Why did many middle class Indians not get money from foreign NGOs to pretend to be doing something to help poor people during the COVID crisis? One answer is that foreign NGOs only give money to anti-national activists so as to gain a threat-point against the Government of India.
Harsh Mander quit the IAS after the post-Godhra riots in 2002. Under Sonia, he enjoyed a brief period of influence but was discovered to be a virtue signaling cretin who didn't get that India is a very poor country where only 15 million people pay Income tax though the tax threshold is half that of the UK where double the number of people pay taxes. Yet India's population is 20 times that of Britain.
India has made many mistakes because Delhi has imitated the leftist policies of very much richer, very much more educationally and technologically advanced countries. This did empower bureaucrats and 'activists' but harmed the poor.
Was the Government's response to COVID wrong? No. India needs to protect that section of the population which pays more into the Treasury than it receives. If the urban middle class is decimated by the pandemic then Government revenues collapse. But so does aggregate demand. So does investment and infrastructure spending. So do doles and subsidies.
With typical fatuity Mander writes in Scroll-
We often tell ourselves that the tiny coronavirus that has taken the entire planet into its thrall is agnostic to class, caste, race and gender.
No we don't. There are substantial differences based on race, affluence, even gender.
It is for this reason that the shibboleth is frequently repeated that no one is safe until everyone is safe.
Which is nonsense. Vaccinations have already made a lot of people relatively safe. Medical interventions have greatly improved. In any case, outcomes in some places which had tight lockdown are very different from what obtained in the US. China has had less than 5000 deaths. The US has almost a million.
Yet, during the first wave of its depredations in India, the historic walls of class and caste seemed robustly un-breached.
Caste? Most 'upper caste' people in India are still very poor.
The rich and middle-class Indians felt secure –
Fuck off! They were shitting themselves copiously! Which country has Mander been living in?
as they do through every trial and calamity – that their money, their social power and networks and their government would protect them.
No Indian thinks the Government will protect them. They think the Government will fuck them over.
They did not see, and did not care about the distress of the working poor.
Unless those poor people were working for them. That's how Capitalism works. If your workers die or runaway, you go bankrupt.
Their faith in the government seemed well-founded.
Modi did look impressive. But outcomes depend on the local authorities, not the Center.
They felt protected by the strict lockdown, the requirement of working from home, keeping radical distance from everyone outside the household, and ensuring radical sanitation.
Nope. They were still shitting themselves copiously. Then people saw that protesting farmers- many of whom were elderly- weren't getting ill. The idea took hold that the 'China virus' had been beaten up by the much nastier Indian virus. The good thing about having lived for millennia in a shithole is that you probably inherit a lot of immunity to stuff spread by bats or pangolins or whatever.
It did not occur to them, it did not indeed matter, that the state’s policies even in principle offered safety only to those who had homes that were large enough to allow people to stay indoors and keep a safe distance, had running water, had secure jobs, savings and social security.
But that was fucking obvious! However, provided the 'working poor' in cities were young their mortality would be lower. The problem is that India can afford to lose a lot of poor people because they have low marginal product, but it can't afford to lose too many of the more productive.
I wonder how many among them even were mindful of the harsh existential reality of the working poor in India.
Mander thinks he is serving a useful function by telling Indians that their country is as poor as shit because people of who were as poor as shit still had babies who were bound to be as poor as shit. Perhaps he should also tell them that they are not as fair skinned as Scandinavians. But why stop there? Why not say 'I wonder how many among the Indian middle class are even mindful to the harsh existential reality that its gonna cost them a pretty penny to emigrate to somewhere nice?'
That around 60% of all families in the country lived in one room or less, therefore distancing was impossible for them.
More particularly if they kept having babies.
Or that nine out of ten workers were informal, with no social security and job protections,
because of paternalistic Labor laws
therefore “working from home” meant being jobless and starving at home.
Why starving? So long as 'one nation, one ration card' is implemented, starvation is avoided.
None of this troubled the rich and middle classes,
What troubled them was that it was getting more and more expensive to emigrate.
who publicly applauded the policies that seemed designed to offer them protection – banging thalis and lighting candles, when called upon to do so – indifferent to the explosion of suffering that these very policies unleashed on the “lower depths” of the social order.
