The Predictable Pyres of India

The pyres of India are burning on overtime. Each day is a new record of people dead or infected. Battles rage over medical oxygen. People reportedly die in the streets. Things aren’t going very well, to say the least…

It’s a travesty. A tragedy. Naturally. But I have a hard time feeling sad about it. I find sympathy in short supply for the beleaguered Indians. Because this development isn’t surprising to me. Not one bit.

Seeing as the memory of the public, and the internet even more so, is spotty and inconsistent at best, let’s remind ourselves of a few of the scenes we’ve seen out of India for the past few months. Religious holidays attended by tens of thousands. Bathing in the Ganges, as just one example. Or why not look at the ongoing farming protests outside New Delhi, that have been crowded and tumultuous since September. Or the sometimes raucus demonstrations against violence on women.

If there’s one painfully apparent lesson to all these occurrences, it’s that it has proven near impossible to instill a practice of social distancing upon the subcontinent. For practical, financial, religious, habitual, and demographical reasons, surely. But also for a lack of leadership and discipline. I loathe to use the s-word, but it seems clear that India has failed to adapt to the current pandemic. And now, the country is paying for it.

And all the while, the Bharatiya Janata Party, with prime minister Narendra Modi channeling the same wavelengths as Bolsanaro or Trump, beats its chest and proclaim the pandemic defeated through sheer force of cultural virtue.

It’s easy to condemn, from up here in a Norse ivory tower, as a privileged westerner. It’s easy to judge when we here have the opportunity and capacity to properly socially distance until the vaccines are doled out sufficiently. But no matter how easy it is to sneer at foreign social norms that have been unable to adapt to a new world order, the facts stay the same. India is on its knees. On Friday, India sported nearly 400’000 daily cases. Nearly half a million people in just one, single, solitary, day. And those are confirmed cases, mind you. I imagine there being quite a few unconfirmed ones as well in a nation as financially and socially diverse as India.

And I have not a tear to shed. I’m sorry, maybe I’m callous, but I can’t. Because from what we’ve seen out of that nation, this seems naught but fair. No; people don’t deserve to die in droves because they’re unable or unwilling to distance themselves from each other. No; people don’t deserve to die because their elected leadership is a criminally belligerent nationalistic mess. But what do you expect? The virus doesn’t care whether you’re too poor to socially distance, too pious to avoid public gatherings, too easily fooled to elect capable leadership, or too uninformed to undertake proper precautions. Those are all relative terms which an absolute plague doesn’t give a fig about. And if it can get you, it will get you, regardless of your finances, education, religion, or intelligence.

To add insult to injury, with every unnecessary or easily preventable infection, the state of the war on Covid deteriorates with new mutations, creating a steeper challenge for governments and doctors and nurses to stop the spread. So, not only is it a tragedy that Indians are dying en masse, but also that by doing so, they’re putting everyone else at greater risk too.

So in lieu of sadness or sympathy, I feel frustration and anger. And it doesn’t matter if that’s unfair or cruel or mean. Because the plague’s running rampant in India. The implications of which are thousands of dead, and an increased risk for the rest of the world. The reasons for which is a population of people incapable or unwilling to take precautions. Which in turn can be traced back to a government or society that has proven utterly unprepared to handle and unwilling to adapt to handling a pestilence like this. Whoever you want to blame, be it Modi’s and the BJP’s leadership, the socially dependent and tight-knit communities, the dense demographical and socioeconomical circumstances, or the recklessness of an uninformed public, the results are the same. Dead people, and a biological wild-fire out of control. All of which we could see coming a mile away.

/Sebastian Lindberg 5/4-2021