A full stop in India

Jyoti Mukul's book is a welcome study of the economic and emotional impact of the government's decision to shut down transport links to contain transmission of Covid-19

The Great Shutdown: A Story of Two Indian Summers

Editor: Jyoti Mukul

Publisher: HarperCollins India

Price: Rs 599

Pages: 372

As a resident of Mumbai, local trains have been my lifeline. I have relied on them to take me to college, work, dates, and social outings. I was shocked when train services came to an abrupt halt during the Covid-19 pandemic. I had never imagined a situation in which local travel would be deemed unsafe, and closed down to contain the spread of a deadly virus. Rail networks, after all, are the city’s veins and arteries. They enable supply of labour and leisure. They sustain livelihoods. They offer cheap and efficient transport to millions of people.

Reflecting on how the shutdown altered my relationship with Mumbai, I was forced to acknowledge what an immense privilege it is to be able to work from home or a coffee shop. While I can open my laptop anywhere, and conjure up a portable office, this option is not available to those who necessarily have to use local trains to commute to their workplaces. They were badly hit. They had to find alternatives, or lose out on their monthly earnings.

These reflections were set in motion by journalist-turned-policy analyst Jyoti Mukul’s new book called The Great Shutdown: A Story of Two Indian Summers. Her area of research is not limited to Mumbai; the whole country is her canvas. Mukul, formerly a senior journalist with Business Standard, examines the economic and emotional impact of the Indian government’s decision to shut down the “almost 68,000 kilometres-long railways network”, especially on migrant workers separated from their families. It “severed, in many cases, the only link for people to their home states.”

The insensitive manner in which decisions affecting their lives were made and implemented has been written about in many other books including Harsh Mander’s Locking Down the Poor: The Pandemic and India’s Moral Centre, Samina Mishra’s Jamlo Walks, Puja Changoiwala’s Homebound, and Barkha Dutt’s To Hell and Back: Humans of Covid. Jyoti Mukul’s book is a welcome addition to this body of work.

She reminds us that the only time when railway services had been interrupted simultaneously all over India was over 46 years ago when, on May 8, 1974, the All India Railwaymen’s Federation went on a national strike to protest the arrest of George Fernandes — the organiser of the strike — and more than a thousand other union leaders. The author adds that the Indira Gandhi government stepped up and “roped in the territorial army to run train services”.

This book chronicles the numerous blunders and miscalculations made by the Narendra Modi government in its multi-pronged approach to reduce transmission. For starters, it points to the absence of any “clear reason” as to why train services were stopped before domestic air travel. While the author does not explicitly name class as a differentiating factor as far as customers are concerned, she notes the vital significance of trains for “long-distance travellers, especially for those who do not have airports in their city or cannot afford flights”.

The book compels us to consider what’s worse than negligence and incompetence — covering up, passing the buck or blocking access to information. The exasperated author reveals how her queries through the Right to Information Act were dodged, transferred or delayed. She writes, “The Indian government had no clue about the health of its own employees, even though it was at the helm of the fight against the pandemic.” When she sought data from the National Highways Authority of India and the Indian Railways, they could not produce “consolidated numbers of simple things like monthly toll collections from the national highways and money spent on providing refreshments to Shramik Special passengers.”

It would be foolhardy to claim that people who travel by air did not suffer much. Thankfully, this book does not engage in such silly posturing. It takes into account the hardships of people from small towns who took the earliest flights available to Delhi and Mumbai, and were stuck there because it was impossible to get public transport for last-mile connectivity.

In contrast to the public plaudits for healthcare workers, it shows how cruelly airline staff were treated in many neighbourhoods after all the hard work they had put in to fly people to safety. The book weaves in a poignant first-person account from an unnamed Air India air hostess on the humiliation and harassment several such airline crew members faced. Local authorities put up a poster outside her house, indicating that she and her husband had returned from overseas. As a result, neighbours looked at them as if they had the disease.

Air India has messed up on several fronts in the past but, to its credit, it stood by its employees and lashed out at “vigilante resident welfare associations” involved in “ostracizing the crew, obstructing them from performing their duty or even calling in the police, simply because the crew travelled abroad in their course of duty.” Air India urged the public to recall that “many a spouse, parent, sibling, child and near and dear ones have been brought home safe and secure from affected countries, thanks to the heroic efforts of these Air India crew”.

What lessons did the government learn from its experience of (mis)managing the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic? How did it apply to them during the second wave? Why was the strategy of a national lockdown abandoned? Were the reasons scientific or electoral? What were the alternatives that the government could have pursued for the well-being of citizens? Could India have learnt better from best practices and disasters unfolding in other countries?

The author’s analysis is based on extensive interviews, news reports, government circulars, public health data, parliamentary proceedings, and court orders. She concludes the book with a preliminary exploration of immunity certificates and vaccine passports in the context of international travel. It is intriguing but too brief. Hopefully, a sequel is in the making.