17 April 2020
I am not one for speeches, however, the two interactions, if you can call them that by PM Modi and Mr Rahul Gandhi, were simply too apart to compare. I don’t buy it when people take pole positions on their latest rounds, on the PM on 14 April and on Mr Gandhi yesterday. I feel that the PM has consistently forsaken press conferences, so when some journalists and social media influences still want to compare him with Mr Rahul Gandhi who does them, they are being unfair. I am biased, that as a democracy, may be we needed to have a law that ensured the PM addressed a Press conference at least once a month, and in times when an emergency of this nature of invoking the National Disaster Management Act 2005 is concerned, it should be a daily affair as long as it is in force. My prejudice is due to my understanding that the PM is the first level of accountability of a democratically elected government and answerable to the people through the press. It is also because, without this pressure from the PMO, most tiers of our labyrinthine and obtuse bureaucracy will divert from the express nature of response, hence for overall efficiency of the government, we need this pressure from the top.
A pandemic like the one we are facing is the first time, in our modern human existence, one where the science is being able to keep pace with the pathogen. We knew much about the characteristics of the disease soon after the outbreak occurred in Wuhan, though it was from Taiwan, but within a fortnight the WHO too delivered a clear clinical picture of the contagion. Since then, we have seen how from developing test kits, to the various molecules already existent and being tried out, to the race for a vaccine, the response of the scientific community has been very focussed and markedly one of altruism. Only a Pandemic could have pulled off the collaboration with Glaxo-SmithKline and Sanofi, the twin towers of big Pharma in developing a vaccine. It has also made branded companies retool and produce masks, coffin/body bags, PPEs, gloves and visors as seen from Italy’s fabled stable to India’s HLL, M&M. Automakers from old Ford to new Tesla are tying up to produce ventilators. It is humanity getting a sense of a challenge where the odds were existential and hence rallying around to contribute their collective mite to overcome this disease.
So one can be surprised to see Dr Sambit Patra still do his purgatory tricks, after Mr Rahul Gandhi’s conference.https://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/laughing-strategically-and-rolling-on-the-floor-dynamically-sambit-patra-mocks-rahul-gandhi-over-covid-19-press-conference/1930408/ It will take us much to recount to him, as many did replying to his tweets, quote tweeting those of Mr Gandhi which now seem prescient about the extent of the Covid19 challenge that has gripped India. Of course, there is a theory why Dr Patra a man of medicine himself, is disbelieving the need for strategic testing, or how mass testing now can never catch up with the infection in India. He is not alone. There are many highly capable people who think that when we step out of lock down, on 3 May 2020 now, we would be in a Coronavirus free India. We can go back to whatever we were doing. There are many who buy seriously that it is Mr Bill Gates and his Vaccine Manifesto that is driving us to think that normal will come only when the world is completely vaccinated from this Covid19, because the virus may not have granted immunity to those who suffered mildly from it, as Korean results show now. It is because of how we employ our intelligence as this BBC article shows, through Cognitive Reflection Test. (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200406-why-smart-people-believe-coronavirus-myths) So our social media and web based media offer us a deluge of information which we distil over time and end up actually in silos where our cross references are more like echo chambers than cross examination of inferences!
I would like to believe that India has a larger problem because, for some time now, Indians are being conditioned to ‘fall in line’ to rally under the flag and to not question authority. There is a whole generation of Indians who benefited from a path breaking move of 1991 which ‘liberalised’ the economy, taking nearly a fourth of India into a new middle class that is larger than the size of USA’s population. It is these people educated in India’s best schools and colleges, who are either now permanently settled abroad or keep frequenting overseas, who think that India needs to become socially more conservative and democratically less liberal! The resonance that Mr Patra’s take would have with this subset of our population is such that you would wonder how they have surrendered their intellect and abdicated their democratic duty so readily. Even in an emerging scenario a rational mind would play options, would want to reflect on whether there was a better way, seeking to continually undertake midcourse corrections. In their personal lives, they would have all done it, to reach where they have, yet they have now submitted to social conditioning of becoming camp followers.
In normal times, this will not have costs like they will in abnormal ones like now! Ideas dry up, when people are not forthcoming. Indian authorities responses to Covid19 has a ring of staleness, weariness, and appear to follow what ever USA and other developed countries are considering or doing, resultant is that we are playing ‘catch up’ with the contagion. You can see how the current change in testing strategy is reactive, after witnessing the rising trend of case positives, you can see how indigenous kits are yet to roll out despite the fan fare with which they were announced, and we remain tied down with supplies from China. Would it not have been better, if our media could have tracked what happened to the consignment of 1 million test kits ordered from Germany by ICMR in the last week of March 2020? Would it not be better to know where the MyLabs kit has reached as serial/mass production? Would we not feel better if we knew how HLL is shaping on the 1 crore PPE kits ordered by the Government? In USA, CNN ran a report, saying Elon Musk did not deliver on his promise of offering FDA-approved 1255 ResMed, Philips & Medtronic ventilators that he had purchased from China. Mr Musk not just asked Californian governor to confirm whose spokesperson was the source of the CNN story, but also started tweeting receipts of his shipments, when this entire affair was not a business transaction but an act of philanthropy on Tesla’s part. Soon individual counties and hospitals confirmed receiving ventilators and FoxNews had a field day!https://www.driving.co.uk/news/elon-musk-hits-back-reports-tesla-ventilators-never-delivered-hospitals/
What Indians are missing is democracy’s basic tool to keep up the efficiency by calling out and holding people to account. Delays during a pandemic are like Justice, which when delayed is as good as denied, only this is deadlier! We are also missing an activist judiciary, as we see how lamely the SC accepts assurances offered by the SG Mr Tushar Mehta. I will not agree with the radical view that our judiciary is now the acme of middle class morality. Dealing with issues with alacrity when middle class is involved and with wide berth when the poor and marginalised are. Yet it leaves a sour taste in the mouth, when you know that middle class got air craft, got terminal to terminal transport, got military facilities for quarantine and were safely home before we locked up, and for those stranded, AC buses to fetch them home even after the lock down, as was seen with pilgrims from Ahmedabad stranded at Haridwar. Of course we know that moving populations after enforcing a lock down would defeat the purpose of the lockdown, then why have different yardsticks? You think the hungry migrant labourer is not registering how India has let him and her down? Now can we connect the dots, connecting to that middle class swing to the conservative right? The one that denounces Leftist ideologues as Urban Naxals, Libtards, and so forth? Our leadership bar is set by us, the people, as famously declared decades ago by Chimanbhai Patel a leading light of the INC and Congress CM from our PM’s own Gujarat!
The pandemic is not going to tailor itself to our politics. Of course, commentators like Ms Swati Chaturvedi aver that the ruling party already has the narrative script for pinning this one on Muslims! I am more sanguine, that Mr Modi is evolving to an emerging situation of unprecedented scale, he has understood the scale of the crises, perhaps a tad late, (which can be said for almost all leaders internationally from Mr Johnson to Mr Trump), and he has started making efforts to reach out to all sides of the aisle including CMs of the states who are equally important stakeholders. Perhaps he would soon nominate some minister to hold press briefings on his behalf as the late Mr Arun Jaitley used to do in his first term. And we would do well to heed Mr Gandhi’s caution to avoid declaring a premature victory in our campaign against Covid19 Pandemic!
indiarubberman.com 