Dharavi slum, Mumbai. PTI
Ashoak Upadhyay
T
he COVID-19 pandemic has not only introduced new words with almost toxic implications into our lexicon of everyday language, whatever tongues we speak in, it has also redefined the meaning of ‘home’ and exile. To focus on the latter first, consider the tragedy of migrant workers in various metropolitan centers in India unable to find transport and thus flee to the safety of their villages that they had ‘fled’ to find their dream in the city, dreams of some livelihood to sustain their people back home; words lose their meanings and significances with dizzying rapidity. The village has become the sanctity; the city is now the center of the apocalypse called COVID-19 for the migrant labourer at construction sites, waiters in dhabhas, street side restaurants, domestic service providers; flight is no longer an option but a necessity as the means of escape begin closing down. The heart-wrenching scene of migrants crowding Anand Vihar bus station in Delhi desperate to reach their villages in UP tell us more about the toxic effect of the pandemic than any economic statistics about an approaching financial crisis can evoke. Economists may tinker with ‘growth’ numbers in their lockdown cocoons dreaming up visions that will pull the ‘economy’ out of an impending recession but what the migrants in flight show us is the heart of a darkness we have tiptoed around in our shallow conception of the crisis that impacts us: the disenfranchised unentitled and misguided had been forgotten.
For migrant workers fleeing the pandemic language loses meaning in a way that is inflected with the cruelest of ironies. “Stay at Home” is a pious but valid instruction from medical authorities and governments. When the PM intoned ‘Janata Curfew’, social distancing and the firm plea bordering on an order, a register that the urban middle classes simply drooled over with piteous relief at being looked after by a stern father, who would have spared a thought for the migrant worker huddled outside his shelter at a construction site shut down? Who knows if the contractors would have followed the father of the modern nation-state in his advice to continue paying wages? We the middle classes will do so in order to ensure the maid comes back to work, we will wallow in our illusions of good faith and concern for the poor; but who has checked if those migrants at Anand Vihar had not made their panic-ridden flight to the station with empty pockets?
With our withered conscience, how can we even begin to imagine the tumultuous despair of the migrant who has no language left to define an existence on the run from an impending disaster of infinite incertitudes? Who shall he appeal to? The “Home” was always a temporary roof in the city of dreams; the village was the memory, sometimes bright but often dimmed by overlain remembrances of poverty or social oppression. The city was the liberating dream, the construction site the space in which alternative communities could be created. What did the injunction: Stay at Home! mean for the migrant? Which home? Home is or was not where the heart is but where the money was but this ‘home’ is now a death pit. To ‘stay’ at home I have to flee to it. The exigencies of immobility, of social isolation that the pandemic demands require a consciousness of self-isolation, of self-governance; the exigencies of flight to ‘home’urge a collective consciousness of together-ness, of a primordial need to stick together; ‘social distancing’ loses meaning, turns to dust under the panic trampling of feet and hearts and a despair gone mute. Yet social distancing is writ large: the migrant has been distanced from the writs of govern mentality and self-regulation by the force of an impending disaster. Language fails, meanings collapse into a tragic void.
What if not in a void are the 15 lakh residents of Asia’s largest slum living in, an absence of meanings? In Dharavi in Mumbai city, that had burgeoned into a favourite “slum tourist” site for gawking, western tourists eager to carry back a flavour of a nightmarish ‘Other’, how will the tightly packed communities practice or even comprehend social distancing? Wash hands every two hours? We don’t have water to drink!
For most slum dwellers the COVID_19 virus would be just another “brick in the wall” another item in their never ending catalogue of daily disasters either waiting to happen or already visited. A 2015 study of slum dwellers by the International Institute of Population Studies (IIPS) found 89.6 per cent die of respiratory problems diseases, In Mandal, a creek-side slum in Mumbai, there was incredulity at the instructions to wash hands:
“Wash hands frequently?…Sometimes I have to skip bathing to save water for cooking.”
A similar sentiment of disbelief was echoed in Syria where local medical workers fear the virus may be spreading rapidly. In northwestern Syria a million refugees from the war shelter in muddy tent camps and abandoned buildings constituting a ripe field for the visitation of an apocalypse they had not bargained for. In such camps, “night watches without watching over anything.” (Blanchot, 1995: 51) Dispossessed and uprooted by the vicious politics of empire-building and hegemonic brutalizing wars in the name of democracy and “peace” the refugees may now be in the midst of a crisis that could take the most unspeakable toll to date. According to a news report, “Syrian doctors believe that the virus has already swept into the camps with death and illness that bear the hallmarks of the outbreak.” The report continues that the “international response has been slow to non-existent…”
The pandemic is drawing new cartographical lines: people segregated into territories demarcated by an “abyssal” line. (Santos, 2014: 118) On this side of the line are the privileged victims whose lifestyle allows for the language of ‘govermentality’ to resonate and find acceptance: thus “social distancing”, “self-quarantine” near-obsessive cleanliness, indeed self-regulation work in good measure.
These privileged citizens, on this side of the line would rather forget the existence of those on the other side of the line. Here the language and discourse of self-governmentality breaks down as an epistemology of orderly existence. This appears fairly obvious. You cannot wash your hands every two hours in a slum where there is no water to drink or to cook in. Scarcity of this sort denotes lack of entitlements; deprivation is absolute, a way of life.
It is also obvious that these demarcations do not define new abyssal lines so much as reinforce existing ones. COVID-19, the pandemic’s spread strengthens the epistemologies of pre-existing exclusions. The slum is an eye sore for the urban middle class privileged whether living in a tenement or a high rise; it has its uses in terms of the supply of low paying labour and to that extent the slum is tolerated. It works to reinforce an epistemology of a “metropolitan-periphery” nexus in which the slum is the unruly ‘Other’.
At a deeper level this constitutes part of what sociologist and social activist Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls societal fascism. He identifies five types and one of them is the fascism of social apartheid, “the social segregation of the cities into savage ad civilzed zones.” (Santos, 2014:128). The savage zones do not fit into a neat social contract that the civilized zones do; they are dens of vice, drug peddling, the lumpen-proletariat and the epicenter of a polluting environment against which the civilized zones have to segregate, isolate themselves. So the fortified gated communities evident in south Asian cities guarded by personnel from the slums perhaps but civilized temporarily by donning the ‘unform’ with which they exercise the power invested in them to keep the savages out.
This form of fascism remains tentative and tenuous because the savage zones supply more than those security guards; they are the repository of domestic labour that reinforces the narcissistic belief in being part of the civilized zone. But the equation between the two zones, the metropolitan and the periphery often expresses itself in a subaltern consciousness played out in ways that contain its own dialectic: protest at working conditions and/or sexual exploitation could have unintended consequences. Equally a perverse dialectic operates as is evident now with the idea of quarantine and social distancing: the metropolitan, civilized zones take to the idea of self-isolation as a form of necessary self-regulation; not just to prevent the spread of the virus within the zone itself but also to protect it from the pandemic coming in with the domestic from the other side of the line. And for the latter’s part, knowledge of the virus’ likely origins has filtered down into the periphery, defining an inchoate subaltern awakening of the dangers that face them in the civilized zone; many have stayed away from homes blessed with a member travelling in from the supreme metropolitan centers.
But the abyssal lines remain and are nowhere more evident than among the refugee camps and at the borders of developed countries. The imagination boggles at the horrendous prospect of the pandemic running through refugee camps: already turned into the ‘Other’, savages of and from, an unruly Hobbesian world, the refugees remain and will increasingly become nobody’s children. Like the creature in Mary Shelley’s classic novel, the Dr. Victor Frankensteins on this side of the abyssal line, will not just disown them but wish them an oblivion or leastways a safe distance from their borders and attenuating consciousness of the world and its manifold disasters. Part of the reason the refugees in northwest Syria, a million of them, have been abandoned is not just callousness but a strategic response to limit the borders of their generosity and humanitarianism to the civilized zone.
Some of the implications of this exclusivity on existing inequalities have been noted even from within the civilized zone or rather from its rarefied heights, outfits such as The World Economic Forum that looks at the pandemic in an “age of inequality.” Ever since Thomas Piketty’s work income inequality has become a co opted catchphrase occasionally sounded to remind themselves that capitalism could do better, must do the right thing by the poor, generating not policies to tax the oligarchs and rein in the greed of the top one per cent but pleas for greater philanthropy by that privileged miniscule.
In the case of the pandemic the WEF points to the perils for the uninsured, the poor in the US and elsewhere. Some 27.5 million or 8.5 per cent of the American population had no health care in 2018. is not insured. The individual costs for these could be “devastating.” Not just that. The WEF informs us that “concerns” were raised about the accessibility of future coronavirus vaccines universally across the population after “…the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, said he could not guarantee it would be affordable to all when available.”In Africa the WHO’s biggest fears is for the poor densely populated areas. The WEF quotes an official: “In this type of situation, if health facilities don’t have the appropriate capacity to treat patients, then the death toll could be significant. And what makes this even more crucial is that the coronavirus could decrease our resources for treating other diseases such as malaria and for ensuring maternity and child healthcare”
In the quotes above we get a reading of the crisis that ought to alert us as to the way the pandemic’s management will be conducted. It is clear that the abyssal lines within the most advanced country in the world will define the nature and extent of treatment: Only those who can afford to pay will be treated. Africa will have to depend on the generosity of strangers and much as jack Ma Foundation and the Chinese government might pump in desperately needed medical supplies into the unfortunate continent , it will be ignored or stay below the radar of the privileged set of policymakers and pharma companies smelling profit in the fogs of the pandemic..
As that WHO official fears Africa and we should add other densely populated clusters across Indian cities too will become the source of secondary diseases and that will provide the grounds for yet another form of societal fascism, for an exclusionary epistemology that locates the dangers to the civilized zone in the zones of the dispossessed.
So the more pernicious implication of the pandemic is not the fact of the impact on inequality and the poor but the narratives that will flow out of it. The poor will not just become victims of the pandemic but also of accompanying diseases generated by a policy and social apartheid that distances health care and other social security measures from them. The predictable outcomes of this distancing will engender further narratives of blame that will mystify by obfuscating existing perceptions of the pandemic’s origins and carriers. Such narratives constituting an epistemology of hegemonic reason will revive and sustain inherited perceptions within the civilized side of the line, the metropolitan zones, that their credos of ‘discipline and punish’ worked but are imperiled by the hordes on the other side of the line.
In this age of global capitalism unlike earlier epochs of colonialism, the metropolitan-periphery nexus can be replicated across developing countries and so the world witnesses a gridlock of abyssal lines that continue to reproduce themselves on the basis of the same epistemologies of social distancing.
Right now, in these stages of the pandemic we are aware that the urban well- travelled middle classes are carriers of the virus whose epicenter is the West, the Matropolitan zone; the poor domestic help and refugees swarming to flee the city also know that the Indians travelling back from places such as the US, UK, Spain and Italy, not to mention other parts of Europe and south-east Asia bring back the virus.
But if the history of past epidemics and plagues is any guide the narrative will be re-written from within the walls of the civilized zone for the consumption of both sides of the abyssal line, a narrative that will create new borderlines configuring new victims to Other and sustain existent hegemonies.
The coronavirus has arrived as it were at the doorstep, or is already inside, communities ripe for its spread like a contagion. With all our modernity and globalization (or because of them) millions still live in squalor lacking basic amenities that most of us would take for granted—and use to ward off the evil eye of that micron. But as Elise Mitchell points out, in The Atlantic in the United States no less,the virus is “spreading in states where tens of thousands of people are without permanent shelter or sanitary living conditions and rely on food banks for survival.” States with huge populations of incarcerated people living in insanitary and overcrowded without adequate health care and food security are ripe pickings for the virus and what is more the spread of other related diseases that are generated in those unsanitary conditions spreading outward towards areas apparently safe—areas on the this side of the line, in the civilzed zone. And that is when the narrative will be re-written; as Mitchell suggests happened 500 hundred years ago in the case of small pox brought into the Caribbean by Spaniards and passed off later as a native infection.
COVID-19 too will spread in the “incarcerated” areas of the developing countries populace with a speed the present government has shown itself incapable of handling with any degree of resolve other than jaw-tightened rhetoric and pleas for social distancing. As yet there is little by way of public policy that reckons with the spread of the virus in dense areas; the news report of a slum dweller in Mumbai testing positive after returning to work for someone who had traveled in from another country is starkly reminiscent of Mitchell’s account of the first recorded outbreak of small pox in the Americas five centuries ago when “a European man arrived on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola carrying the disease in 1518.”
Scenarios of the new narratives are already unfolding: almost every major European Union country has closed borders, the latest being Germany to all except permanent residents of EU: diplomats and commercial traffic. Germany has also suspended refuge intake programmes and asylum-seeker hearings. As The Economic Times reported “Migrants and asylum seekers have become one of the most vulnerable groups hard hit by the crisis as public services that usually tend to the group are wound down “ Elise Mitchell points out that 500 years ago the small pox epidemic spread was fought with health programmes restricted to the non-Native populations. As she concludes, “Societies further their own destruction whenever they fail to provide anyone health care, housing, or dispensation from work because of their employment, socioeconomic, or immigration status.”
The narratives of the abyssal lines that accompany the pandemic will abet its spread through inaction and neglect among the dispossessed. This in turn will generate further narratives as “explanations” of the pandemic’s fallout centered on race, ethnicity and marginality’s incompetence with governance and self-regulation. The ‘Other’will be redrawn as the authors of the misery that inflicts the civilized zone. Pandemics will die out taking their toll but epistemologies remain; Drawing on her research on the small pox 500 years ago whose primary cause was misleadingly found by the colonists to be the slavery ships and African slaves, Mitchell cautions us: “Over the past two months, the public has been inundated with images that map the coronavirus onto geopolitical borders. These images simplify dense information in ways that create the illusion that contagious diseases are linked to particular peoples and places.”
Symptomatic of this narrative of blame and stigmatization is the naming of the virus by its place of origin. In 2015 the WHO issued guidelines for naming diseases one of which aimed at removing the practice of naming a disease after the place it had originated. That is why this one is called COVID-19 yet the American President has already branded it the “Chinese Virus” thus creating if nothing lse a title for a new narrative of demonization and discrimination. As Mari Webel points out naming diseases by place of origin has a long history and points to the outbreak of cholera in the Ganges delta in the 19th century. The disastrous illness spread on account of global travel and was identified as “Asiatic” with consequences that were discriminatory and racist. Here he is:
“Distinguishing the disastrous illness of cholera as “Asiatic” fit with the racialized, imperial views that denigrated the intelligence and the cultures of non-white populations globally. It also helped justify more stringent quarantine measures and travel restrictions for people read as “Asian” and not European. Muslim pilgrims en route to Mecca from southern Asia, for instance, were subject to different rules than European troop ships traveling the same routes.”
Racist stereotyping continues Webel also followed the Ebola virus (EVD) in 2014-15 where people from West Africa were “erroneously” blamed for the spread of the epidemic. The narrative went further as eating habits were demonized. West Africans for eating “bushmeat” a term pulled out of colonial discourse to describe meat from hunted animals as distinct from that of domesticed animals. “Talking about “bushmeat” allowed people to characterize those suffering from EVD as primitive or exotic. It also implied that West Africans were responsible for bringing EVD into global circulation because of what they ate or how they lived.” And as the author reminds us the causes for the increasing spread of the illness had more to do with a deficnet health care system than what the pople ate..
Despite the WHO guidelines, in the public imagination, particularly in the civilsed zones exposed to a globalised way of life, the COVID_19 will remain a Chinese virus. And new narratives like the old ones from previous globalized epochs are going to be written stigmatising more than the people from the place of origin; the blame strategy will search for the ‘villains’ that spread it. As the pandemic intensifies in areas with an absence of health care, social security and dense overcrowded populations, the narratives yet unwritten would have found their main characters. Such narratives will form hegemonising epistemologies in which ‘social distancing’, enforceable curfews, quarantine, ‘contract tracing’ and, detention centers and citizenship verification will become tropes of well-being. Societal fascism will consolidate and expand all over liberal democracies ruled over by unfettered regimes of narcissism and authoritarianism.
The pandemic itself may recede into the dim recesses of living memory but not before it would have been turned into the crucible for newer forms of an exclusionary politics, engendering more innovative organizations of hatred for those on the other side of the abyssal line.
And the chimes of freedom’s fragments could fade away into a deafening darkness.
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Notes Blancjot, Maurice: The Writing of the Disaster Santos, Boaventura de Sousa: Epistemologies of the South. Routledge. 20114 Elise A.Mitchell: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/humanitys-long-history-of-making-epidemics-worse/607780/ Mari Webel: https://theconversation.com/calling-covid-19-a-chinese-virus-is-wrong-and-dangerous-the-pandemic-is-global-134307 Related Read in The Beacon:A Long View on Covid-19: Seeking Alternative Futures
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