It is too late! The coronavirus or COVID-19 horse has bolted and closed the barn doors. Despite Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s total lockdown, the number of people testing positive for the virus has risen exponentially during the past week from 200 in three days to more than 400 in a single day.
When Modi declared his lockdown on March 24 the total number of infected persons was 476 and there had been nine deaths. Nine days later, despite the lockdown, it has reached over 2500 and deaths have crossed 70.
In the first days after Modi announced the lockdown the whole of India heaved a sigh of relief. The prime minister had acted decisively: India had taken the extreme measure that had enabled China to halt the spread of the virus at a far earlier stage than the European countries, which were only then beginning to impose complete lockdowns on their cities. But in the nine days since it was declared the lockdown on India seems to have had no perceptible effect on the rate of spread of the disease. The slope of the upward curve of COVID-positive cases is just as steep as it is in Europe and South Korea and only marginally flatter than in the U.S.
Does that mean that the lockdown has not worked? Not necessarily. Some part of the increase is no doubt due to better and more extensive testing. But the main reason is that the past 48 hours are atypical because the data have been heavily skewed by the discovery of a single giant COVID hotspot right in the heart of Delhi. This is the headquarters of the Tablighi Jamaat in the almost entirely Muslim suburb of Nizamuddin – where the great 14th-century Sufi saint Nizamuddin Aulia and 19th-century famous poet Mirza Ghalib lie buried.
In the communally surcharged atmosphere that the Modi government has created during the past six years, it is not surprising that there is more than a hint of reproach in the reporting of the Tablighi Jamaat’s dereliction. The Delhi police, that felt no qualms about doing nothing to stop the communal carnage that was going on before its eyes in Northeast Delhi for two whole days from Feb. 25-26, has lost no time in slapping a slew of cases against the head of the Jamaat Maulana Saad and other office bearers, under four separate sections of the Indian penal code.
- Dereliction linked to communal animosity
But a close look at how the dereliction occurred shows that it too can be traced directly back to the communal animosity that Modi has fostered so sedulously ever since he became the prime minister of India.
The origins of the tragedy lie in a grand religious function the Jamaat held at Nizamuddin locality of Delhi. An estimated 4,000 people attended it, including at least 240 persons from other countries. The gathering took place from March 10-11 when India had not even announced restrictions on foreign travel let alone canceled the visas it had granted to foreigners to visit India. The first of those measures were announced on March 13, and by March 18 all but a few airlines had canceled their flights to and from India, leaving many of the foreign visitors, who were almost certainly the source of the infection, stranded in Nizamuddin. Two days later Delhi was in quarantine; four days later Delhi had its first trial lockout for 24 hours, and another 48 hours later the country was under total lockdown.
That was the root cause of the congestion that made COVID-19 spread like wildfire among the visitors stranded at Jamaat headquarters. But even if they could not go home could not the congestion at the building not have been avoided. In fact, by March 24, most of the 4,000 participants had already departed to their homes in India. That is the reason why 110 new cases have been discovered in southern states of Tamil Nadu among those who had been in Nizamuddin, and 67 in Andhra Pradesh. As many as 300 participants had come from Kashmir, which is also reporting cases.
But being perfectly aware of the government’s relentless emphasis on social distancing, why did the Tablighi Jamaat officials not at least disperse the remaining stranded participants widely throughout Delhi? One needs to be a Muslim in India in these dark days, to understand the question.
Even if hotels and guest houses had been prepared to accept Muslim guests, which in Delhi all are not, the risk of contracting COVID-19 was still preferable to dispersal and isolation. The cold-bloodedly incited, bestial, communal riots that had torn northeast Delhi apart, killing 53 persons (44 of whom were Muslims) and destroying 250 billion rupees ($3.5 billion) worth of property had ended barely a fortnight earlier. The police had openly sided with the killers and their Hindu neighbors had given only lip sympathy to the victims. Can anyone blame them for deciding to stay together instead of taking the risk of being stranded indefinitely in a hostile environment where their lives could at any moment be in danger?
- Wakeup call
What happened at Nizamuddin should be a wake-up call to all Indians to look closely at themselves before they start pointing the finger of blame at others. The real nightmare is only just beginning. One crucial failure of planning and foresight in the lockdown has already sent tens of thousands of migrant workers struggling back to their home villages. This is the failure of both the central and state governments to understand that to keep the workers in the cities their employers had to be compensated for the near-total loss of business they would suffer. Only then would the government has acquired the moral right to prosecute those employers and landlords who failed, or refused, to keep their workers housed and fed during this time of trial.
Today migrant workers who have been thrown to the wolves in the towns are streaming into their home villages and hamlets by tens of thousands every day. State governments are scrambling to regulate their return, testing and then clearing or quarantining them. But the tests they are using, mainly the temperature test can only catch those who already have the symptoms. As many or more will still be in the asymptomatic stage. Since social distancing is almost impossible within a family, all of them will continue, unknowingly, to infect others. The worse, therefore, is still to come.
By Prem Shankar Jha
(The writer is an Indian economist, veteran journalist, and author. He served in the UN Development Program, the World Bank, and information advisor to the prime minister of India.)