But if the affluent had not observed lockdown, if they had defied Government policies in this regard, the outcome would have been worse. Furthermore, the fact is, crazy labor and land acquisition and agricultural policies are responsible for the poverty of the 'lower depths'. But reform is difficult not least because of virtue signalling cretins like Mander. It was these activists who forced Manmohan to abandon further reform. India is very poor because as Edwin Lim of the World Bank said, cunts like Mander can get richer preventing Development than those tasked with promoting it.
Visibly the lockdown – not the coronavirus – proved calamitous at this stage only to the labouring poor and destitute, who were thrown overnight into mass hunger, joblessness and painful migration.
Why did they have to migrate in the first place? How come jobs hadn't gone to where labor was cheapest? The answer is that generations of 'activists' had preferred to virtue signal and back regressive shite like the farmer's agitation.
Millions – some estimates put the figure at a mind-boggling 30 million
So, less than 2 percent of the population.
women, men and children – flooded the country’s highways and village roads, enduring police batons, hunger, thirst, the dread of infection, and the hot overhead summer sun to walk hundreds of kilometres to the only place that they could call home.
But which was a shithole for Malthusian reasons. Industry had been strangled there by nutters like Mander. That's why there had been no demographic transition.
The middle-classes watched the unending exodus of humanity from the balconies of their homes or on their television screens, bewildered at their numbers and predicament, but mostly indifferent, walled away from their agony.
While Mander was getting a hard on and stroking himself off at this wonderful opportunity to virtue signal.
Almost none of them made a single demand from the government
because they were migrants. The locals wanted them to fuck off- till they realized that they were a source of cheap labor. Still, the richer states are now gung ho on 'sons of the soil' employment policies.
that could have prevented a great part of this suffering:
Mander helped bring about that suffering by actively opposing every sensible type of reform.
when the rich and middle-class formal workers were ensured salary payments while they worked from home,
because they had relatively high marginal product. The problem with migrants is that a lot of them were in zero marginal product service industries.
the only fair state action would have been to pay at least statutory minimum wages to every household outside formal employment in the country.
With what money? Can 15 million tax payers really support 400 million people?
In a petition filed by me and others concerned with the unfolding tragedy making this demand in the Supreme Court of India, the chief justice retorted, “The government assures us that every household is being supplied food. Then why do they need money transfers?”
Why did the Chief Justice say that? The answer is that he had to go according to the law. There is a right to food- because India has enough food- there is no right to what would in effect be a universal basic income.
Risking charges of contempt of court, I felt spurred to tell the learned judge, more senior than any in the country, that first it was a terrible lie that governments were ensuring sufficient food to all people in the country.
Did the cunt produce any actionable evidence? Nope. The guy was just virtue signalling so as to refill his pockets with NGO money.
My colleagues and I, who were trying desperately to supply food to as many people as we could, were daily witnesses to levels of mass hunger that I have not seen in my lifetime.
Was this guy using his own money? Nope. He was taking money, some of which he kept for himself, in order to burnish his own reputation.
And even if it was, I wanted to say to the judge, “I undertake to ensure that you get excellent cooked food delivered to your home daily. Then, by the same yardstick that you used for the poor, you too should willingly forego your salary.”
But the judge was paid for judging in accordance with the law. He could use his own wages to have food cooked in his own house. I want to say to Mander 'I undertake to ensure that you get lectured every day on your indifference to the suffering of the poor. Then, by your own yardstick, you should stop taking money from NGOs.'
The broken health system
broke because beating and raping doctors and nurses is considered a privilege of the social order.
It rowdily breached and completely overturned these settled protections and privileges of the social order. Nikhil Pandhi, a doctoral candidate, wrote evocatively for The Wire Science of how the second wave “visibly vanquish(ed) even India’s middle and upper-middle classes and castes whose distinct struggles for ventilators, oxygen cylinders, hospital beds and vaccines reveal the cracked landscape of tertiary health systems in the country”.
More than that was revealed. But this was scarcely news to India.
People who long felt secure in the protection of privilege
don't live in India. They emigrated long ago to places where they weren't privileged at all but could be sure that they'd get some basic value of money from the Health System.
“are now finding their worst nightmares coming true”, Pandhi wrote. “Individual privileges that entitled them to health in life (indeed, even dignity in death) are being hollowed-out in the pandemic by dramatic experiences of suffering…”
Then the crisis passed. There was a surge in demand and then that surge subsided. The same thing happened in many much richer countries.
What is more, he wrote, India’s privileged classes and castes for the first time experienced an “as-if untouchability”.
