Letter to BS: Kerala has shown acumen and toil to tackle coronavirus

There is much to be said about Communism as a tenet and policy tool. The Stalinst version saw Russia, over time, slide into oligarchy. In contrast, the Maoism of China took to the regimentation of the proletariat, for socialistic ends. Covid-19 illustrates the extremes of both the negative and positive aspects of the China model — the inbuilt credo of managing information that suppressed the scale of the outbreak and then the vigorous policy implementation that laid foundation to acquiring the humongous capacity to mass produce anything at will with extraordinary speed to cater to markets on global scale.

The Red ideology took root in other nations too, each adopting it selectively to suit the tide of their times and political drift. The Obama go­vernment in the US leveraged this to bring in a universal health coverage only to meet visceral resistance. It had the foresight to factor in pande­mic health hazards of citizens. It spruced up the architecture of Centre for Disease Control and Pre­ven­tion and readied an exhaustive document on control of pandemics.

In President Donald Tru­mp’s time, the rabid right wi­ng has found an apostle to promptly dump both. The sad part is, even with deaths now mounting in thousands in the US, the hard-right is bent on cocooning the economy at the expense of human lives. Wall Street matters to the regime more than the Main Street and New York is being kept defiantly open.

Back home, Kerala has shown commendable acu­men and toil to joust with a powerful foe and is clearly winning. It can only thank its Communist roots that kept the common man as its core concern. Its assiduously-built architecture of health sche­mes and last-mile delivery, backed by cadre driven distribution of ration/services, has risen up to the task.

One fervently hopes that the US too discovers its merit, come November 2020.

R Narayanan
 

Navi Mumbai

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