COVID-19 and India’s Trail of Tears

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has made plainly visible what has always been true, viz. that in capitalist nation-states, an electorate's voting decisions are a matter of life and death. In the year 2020, the people of India are paying with their lives for the election victory in May 2019 of the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its strongman Prime Minister Narendra Modi.The COVID-19 crisis could not have arrived at a more opportune time for the BJP government, rocked as it was by the large-scale protests that had erupted following the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December 2019. The Act expedites the granting of Indian citizenship status to non-Muslim religious minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, but withholds this privilege from Muslim applicants. This is the first time that religious profiling, prohibited by the Indian Constitution, will explicitly be used to deny Indian citizenship to Muslim applicants. Home Minister Amit Shah had stated in the Indian Parliament in summer 2019 that the National Register of Citizens (NRC), a brutal bureaucratic exercise conducted in the north-eastern state of Assam that threatens nearly two million people with statelessness, would be extended to cover all of India. Widespread fears that the two initiatives would be used in conjunction with each other-whereby the NRC will declare impoverished Indian Muslims lacking requisite documents as foreigners while the CAA will ensure that they are ineligible to apply for citizenship-led to nationwide protests.Millions of people across the country, of all ages and religions, ethnic and caste backgrounds, and of varied political persuasions, came out into the streets to protest the anti-Muslim character of the new law. Young people were the first to dominate these demonstrations. The student marchers' calls for protest were echoed across Indian society, by Dalit groups, the gay community, trade unions and the entire political opposition. The scale of these protests was reminiscent of the days of India's decolonisation struggle: a Bharat Bandh, or national shutdown, called by the trade union movement brought out an estimated 250 million protesters across the country on 8 January 2020 (Panicker 2020). If there was an initial concern with brandishing the multi-religious character of the opposition to government-imposed anti-Muslim measures, it soon gave way to an unapologetic resistance that refused to downplay Muslim

Punt Politics as Failure of Health System Stewardship: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic Response in Brazil and Mexico

“…In India, national responses were swift, severe, and uniform, but the country still became the pandemic focal point of the pandemic in May of 2021. Reopening was fragmented across subnational governments and rifts between national and state-level policy making will be a determinant of outcomes [79] , [80] , [81] , [82] . The U.S. under Trump and the UK are cases of high-income countries where populism led to disdain for public health science of NPI at the national level.…”

The Perilous Mix of Populism and Pandemics: Lessons from COVID-19

“…Modi also weaponized COVID-19 restrictions against political opponents, limiting travel and public gatherings to extinguish demonstrations against controversial legislation. Moreover, Modi used emergency pandemic powers to detain key individuals from Muslim protests against the government and to blame Muslims for the virus (Mathur 2020).…”

Not far enough: Public health policies to combat COVID-19 in Mexico’s states

“…Latin America became a global epicenter of SARS-CoV2 virus infections and deaths from its associated disease, COVID-19, over the summer of 2020. The pandemic that started in Wuhan, China, at the beginning of 2020, quickly passed to Europe, Canada and the USA [1][2][3]. Despite the fact that Latin America only has 8% of the global population, since the last week of May it has consistently contributed more than 40% of the daily deaths in the world [4,5].…”

“…On March 24, the official beginning of phase 2, "community transmission", was declared at the national level, thus suspending non-essential government activities and reinforcing confinement measures. During the months of March, April, May and the first weeks of June, 2020, the national health authorities did not recommend the use of face masks for the general population, despite the evidence suggesting that their use is effective in mitigating contagion [2,15,[21][22][23]. Thus, compared to most Latin American countries, Mexico lagged behind in the application of national measures of physical distancing and containment of the epidemic, starting from the date of the first detected case of COVID-19.…”