Nonsense! Every fucking Indian my age experienced horrible treatment from IAS officers like Mander or Income Tax officials like Kejriwal. But Kejriwal was clever. Mander turned out to be a fool- though no doubt he has done well enough financially.
“The uncremated corpse [is] lying in wait for a pyre bundled in body-bags and concealed from the fear of contamination…The virulent dead having to be disposed of from a distance as if they were ‘untouchable’…”
This Pandhi dude sure is one casteist piece of shit. Other people feel sorrow when they see things like this. Pandhi is worried about some primitive type of caste shibboleth.
Most of us in the middle classes in India experienced the months of the summer of 2021, when the second wave was unleashed on India, as a dystopic nightmare from which wakening was as frightening as sleep.
Nobody was having a picnic anywhere. Delta was scary shit.
Each day we were terrified to check our phone messages, because someone we knew, cared for, loved, respected was bereaved or had died.
Sadly, Mander is still alive.
It was a professor one day, an activist the next,
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
a doctor the third, a father, a grandmother, a spouse, a lover, a co-worker, a friend, a daughter, a son.
a rapist, a murderer
I do not know a single family or workplace that was not stricken with sickness and death. Our efforts at relief became almost inconsequential. We tried to test, isolate, treat and offer rest to our homeless sisters and brothers and offer food to as many as we could.
So as to get that sweet sweet NGO moolah.
At work, my colleagues in the Karwan e Mohabbat
Campervan of Lurve- into which nobody in their right mind would willingly climb in.
(who had come together to fight hate violence and lynching that had grown into an epidemic before covid felled us, and who struggled during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic to reach food, health-care and transportation to as many as we could) could this time muster only eight oxygen concentrators that we tried to juggle from home to home as desperate calls kept ringing on our phones.
So, these guys looked out for themselves by getting 'oxygen concentrators'. You can take the self-serving little shit out of the IAS but a self-serving little shit he will remain.
We converted our offices into isolation centres for colleagues who were infected and did not have homes large enough for isolation. We tried to get PPEs to funeral workers. But all of this was not even one lamp in the midst of the raging malevolent tempest of the second wave. And the state was almost entirely absent.
But it was more present than this little cunt's well funded Campervan of Lurve.
Journalist Vikas Pandey of the BBC spoke wrenchingly of his own dilemmas, not as a reporter but as a caring human being amidst the “tsunami” of the Covid-19 crisis. His voice could have been of so many of us:
Some British and American journalists had similar stories to tell. But India is very much poorer than Britain and America. One reason for this is that anti-national activists are able to feather their own nests with foreign money provided they obstruct needful reform.
“Every morning starts with frantic calls from friends, family and colleagues asking for a bed, oxygen cylinders or medicines. The number of people I am able to help is reducing every day as the doctors and officials who could earlier help are no longer available to speak on the phone. Helplines are not working and the vendors who could earlier help have run out of supplies. I go to bed with a sense of defeat every night, but then pick myself up and start in the morning again as more and more people call for help. I can understand their helplessness as I lost a cousin a few days ago in a top hospital in the city. He waited for 18 hours to get a ventilator but the hospital didn’t have any. His last message to us was ‘please save me’. But we couldn’t.”
One reason for this was that the Supreme Court destroyed the incentive for private hospitals to maintain spare capacity on a prudential basis. If hospitals have to provide free emergency care to all comers then only those who can defy the Courts- i.e. are owned by gangsters- will invest in infrastructure. The problem here is that gangsters don't tend to be tech savvy. Nor are they highly rational and interested in long term outcomes.
Eighty-three-year-old Triyambak Tapas wrote for the Times of India a moving testimony about his wife who tested Covid-19 positive and died a frighteningly lonely death. He recalls how he rushed his wife to a well-known hospital in Bengaluru, when she developed high fever. A nurse came up to the car and tested her oxygen level, and found these extremely low. “We were told that all ICU beds with ventilator(s) were full.”
Hospitals used the excuse of COVID to deny emergency treatment for non-COVID patients. Activism and PILs can't make a country poor but they can certainly contribute to avoidable death.
They rushed her to another well-known hospital five minutes’ drive away. “The same thing repeated. All the beds were full.” He recalls poignantly, “Parked right in front of the emergency ward my wife was sinking slowly.”
Pleading that she was almost dead, the hospital authorities took pity, and agreed to take her into the emergency room and give her emergency oxygen until they found her a bed in another hospital.
