The coronavirus and our little coronations

The political class has been unlocked once again. At the first given opportunity, they’re back to doing the one thing they’re good at: fighting each other.
The anti-racist protests in America, a class war of sorts, became possible only because the curve flattened a bit. (Express Illustrations)
The anti-racist protests in America, a class war of sorts, became possible only because the curve flattened a bit. (Express Illustrations)

Where does one even begin? Wrestling with a pandemic that had left us with little option, we locked ourselves up like cave people of the past, illumined only by a small fire, scared of the great, wild unknowns that raged outside. In a trice, we abandoned all soft dreams, and drastically trimmed the horizon of our ambitions—our pursuit could now no longer be of any higher calling, we were thrown back to the bare existential, the primal need to save our lives.

That reduced us further: at two levels. The material and the moral. The means of livelihood that sustained us in this world started thinning, the liquidity of printed money lived up to its name: our savings leached away. Stress on such planetary scale was bound to set off abnormal waves in humanity’s collective psyche.

And sure enough, the jackboots were out soon. Heavily placed on the neck of an African-American outside an eatery in Minneapolis, of a healthcare whistle-blower in Wuhan…. Almost in lock-step with a tiny new non-being that was strangulating the elderly in many parts of the ‘developed world’. Society and pandemic fused into one asphyxiating metaphor: breathing has become a problem. Who would have thought that hundreds and thousands would be out on the streets of America and Europe demanding equal rights to breathe!

For those of us who grew up singing the songs and reading histories of a different era, it was indeed a bit surreal when the clock seemed to wind back to a time when disease and pestilence stalked the land freely, like thugs and pindaris, a time when growing up to be an adult was a happy accident. It was almost as if we were being granted our secret wish to be on a time machine, being taken back a century, but with a perverse twist. It was not that idyll of our fantasies, but its very negative. Wait … negative is a good word now. Never before in civilisational history perhaps has a negative report been more celebrated!

History itself cannot be negated, but the effects of history have to be overcome—if we wish to move forward rather than backward. That’s why hundreds of people are raging against the tacit social-intellectual quarantine of the elite. Across America, statues and monuments of Confederation war leaders, which glorified the slavery of the South, are being pulled down or renamed. Even some hawks at Pentagon agree with it, but not Donald Trump. He sees in this attack on the “Great American Heritage” a chance to bounce back in a re-election that was slipping away from his hands.

Here, of course, we are still building statues. Never mind if we betray the real legacy of the icons thus sought to be further iconised. A Vivekananda or a Kempe Gowda would have surely done a double take at the idea of statue-building in the midst of a pandemic. Despite the proposer state and its showpiece city, Bengaluru, proving better at controlling the pandemic than Mumbai or Delhi or Tamil Nadu put together. BSY of course will never get feted in the party for that. He suffers from the same problem as MMS once did: someone else will have to be propped up. The pandemic may have irrevocably changed our way of life, our global equations, but it has not so much as touched the high command culture of Indian politics.

The political class, uncharacteristically locked in battle on a social front, has been unlocked once again. At the first given opportunity, they’re back to doing the only thing they’re good at: fighting each other. There’s the Rajya Sabha to be won. In Karnataka, the surprise was restricted to the names, and a threat call; in Gujarat, it’s a full-blown tug-of-war over MLAs. (Who cares if bodies are being buried anonymously?) The Congress has seen much attrition there since it narrowly lost the last Assembly polls—now, it was to suffer the indignity of some more defections, before resort politics could even kick in. The BJP calls it Congress-style harakiri, which apparently means someone from within the GOP wants to ensure the defeat of one of its own candidates. Flock engineering, coercion, bait: all this for just one seat. In Rajasthan, Ashok Gehlot, in a preemptive move, whisked away his flock to, where else … a resort. Again, just for two seats. Why such fuss? Obviously, the Upper House is about to see some heavy lifting. Every single vote would matter.

A set of bigger, bloodier electoral battles are around the corner too: the Bihar and Bengal Assemblies are at stake. Migrants be damned. Hotspot? What hotspot? Amit Shah is shaking hands with Nitish Kumar: together, they will face a minor. In Bengal, though, Shah has a match in Didi. Mamata Banerjee may have scored some self goals, but she can be matchless—Shah’s efforts at learning Bengali notwithstanding. He may have to learn some Rabindra Sangeet. Meanwhile, LED screens are much in demand. There was a time when screens used to bulge outward, or have a 70mm arch. Now we have flattened that curve, so that we can consume our own hubris without distortion.

The anti-racist protests in America, a class war of sorts, became possible only because the curve flattened a bit. Here in India, we are still rising to meet our endless series of doomsdays. Elections and epidemics go well together. Well, the neocoronavirus may have physically masked us, but metaphorically speaking, it has unmasked every stratum of society and politics. If they needed to be, that is.

Santwana Bhattacharya

Resident Editor,Karnataka

(Email: santwana@newindianexpress.com)

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