Is anybody stupider than Pratap Bhanu Mehta? Yes. Yamini Aiyar, his successor as President of the Center for Policy Research, is more stupid. This is an important victory for Iyers everywhere. We must be granted Extremely Backward Status immediately and get retrospective affirmative action.
Consider the following pile of shite published in 'Seminar'-
IN March 2020, as the Covid-19 induced global panic made hitherto draconian acts – border closures, surveillance and lockdowns’ – legitimate forms of state action,
These acts were already perfectly legal and legitimate. They were not 'draconian' because they weren't excessively harsh. Many different types of polity introduced them.
India faced an important choice: unleash state power to manage the pandemic or invest capacity in the public health system.
Rubbish! Investing in the public health system takes time and yields results only in the medium to long term. The State already had the power to do what it did because exigent circumstances of this type have always existed.
India had to choose between doing nothing and trusting that 'herd immunity' would be achieved before the Social Order broke down completely- i.e. communities self-isolating and chasing away 'aliens' and 'untouchables' such that pathogen avoidance based xenophobia reinstated autarkic casteist enclaves all over the place- and tens of millions had perished or else India could do what many other countries did under the rubric of 'best practice'.
It is a different matter that India has now been revealed to be too poor and lacking in State capacity to 'do' lockdown. This is sad. Still at least the attempt was made to prioritize lives over money.
Why does Yamini believe that 'Public Health capacity' can be raised instantaneously? All that can happen is that pre-existing slack or spare capacity is fully exploited.
Yamini thinks Capital can be created instantaneously. There is no 'roundaboutness' such that first Capital investment has to rise before the Consumer gets more goods or services. Has what Yamini asserts ever actually happened anywhere in the world? Why does she not demand that per capita National Income be raised immediately to American levels? How about saying 'India faced a choice. Either it could confer immortality on all citizens regardless of caste or gender or it could do Nazi shit of a very naughty type.' ?
The choices India made on 24th March (when the prime minister announced the first 21-day national lockdown) and in the months that followed, laid bare deep fault lines in India’s state capacity
Did Yamini really not know that India is as poor as shit? Did this fact have to be 'laid bare' for her? What 'fault line' is she talking about? India has low State capacity in high value adding services. On the other hand, it can beat the fuck out of agitators and jail the Opposition- if that is what the Government wants. But beating people aint high value adding. Treating COVID involves higher education not the ability to wield a steel tipped cane.
It is not the case that India is actually a very rich country but there is some fault-line of a geological type which has caused a big hole of poverty to suddenly appear.
and the social contract that shape state action.
There is no 'social contract'- or, at best, one of adhesion. What 'shapes' State action is resource constraints on policy objectives. Modi wanted to save lives and enable a quick recovery based on scientific advise. What's so evil about that?
Through the lockdown, the most pernicious elements of state failure – its stubborn refusal to deliver a modicum of justice,
which is similar to its stubborn refusal to give each citizen a billion dollars
and uphold the rights of all its citizens,
including the right to life which entails the boon of immortality which Modi is meanly withholding from India's poor and suffering mortal population
its centralizing tendencies and above all its penchant for using coercion over building trust and investing in the public health system – were unleashed on citizens.
By the guy they adore above any of his rivals. Why speak of 'unleashing' stuff the majority consider salutary?
Elements of this remain visible
to Yamini because she has shit for brains
as India redesigned its approach in the months after unlocking.
In the shadow of Covid-19, the Indian state was put to test in unprecedented ways.
Modi and certain Ministers- like Kerala's Shailaja- passed the test. India, as a whole, failed. Why? India is very poor and people in Delhi who talk about 'policy issues' are Yamini level cretins.
Its response will frame our debates on the Indian state and what it will take to ‘capacitate’ the state to deliver basic public goods in the years to come.
Your debates are stupid and ignorant. Nobody gives a toss about you.
As 2020 comes to a close, we need to look back to look forward.
Only if we are writing shite for a shite magazine which I thought had folded ignominiously thirty or forty years ago.
India went into lockdown when the globe was in active pursuit of flattening the Covid curve.
Why was the Globe being so nasty? It should have been passively running away from Covid's naughty curves. That is the Gandhian way.
Weeks after the first Covid-19 patient was detected, Indian elites joined the global chorus seeking swift governmental action.