They continued innumerable phone calls to find a hospital bed, and in the end succeeded in securing the promise of a bed with a ventilator in a hospital. Once she was in hospital, they lost contact with her. That night she died, and they could only see her face for a fleeting minute when they briefly unzipped the body bag to show her face. No rites were permitted as her body was cremated.
Suddenly Modi's lockdown didn't seem such a bad idea. But Mander, obviously, was against it and for the farmer's agitation.
Sometimes – perhaps too rarely – there was rage. In Delhi, Shivangi lost her grandfather. “I do not know if the government is sleeping or what they are doing,” she told the BBC. “I am totally disheartened at the situation I am seeing. The government is a literal failure. A person cannot live here in Delhi. A person even cannot die peacefully in Delhi.”
Imagine how much worse things would have been if Mander, not Kejriwal, had become C.M.
Puja, who runs a small boutique in her home in Delhi, was equally distraught. “There are bodies piling everywhere,” she told The Diplomat. “Everyone I know is infected, including my daughter and me. How did we get here?”
It is interesting that Mander is having to rely on English language sources, available on the internet, to pad out his screed.
Her business had collapsed after the lockdown, and no government aid reached her. She had tumours in her abdomen, but no hospital could give her a bed because of the second wave. “Modi ne akhirkar India ko sadak pe utar hi diya [After all, Modi has thrown India to the streets].”
Says a lady talking to 'The Diplomat' who lives in a State ruled by Kejriwal.
But most often this fury was doused and drowned in just helpless, desperate sadness. Pradeep Sharma was inconsolable as he spoke to journalists of The Diplomat.
Which is Mander's go-to journal to find out what is happening in the country he lives in.
His 46-year-old brother tested positive for Covid-19 at Deendayal Hospital in West Delhi. However, the hospital had hopelessly run out of beds, so he rushed his brother to another private hospital, the Vimhans Nayati Super Speciality Hospital in Lajpat Nagar, New Delhi. But they too turned them down. “There are no hospital beds,” he lamented. “I do not know what to do.” He covered his eyes with both hands and cried.
He bought six vials of Remdesivir from the black market, but when he arrived at the hospital with the medicine, he was dead.
his brother was dead. He was alive.
“I could not find my brother’s mortal remains, but the hospital had hired bouncers who pushed me around,” he told The Diplomat.
In Mamta's Bengal he could at least have brought in a mob to beat some Doctors- provided, of course, he belonged to a minority community.
When he located his brother finally, there were bodies lying around on top of one another, and he had to step on other dead bodies to get to him.
So, he didn't help stack those bodies properly. He just stepped on them.
The crematorium had run out of wood, and they collected weeds and grass to cremate him. His father died three days later, and they had to keep the body at home for two days as there was no place in the mortuary and the crematorium.
Which is why having spare capacity is important. The problem with dividing up the cake in an equitable manner before it is baked is that there is less cake.
Another unfortunate family in Ghaziabad lost four members of the family to Covid-19 in rapid succession, leaving two girls no older than six and eight years orphaned, India Today reported. It began with a retired school teacher Durgesh Prasad testing positive. He stayed isolated at home, but soon all the adults in the joint family tested positive. One by one each of them died, first his son, then his wife and finally his daughter-in-law.
Government should abolish death. Constitution guarantees Right to Life. We must start agitation now or at least as soon as Soros Sahib sends check.
There were young people studying and working overseas, racked with worry. Nine members of the family of Ansh Sachdeva, a student in Boston, had caught the contagion in Delhi. The 23-year-old told BBC: “Every time I call, someone we know has died of it.”
Sadly, Mander wasn't on that list.
By the time he could return to India, his grandfather had died.
Go thou, Mander, and do likewise.
He could not see him one last time or even attend his funeral. And his other grandfather was battling long covid. “I feel so helpless. It is so scary,” he told reporters.
Ashwin Mittal, a young man in Delhi, tested positive for coronavirus, the BBC said. But, desperate to find a hospital bed with oxygen for his grandmother who was gasping for breath, with his fever and aching body he drove with her for many hours from hospital to hospital, but there were no beds.
Because it wasn't profitable for there to be enough beds in the private sector while the public sector is shit.
Finally, one hospital in north Delhi took pity on him and took her into the emergency room as he looked for an ICU bed elsewhere. But ICU beds were even harder to find than general covid hospital beds, and Mittal kept pleading that the hospital keep her in their emergency ward for longer and longer. But the hospital said they would have to discharge her, as they too were running out of oxygen. He knew then that only a miracle could save his grandmother.
