The pandemic may be the most important event of our lifetimes. The pandemic will define the legitimacy of governments and leave-long lasting impressions of how societies responded on behalf of their citizens.
The tragedy being played out across India is beyond tragic–it was predictable, ignored, supported by willful blindness, and even encouraged. This is a period that demands catechization with a view of India’s place in the future.
One cannot exit the airport terminal without being struck with the enormity and complexity this emerging economy faces superimposed on paradox; a country with a moon and Mars mission, 140 billionaires, one of only eight countries with fixed wing aircraft carriers, and the fifth largest economy; but none of that appears self-evident at first, second, or third glance upon arrival.
And here begins the foundation of its Achilles heels, Indian unquestioning belief in national exceptionalism, population, and religion. Each is relied upon by patriots against any discussion, justification, or defence on any socio-economic, socio-political, or socio-cultural conversation. I have had the opportunity to visit India several times since 1987, travel extensively across the country, and spend time with people from all walks and strays of life.
These are the three justifications that have also contributed to the current crisis. It is this sense of false exceptionalism that led to the widespread belief that Indians had, through exposure to other pathogens, an enhanced ability to resist the effects of COVID-19; added was a sense of false exceptionalism regarding India’s medical system and bio-technological capabilities. A system that from any pragmatic and impartial view was clearly archaic.
Added to this were the ill-conceived policies, compounded by anecdotal science, that the country’s population was set into mass dispersion from urban to rural areas spreading the virus ever wider. The lockdown itself became a super-spreader event!
Indians were told that they are unlike any other people, that they would not experience the same levels and intensity of infections as others around the world. High-ranking officials advanced theories, without any scientific foundation, that higher tolerance to infection, including India’s hot climate as a mitigating influence, its younger demographics, and homeopathy were uniquely Indian defenses against the intensity of the pandemic in India. These messages contributed to teeming markets, sports events, and transportation networks.
The message was clearly unclear. On the one hand authorities attested to mass testing, preparation of mass treatment facilities, and lockdowns and restrictions to control the spread of the virus; on the other, very few businesses and social events were allowed and promoted.
Herein is the second explanation, defence, and excuse all rolled up into a single dynamic. The population is the second excuse at the heart of every rationalization and defence of every socio-ethnographic challenge, but this is an excuse for inept and failed national policies, or lack of policies, allowed to persist for far too long.
India’s population was mere 353 million at the time of its independence in 1947, 450.6 million in 1960, 555.2 million in 1970, 819.7 million in 1987, and 1 billion by 1997. Today the population is nearly 1.4 billion, a billion people more than there were at the time of independence. There is a systematic tendency to blame the population boom on something or someone external. The fact is, the population explosion since 1947 has been completely and entirely a phenomenon that occurred within the time that India has been under the governance and policies of Indians.
There have been as many opportunities as the millions of births since 1947 when India could have invested in family planning, education, and support policies to curb runaway population growth. This simply has not occurred, beyond what have amounted to nothing more than symbolic efforts.
One of the reasons that those policies have never been implemented effectively, and consistently is the third factor–religion. The politics of the day now solidly have their basis in the fear of religious sectarianism, but that’s nothing new. It has been the foundation of ongoing conflicts between Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs since 1947. The BJP is firmly founded in Hindu nationalism and all the bigotry and xenophobia that accompany such movements.
Muslims have been blamed for practicing polygamy and having large families. India’s approximately 172 million Muslims have been exempt from polygamy laws, now being challenged before the Supreme Court. This sectarian divide has been the cause of dozens of riots and thousands of deaths over the past several decades, the most recent in March of 2020. The resulting xenophobia has divided the country further, adding to a repugnant persistence of the religious bigotry, caste, and class systems. 
At the same time, neo-nationalistic policies, and religious fundamentalism have permitted the world’s largest mass gathering at the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival that draws upwards of hundreds of millions of devotees to meet at the Ganges. In April, the Kumbh Mela religious festival in the northern city of Haridwar attracted millions of Hindu pilgrims from across India to the banks of the holy Ganges River, crowded shoulder to shoulder, and with few wearing masks. Over a million pilgrims a day are expected to bathe in the sacred river. Over 5 million people are expected per day on the most auspicious days – April 12, 14, and 21, 2021 – for a total of 100 million celebrants.1
This too is an expression of xenophobia that divides the country; a far cry from the government’s arrests and stigmatization of Indian Muslims blamed for a ‘surge’ in infections after about 8,000 people in the Tablighi Jamaat congregated at the group’s compound in New Delhi in March of 2020. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government arrested 29 people, including 16 foreigners, who participated in the missionary meeting.
Also in March of 2020, Indian authorities in the northern state of Punjab quarantined about 40,000 residents from 20 villages following a COVID-19 outbreak linked to a Sikh preacher who had ignored advice to self-quarantine and attended a religious gathering – no arrests were reported.
The current tragedy is as much a result of willful blindness as willful ignorance.
