By Prasenjit Biswas
As larger numbers of people are living in quarantine centres and containment zones in India than the number of infected by the Covid, there is a cry for ending this. Being locked down, the space of living has squeezed into smaller and smaller holes for a larger number of people. The cry for ending arises from there. There is a serious discrepancy between the transmission eco-system of Covid and closing our internally open and expandable private spaces.
To understand this, let’s look at the idea of spread of Covid through physical contact that has given rise to the idea of ‘safe distancing’. One basic issue is, if the COVID virus can remain airborne up to 30 metres, is our idea of six metres distance correct enough? The impossibility of maintaining the required distance is both relevant and exceptional. It brings back memories of a weird but widespread practice of dissecting rats during the Bubonic plague, or the infamous memory of Spanish Flu of 1918 leading to imposition of infamous Rowlatt Act of 1919 by the colonizers. It looks like the administrative measures like the idea of containment, incarceration and isolation that arose in early modern colonial period could not have been replaced by modern medicine, vaccination and other such means even today. In-spite of such measures, isn’t it true that Spanish Flu never disappeared and it rather reappeared as H1N1 virus? So measures of containment of people physically as self or administrative measures couldn’t stop re-emergence of a more virulent strain as in the Spanish Flu. The same is the case with Covid with D614G mutation in the virus in some places.
As far as internally open nature of our social space is concerned, any constraint put on such a space is going to create its own negative impact. Let’s read two opinions. ‘The invention of the racial “Other” as a reality will increasingly be done via algorithms, statistics, modelling and mathematics’, says Achille Mbembe, the lead thinker of decolonization. Apart from this impact of an increased amount of racial othering, artificially shrunk private and public spaces in Covid times result in what historian Yuval Noah Harari termed as ‘under the skin surveillance’, ‘the emergency pudding’ and ‘soap policing’. Put together, it marks a mechanism of making us smaller and smaller and that is supposed to win the war against the virus, while battle in all other front such as human dignity and human rights will bear its chilling effect. An emergent surveillance state mixed up with disaster capitalism will have the possibility of shrinking democracy and human rights.
The conflict between medical measures and social control measures mark the new reality of stigmatization of the vulnerable and an increased aggression against those whose human rights are shrunk by the smaller social space. This will mark a spurt in all kinds of violence and violation. Police violence across the globe, stigmatization and prohibitions on even the dead, man-made slow famines and many other such systemic violations have erupted. The worst is when distress and human miseries are being pushed back in the name of Covid emergency and the basic accountability of governments across the world is on the wane. What returns in everyday life is again a systemic failure to mitigate citizens from economic suffering combined with unprecedented migrant labourer crisis, loss of income, job and growth. In this sense, the global crisis of ‘disaster capitalism’ prolongs through the Covid crisis.
At another level, bellicose demonstration of military dominance over land, sea and outer space endangers the whole of mankind after Covid. Interestingly, Spanish Flu simulator used by students of Oxford University shows how the Flu prolonged the military expansion even after the end of World War- 1. Here without fighting a war today, simulations of war are happening as a means to dominate the physical space. If I say, that our social and private spaces have shrunken and the possibility of state to state warfare rises, I would be in good company of military thinkers like Stephen Peter Rosen and also probably with a war optimist like historian Geoffrey Blainey. Blainey argued that war promotes an optimism of ending , while peace promotes a pessimist vision of the world. Playing devil’s advocate, Blainey called for ending war to end war as a means of achieving power. Increased propensity by China to augment its global firepower and an attempt to militarize the war on Covid looks like an authoritarian state’s way of gaining global power. Indeed, Francis Fukuyama called for democratic resilience against Covid induced shock effects such as Chinese aggression in response to China’s isolation in the world!
On a happier note, the pandemic can end belligerence, which could also be an end of the pandemic. Against a possible ‘medical holocaust’, a term used by Catharine Arnold, one can think of a solution of drawing antibodies from recovered patients and use it to cure more people. The humbling effect of donating antibodies by an ex-Covid patient is more than the blood donation movement that now needs to spread across continents so that a planetary end of Covid is in sight. Donating antibodies can really build up an atmanirvar bharat as well. In the Indian philosophical traditions, the notion of sambhava (probability) in Puranas and in Khasi tradition the notion of Ka Ryngiew can help us imagine SARS-COVID-2 neutralizing antibodies rich blood donation to the needy patients. Such a giving will certainly strengthen the Ka Ryngiew in the human self. Such a probability will also help end the pandemic.
The psychological boredom inflicted by the pandemic could be ended by initiating new tie ups with the neighbours such as developing a lawn that meets neigbours’ lawn. In the context of North-East, looking at Baghjan fire and Dibru-Saikhowa man-made earthquake from condensate well in the middle of a Pandemic, there is a need to realize the ecology of sacred landscapes and stop unwanted land use. As epidemiologist Sonia Shah warned, destruction of animal, plant and virus habitats for having pipelines, roads and other such infra projects will expose us to more and more zoo-ontic viruses like Corona, as they can easily enter our bodies from the landscapes now captured by us by removing other species. We need to end such practices to end future pandemics.
(The author teaches Philosophy at NEHU, Shillong).