Unmasking India's Covid response

When the Mask Came Off

Authors: Harsh Mander, Natasha Badhwar and Anirban Bhattacharya

Publisher: Yoda Press

Pages: 264

Price: Rs 550

Harsh Mander, Natasha Badhwar and Anirban Bhattacharya’s edited volume will remind you of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic if you have forgotten. It documents the humanitarian crises that unfolded due to the Indian state’s “sudden, comprehensive and punishing lockdown” imposed on March 24, 2020. These are painful narratives of joblessness, mass hunger, forced migration, and the loss of dignity.

This book appears to target readers who are already suspicious or critical of the story being told about India’s successful handling of the public health catastrophe unleashed by the virus. It seeks to hold the central and state governments responsible for hardships faced by sex workers, homeless persons, ragpickers, sanitation workers, daily wagers, disabled persons, small farmers, Kashmiris, domestic workers, university students, and many other groups.

Harsh Mander is the Director of the Centre for Equity Studies. He is also an activist and researcher who started the Karwan-e-Mohabbat campaign in solidarity with victims of communal violence. Natasha Badhwar is part of this campaign, in addition to being a writer, filmmaker and media trainer. Anirban Bhattacharya works with the Centre for Financial Accountability. He is a researcher and activist. He works on public finance, labour, democratic rights and equality. The editors have dedicated this book —a labour of love and fury — to their colleagues, Mohd Arif and Pradip Bijalwan, “both of whom died after being infected by the Covid-19 virus while providing relief to communities during the second wave of the pandemic in India.” Arif offered strength and solace to lynching-affected families in Mewat whereas Bijalwan ran a street medicine programme for homeless people and a Covid-19 clinic in Delhi.

They risked their lives to provide services that should have been provided by the state. When the Mask Came Off is, therefore, an attempt to unmask what Mr Mander calls the state’s “crimes against humanity.” This book could be read as a companion, if not sequel, to his last one titled Locking Down the Poor (2020). The new volume allows readers to gain insights from a number of scholars, activists, teachers and volunteers. For instance, Shirin Choudhary draws attention to the plight of sex workers who could not access relief packages as they do not have ration cards. They were forced to borrow groceries from shopkeepers who demanded “sexual favours” in return. Niyati Sharma and Swati Singh’s essay “A Call for Help: Responding to Distress Calls during the Lockdown” calls out the e-coupon system for non-ration card holders to get rations from shops. Migrant workers could not get food without “a mobile phone with sufficient balance, access to the internet, the requisite luck to actually get through to a government helpline number and have the officer hear them out, and the ability to fill online forms.”

Sagar Kumbhare points out the impossibility of physical distancing in 80-100 square foot one-room houses cramped with six to 10 sanitation workers. Highlighting injustices along caste and class lines in the essay “Sanitation Workers: At the Bottom of the Frontline against Covid”, he writes, “The government seems to have hung a death warrant around their necks sending them to the front to fight Corona without due concerns about their safety.”

Radhika Alkazi’s essay “Disability Lockdown” is about the challenges encountered by disabled people who could not step out of their homes to reach places where food was being distributed. Those who managed to get there could not jostle with others for their share, or found it difficult to observe physical distancing because they needed someone to guide them physically. Some did not have the disability certificates needed to receive disability pensions. In the essay “A City Turned into a Wasteland”, Suresh Garimella and Balu Sunilraj focus on ragpickers whose livelihoods were affected when residents of apartment complexes refused entry. Though the government directed employers not to dismiss workers from their jobs, this did not help “millions in the Indian informal economy who have no identifiable employer.”

Banojyotsna Lahiri’s essay “Hunger and Lockdown: Not New to the Tea Garden Workers; Neither is Our Apathy” is about the crowded, unsanitary housing provided to workers in tea gardens. They were asked to choose between death by starvation and death by infection. Amitanshu Verma’s essay “Locked Down in a Country Not One’s Own: The Rohingyas at Nuh” is about stateless people willing to work for pay but viewed as illegal infiltrators.

This is a tough book to process, especially if getting through the day is hard enough and leaves you with little energy to learn about how others have suffered and continue to suffer. However, if your mental health permits you to stretch yourself a little, do read it.