When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur,on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown toenforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite—physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is trueeven within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quartersin slums and shanties.Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in theirlives than looming unemployment, starvation, and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day,including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim pogrom, one man’s wordsespecially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur, near theNepal border.“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us,” he said.“Us” means approximately 460 million people.State governments in India (as in the United States) have showed more heart and understanding in the crisis.Trade unions, private citizens, and other collectives are distributing food and emergency rations. The centralgovernment has been slow to respond to their desperate appeals for funds. It turns out that the prime minister’sNational Relief Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money from well-wishers is pouring into the somewhatmysterious new PM-CARES fund. 1 Prepackaged meals with Modi’s face on them have begun to appear. In additionto this, the prime minister has shared his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream bodydemonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of self-isolation.The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requeststhe French prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and use that $8.5billion for desperately needed emergency measures to support a few million hungry people. Surely the French willunderstand.As the lockdown enters its second week, supply chains have broken, medicines and essential supplies are runninglow. Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and water. Standing crops,ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting. The economic crisis is here. The political crisis is ongoing. Themainstream media has incorporated the Covid story into its 24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An organizationcalled the Tablighi Jamaat, which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was announced, has turned out to bea “super spreader.” That is being used to stigmatize and demonize Muslims. The overall tone suggests that Muslimsinvented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.The Covid crisis is still to come. Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with,with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste, and class completely in place. Today (April 2) in India, there arealmost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. These are surely unreliable numbers, based on woefully few tests.Expert opinion varies wildly. Some predict millions of cases. Others think the toll will be far less. We may neverknow the real contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that the run on hospitals has not yet begun.India’s public hospitals and clinics are unable to cope with the almost one million children who die of diarrheaand malnutrition every year, with the more than two million tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the world’s cases),with a vast anemic and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor illnesses that prove fatal forthem. 2 It will be impossible for them to cope with a crisis that is on a scale anything like what Europe and the UnitedStates are dealing with now. All health care is more or less on hold as hospitals have been turned over to the serviceof The Virus. The trauma center of the legendary All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi is closed,the hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees, who live on the roads outside that huge hospital, drivenaway like cattle.People will fall sick and die at home. We may never know their stories. They may not even become statistics. Wecan only hope that the studies that say The Virus likes cold weather are correct (though other researchers have castdoubt on this). Never have a people longed so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it isdefinitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chineseconspiracy to take over the world.Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could.Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality,” trying to stitch our future to our pastand refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers usa chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return tonormality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This
one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banksand dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage,ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.* First published in the Financial Times , April 4, 2020.
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AZADIFREEDOM. FASCISM. FICTION.
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Published in 2020 byHaymarket Books
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Table of ContentsIntroduction1. In
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the police, attacked Muslims in wor
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historian had tried to suggest; it
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- Page 21 and 22: services. The graveyard becomes a p
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- Page 25 and 26: CHAPTER THREEOur Captured, Wounded
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- Page 31 and 32: §The God of Small Things , publish
- Page 33 and 34: CHAPTER FIVEThe Silence Is the Loud
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- Page 37 and 38: “You must say it then,” I said.
- Page 39 and 40: India is not really a country. It i
- Page 41 and 42: —the Bahujan Samaj Party, Rashtri
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- Page 45 and 46: and hard and intractable.The Indian
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- Page 49 and 50: CHAPTER SEVENThe Graveyard Talks Ba
- Page 51 and 52: Kanhaiya Kumar, the charismatic you
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- Page 55 and 56: people with a profile, like me—wh
- Page 57 and 58: The Chief Minister with cold eyes a
- Page 59 and 60: the official story. Based on wisps
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- Page 67 and 68: NotesINTRODUCTION1 . Anumeha Yadav,
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- Page 73 and 74: Azadi, 1 -2, 43BJP and, 143Kashmir
- Page 75 and 76: Daesh (ISIS), 67Dakhani, Wali, 39 -
- Page 77 and 78: Gujarat, 95 , 102 , 1642002 massacr
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- Page 83 and 84: National Intelligence Agency, 60Nat
- Page 85 and 86: Sardar Sarovar Dam, 98 , 112Saudi A
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