It could well be two different wars. One is fighting on terra firma—on fine kilometre gauges, on fingers, ledges, narrow mountain turns, a stone-cold valley en route to the frozen alkaline deserts of Aksai Chin, home only to the ibex, the blue sheep and the itinerant jawan. The other is waged in the netherworld of social media. Here too, clubs and nailstudded maces are used—almost as if a primordial virus has taken the human race back in time. Ordinary life too is proving quite a duel unto death all over India consequent to that deadly scuffle in Ladakh.
The garment factories of Bellary don’t have a shirt on their back. Just as the serene blue of the Pangong Tso was disturbed by Chinese footfalls, the episode has left creases on the blue jeans of the colliery town too. Cheap Chinese denim is apparently not an option for these MSMEs anymore; they have to perforce source more expensive material from South Korea and Japan. The influencers of social media will have it no other way! If you can’t be at the border defending the posts—Patrol Point 14 or Finger-4—you might at least be ready to be hemmed into a different cut of cloth. The test of patriotism after all has to be passed.
As for the tests, there are too many to be taken and passed by us Indians. Chinese apps and chowmein are out! Restaurant owners, the big daddies included, better rename their swish haunts. Why only Bellary’s jeans? Ming Room? Ah, isn’t restoring the geographical sway of the Great Ming Dynasty the prime impulse driving the bosses of Beijing? Whether up on the Karakoram or out on the tiny archipelagos of South China Sea? Children across Karnataka are taking one too—writing the SSLC exam is itself a test! What with social distancing, hand sanitising, masks, and of course question papers and answer sheets. State Education Minister S Suresh Kumar is more often than not to be found in and around exam halls. No, he’s not taking the SSLC again, just playing a superparent-at-large, touring the facilities.
Board exams during a pandemic are no small matter, particularly when Bengaluru is not exactly in pink of health. There’s also the SARIILI cases, and the return of the native is compounding matters. The CBSE and ICSE have cried off from holding the classes X and XII board exams, with Supreme Court endorsement. Neighbouring Tamil Nadu has also decided to promote students without putting them through the grill. Why Karnataka decided to go against the tide is a mystery.
Maybe the situation indeed seemed manageable here, before unlocking played spoilsport. The biggest test, of course, is still about whether or not the virus has literally made incursions inside your body’s LAC. It has in any case hit just about everything, from normal social interchange to economic well-being. Jobs are falling off a steep Himalayan cliff. Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa has been trying to balance two contrary needs: health and economy. But health is dependent on wealth. And the virus is refusing to be kept at bay, surfacing and resurfacing seemingly at will.
Karnataka’s positivity rate of 2.04 per cent is still much better than the national average (6.45 per cent) and way below the scary figures of Maharashtra (17.67), Delhi (16.76) or even Tamil Nadu’s 7.27. Counting the dead to prove a point is a morbid task, but on that unavoidable parameter too Karnataka is much better placed. Higher testing has brought a discomfiting spike in cases.
But Karnataka does look like an island of hope. The Opposition protests, but within limits, whether on Covid or China. A former prime minister chooses the formality of a written query to seek answers on the Chinese incursions, not a rancorous national debate. The CM calls all-party meetings where they give ‘constructive suggestions’. Consensus, an illegal migrant in the North, still feels at home here. A Kempe Gowda event can have BSY, Deve Gowda and D K Shivakumar in the same frame—though no one is asking why a costly statue is a priority now, and not vanquishing the novel virus. That anything can be beyond politics in India is itself novel.