India is currently in the early stages of a three-week lockdown imposed by the Modi government to control the covid-19 pandemic. National and state borders have been sealed and swathes of the economy shut down.footnote1 Workers have been laid off and day labourers have lost their incomes. Sanitation workers and other key employees are struggling to get to work without public transport. Those in the informal sector have been particularly hard hit. Migrant workers are desperately trying to return to their villages, in some cases walking hundreds of miles along now empty highways, carrying their children in their arms. Students, too, are trying to get home as their colleges and universities have shut. Those who succeed may be carrying the virus into areas of rural India it has not so far reached. But for many the distances are just too great and they are stuck without an income, facing hunger in the cities that will no longer support them. The ngo sector is trying to step in, and some local-government agencies are supplying food and shelter. But the risk of overcrowding and the spread of disease imperils such interventions.
Meanwhile, a combination of disrupted supply chains and panic buying has led to empty shelves in shops. Food prices have risen and some commodities are unavailable. It did not take long for stories of lockdown-related violence to emerge: social media—and increasingly, the mainstream media too—is awash with evidence of the police assaulting people for supposed infractions: shoppers trying to buy essential goods, delivery staff, journalists, doctors and transport workers. A young man in Kolkata who had gone out to buy milk died after being beaten up by the police. The Chief Minister of Telengana, a Modi ally, has threatened that people breaking the curfew will be shot on sight. The widespread confusion about what is permitted makes a fertile breeding ground for vigilantism. It has also given the police new opportunities for extortion, with vegetable sellers being forced to pay bribes in order to ply their trade, even though they are exempt from the restrictions. A potato seller in Patna who refused to pay up was shot in the leg by the police. Less visible are the effects of the restrictions on victims of domestic violence. The homeless are desperately vulnerable.
The lockdown was the Modi government’s panicked response in late March to the realisation that the covid-19 epidemic was spiralling out of control. Although the number of confirmed infections was still below a thousand, government advisers must have warned of a looming public-health disaster, with overwhelmed hospitals and people dying untreated. Modi and his Number Two, Amit Shah, must have realised that all the media manipulation in the world would not be able to neutralize those scenes. Motivated, presumably, by Modi’s need to be seen to be taking control of a deteriorating situation, the lockdown was announced without any details of what exactly was forbidden, or what measures the state would take to mitigate its disastrous impact on large sections of the population. With his penchant for spectacle, and aversion to press conferences, Modi made the lockdown announcement in a televised address. Panic buying ensued immediately, with the kind of crowding in shops that horrifies public-health experts. Circulars with more detail were put out some hours later, but these reached only a fraction of Modi’s tv audience and did little to lessen the widespread anxiety and confusion. It took another two days before the government announced a relief package of 1.7 trillion rupees, some $23 billion—a positive step, but the details show derisorily small handouts to people who have lost their incomes. Economists have noted that some of the money was already included in the budget and has simply been repackaged.
The lockdown has transferred the burden of the coronavirus pandemic almost entirely onto the shoulders of the poor and marginalised. It is clear from the videoclips on social media of ordinary people expressing their anger and helplessness that most see the lockdown as a calamity far greater than covid-19 itself. This may be partly because the full force of the epidemic has yet to arrive, while state mitigation of the lockdown’s effects has been pathetically inadequate. But their arguments cannot be so easily dismissed. India’s young population and the heavily age-biased nature of this disease means that the fatality rates of the coronavirus could be somewhat lower than in the West, especially amongst poorer communities with generally lower life-expectancy. Put brutally, workers may starve to save the primarily middle-class elderly from dying. And for anyone who doubts that the possibility of starvation is real, it’s worth noting that the Chief Minister of Kerala, widely praised for his response to the pandemic, felt the need to explicitly reassure people that he would not allow anyone in the state to starve to death as a consequence of the lockdown.