After an ill-timed lockdown, a messy unlocking

India has started easing the rigid lockdown to revive the economy. The lockdown was imposed in late March to check the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. There were only 519 confirmed cases of infection and 10 deaths at that time.

The celebrated American thinker Noam Chomsky termed the Indian lockdown “genocidal”. Harsh as it was, the lockdown failed to control the coronavirus situation in big cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai. But it brought economic activity to a standstill.

As Rajiv Bajaj, an industrialist, put it recently, the government set out to flatten the coronavirus curve and ended up flattening the GDP curve.

Ironically, the curbs are being lifted when the number of infections is above 250,000 and still rising. The death toll, however, is still low: just above 7,000. In the global coronavirus chart India is now at the fifth place. The countries higher up in the table have passed the peak. But, for India, the worst is yet to come.  

The World Health Organisation and the International Monetary Fund praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the early lockdown. However, the paradoxical situation of having to ease the curbs when the pandemic is spreading at an increasing rate raises the question whether he had acted too soon.

According to a commentator, Modi just did what the western countries did. Had he looked to the east, he would have found other models, like Singapore, South Korea and Japan. They achieved better results with less harsh measures.

A doctor, writing in a public health journal, said the government had followed the advice of bureaucrats, not of public health experts.

The poor paid a heavy price for the mistimed lockdown. The sudden closure of factories left millions of villagers working in cities jobless. They wanted to go home but could not as train and bus services had been cancelled.

In sheer desperation, many started walking. Their plight attracted media attention worldwide but the authorities failed to provide relief.

When activists raised the issue in the Supreme Court, it refused to intervene, accepting the government’s dubious claims without question. After its failure to act invited criticism, the court took up the issue suo motu. But it is yet to issue an enforceable order. When the lockdown restrictions were eased, the Centre allowed the Railways to run special trains to ferry the stranded workers home.  Several trains took passengers to places other than their destinations. Apparently the trains were diverted without informing the passengers.

Factories have now been allowed to reopen and they want the workers to return. Some of them are offering rail and air fare to travel back. The government of Uttar Pradesh, which accounts for a large number of workers in the western states of Maharashtra and Gujarat, is trying to hold them back with promise of alternative jobs.  

The economy was going downhill and the government was offering stimulus packages to badly hit sectors like automobile and construction, when the virus struck. It has now come up with stimulus packages for more sectors, including small and medium enterprises.

But the unlocking of the country is turning out to be a messy affair and may hamper the efforts to revive the economy. The current spurt in infections is attributable to two factors: one, return of Indians who were trapped abroad, many of them in countries in the grip of the pandemic; two, movement of migrant workers from infected cities to villages. If the government had allowed time for people who were away from home to get back before the lockdown came into force the risk of spread of infection would have been less.

With malls, markets and places of worship opening this week, another spurt is likely in the coming days. The bid to revive the economy is taking place even as global rating agencies have downgraded India and forecast zero growth or, worse still, negative growth. The country was deeply riven by the Modi regime’s citizenship law when the virus struck. The ruling party did not use the pause provided by the pandemic to restore social harmony. What’s more, the police, acting in a partisan manner, are slapping cases under repressive laws against women and student activists who led the protests against the citizenship law.

French politician Talleyrand famously said of the Bourbon kings: “They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing”. These words apply equally to Modi and his party.