A social anatomy of Covid-19 in India
Two trends are clear when analysing the relationship between Covid-19 and social conditions. One, as similar to natural disasters, it has hit worse the socially marginal communities. Migrants, refugees, urban poor, and daily wagers notwithstanding, the most telling example in terms of actual loss of life is coming from the U.S.A. In Louisiana and Chicago, the death among the blacks is as high as 70 per cent. The existing medical conditions reflecting long-standing social depravity, access to health services, and the nature of jobs that put them to greater exposure are reportedly the reasons behind this.
Another unsettling trend is consolidating on the other side of the globe. In India, the rise in accusing marginal, minority communities, particularly Muslims, alike the perpetrators of ‘original sin’, in spreading the virus either due to negligence or with alleged criminal intent is deeply troubling. At the same time, however, these examples reveal the structural faultlines of nation-states that feed the politics crafted around ‘religious or racial identities’, which the pliable mainstream media exploits and a significant section of majoritarian community gleefully endorses.
The current anti-Muslim diatribe on some leading national and regional news channels as well as in social media began in the wake of almost half a dozen deaths reported towards the end of March, investigating which, it was found that all of them had attended the annual conference of an Islamic missionary group, the Tablighi Jamaat, in Delhi mid-March. While some media houses have restricted to the use of the word ‘Jamaati’, the general insidious purport is of essentializing the whole community of Muslims. It comes as no surprise that #coronajihad was trending amongst Indian twitterati. Some channels described the supposed role of Tablighi Jamaat in spreading virus as ‘virus terrorism’.
(From the twitter handle of Vishweshwar Bhat, editor-in-chief of Vishwanavi Daily, a South Indian newspaper), reproduced from https://www.newslaundry.com/amp/story/2020%2F04%2F08%2Fkannada-media-paints-the-coronavirus-crisis-communal?__twitter_impression=true
After a long, initial indifferent approach towards the epidemic – for instance, on 13th March, which was also the first day of the congregation of Tablighi Jamaat, the Healthy Ministry had given a press release saying ‘coronavirus is not a health emergency and there is no need to panic’ – the government finally took note of the imminent threat. However, very soon, not only to health, the virus also has become a threat to the body-politic of the nation and to the fabric of social life in neighbourhoods and families.
While it doesn’t seem unusual to perceive vulnerability along the terms of family, neighbourhood, and nation, implicit in doing so is the gradual and continuous search for the ‘internal other’ which threatens these spaces. Initially there was some anger expressed towards China (once again, a global pattern can be traced in the way Donald Trump insistently kept calling it a ‘Chinese Virus’), which manifested in sporadic attacks on and forced quarantine of ‘Chinese’ looking individuals from North-East states (who are derogatorily referred as ‘chinkis’ in mainland India). However, both the anger and the attacks subsided.
Meanwhile, the news about the deaths and transmission related to Tablighi Jamaat broke out, which infused a fresh energy in otherwise ‘dull’ media discussions that had already turned to ‘celebrity chats’ to spice up their content. The Jamaat brought virus back into the news but this time through its social vectors.
Now was an ever-present, already existing ‘internal other’ which could be blamed for the pandemic. The optics were impressive: a large group of Muslims gathered ‘secretively’, held meetings, and then many of them dispersed to transmit the virus in the society across the regions. The Muslim bodies were portrayed as ‘corona bombs’ signifying their deliberate intent to harm the nation’s body-politic. Even those who did not travel and remained at the Markaz (Jamaat’s headquarters) in Delhi were dubbed as people who were hiding after acting out a conspiracy.
The issue is not of denying the spread of contamination that happened when Tabligh members, both who had come from outside of India as well as those from within India, dispersed to different parts of the country. The concern is with the invention of a public discourse in which politics along community lines prevails over critical questioning of obvious administrative lapses. The concern is with a barrage of fake videos and news circulated daily on WhatsApp groups of family and friends, which even after being proven false, lingers on in the memory of users. A specific video for the consumers of fake news might be false but the general belief of Muslims being intently responsible for the spread acquires the status of the truth. The ruling party’s media spokespersons daily break down the ‘data’ of infection along what percentage of it has been caused by Jamaat. This reflects the ‘savvy’ use of new media to constantly widen the perceived and existing gulf, but also to invoke a troubled historical past.
In both long- and short-term contexts, the inevitability of this thematisation of Muslim culpability is not hard to discern. Historically, for the right-wing politics, Muslims have represented a threat to both the core constituents of social and political life: family and nation. From inter-religious marriages to the narrative of population explosion, they have been seen as a threat.
In the more immediate run, the enactment of the controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill, which according to the experts, introduces the criteria of religion for citizenship for the first time in Indian Constitution, played on and further intensified the marginalisation and insecurities of Muslims and their vilification. A two-month long sit-in protest, that took place in Delhi against it, was predominantly attended by Muslims, which culminated into a horrific pogrom in which at least 36 Muslims were killed. The political provocation has been happening for some time through accusations of Muslim men wooing away Hindu girls (“love jihad”), and their involvement in cow-slaughter and beef eating that eventually led to a number of deaths due to mob lynching. A toxic mix of hate-ridden politics and fake news, amplified in the echo-chamber of a pliant media newsrooms, has nurtured a society willing to transform the fact-based Tablighi role into a felt simmering anger against the Muslim community.
The whole process rather turned out ugly very fast. A very subtle drive is on its way to exclude Muslims from the economic activities. For example, a gated neighbourhood decided to ban the entry of Muslim vendors inside; a Muslim fruit vendor was forced to shut his shop while the Hindus were left untouched; a Muslim family was attacked with weapons because they didn’t switch off the light on 5 April as the Prime Minister had demanded the nation to do so; a mosque was ransacked and partially burnt in Delhi and shots were fired on another near Delhi. In the southern state of Karnataka, milk and vegetable sellers were beaten up and prohibited to work. A village in the same state banned the entry of Muslims. Even the Muslim individuals doing relief work of distributing food were attacked in Bengaluru, and so were Muslim truck drivers in a northeast state of India. To avoid transmission of the virus, messages are in circulation to not “receive money from Muslims”.
Urban migrants and Dalits have also faced similar discriminatory acts but studies suggest that the effect of economic disruption might be felt more by Muslims. 19 per cent of the total Muslim workers are engaged in casual jobs in comparison to 13 per cent of Hindus. 48 per cent of the total workforce classified as ‘self-employed’ are of Muslims. Working without any social security network, the informal labour market of India is huge (around 90 percent of the total workforce). Historically, Muslims have been underrepresented in secured jobs and education, and therefore, any targeted exclusion from the informal sector will hit them very hard.
The virus will affect different social segments differently. Seemingly, for many, the operative word in ‘social distancing’ – the measure to flatten the curve – is ‘distancing’. For marginals and minorities, the social might become the main thing to watch out for, not only because of the structural reasons that is already making hunger and death more imminent amongst them but also because how politics, media, and society keeps that ‘social’ fissured and fractured.
Nitin Sinha, senior research fellow, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin
Reyazul Haque, research fellow, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin
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