Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”. All that took money, and a great deal of time. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier Jair Bolsonaro, had left Delhi. In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law it had just passed in parliament. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered.Īt least not until now - because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” - sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. And we think to ourselves, “My God! This is America!” About states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’ dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch the New York governor’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. Narendra Modi with the US president and his wife Melania at a packed rally in Ahmedabad on February 24 - part of a lavish official visit © eyevine But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage? They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest - thus far - in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.īut unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. More than 50,000 people have died already. The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |