A little over 100 years ago, Spanish flu killed about 15 million people in India. Mahatma Gandhi too came down with it but it failed to make a political impact in colonial times. Looking back from our current “coronial”, or post Covid-19, sensibilities, this is hard to explain. It is almost as if the Spanish flu crept in at night, killed people door to door, and left before sunrise.
Why is it so different today? The Covid-19 death toll in India has exceeded 16,000, which is every bit tragic, but these numbers are an evaporating droplet in comparison to 15 million fatalities in the Spanish flu. But at that time, a lockdown didn’t even figure as a distant possibility.
The bubonic plague devastated the world for centuries and, at one point, killed a quarter of the population from the Caucasus to Carthage. Yet nobody, in all those years, ever thought of giving the silk route a miss or not setting off on ships with spices and calico.
The same question again: What has changed?
If there is a single prime mover, then that has to be democracy. Democracy has made a difference because its masthead says that all lives matter. Even in theory, such a proclamation has consequences. So, when a pandemic happens, a modern democratic state cannot be seen sitting lazily on its hands, waiting for herd immunity. It must act fast, even if that action later turns out to be ill-advised. Inaction is worse than wrong action!
This story is from the July 01, 2020 edition of The Times of India Hyderabad.
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This story is from the July 01, 2020 edition of The Times of India Hyderabad.
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