Infecting public health

Politics and religion are Covid-19 super-spreaders

India is setting new records in terms of new Covid-19 cases, with daily cases rising from 20,000 to 100,000 in just 25 days, causing a partial lockdown and curfew in Maharashtra and other parts of the country. Yet the businesses of religion and elections, two key super-spreaders, have acquired a curious immunity from the enforcement of Covid-19 protocols. At the Mahakumbh mela, which officially began on April 1, and in election rallies in Assam and Bengal in particular, the basic norms of mask-wearing and social distancing have visibly been jettisoned. This, when ordinary citizens are being fined for violating protocols and many suffer the hardships of job losses and poor employment opportunities as this second Covid-19 wave disrupts supply chains and crimps small and medium businesses.

The Mahakumbh is an egregious and inexplicable example of the hazards of unregulated gatherings in Covid-19 times. Encouraged by Uttarakhand Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat’s initial carte blanche for test-free Kumbh attendance, hordes turned up, resulting in a spurt of Covid-19 cases not just in Haridwar but in the whole state, with the chief minister himself and several Naga sadhus testing positive. Though Mr Rawat’s order was countermanded by the Centre almost immediately, stipulating that each devotee must submit a negative RT-PCR test 72 hours before attendance and observe the mask and social-distancing protocols, much damage was done. Over 700,000 took a holy dip in the Ganga during an auspicious day in January and 5 million are expected to attend the next holy dips scheduled in April.

It is inconceivable that safety protocols can be rationally followed with these numbers crowded into a confined space of the bathing ghats. The state government had cancelled the annual kanwariya yatra last year but the differences in the responses apparently lie in the logic of hard cash. Where the kanwariya yatra exercise entails closing down highways and diverting trains for devotees headed for Haridwar, the Mahakumbh has been preceded by heavy investment in tourism infrastructure by the state and central governments. It is now obvious that the state and the country will have to bear the consequences of this flagrant violation of safety protocols. There is also surely some dissonance in the administration’s tolerance for the Mahakumbh when vicious, communal-tinged criticism was heaped on the Tablighi Jamaat gathering in New Delhi in March last year. It is worth noting that pilgrims to Mecca around Ramzan will have to be vaccinated ahead or show evidence that they have recently suffered Covid to perform the umrah.

The supreme irony, perhaps, is that the re-imposition of minimum safety protocols at the Mahakumbh has attracted the powerful Dwarka Shankaracharya’s ire. He has questioned the need for these restrictions when they are being observed in the breach at political rallies attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, sarcastically pointing out that the virus seemed to disappear during elections and reappear when they are over. Despite the inverted logic, the Shankaracharya has a point. It is difficult to enforce safety protocols when the nation’s most powerful leaders conspicuously ignore them. With the government-controlled vaccination drive yet to gather critical mass, this second Covid-19 wave is shaping up to infect the fledgling economic recovery. The argument that most recent cases are in Maharashtra, which has neither the Mahakumbh nor elections, has some merit, but that doesn’t justify this dangerous infection of public health by religion and politics.