India’s progress has been spectacular in some aspects, but it is far from unique or exceptional. Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and Brazil are only a few examples of societies that in 1947 were in similar or worse states of affair, all having lifted their citizens far higher than India. And yet, one can hear an almost assured and instinctive retort: ‘but India has a huge population’.
What were different were India’s population size, religious diversity, and caste system; but India has had seventy years to develop strategies for responding. Instead, India has seen the addition of one billion citizens in that period, persistent communalism, and little change in the prospects of the marginalized, with no one else to blame other than itself. On the contrary the country’s richest and influential have made their fortunes on the underprivileged and have been complicit in parasitical capitalism.
According to data from Census 2011, the number of child labourers in India is 10.1 million, of which 5.6 million are boys and 4.5 million are girls. There are also 160 million citizens considered “untouchable”, people tainted by their birth into a caste system that deems them impure, less than human. That is 160 million and growing who have almost no prospects for education, health care, or security.
The sense of exceptionalism has become a false defence against any unveiling of the underlying challenges that face India. The persistence of the underprivileged is sadly a national pretext for having accepted billions in foreign aid. Failing to improve the status of the most affected is no different than the thousands of beggars who deliberately deform themselves in order to solicit the sympathy of the passer-by.
At a recent dinner at the opulent Gymkhana Club, the official private club for high ranking diplomats and politicians in Delhi, a diplomat’s husband proudly proclaimed that India has one of the lowest divorce rates, comparing its less than one per cent to Canada’s 38 per cent, leaning on this statistic as a sign of the health of women’s rights and privileges in a rising India.
I couldn’t not be infuriated that this one statistic was being used to cloak the submerged iceberg of injustices.
Estimates suggest that each year, at least 1.5 million girls under 18 get married in India, which makes it home to the largest number of child brides in the world–accounting for a third of the global total. Nearly 16 per cent of adolescent girls aged 15-19 are currently married.2
Prime Minister Modi’s ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padao’ (Save the Girl, Educate the Girl) programme, launched in January 2015, was the first time since independence that the Indian government raised the issue of female genocide in a public campaign.3
India’s female genocide is widely attributed to poverty and illiteracy even though data and facts say otherwise. As India’s most recent census data from 2011 shows, the Child Sex Ratio (CSR), which is the ratio of girls to boys from birth to six years, is best among the poorest and least educated communities. Globally, a CSR of 950 girls to 1000 boys is considered ‘normal’. CSR in India gets worse in proportion to increases in wealth and education. The wealthiest states have a CSR of 850 and below, much lower than the national CSR of 914 in the 2011 census, itself the lowest since India’s independence. This correlation between increase in wealth and a corresponding increase in the rate of killing of girls (female infanticide) in the 0-6 years age group is repeated across the spectrum in neighbourhoods, districts, villages, cities, and states. Even a religion-wise comparison reveals that the worst CSRs are to be found among the wealthiest communities: the Sikhs and the Jains.4
It does not require genius to extrapolate why the official divorce numbers are only one per cent!
To complicate matters, corruption continues to be a major problem in the world’s largest democracy and a substantial risk not only for the ordinary citizen but also for businesses.
India slipped further on the rankings of the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) for 2019, an annual assessment by Transparency International that ranks 180 countries and territories worldwide. India dropped two spots to 80th, which it now shares with Sub-Saharan countries of Ghana and Benin.5
These are uncomfortable facts. Facts, of which political correctness prevents open discussion, and facts economic foreign policy mitigates for national interests. Facts that the ruling government in India has now attempted to conceal through censorship. Yet these facts should, must, and need to be part of 21st century policy making.
Anil Anand is a research associate with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Photo by Karthikeyan K on Unsplash.
[show_more more=”SeeEndnotes” less=”Close Endnotes”]
- “Over 2,000 COVID-19 cases detected at Haridwar Kumbh Mela in past 5 days”, 15 Apr 2021, https://www.livemint.com/news/india/over-2-000-COVID-19-cases-detected-at-haridwar-kumbh-mela-in-past-5-days-11618486690202.html
- Banerji, Rita. “A deadly politics of wealth: femicide in India” Open Democracy, August 2,2016, See: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/deadly-politics-of-wealth- femicide-in-india/
- “PM Modi Launches the ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana’ in Panipat: Highlights”, NDTV.com, January 22, 2015, See: https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/pm-modi-launches-the-beti-bachao-beti-padhao-yojana-in-panipat-highlights-730871
- Banerji, Rita. “A deadly politics of wealth: femicide in India” Open Democracy, August 2, 2016, See: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/deadly-politics-of-wealth- femicide-in-india/
- Desai D., Ronak. “India Failing To Make Progress In Its Campaign Against Corruption” Forbes, Mar 3, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronakdesai/2020/03/03/india-failing-to-make-progress-in-its-campaign-against-corruption/?sh=567c7a6fe127
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