write a diary entry on lockdown vacation
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The Prime Minister’s call to light lamps, torches, candles or cell phone flashlights inside homes on Sunday night found support among the middle classes in Indian cities. Focused solely on urban India, the media coverage though didn’t offer much of a sense for how people in villages responded to the Prime Minister’s call. In any case, the invitation to join in a symbolic show of resolve to overcome the coronavirus threat needed to have been accompanied by a candid discussion of the steps the government was planning to take to manage the new health threat.
The details of the country’s poor infrastructural preparedness are familiar: the doctors and other health care workers don’t have sufficient protective equipment to work with, a fact that has made many private hospitals turn away people with even a normal flu; the number of tests being done to identify patients with the coronavirus is highly inadequate; the quarantine space within existing hospitals is severely limited.
It would have also been good to see the Prime Minister share the measures that the government was putting in place to help the lakhs of poor migrants fleeing the cities for their native places and to help the lakhs of poor farmers incurring heavy losses due to the shutting of market and transport facilities.
It would have been good to see the Prime Minister ask Indians not to stigmatize the patients who have tested positive for the coronavirus and the health care workers who are treating them. Numerous cases of social boycott or stigmatizing of such individuals have been reported from across the country. These are clearly overreactions since quarantining helps isolate the virus and most of those affected by the coronavirus are likely to survive.
Addressing issues of significance like these alongside would have lent substance to the call to participate in a symbolic show of strength.
Enthusiastic as the show of solidarity was on Sunday night, the lights, firecrackers, songs and chants appeared as expressions lacking in depth. The ritual of being together seemed to merely want the coronavirus gone and normalcy restored, without a sense of grief about those who had died or were suffering from the virus or the lakhs of poor migrants and farmers who are bearing the brunt of a lockdown done for the collective safety of the country. And, really, how could anyone burst firecrackers at this time? The pollution caused from it is harmful people with respiratory disorders who are among the most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
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It is deeply saddening to see the crisis occasion being used to vilify and target Indian Muslims in social and news media over the last few days. Until then, the fight against the coronavirus had seemed like one where all Indians were in it together. The situation changed when many among those who attended the Tabligi Jammat congregation in Delhi in mid-March tested positive for the coronavirus.
It is necessary of course that those who attended the event are tested and quarantined if found positive. Given the dire necessity of avoiding large social gatherings at this time, the government shouldn’t have given the Tabligi Jammat permission to hold their meeting and the organizers shouldn’t have had their congregation even when they had legal permission for it.
And, if a few among those who attended the Delhi congregation are resisting being tested by doctors, one needs to ask why they might be doing so even as we criticise their conduct. Do they fear social boycott in their families and neighbourhood? Do they fear being locked up in prison for having participated in the Delhi event?
And, if Friday prayer gatherings continue being held in any mosque, those have to be criticised too, the way we need do for any other religious congregation during the lockdown. But it is silly and dangerous to hold all of the 17-crore people who make up the culturally diverse Muslim communities across India responsible for local incidents.
Hundreds of fake video clips, news items and memes accusing Indian Muslims of conspiring to spread the coronavirus and even asking for their social and economic boycott have recently started circulating on social media. In response, the Chief Ministers of Andhra, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka have asked that the fight against the virus not be lent a communal angle. But a lot more needs to be done: to identify and penalize the perpetrators of malicious content, to get media to be socially responsible in their work, to get people to stay away from communal propaganda.