You may wonder why I am writing about Gandhi and the Pandemic but beginning with an anecdote about Donald Trump. It may be a stretch to blame the first surge of the Covid-19 pandemic in India, on the former US President. But, according to The Washington Post, US intelligence agencies had issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump as early as January and February 2020, during which he continued to play down the threat.
Yet on February 24, 2020, Air Force One, carrying Trump with his family members and a huge phalanx of courtiers, landed in Ahmedabad. The team that accompanied him was not screened at Indian airports, even though India too had put out an advisory, aware that a lethal coronavirus was being transported by infected passengers travelling across the world. Trump & Co were in India to revel in the Namaste Trump Tamasha. A grand spectacle with over 1,00,000 fawning Indians cheering the most powerful man in the world. Feeding the ego of a megalomaniac, whose Hallelujahs in the city—where Mahatma Gandhi’s Ashram is one of the iconic pilgrimage centres, and which he visited, clumsily even attempting to spin the charkha—could be heard across the Atlantic by his devoted base in the US. Unknown to both Trump or his pleased host Modi, the invisible virus was already in Super Spreader mode.
Yet on February 26, 2020, when asked about the pandemic virus, Trump insisted publicly that the number of cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” It was during this period I was invited by the University of Vienna, in Austria, to a private screening of my work in progress, a feature documentary, AHIMSA—Gandhi: The Power of the Powerless. But the signs of the first surge of Covid-19 relentlessly spreading were evident even to an amateur like me. By the first week of March 2020, it became obvious that any international travel was fraught with danger and that countries would soon ban air travel from certain destinations.
My wife Uma Gajapati and I decided to cancel our Vienna trip, and instead flew down to Visakhapatnam, to be with our daughter Sanchaita. It was one of those fortuitous decisions, because within a few days the virus was very much a clear and present danger to India. With his uniquely inimitable sense of drama, PM Modi addressed the nation on March 22 and declared a 24 -hour ‘Janata Curfew’. Then on March 25, without any apparent contingency planning and without analysing the impact on the livelihoods of the poorest of the poor, the marginalised, the daily-wage earners, the migrant labourers or creating a safety net for them, a total nationwide lockdown was announced till April. This led to the inevitable sense of insecurity and thus began the large-scale movement of the urban poor as they headed for their homes to the villages.
It was another matter that the action itself was an example of a cruel and massive jolt akin to the shock demonetisation had given the Indian economy. Except this time the human dignity of the poor and the helpless was bludgeoned. The images were heart-rending. A young girl cycling her old father for hundreds of miles. Men, women and children walking forever or desperately climbing on a stray truck or tempos which passed them by.
The sheer lack of empathy, the unbearable absence of compassion brought into sharp focus what Mahatma Gandhi would have done in such a situation. Ironically, a hundred years ago, India had been hit by the mother of all pandemics. The Spanish Flu. Gandhi himself fell ill from it but fortunately recovered. During 1918-20, the period of the pandemic, India was still under a colonial yoke, but Gandhi created an SOP, which he asked his fellow countrymen to follow. This included a crucial commitment to hygiene, social distancing, wearing masks and nutrition, among others.
But Gandhi’s own talisman would probably be the best lesson in handling the Covid pandemic even when it had begun. He always asked policymakers to look at the face of the impoverished, the most destitute and see if the blueprint they were implementing would wipe the tears from the face of the last man/woman/child standing. Had the government sincerely looked for inspiration from this vantage, we would not have witnessed the traumatic, heartbreaking images of the already poor—robbed of their dignity—further pillaged.
This occurred with greater anguish during the second wave, brought about through sheer hubris, complacency and the attitude of Mission Accomplished. After the first wave had subsided, India pompously announced to the world that it had saved Humanity. Entrenched in this arrogance, we forgot our hospitals and ICUs were under-prepared to handle the virulence of the Delta variant of the virus when it arrived. This time the visuals were even more distressing.
Watching men and women collapse as they gasped for breath, because of lack of oxygen or life-saving medicines was traumatising. But the searing images, which painfully made India a symbol of avoidable human tragedy, and for the world to witness, were the drone shots of funeral pyres. Of dead bodies abandoned on the banks of our holiest rivers or floating corpses wrapped in saffron, looking for moksha in the waves of the River Ganges.
From his first mass movement in Champaran in support of the indigo farmers to the Salt March or his relentless plea for sustainable living, Gandhi emphasised the need to create a holistic and self-sustaining rural model. This would inevitably include a stress on healthcare and education, which would
be accessible and probably state of the art.
As Tridip Suhrud says in my film, “For Gandhi, a quest for truth can actually take the form of an inquiry. It is that inquiry which gives Gandhi the idea of how an Indian peasant lives. Gandhi begins to understand poverty. He begins to understand destitution. He begins to understand what it means not to have any possessions. What it is not to have a school. What it is not to have primary sanitation or even very elementary healthcare.”
Over the years, this vision and wish of Gandhi have gradually been dismantled and the first sign of neglect can be found in the deplorable state of our rural health infrastructure. The callousness has now evolved to consume the urban and peri-urban public healthcare. But be that as it may, amidst the ongoing crisis, what one wished for and missed the most was a touch of empathy; a leadership which could lift our spirits, from the empty gestures of banging thalis and pots and pans to decorum that touched the better angels of our spirit or the grace of genuine compassion.On the eve of Independence, savage communal bloodbaths shook the nation. Gandhi was appalled. He left everything, and tried to go and douse the flames. He first went to Noakhali in Bengal. He was 77 years old.
As Ram Guha says in my film, “He’s very lonely because many of his closest friends have died. You know Tagore has died. CF Andrews has died. His secretary Mahadev Desai has died. His wife Kasturba has died. And right at the end of his life he embarks on this pilgrimage for peace across eastern Bengal.”
Tridip continues, “But Gandhi is walking through that 57 villages tour of Noakhali that he does. He is actually walking bare feet. As an act of atonement, as an act of prayerfulness. He says that ‘I’m walking through killing fields where the blood of innocents has been shed’.”
And as we wait for the inevitable third wave of Covid-19 to arrive—fully aware that it will once again wallop the poor, once again revive the deja vu of seeing floating corpses, and bodies hurriedly and furtively buried in the sand—I can only wish for the courage and emotional magnanimity of a Gandhi who can be with us as a beacon of hope. As the moral conscience of a people, who can be persuaded by example to rise above their pettiness and seek light through sharing grief. Seek light through empathy, with the people who have lost everything.
In the long run, desensitised as we have become to death and destruction, to destitution and hopelessness, we need to go back to learn from Gandhi the urgent need to care for our fellow human beings. To hold the hand of those drowning in the pits of despair, and pull them out of their sewers. As my daughter keeps reminding me, “The poor do not need poor solutions.” In fact, they are the ones who need centres of excellence in healthcare and education, using cutting-edge technology, in their villages. For the meek do not inherit the earth. The truth is we have seen that they are, more often than not, crushed by the sheer greed and conceit of the rich and those who rule them.
The Mahatma’s own talisman would probably be the best lesson in handling the pandemic even when it had begun
From his first mass movement in Champaran in support of the indigo farmers to the Salt March or his relentless plea for sustainable living, Gandhi emphasised the need to create a holistic and self-sustaining rural model
Ramesh Sharma
Emmy-nominated and multiple
award-winning filmmaker whose
latest film is AHIMSA—Gandhi: The Power of the Powerless