Tag: COVID-19 in India

On The Lancet editorial

On May 8, The Lancet published an editorial criticising the Narendra Modi government’s response to India’s second COVID-19 outbreak, which has been redefining the meaning of ‘snafu’. All hell broke loose. Of course, hell has been breaking loose for quite some time in India now, but the latest episode was in one specific sense also gratifying to behold.

There were the usual rumbles in the week following the editorial’s appearance, until on May 17 India’s health minister Dr Harsh Vardhan shared a blog post penned by a Pankaj Chaturvedi deriding The Lancet‘s choice of arguments. (I’m fond of emboldening the honorific: it shows doctors can be stupid, too.) The post is mostly whataboutery studded with a few gems about how people who liked the editorial aren’t pissed enough that favipiravir and hydroxychloroquine were approved for use – as Dr Vardhan’s ministry did. More importantly, it seems Dr Vardhan, and his colleagues in fact, threw themselves into the barrel looking for anything with fully formed sentences that said The Lancet was wrong – a sign that their government still gives a damn about what foreign journals, and perhaps magazines and newspapers too, say about it.

We need to use this to the fullest extent, and I daresay that it’s the sort of resource the government is going to find difficult to duplicate as well. There was recently an article about Modi doing a great job during India’s second wave, published in an outlet called The Daily Guardian. There was enough confusion to draw the UK’s The Guardian forward and clarify that it was an unaffiliated entity – but no amount of confusion can supplant an institution, no matter how illiberal. Aakar Patel wrote in 2018: “The fact is that intelligent and intellectual bigotry is very difficult. There are very few people who can pull that off and that is why we can count the major ones on our fingers.” This is also why the government has twitched every time the New York Times, the Washington Post, BBC, The Lancet, Science and The BMJ have published articles critical of India, even if this isn’t the full picture.

It’s doubly interesting that the sophistry of the rejoinders aside, Dr Vardhan, his colleagues in government and his party’s supporters have all been antagonised by what they perceive to be a political act by a medical journal. This is an untenable distinction, of course – one that fantasises about a clear divide between the Watchers, who look out, and the Watched, who dare not know what the Watchers see. More pertinently, it’s a reflection of what they desperately expect from their own compatriots: to ignore how bad political leadership could help a virus ravage hundreds of thousands of families.

Laurie Penny wrote an essay in 2018 with some life-saving prescriptions, including that victories against fascists can never be had in the realm of reason. But when The Lancet publishes an editorial, The BMJ the work of an investigative reporter or even The Economist a tightly worded admonishment, they’re both reasoning and enacting a theatre of reason, and the latter seems to bother right-wing ideologues. These people are not going to heed reason, not now and not ever, but it’s heartening, even if my hope is naïve or misplaced, that they’re tractable in some meagre measure… less like dark matter and more like neutrinos.

Featured image credit: Kunj Parekh/Unsplash.

The Government Project

Considering how much the Government of India has missed anticipating – the rise of a second wave of COVID-19 infections, the crippling medical oxygen shortage, the circulation of new variants of concern – I have been wondering about why we assemble giant institutions like governments: among other things, they are to weather uncertainty as best as our resources and constitutional moralities will allow. Does this mean bigger the institution, the farther into the future it will be able to see? (I’m assuming here a heuristic that we normally are able to see, say, a day into the future with 51% uncertainty – slightly better than chance – for each event in this period.)

Imagine behemoth structures like the revamped Central Vista in New Delhi and other stonier buildings in other cities and towns, the tentacles of state control dictating terms in every conceivable niche of daily life, and a prodigious bureaucracy manifested as tens of thousands of civil servants most of whom do nothing more than play musical chairs with The Paperwork.

Can such a super-institution see farther into the future? It should be able to, I’d expect, considering the future – in one telling – is mostly history filtered through our knowledge, imagination, priorities and memories in the present. A larger government should be able to achieve this feat by amassing the talents of more people in its employ, labouring in more and more fields of study and experiment, effectively shining millions of tiny torchlights into the great dark of what’s to come.

Imagine one day that the Super Government’s structures grow so big, so vast that all the ministers determine to float it off into space, to give it as much room as it needs to expand, so that it may perform its mysterious duties better – something like the City of a Thousand Planets.

The people of Earth watch as the extraterrestrial body grows bigger and bigger, heavier and heavier. It attracts the attention of aliens, who are bemused and write in their notebooks: “One could, in principle, imagine ‘creatures’ that are far larger. If we draw on Landauer’s principle describing the minimum energy for computation, and if we assume that the energy resources of an ultra-massive, ultra-slothful, multi-cellular organism are devoted only to slowly reproducing its cells, we find that problems of mechanical support outstrip heat transport as the ultimate limiting factor to growth. At these scales, though, it becomes unclear what such a creature would do, or how it might have evolved.”

One day, after many years of attaching thousands of additional rooms, corridors, cabinets and canteens to its corse, the government emits a gigantic creaking sound, and collapses into a black hole. On the outside, black holes are dull: they just pull things towards them. That the pulled things undergo mind-boggling distortions and eventual disintegration is a triviality. The fun part is what happens on the inside – where spacetime, instead of being an infinite fabric, is curved in on itself. Here, time moves sideways, perpendicular to the direction in which it flows on the outside, in a state of “perpetual freefall”. The torch-wielding scientists, managers, IAS officers, teachers, thinkers are all trapped on the inner surface of a relentless sphere, running round and round, shining their lights to look not into the actual future but to find their way within the government itself.

None of them can turn around to see who it is that’s chasing them, or whom they’re chasing. The future is lost to them. Their knowledge of history is only marginally better: they have books to tell them what happened, according to a few historians at one point of time; they can’t know what the future can teach us about history. And what they already know they constantly mix and remix until, someday, like the progeny of generations of incest, what emerges is a disgusting object of fascination.

The government project is complete: it is so big that it can no longer see past itself.