Those wicked elites are always up to no good. Good people seek delayed governmental action.
Lockdowns were the consensus instrument. It is worth remembering that days before the national lockdown, several state governments had begun sealing borders and implementing state specific lockdowns. Lockdowns were a fait accompli.
Nonsense! The National Disaster Management Agency took the required legal steps. If there was a fait accompli, why has the thing not been challenged in the Courts? The fact is, there was no reasonable- as opposed to paranoid- reason to challenge it.
Epidemiological models predicting millions of infections, combined with the global obsession for flattening the curve, played a part.
Why speak of this as an obsession? The thing was perfectly rational and scientific. Aiyar has an MSc in some retarded Development shite from the LSE. She isn't exactly a brain box.
But another factor that legitimized lockdowns as India’s only option was the reality of India’s broken public health system and a deep distrust in its ability to respond to increased infections.
This is very silly. The UK had a lockdown at around the same time. Is the NHS 'broken'? Is India on par with a much richer country in this respect? If even the NHS could be overwhelmed, India- a much poorer country- would have been shattered. What would have been the result? Each village or neighborhood would have policed its own borders and chased away, or killed, those suspected of carrying the virus. Caste, au fond, is based on pathogen avoidance. COVID could have sent India hurtling back to medieval times. Yamini might not have been affected. She is a Brahmin. But what about the ex-untouchables? What about religious minorities? What about migrants?
After all, India could not pull off the Wuhan miracle and build a hospital from scratch in 10 days.
So, there'd be no point in 'investing in public health capacity'.
The global visibility on Covid-19 (the daily tracking of infections and testing rates) and the elite pressure in India required state action.
India had a chance to corral the beast. It failed. But this has nothing to do with 'elite pressure'. The rich could hole up in their farmhouses as in Poe's masque of the red death.
The state’s own disenchantment with the health system,
there was no enchantment or disenchantment. Either a State had good health care or it didn't. Kerala and T.N were in one boat, much of the rest of India was in a completely different boat.
however, prevented it from drawing its own experience of dealing with zoonotic diseases, with relative success – NIPAH, H1N1
Kerala had experience with NIPAH and this is considered a factor in its quick response.
– amongst others to mobilize disease surveillance and strengthen the health system, including fever clinics and hospitals, on a war footing. State governments had begun making some investments in this direction
i.e. they already had some relevant infrastructure
pointing to the importance of localized, state specific health responses, however, here too the dominant narrative of a weak state overshadowed any debate on the consequences of lockdowns.
I suppose 'narratives of a weak state' caused lockdowns in the UK and US and China and Japan and so forth. Will these narratives never learn? They mustn't overshadow stupid debates because otherwise Yamini Aunty will scold them and send them to bed without any supper.
Precisely because India’s health system
like the British and Chinese and American health system
cannot cope with the virus, it needed to be contained, the argument went.
Why? Coz people don't want to die or get very very sick. In India, there was an additional factor. If the State won't do what is needful, local communities will take the law in to their own hands. Indian people- provided they didn't study bogus shite in England- know that this entails ethnic cleansing and a return to localized autarky.
Severe measures would therefore, the PM said, help India win the virus war in 21 days. The political focus was now on managing lockdowns rather than the health system.
Nonsense! It was on both. Different types of resources were required for these very different activities. Yamini, cretin that she is, may believe that a policeman can turn into a Doctor and vice versa at the drop of a hat. But nobody else is as stupid as her. That's why she was made President of the Center for Policy Research. The bureaucrats get to laugh at somebody even more stupid than they are.
The hasty announcement of the national lockdown with four hours’ notice,
because longer notice would have been self-defeating
its severity and subsequent state failure to provide adequate economic relief, has all been the subject of public scrutiny and debate. However, there has been relatively little debate on the political consensus to lockdown as a measure of first resort.
Because nobody else is as stupid as Yamini.
After all, politicians and bureaucrats are not blind to the realities of poverty and the fact that the everyday lives of Indian’s are not conducive to social distancing and lockdowns. Yet, the decision to lockdown had wide elite acceptance.
Except among members of the elite who were as mad as hatters.
This consensus itself tells us a lot about the nature of the social contract, and its intersections with our cognitive maps about the state, and its capacities.
No it doesn't. If virtually every country did the same thing as India, we learn nothing about the nature of what must be very different social contracts. Incidentally, a social contract is itself a cognitive map about the state and its capacities. It can't have intersections with something it itself embodies.
The elite consensus offered the perfect setting for what Debraj Ray and S. Subramanian evocatively describe as a perverse ‘Politics of Visibility: draconian on high profile measures such as lockdowns and weak on the measures that are less easily observed.
Whereas the general consensus that people who quote Debraj Ray and S. Subramanian are as stupid as shit evocatively describes a wholly justified 'Politics of invisibility' whereby stupid cunts droning on about draconian measures are neither looked at nor listened to.
The legitimization of this politics of visibility, by the dominant narrative of weak state capacity, is revealing of how easily the narrative of state failure can undermine the state’s capacities to deliver.
A narrative of state failure is true if the state can't deliver. It is not the case that telling a story can change reality. My narrative re. Yamini's stupidity does not undermine her capacity to deliver anything useful. Rather, her stupidity explains why she is shit.
The politics of visibility also reveals the ease with which the state marginalizes concerns of the poor.Debraj Ray says 'Governments have a tendency to prefer minimising visible dangers. A tight lockdown reduces visible deaths from Covid-19, but brings with it diffuse, and relatively invisible deaths (for example suicide, domestic violence)'
However, democracy is a powerful corrective.
How so? Does it clamor for public masturbation and people dropping dead of COVID in the streets?
That the policy elite is now resisting large-scale lockdowns, despite their resurgence as a tool in Europe and parts of the United States when cases surge, is an important reminder that even the most invisible voices can make themselves heard and de-legitimize the use of brute state power.
Nonsense! India is very very poor. The choice is between eating and starving. Anyway, now about 20 percent of the population has been exposed, the genie isn't going back in the bottle. Modi gets credit for trying. Failing comes down to... India being very very poor.
I suppose Yamini must be riled because she is 'politically invisible'. But this is not because of 'brute state power'. It is because she is as stupid as shit.
The ravages of the lockdown, as I discuss below, have not led to a reframing of the social contract but they have served as an important corrective to India’s Covid-19 policy approach.
In other words, India was too poor to pursue an approach which richer countries could adopt. It was more like Pakistan than China.
Through the lockdown, the prime minister sought to create a new political mobilization, not unlike the demonetization exercise of 2016. While announcing the lockdown, he appealed to citizens’ to come out in support of the war against Covid-19. Frontline health workers were labeled ‘Corona Warriors’ and it was the nations duty to support them in this warlike effort.
Something similar happened in the UK and elsewhere. But, during the second lockdown, nobody has bothered clapping for NHS workers or anything of that sort.
The lockdown became an opportunity to construct a new nationalism.
Yamini seems not to have noticed that the BJP was always nationalist.
Citzens’ were asked to mobilize by banging their thalis and light lamps. While India’s middle classes and elites responded to this call for action, a far larger but hitherto invisible group of citizens – India’s casual and daily wage workers, many of whom migrate to cities from rural India, rose in defiance.
Defiance? Are you kidding me? These guys walked home because they had nothing to eat and no place to sleep. Yamini thinks they were 'woke' activists engaged in some peripatetic type of symbolic protest. Perhaps this had to do with Black Lives Matter or was an affirmation of the rights of transgender people.
Stripped of their livelihood and basic rights, workers refused to be locked down by a state that routinely abandoned them. They needed to make their way home. When the state blocked all transport, by rail and road, they walked. This was not an act of desperation. It was an act of power, of asserting their rights and dignity.
Cool! In that case, starving to death is actually a type of hunger strike. Similarly, being gang-raped is an act of power. The victim is asserting her rights and dignities. She is quietly laughing at the powers that be as she bleeds to death.
And in their determination, these millions of hitherto invisible citizens deployed their own ‘politics of visibility’, forcing the world to take note – the ‘migrant crisis’ as this long walk home came to be called remains the defining image of India’s draconian lockdown.
That image was real enough. Yamini's genius is to read into it not what is plain and obvious to everybody else- viz India is as poor as shit- but something else entirely. These guys weren't going home because they had no food or shelter. They were challenging elite narratives and disrupting the Politics of Invisibility. It is more than likely that they were also expressing solidarity with transgender people and victims of epistemic self-abuse on Ivy League campuses.
India’s broken social contract and failure to uphold the promise of equal citizenship were laid bare.
