MillenniumPost
Opinion

Eye of the storm

We each have our innate personal beliefs and devices, a divine faith that helps us wade through crises. These provide us with inner strength, helping us ride out the storm. But what of our India, which is today mired in a crazy melee and tumult?

Eye of the storm
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We all have our fallacies and beliefs. I discovered my own nascent ones on October 31, 1984, hours after the tragic assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. It was 7 pm in the evening and my father hadn't returned from office. By then, little Raju knew that riots had broken out in Delhi and people were being butchered on the streets. 'Om Sharavana Bhavaya' was my worried chant to the Gods for the next half hour (taught and reverently drilled into me by a pious and indulgent Madraasi mother). Sure enough, the ageing deviant arrived home soon; I feverishly hugged him and quickly forgave him. All turned out well.

Next chapter. A few days later, as anti-Sikh riots ravaged Delhi, we took in Ajju, the son of our very-genial Sikh neighbor. For a week, Ajju stayed with us, pretending to be my sister. Leaving him with us, his father, Jasbir Uncle, quietly mumbled: 'Wahe Guru Ji da Khalsa, Wahe Guru Ji di Fateh'. All turned out well.

A year before this travesty, India all but lost a crucial and baseline qualifier World Cup 1983 cricket match to Zimbabwe. Sadly, this was an untelevised encounter between two abject underdogs. 'Sad' because from somehow there emerged an unlikely batting inferno, with Kapil Dev smashing an unbeaten and improbable 175 runs to get India home. Kap's Devils eventually won India its first ODI cricketing World Cup. Most of India and all of Haryana chanted 'Jai Bajrang Bali'. All turned out well.

Moral of the story – we all have our little personal beliefs and chants (religious and otherwise) that we turn to in times of crises. If nothing else, they provide us with personal strength and faith, helping us ride out whatever storm we are caught up in. But what of our country, mired in many terrible storms today? This is paradoxical, because you are reading this column shortly after we completed 74 years of our independence.

Too many storms…

The last year-and-a-half has been terrible for India and the rest of the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The travesty is that there is no visible relief or divine intervention in sight anytime soon, as we continue to blank out half of our face behind masks and cower in our frightened little personal space(s). The answer lies in vaccinating as many of India's 140-odd crore people as possible, quick as we can. And therein is the monkey wrench, for vaccination – or the painfully sluggish pace at which it is being done – is the one thing that really sticks out like a sore thumb. India has fully vaccinated only 10 per cent of its population in the first 200 days of the much-glamorized national drive. And experts warn that any return to normalcy can happen only after 80 per cent or more of the population is fully vaccinated.

In these 200 days, it is only since May, when the Government liberalized the National Vaccination Policy and sought to decentralize the drive, that some speed was witnessed. This was also the time when we were at the height of the Second Wave, with nearly 4 lakh new cases being reported every day. As COVID cases and fatalities shot up, vaccination centers saw people queuing up to get their jabs, resulting in a shortage of vaccines. As states cried wolf, many were asked to import their own vaccines to meet the shortfall, but global manufacturers insisted they would deal only with the Central Government. And for reasons unknown, no significant deal to import vaccines has been finalized, other than with Sputnik from Russia. Meanwhile, Moderna, J&J and Wockhardt are trying to get a foot in the door, but things are anything but crystallized. All is not turning out well.

Choppy waters

Life has changed and the irony is that health concerns and fears are only the tip of the icebergs that we are sailing toward now, caught as we are in vicious swirls and the proverbial eye of the storm. The economy has taken a beating that we will take years to crawl back from. In turn, businesses large and small have been maimed, with aviation, hospitality, tourism, automobiles and ancillaries, food businesses and real estate all but on the verge of a resounding collapse. That begets the crunch of the story – joblessness and unemployment. Over the last 18 months, nearly 3 crore qualified and salaried Indians have lost jobs, highly educated and qualified people living in metropolises, urban centers and key Indian cities. They are buckling under EMIs and loan repayment schedules, relying as they are on their savings and Provident Fund withdrawals to keep life chugging along.

Then we have 23 crore Indians who have been pushed back below the poverty line in this financial year alone, in just a few months. While the lowest of the lowest have benefited to some extent in terms of basic employment under MNREGA and other such schemes, a majority remain jobless and are out of cash. It is time to make radical moves, quickly. All is not turning out well.

Business, political chagrin

Businesses, in turn, are going through their roughest patch in decades. Consequently, they have reached out to the Government for relief, either in taxation or levies. In fact, manufacturing companies have cited rising raw material costs and higher transportation costs due to rising fuel prices, which they say are making it unviable to sell their output at prevalent prices and warned that they would soon be forced to pass the burden on to the consumer (thus raising prices and stoking the already runaway inflation). The authorities, in turn, have bluntly turned them down, asking them to "manage at your own behest as the Government has already provided relief through various packages". The only exception is for the telecom sector, especially after Vodafone Plc Global Chairman ruled out any further investments in India, even as its India chief Kumar Mangalam Birla stepped down as Non-Executive Chairman, offering to hand over his 27 per cent stake to the Government at zero cost.

Add to this business mess the brouhaha on the political front. After the curtains went down on the West Bengal assembly polls, the spotlight has since shifted to Uttar Pradesh. A bloody battle has erupted in the state as the incumbents flex muscle and exercise vocal chords, making staunch and provocative statements, all announcing their certain victory at the polls. We also have shenanigans within the Congress, the latest being the leadership tussle in Punjab, with Navjot Singh Sidhu coming out trumps against Chief Minister Amarinder Singh. The party is also feverishly working on its strategy and possible alliance options in Uttar Pradesh, with political chess being played with Akhilesh Yadav. Back to the central ruling party, bitter divides are surfacing in the state units in Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka, especially after BJP Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa's unceremonious exit. All is not turning out well.

Terrible reminiscence

All of the above are terrible reminders of a dark past, but a corollary to a darker today. It is reminiscent to what happened in India during the 1947 partition or the subsequent skirmishes with Pakistan (and the Godhra riots in February, 2002); what we saw in South Africa at the times of Apartheid; or when the Allied forces dropped A-bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bring Japan and Germany to their knees and a force a closure of World War II.

One thought those times are gone, but today's actions are reminding us of the past once again, spreading hatred and betraying the desperate need for togetherness, the only means for survival in today's changed world. A bitter lesson that COVID-19 has taught us is that people have to mend fences and not spread animosity or disdain, parry to fight together a common and dreaded enemy. That is the only way out of the mess that we find ourselves in now, rapidly, as a country and a flagellating world. Or truth be told, the future shall make a mockery of the world's past mistakes, and the ones we are making again today.

All is clearly not turning out well.

The writer is a communications consultant and a clinical analyst. narayanrajeev2006@gmail.com. Views expressed are personal

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