Locking Down the Poor: The Pandemic and India’s Moral Centre

by Harsh Mander

In early 2020 the first cases of Covid-19 infection were confirmed in India, and on 24 March the country’s prime minister announced a nationwide lockdown, giving the population of over 1.3 billion just four hours’ notice. Within days, it became evident that India had plunged into its biggest humanitarian crisis since Partition.

In this powerful book, Harsh Mander shows us how grave this crisis was and continues to be, and why it is the direct consequence of public policy choices that the Indian government made, particularly of imposing the world’s longest and most stringent lockdown, with the smallest relief package. The Indian state abandoned its poor and marginalized, even as it destroyed their livelihoods and pushed them to the brink of starvation.

Mander brings us voices of out-of-work daily-wage and informal workers, the homeless and the destitute, all overwhelmed by hunger and dread. From the highways and overcrowded quarantine centres, he brings us stories of migrant workers who walked hundreds of kilometres to their villages or were prevented from doing so and detained.

He lays bare the criminal callousness at the heart of a strategy that forced people to stay indoors in a country where tens of crores live in congested shanties or single rooms with no possibility of physical distancing, no toilets and no running water. Combining ground reports with hard data, Mander argues with great clarity and passion that India is in the middle of a humanitarian catastrophe, the effects of which will be felt for decades.

Genres: Nonfiction, India, Politics

240 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Umesh Kesavan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author, a former bureaucrat and a social activist, continues writing books for members of the society who cannot read his books. This book is not merely a searing indictment of the regime which mercilessly locked down an entire nation with an advance notice of four hours ; Rather, it excoriates the elite sections of the society which looked away while the poor were robbed of their dreams in the name of a pandemic. The author is no literary giant but his conviction and compassion more than compensate for shortcomings in flair. Books such as these ought to be not merely read but passed on as a baton to others so that the flame of a strong moral centre burns bright in our hearts.

[Ujval Nanavati · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a log of our dead morality and comatose conscience.

It is also a log of the criminal lack of competence and lack of will on the part of the PM and Home Minister to start with and many others down the line.

Everyone should read this log of criminal errors of omission and commission; it will help us to never forget.

"A virus causes disease, not hunger and unemployment. It is not the pandemic but the response to it that threatens the livelihood of millions of people" - Carlo Caduff, medical anthropologist.

[Ubah Khasimuddin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, just wow. Harsh Mander provides a searing and thoughtful analysis of the draconian lock down in India, at the start of the pandemic in late March 2020, that lasted almost till June 2020. As an upper middle class foreigner living in India, I bemoaned the lockdown and hated it being isolated but did thing there was some plan behind what India was doing. I thought they were preparing the health care system, that by locking down they could curb the spread of the disease. But once the lock down ended, we all realized the sad truth. The lockdown was useless. But after reading Mander's book, I am not only upset about the lockdown but ashamed at my priveledged life, I didn't realize how terrible it was for others. I saw the images and did know it was affecting those in the gig economy but the extent of the tragedy was beyond what I saw on the news.
Mander provides detailed examples of every aspect of the lockdown, how migrants were given no time to prepare, how the Indian government did nothing for the poor but everything for the rich (chartered flights for stranded Indian students, but not even a train for the migrants to get home), how Muslims were made the scapegoats for the spread of the virus, how the health care system shut everything down just to cater to COVID 19 cases so those with any other terminal or life threatening illness were on their own, how so many jobs were lost, how education was halted and the worst part, how even after 3 months of lockdown the Indian government was utterly unprepared for the deluge of cases that came (what were they doing in that time?!). What a total and utter failure the lockdown was!
This book lays it all bare and makes the case that another full-scale lock down in India is not the solution for battling COVID 19 and so far so good that State and local governments in India are not going that route.
If I had any complaint about the book it was that the publisher screwed up the printing and there are whole sections missing and double copies of pages.
Highly recommend for those living and working in India and went through the 2020 lockdown, just around 200 pages, its a super fast read.

[Rahul Mishra · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must and moving account of the pandemic. This is an urgent book which lays bare the state of morality of thousands of people in India and the governments we chose.
It holds responsible every individual for the pain that the poor had to endure due to the policies and actions of state and elites.

[Revati · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devastating. We should all be ashamed.