India's overwhelming poverty was laid bare as was the utter uselessness of cunts like Mehta and Aiyar. No wonder India is a shithole if its 'Center for Policy Research' is presided over by cretins like them.
It speaks volumes of our polity that the Indian state stubbornly refused to respond to this powerful articulation of citizens’ voices. Once workers began walking, the state reacted in the only form it knew – through orders and coercion. First it ordered citizens’ (literally picking them up from streets, in some instances) to lock themselves up into state sponsored shelters. When the walking continued, the state responded with greater defiance. It refused to organize transport (it took nearly 36 days before trains were organized), food or shelter for walking migrants. Shelter was available only for those willing to abide by lockdown rules. On April 19, in a bid to begin economic activity, the home ministry issued guidelines that allowed labour stuck in government shelters to travel within the state to work but refused them the right to travel home. Worse, there was no word on workers’ rights – housing, food, social security.
At this point, it became clear to even the most addled egghead that there was no point sticking with 'rights based' approaches to everything under the Sun. When the crunch comes, there is no remedy for rights violations- ergo those rights never existed. They were a figment of the imagination of worthless Academics.
The relief response, announced days after the lockdown, ignored the challenge of migrant workers entirely. It took till early May for the Ministry of Finance to extend the PDS ration subsidy to ‘migrant workers’ but this too was mired in paperwork. The state refused to offer any cash transfer linked income security. Instead it actively conspired to keep workers invisible to the state. ‘We simply do not have data (on migrants)’, was the excuse the Ministry of Finance repeatedly offered, in a tacit admission of how deeply broken the Indian welfare state was.
Yamini still doesn't get that there is no 'welfare state'. The country is too poor.
Facing a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, when unemployment rates skyrocketed to 25% and income levels had dropped severely amongst households in the lowest income decile, the state was expected to raise the game and do what it takes. Instead, it sought refuge in its failings.
The State could only do what it was able. But everybody knew India was as poor as shit. Only Yamini and her chums hadn't got the memo. They were under the impression that India is very very rich. Sadly, evil elite narratives are preventing the Government from just transferring a billion dollars into each citizen's Jan Dhan account.
The executive had a free pass partly because mainstream politics failed to mobilize.
Mobilization causes wealth to shower down from the sky. Sadly, 'mainstream politics' is being very mean and refusing to mobilize.
Once the lockdown was announced and the suffering of workers became visible, in a rare moment of state-civil society solidarity, local NGOs and civic associations galvanized, many in partnership with government, to offer humanitarian support. Politicians and legislators, however, were conspicuously absent. The lockdown suspended normal sites of political action – Parliament, rallies, street protests. And our politicians succumbed. The violence of the lockdown was an opportunity for large-scale political mobilization and for forging new solidarities. But for a brief encounter with the demand for jobs in the Bihar elections, the horrors of the migrant crisis has failed to mobilize politics and channelize distress into a political demand for change.
Why? Because it is bleeding obvious that a 'political demand' for everybody to be given lots and lots of money won't actually change anything.
Politics has taken the indignities and suffering of millions for granted: doing the bare minimum rather than demanding justice and a fairer social contract.
Social Contracts have magical powers. They should include a clause guaranteeing eternal youth to anybody who wants it.
Ten months later, the policy debate has conveniently limited itself to portability of ration cards and a slogan: one nation, one card. The focus has now shifted to ‘big bang’ reforms in labour and agriculture silencing ordinary voices. Robust social security has still not made it to the political agenda. This is the Indian state’s greatest failing.
India now realizes that to get to where China is, it must do what China did. Pretending everything is the fault of 'narratives' is plain silly. The Indian State did indeed fail in its response to COVID. But the reason for this was it had bought into a 'rights based' academic availability cascade which was based on pure fantasy. The truth is now clear to all. The business of Government isn't business- i.e. improving resource allocation and thus productivity . Let it evacuate an arena it can neither control nor contribute to. Let 'andolanjeevis' run amok by all means. The futility of demanding wealth from the Government in a very poor nation is becoming more and more apparent. Just as a foreign exchange crisis permitted trade liberalization in the early Nineties, so too will India's fiscal crunch sweep away the entire academo-bureaucratic cobweb of welfarist regulations and entitlements which have wasted the Nation's resources and kept its poor yet more miserably poor.
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