By Jo Lyngdoh
A car pass culture has emerged as a new form of elitism in Shillong. Today, businesses and shops are allowed to operate and a number of essential and non-essential movements are consequently allowed. After all, how can businesses operate if the general public is not free to arrive at the business premises. However, a crucial lack of clarity is observed in the movement of private vehicles. There is no strong need for restricting private vehicular movement since it carries almost zero risk of covid exposure as compared to public transport, shopping, working in offices or walking! Despite this, the ambiguous orders from the DC’s office indicate that car passes are still needed for private vehicular movement. This has led to rampant abuse of the so-called car passes by anyone with a government job/connection themselves or within their families – allowing them free movement at any time of day or night with no restrictions. This is an elitist trait since it means that common citizens with no government connection will now have to walk or risk travelling in public vehicles despite having access to their own private vehicles. It is a confusing and discriminatory state of affairs.
Why should the police have to spend time checking for passes instead of other necessary police work? Is it not more effective to deploy police manpower to check for mask-wearing violations and other Covid protocols in markets rather than checking vehicles? Is there any proof that restrictions on private vehicles reduces Covid spread, if people can anyway move around via car passes, public vehicles or walking? How can high-contact activities like shops and public vehicles be allowed to operate while private movement in private vehicles is restricted? A private vehicle is effectively an extension of one’s private space and does not lead to any mass interpersonal interaction that may spread Covid.
The government continues with a slew of such restrictions with no rational underpinnings, following a scorched earth policy to stop everything/anything in sight and suspend all freedoms in the hope of containing Covid. All this after having made gross negligent mistakes with the state’s entry point checks in March-April; the only factor leading to this new wave in the city/state. Who is accountable for the mistakes? Nobody? Who now suffers due to the restrictions – everyone except the “car-pass class”! There is a fine line between partially suspending our fundamental rights to freedom of movement for reducing Covid spread versus the totalitarian restrictions that makes common citizens question whether we are under a dictatorship, or a democracy.
With the new reopening phase running for a week and having no impact on daily Covid trends, allowing freedom of movement in private vehicles is unlikely to cause undue rise in Covid cases. The government can even allow this for 2-3 weeks and check the impact on the Covid spread. The public are not sheep to be herded, but equal citizens who have the right to demand intelligent and effective governance – paid for with taxpayer’s money towards payment of salaries for government staff. The government should carefully evaluate any restriction of an activity rationally based on the degree of interactions amongst people involved in that activity. Only specific entities such as mass tourist spots, pools, concerts, rallies, dance clubs etc may be restricted – but for all other activities that involve little to no interaction with a large group of people (especially unknown people) – there should be no restrictions. Every restriction must be evaluated on its effectiveness, enforceability and equality.
The government is also urged to observe Covid restrictions applied on similar population/case trends in other parts of the country instead of unilaterally applying highly restrictive measures only in our city/state. If 4000 active cases and 323 occupied beds (Source: Government’s online Covid dashboard) is justified for severely restricting a city of 9 lakh and a state of ~30 lakh people, then perhaps it should ban alcohol and cigarettes as well, which impacts health and lives at multiple orders of magnitude, higher than the current Covid numbers.
Yes, Covid is still a menace to the population, but people have lives to live and livelihoods to earn. We have also learnt ample lessons since March 2020 about handling Covid – and most people do take their own precautions such as following protocols and getting vaccinated. Despite this, there is no reward for such behaviour and all must continue living under more restrictions than one can manage to keep count of.
The government is humbly requested to focus all its resources on mass vaccination instead of the maintenance of restrictions on private movement of individuals or vehicles. Once this is allowed, all the traffic police personnel currently engaged in asking drivers about where they are going and why – can instead be efficiently engaged towards vaccination awareness measures, protocol checks at markets and the normal regulation of traffic.