Ganga (Singh & Rehman, 2021). This had come to pass because the poorer families were priced out of the cremation market after being priced out of the hospital, medicine, and oxygen markets. They could do little more than bury their dead in shallow graves on the banks of rivers. These shallow graves were exposed by the river when the water levels rose. At the same time, many of the dead were simply dumped into rivers, leading to multiple reported instances of stray dogs gnawing on the dead bodies (Brogle, 2021).
The COVID-19 pandemic: Incapacity and choices in the face of disaster.
The timeline of events during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the limitations in the capacity of the government in facing up to the challenge that the pandemic posed; it also exposed the choices made by the government when it chose to dedicate its resources to the purposes that had little to do with combating the epidemic and focused more on moving forward with other priorities that it had.
The actions of the government during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate continuities with the trends highlighted in the three works in the first section. India’s trajectory of development had largely ignored the need to foster a robust public healthcare system. During the pandemic, the sudden nationwide lockdown and messianic proclamations of providing vaccines for the world formed a significant part of the government’s rhetoric.
At a stage when the spread of the infection was mostly concentrated around Mumbai city and the state of Kerala. The government made a choice which forced its informal workers to undertake a long and arduous journey back to their villages, during which they were again subjected to inhumane checks and quarantine measures.
The pandemic provided the government with an opportunity to initiate agrarian market reform at a time when most of the population was reeling from the economic shock of the first Covid lockdown and the GDP had contracted by 24% in the April-June quarter of 2020. The government’s failure should not divert our attention from its intention to introduce unpopular reforms when the population was in a state of shock (Klein, 2007).
The COVID-19 pandemic, which would have spread and caused massive damage to the Indian population, was exacerbated by the government’s choices, whether these were due to inaction, misguided priorities, or an urge to make grandiose political gestures (Kelman, 2022).
Added to this is the fact that the government’s actions betrayed a striking indifference to the reality of how India’s society actually functions. The blinkers under which the government operated made it feel like many of its actions were driven by an instinct seeking validation and not a preparation for a crisis about to hit the country(Zubok, 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the limitations of society in a disaggregated form, where industrial, scientific, logistical, and social capabilities were all put to the test, highlighting the interconnections of complex networks upon which functioning modern societies, including ours, rest (Latour, 2000, 2005).
I am not the first making the case for looking at disasters as a consequence of human political choices. Yet it is worth restating, as not doing so allows political actors to move on without accountability and preempts the formation of institutional memory that is necessary for building the capability to deal with large-scale natural hazards, such as epidemic outbreaks, earthquakes, tsunamis, and cyclones. We will do well to remember that, in terms of empirical details like mortality and impact on the economy, the COVID-19 pandemic easily dwarfs the mortality of wars that independent India has fought and the deaths that took place during the 1975-77 emergency combined.
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Dr. Ishan Shahi has a PhD in Sociology on the Production of World-Class Space in Banaras. from Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay
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