Covid-19: What handling of the pandemic reveals about India and the world

Nobody but dyed-in-the-wool, tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists believes that the novel coronavirus, which emerged from Wuhan at the end of last year, is anything but a natural evolution. (Scientists currently think that, while it may have evolved first in bats, it jumped first to another animal — perhaps a pangolin or a civet — and then to humans.) In spite of much uninformed and irresponsible speculation early on in the pandemic, the overwhelming weight of evidence is that it is natural. It certainly is not, on the basis of everything we know at the moment, a biological weapon gone rogue — as some in the US and elsewhere implied.

It would be much more convenient if it was. For what the virus has done is somehow reveal the flaws and weaknesses in particular societies and polities — and it has disproportionately hurt those that are relatively free and relatively open, and do not put a high price on social order and “discipline”. 
 

If Beijing had actually wanted to design a mechanism that purported to reveal the “superiority” of ordered, highly supervised authoritarian societies with extra-strength and interfering states, then it could not have done better than the virus has done for it. When the fear of stern retribution for rule-breaking is combined with the sort of state capacity that is already set up for mass surveillance, then pandemic control is a lot easier than it would be otherwise. 

Chinese officials are right to praise the response of the city and people of Wuhan itself. Few cities of that great size elsewhere in the world would have been able to shut down so completely for so long. In most other places, people have sought ways of leaving the house; of avoiding institutional quarantine; of demanding that lockdowns are lifted well before the threat of the virus has actually been reduced to manageable proportions. In Wuhan itself, those basic human instincts were rendered irrelevant by the enormous power of the state. We will never know the degree to which the citizens of Wuhan were willing participants — but the control of the virus in the city it first infected is nevertheless their achievement. For patriotic citizens of the People’s Republic, Wuhan’s recent experience — culminating these days with crowded, public raves in water parks, to the fury of just about everyone else in the world — must seem like their own country’s recent history in miniature. First the pestilence and the deaths; then the long endurance in hope of a better future; and finally, the opening up.

Other countries have responded in their own ways. Democratic yet largely civic-minded societies in north-east Asia — South Korea, Japan, Taiwan — sought to control the virus through large-scale social mobilisation. It has not worked perfectly; outbreaks recur, whether in Seoul churches or Tokyo hostess bars. But they have not done badly; which reflects, one supposes, the level of civic-mindedness of their daily life as well as the nimbleness of their states. 
 

In countries like Australia — also democracies, but with more social acceptance of dissent than, say, Japan — the responses of governments have been relatively harsh. The state of Victoria, for example, has chosen a path out of strict lockdown that is one of the most harsh in the world; and anti-lockdown protestors are being arrested, often quite roughly, by Australian police. That the government has nevertheless been able to try such measures, in spite of being an open society, reflects the strength of and trust in the state.

But then there are countries like Britain — which is almost the worst place in the world in terms of cases per million and fatality rates — and the United States, where deep distrust of the state and of “experts” has combined with low social protections and divisive polities to create a confused approach to controlling the virus. In many ways, the backs and forth in Britain — herd immunity or not? — and the open mendacity in the United States alongside the inability to decide on such things as relief measures has clearly revealed the larger questions plaguing governance and social cohesion in those societies. In the US, whatever 50 per cent of the country believes will be denounced by the other half; while in Britain, policy making ability has so deserted the highest levels of its domestic administration that it has had to endure serial failures, from a late lockdown to a confusing reopening to mixed messages today.

And then there’s India. If this virus’ success in countries depends on there being an under-resourced administration, lack of trust in the state, poor social cohesion, and relatively low levels of civic discipline, perhaps it is fitting that we will almost certainly exit the pandemic with the highest number of cases. In those, certainly, we lead the world.