We let the rich infect the poor
Dipankar Gupta
Sociologist
There is a pat explanation of why, in spite of the lockdown, Covid-19 has created enclaves for itself, or hotspots, across the country. The narrative goes somewhat like this: How can this measure work where every sixth person lives in a slum and where a third of the world’s slum dwellers are found? No matter which way we look, we are cooked; either Covid will kill us or the lockdown will eat us alive. Therefore, if the coronavirus is proving to be more than a handful today, it is largely because of the poor. It’s nobody’s fault if the lockdown hasn’t quite contained the disease because the masses are just too numerous to control. A rationale such as this makes a failed project look heroic. It died like Karna on the battlefield, or to paraphrase Aristotle, it was a ‘flawed good effort’, a Greek tragedy.
The truth, however, is that Covid went off the charts because we failed to save the poor from the rich, and not the other way around. Poverty had little to do with the entry of coronavirus in India. Its main carriers were western visitors, a variety of travellers, including bigoted Tablighis, Indians returning from overseas, in short, people with passports and money to travel.
Once our eyes adjust to this light, we begin to see more clearly. Maharashtra is the richest state but now most hit by Covid. Kerala has the lowest number of slum dwellers, only 0.6% of its population, yet it has one of the highest incidence of the disease in the country. In which case, it does not matter if 40% of Mumbai or 30% of Kolkata live in slums, or if half the slum households are just one-room shanties.
This lockdown would have done better if the poor could have been protected from the better-off when the alarm first rang. That would have meant declaring gated colonies and elite neighbourhoods as potential hotspots from the start and having every airport entrant tagged and medically checked.
Obviously, those who tested positive, or were marked as suspect, got quartered in affordable pay-as-you-go quarantine. Such an exercise seemed very difficult and expensive then but, like a good sugar substitute, it would have been a lot cheaper to manage in the long run. The country would have bled less because its economy would not have been kneecapped. Businesses would still be stirring, albeit in slow motion and life, in general, much closer to normal. Could it be our hypersensitivity towards the comforts of the better-off, people like us, that stayed our hand from being tough on our kind?
The usual assumption that the poor are like solid waste and must be treated so that others may be saved, does not hold in this case. Yet, because of our inbuilt biases we followed the usual route: kind to the better-off. Just prior to the lockdown there were many instances when blue-collar staff employees often had to go through temperature checks before entering their workplace while the white-collar executives calmly floated in.
Ironically, though, we had a few things in our favour if we were serious about sealing off the rich. Not only are members of this class less numerous, making them easier to track and quarantine, but our entrenched social norms could have been leveraged towards this goal. Inbuilt class and caste distinctions have, under normal circumstances, kept the rich from interacting with the poor; so why not use a bad habit, especially for a good cause?
Now that we have so many hotspots, we might have reached the dreaded Stage 3, that is when whole communities fall sick and the infection runs wild. When this is in a full-blown form, population density and slum conditions become relevant. This need not have been the case if we could have walled in the virus and kept it within affluent neighbourhoods. There is, however, one serious catch to all this.
The poor need the rich to survive, so how does one get around that? Even though millions of slum households are busily producing carpets, saris, bangles, zari work, and so on, these humble self-entrepreneurs cannot make it on their own. The global chain that they are a part of needs corporate entities at the other end to finalise the deals.
There are several options we could dream up now, but it’s too late. One day, after many homes are broken, this pandemic will stop. At that time, we should remind ourselves that though the hotspots today are largely where poorer people live, it is those like us who took the fire there.
If anything, this awareness may help fashion future policies, especially in health, education and housing, where all classes are kept in alignment so that all boats rise together. After all, recent experience has shown how all boats can sink together.
Left to itself, the Indian elite may continue to assume they are above the fray. Many of them may react to the allegation of multiplying the virus in a disbelieving ‘What, am I the father?’ fashion. But this truth must be out.
