by Abhinava Srivastava 5 May 2021
How should society react to a phase of collective crises? This is perhaps the aptest question one can ask in these terrible and troubling times. The corona pandemic seems to have engulfed all of us in what now looks like a never-ending chase from death. The numbers this time are more disturbing than they were the previous year. Many of us are trying hard to accommodate the anxiety that is surrounding us in altogether new ways. The human losses to this time are more visible, and so are the ironies of our healthcare system that have been challenged and exposed this time in an unprecedented way. The sights of people running for oxygen and ultimately dying in hospitals and even in hospital corridors are horrifying. There is a sense of vulnerability all around, and for many, it’s all about delaying the inevitable now. There is some truth in this as we are surviving only by chance. Thus, in every respect, this is a collective existential crisis we all face, irrespective of the material conditions we live in.
And, yet, there is hardly any sense of collective loss in our social world. The pandemic is, of course, causing people to die on a much wider scale, and the deaths have been reported from every part of the country, but the sense of collective grief is absent. There are, of course, appeals of collective solidarity in some sections of civil society. Still, they do not in any way seem to suggest that we have articulated some collective response to a crisis that has now shattered our social fabric completely. Not long ago, scholars worldwide discussed how the pandemic could unite people across the globe and offer new possibilities of alternative social mechanisms. Still, all such predictions now seem naive, especially in the light of what is happening in India. The country has become the most horrifying spectacle of the ironies a pandemic can bring to a modern nation-state of the post-war period. It is not just about the collapse of the country’s health sector; it is also about how the pandemic has rudely shocked the internal balance of Indian society. The divisions of caste, class, and gender have been reinforced to an unprecedented level impacts that we don’t yet fully know. Though the crisis belongs to all of us, coping with it is mostly an individual act. The inability to channelize a collective response is thus partly driven by the circumstances pandemic has created: we as a society are experiencing something extraordinary, something we have not experienced and witnessed in the immediate past and something which leaves minimal scope for contemplation and reflection on who we exactly are as a society.
Given this extraordinary situation, only ‘death’ seems to be a unifying thread in present times. Ironically it may sound, but people dying on a mass scale due to a virus is the only public spectacle that reminds us that we still exist as a society. There is, of course, a great deal of similarity in the ways people are dying. The virus attacks, they become oxygen-deficient and then starts the struggle of finding a plasma donor, bed, or medical assistance in public or private hospitals. In most cases, they have already died before they are admitted to hospitals. Many of the people have met the same fate across the country. This is the modality of death that has almost become a norm in the last few days, and this is where we experience that we are going through a phase of crises that is common to all that is collective in many ways.
But even this experience of the common modality of death is failing to generate what can be termed as the feeling of collective loss in our social world as a whole, which makes the Indian context further ironic. Indeed, death in itself never evokes a sense of collective grief and loss in a predominantly semi-secular and semi-religious society like India. Most of us believe that every individual is predestined to die in certain ways irrespective of his social standing. Our experience of death is thus highly individualized in normal circumstances. But deaths on a mass scale due to a virus is completely a modern phenomenon. The modality of death that we are witnessing in COVID times has been largely set through the mechanisms of a modern state. It, firstly, failed to act proactively in the initial phase. It then imposed lockdowns for varying periods of time to contain the spread of the virus, something that turned out to be a disaster for thousands and thousands of people surviving on daily wages. And, lastly, it failed to prepare for the second wave of pandemic fall out of which are now witnessing with a sense of grave helplessness. Nowhere in the last year, the state seemed to alert and intervene in the situation that the pandemic has created. Its unwillingness, incompetence, and hypocrisy became evident in the wake of the state-assembly election’s campaign of West Bengal, where India’s head of state, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, addressed mass-gatherings caring little about COVID-protocols.
Thus, our inability to see the present crisis in terms of state failure accounts for the absence of the feeling of collective loss in our social world more than anything else. Despite being ruled and governed by the state, we tend to mystify our sufferings and fail to acknowledge them as massive failures of the state. The sense of casualty has collapsed for most of us, and therefore the state no longer seems to be responsible for the catastrophe we are facing. In the Indian context, this is an extraordinary situation given the fact that the state has not only strengthened itself to new levels in recent years but has also given itself extraordinary powers. It has done so in the name of the people, yet it is the people who have suffered the most due to the state’s gross mishandling of the present crisis. This should have ideally shaken its legitimacy, but that is not what we are witnessing. What explains this peculiarity of the Indian context is our failure to realize that we are citizens-subjects of state- and governed by it. The human loss that we are witnessing on a mass-scale in this country is engineered by state mechanisms and not something we were predestined to. We should stop mystifying it, and unless we do that, we can’t mourn at what is happening in this country collectively.