India could followed Kerala or Cuba's example and made Heath a foreign currency earner. It chose to fuck itself up through PILs and stupid agitations of the sort Mander specializes in.
Wrenching stories of preventable deaths due to shortage of beds and oxygen poured in from every corner of the country. In Robertsgunj, a district town in Jharkhand, 58-year-old Rajeshwari Devi lay for 36 hours in a hospital emergency ward on oxygen support. Until her positive Covid-19 report came, the hospital refused to admit her. They then said that they had run dangerously short of oxygen and that the family must move her to a bigger hospital. But there was no ambulance and no assurance of a bed.
In other words, PILs had achieved nothing. Activism is a mischievous waste of resources.
A politician at last found them a bed, but by the time she reached there, she died. Doctors were close to despair and breaking point, saying it is hard for them to see when this would end when they could return to find time for their families and for rest again when indeed they would “see the light at the end of the tunnel this time”.
Pandemics burn themselves out.
Three families, complete strangers until that moment, crouched clustered around a single oxygen cylinder in the corridors of Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital in Delhi, the BBC reported. Three patients were taking turns to share a single oxygen cylinder.
One of these was Parvati, 75 years old. Her son Ram Kumar had his story of frantically searching for a hospital bed for his mother, being turned away from three hospitals and ending up finally at Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital, which gave them no bed, only a stretcher and an oxygen cylinder.
The second was 65-year-old Om Dutt from Ghaziabad. His son had died just a day earlier, because there were no beds.Again, the family searched vainly for a hospital bed, and finally returned to Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital. Here, they arranged for an oxygen cylinder, but he died after half an hour. And in less than 24 hours, they were back at Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital, at the end of making the same round of hospitals, after the dead man’s father’s health also rapidly slid.
They borrowed a friend’s car, made the rounds of many hospitals, and finally returned to Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital. “We did not want to come back here, but we had no choice,” his grandson said.
The third patient sharing the cylinder was a shopkeeper, Deepak, 40 years, who again arrived at the hospital corridors after scouring the city for a hospital bed.
The lone oxygen cylinder had been given by the hospital to the patient Parvati. But her son Deepak Kumar said, “In the corridors of the hospital we saw these other two families also desperate for oxygen. How could we turn them away?”
A rare gesture
This gesture of solidarity was as special as it was rare. I have often been wrenched and shamed as I witness how uncaring the Indian middle-classes have become, how bereft of compassion they are to the suffering and want of people of poverty and social disadvantage. I believed that this was because they had, as a class, opted out into a stratosphere of class-protected security. In their gated colonies, expensive schools and private hospitals,
and ski chalets in Switzerland and private jets and Hispanic maid servants and English butlers
shielded from the want of health-care, education, and security themselves, they did not care what the unwashed masses endured.
Indeed, many of them were unaware that India is a Malthusian shit-hole. They thought guys in villages dined on haute cuisine while glugging down Chateau Pretrus.
But during the second wave, for the first time in living memory the middle-classes
which were as poor as shit not too long ago
experienced the horrors of helpless dread and death, situations when neither money or networks could save them.
Whereas previously, the Grim Reaper knocked in vain at the gates of the middle class because chowkidar told it to fuck off.
For those months, they had stepped briefly into the shoes of the poor.
No they hadn't. Middle class people die the same as poor people. The difference that COVID made was that there was a greater shortage of hospital beds.
I had hoped that this experience of powerless loss at last would foster some empathy, and therefore, solidarity with the working poor.
It had the opposite effect. Voters don't want migrants. They don't want hospitals to be forced to treat poor outsiders even if they are suffering a medical emergency. They want something like the hukou system- i.e. 'club goods' being restricted to local people.
What COVID has shown the world is that Health resources are scarce. Entitlements have to be linked to contributions. Incentive compatible mechanism design is essential. Bureaucracies- even the vaunted CDC- can fuck up. Activists, however, are always useless.
Maybe at last they would join their voice and social and political power to the demand for better public services, at least free assured quality health care for all.
Demanding shit don't do shit. Free assured immortality for all may be desirable. But demanding it won't make it happen.
However, the horror passed as quickly as it came, and it took no time for the rich and middle-classes to return to the silos of their customary indifference.
While Mander continued to cobble together virtue signalling shite from stuff he found on the internet in 'The Diplomat' or the BBC website.
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