You deserve better. We all do.
Why is our endless capacity to negotiate difficult circumstances never rewarded with systemic change that makes it unnecessary?
Unless you live in an IPL commentary box, it’s been impossible to avoid the horror unfolding before our eyes this week. In many cities around India, the number of people needing medical attention due to Covid-19 shot past the capacity of their health infrastructure, with terrible consequences. People were left pleading for medical assistance that simply wasn’t there, and cemeteries and crematoriums have struggled to keep up with the influx of bodies. With the central government throwing its hands up, and the states bickering over vaccine supplies, oxygen and other essential medicines, people have increasingly turned to strangers for help. Most of our Twitter timelines have been flooded, not with the usual performative coolness and political hot takes, but with genuine cries for help, with a flood of responders doing what they can to match patients to the limited healthcare infrastructure available.
Statistics are easy to ignore, to explain, to whatabout, but you can’t ignore people. And thanks to Indian social media this week, none of us has been granted the luxury of reducing deaths to statistics. The pleas for help tell us so much - mother, sister, father, son, uncle, child, gardener, domestic worker, poet, lawyer, journalist, mentor, all loved, all cherished, and many now lost.
The spin will happen soon enough — we lose more people to other diseases, there have been more deaths in the US — but nothing will change the fact that these people did not have to die. At the very least, they deserved to die with dignity in a safe place. Their families and friends deserved to spend their last hours loving them and praying for them in peace, and not desperately pleading for help in a void.
The spin may even succeed, because we, as voters, have long been conditioned to expect little. People died in long lines waiting to withdraw their own money from bank accounts during the entirely pointless demonetisation exercise in 2016. Three years later, it was forgotten and the ruling BJP was swept in with an even larger majority. Some part of this phenomenon is certainly explained by the blind devotion to divisive political ideologies that runs rampant in India today, but beyond that, our memories are so short, because we place very little value on our own lives and the lives of our fellow citizens.
Before the dust settles on the new graves dug during this Covid wave, there will be lines of people making excuses for governments — we are a big country, we’re not developed, we can’t expect the state to do everything. The same people who were waxing eloquent a month ago about how gifting away more vaccines than we had administered locally was some sort of grandiose and necessary act of foreign policy befitting a rising world power, will talk without batting an eyelid about how that same rising world power cannot rationally be expected to vaccinate its own citizens for free.
This lack of value for the lives of our fellow citizens is not limited to Covid-19. In 2011, when I was working in Elphinstone, we were about to leave work when we heard about the bomb blasts in nearby Dadar. Dozens killed. The emergency services were still working in the area when I reached home to find that journalists had already started lauding some mythical spirit of Mumbai that forced us to go on with our lives as if nothing had happened. No pausing, no grieving, no anger, no space to express fear. The next morning it was business as usual. I found a taxi and the driver told me that he’d been on Dadar bridge when the blasts happened the previous evening. Mine was the first fare he was taking beyond the neighbourhood station that day. Both of us were scared. Neither of us had any courage to speak of, but we both had jobs to get to, and the blasts were already yesterday’s news — no employer gave them a further thought, and neither could we. The lives lost, the grievously injured, had all become a statistic. And forgetting them, moving on, was lauded as a show of ‘sprit’.
Mumbai is a wonderful city in a crisis. Making my way home on the night of the blasts, all I could see everywhere were people helping each other out. Orderly queues for shared taxis, quiet talking, people huddled under umbrellas waiting patiently in light rain for delayed buses. Today, its residents haven’t changed. Everywhere I look, they are stepping up just like they did in the lockdown last year. Organising, helping and comforting to the best of their individual abilities. This last week has shown me that people all around India are doing the same, working round the clock to try and find medical help for strangers. But perhaps we, as Indians, need to ask the question — why is it that our almost endless capacity to negotiate difficult circumstances, to help each other and to demonstrate kindness, compassion and innovation is never rewarded with actual systemic change that will make some of this jugaad less necessary? Why is it that each life lost to systemic failures is so quickly reduced to a statistic and buried?
Covid-19 and its ferocity may have taken us by surprise but the state of our public health infrastructure shouldn’t have. That government doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers are underpaid, that hospitals lack infrastructure, that despite the pandemic, we as a country continue to spend an unusually low percentage of our GDP on public health care, are all well known. Even in the last year, we’ve seen both government doctors and ASHA workers go on strike to bring the flaws in the system to people’s attention, to little avail. Instead, we turn all our attention to feel-good stories — we laud the spirit of an innovative doctor who managed to use one ventilator for many people, of Bollywood actor Sonu Sood who transported thousands of stranded workers home, or a teenager who bicycled 1000 kilometres to transport a disabled father home in the lockdown, instead of turning our rage on the horrific systemic lapses that made any of these actions necessary and demanding concrete change. To be clear, these are amazing people, who deserve every bit of adulation they get. But they also deserve more than adulation. Today, as many of us have learnt, the most noble citizen and the most heroic doctor cannot manufacture medical facilities. They cannot make beds or oxygen cylinders appear out of thin air. They cannot magically create more doctors or healthcare professionals to share their load. Ultimately, individuals cannot do the state’s job. And more importantly, they shouldn’t have to. As we watch helplessly as a broken system decimates us — with everyone from the chief minister of Delhi to the managing director of a big private hospital chain begging for help with oxygen supplies on Twitter — we have to face the fact that all of the good intentions, resource, energy and passion of private citizens cannot, and must not be expected to, serve the place of a fully functional public healthcare system.
While the ruling BJP has done much to compound an already difficult situation in the last few months, we must acknowledge that this is not a problem that has been constructed by a single political party. With the exception of a couple of states, the idea that private healthcare can act as a substitute for public healthcare is one that has taken root in our collective imagination over the course of decades, despite the fact that private healthcare providers have themselves often stressed that they should not be viewed as such. Budget cuts in public health expenditure never get the attention that a coal scam does, despite the fact that they probably directly impact our lives far more. At the heart of this indifference is the assumption that lives are cheap — that with the exception of the small percentage of Indians who can afford private care and good food, the lives of everyone else are expendable.
As the central government moves, in the middle of this devastating wave to privatise vaccination delivery, we see shadows of the same thinking in the applause that surrounds the move. Let everyone who can afford to pay between 800 and 1200 rupees to be vaccinated get vaccinated, and let the rest of the country lump it. To put these rates in context, pre-pandemic, 75% of rural households had a household income of less than Rs.5000 a month. For 75% of rural India, vaccinating a family at these rates would cost more than their monthly household income. In the middle of a devastating wave of this pandemic, we find ourselves, with vaccine policies driven by this same indifference to life, setting ourselves up for the next wave.
The last seven odd days on social media have been both shattering and deeply moving. They have demonstrated to many of us that a large part of this country does care and that a large number of our fellow citizens are essentially good, kind, resourceful and fundamentally decent people. But it has also demonstrated that every Indian deserves so much more. We deserve to have all of our lives valued, and we deserve a public healthcare system that is built on the assumption that each and every one of us is irreplaceable. Because we are. And whatever happens, we must not let the state use celebrations of our own individual and collective heroism to distract us from this demand.