1.3 Billion in Lockdown
India takes its most drastic measure yet in combating the spread of COVID-19. Plus, some non-coronavirus news.
Hi there, I’m Aman Thakker. Welcome to Indialogue, a newsletter analyzing the biggest policy developments in India. This newsletter began in 2018 and, after a hiatus, is starting back up with this latest issue. The aim of this newsletter is to provide you with quality analysis every week on what’s going on in India.
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India Goes Into a 21-Day Lockdown to Combat Spread of COVID-19
On Tuesday, March 24, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that he was ordering a “complete lockdown to save India” from the spread of COVID-19. As of writing, India has crossed the 1,000-case mark, although India has not undertaken widespread testing, with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) maintaining that there is no evidence of community transmission in the country as of yet.
The Prime Minister’s lockdown announcement came a mere four hours before the lockdown came into effect at 12:01 a.m. IST on March 25. Such a short notice follows the pattern of other decisions by Prime Minister Modi, such as his government’s decision in November 2016 to announce the “demonetization” 86% of India’s currency barely hours before specified banknotes ceased to be legal tender. Just as that decision led to panic and a botched response by the government, the lockdown decision has similarly left the Indian government and individual state governments struggling.
For example in Goa, citizens reported that the lockdown disrupted essential services.
Moreover, while the Prime Minister stressed that the lockdown was needed to limit the spread of the disease over the next 21 days lest it set India back 21 years, the impact of the lockdown has harshly affected India’s most vulnerable. Joanna Slater and Niha Masih of the Washington Post, report:
The speed of the transportation shutdown meant that India’s tens of millions of internal migrants had no time to get home. Indian cities rely on a vast workforce drawn from the rest of the country, laborers who move in search of opportunity and often leave their families behind for months or years. They work construction, drive taxis, staff restaurants and much more, living frugally and returning home each year.
For such migrant workers, who are often employed in low-paid, precarious jobs, the measures are a double blow. The economic shock has vaporized their incomes while the transport restrictions eliminated their normal ways home.
The result has been a walking exodus of thousands of people. Precisely how many are on the move is not clear, but since the lockdown was declared, each day has brought fresh reports of migrants trying to get home. Some have managed to hitch rides on trucks, or jam themselves into crowded private buses.
The story doesn’t end here. India’s most vulnerable aren’t just losing their jobs, their access to essential services, and their ability to go home, but are also facing police brutality. Yes, Indian police officers have been caught beating migrant workers as their wait for buses to take them home, and beating ordinary citizens on their way to buying groceries (which in no way violates the lockdown order). I won’t embed the videos here, but you can click through below if you so choose.
Police violence against:
These instances highlight a key policy problem. This government has now, in multiple instances, announced major decisions with very short notice, such as demonetization and even the way in which the government revoked the special autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019. While defenders of the government will argue that too much notice can create panic, or stall necessary solutions in needless politicking, we can now see a pattern to the state’s inability to follow through on the implementation of such dramatic, short-notice decisions. First, the state’s bureaucracy is either spread too thin, or implementation becomes uneven, as seen in Goa. Secondly, the government leaves little time to plan for issues that very simply should have been anticipated, such as the unique issues faced by migrant workers. Finally, rules may change daily, as the government rushes to put out fires. For example, e-commerce companies, which suspended operations in India, are still looking to the government for clarity on whether they can resume operations in the shutdown. While the Prime Minister’s speech asked citizens to rely on these services, the government’s written orders seem to contradict that. Police are also attacking e-commerce delivery personnel, further suggesting the need for clarity.
And in non-coronavirus news…
Omar Abdullah Released from Detention
Last Tuesday, Omar Abdullah, the former Chief Minister of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, was released after nearly eight months. He was detained in August of 2019 following the Modi government’s decision to scrap the special autonomous status granted to Jammu and Kashmir under India’s Constitution, and to divide the state into two union territories: a Western portion of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), and an Eastern portion of Ladakh.
Following his initial detention in August, he was further detained under the government’s Public Safety Act (PSA), an arguably draconian law that allows the Indian government to detain any person without specifying any charges for up to two years. During his detention, this photograph of a nearly-unrecognizable, bearded Abdullah, shown below next to what he looked like prior to detention, went viral:
Among his first statements following his release included celebrating a meal with his parents. His father, Farooq Abdullah, also a former Chief Minister of J&K, was also detained under the PSA, was released earlier this month.
Despite Abdullah’s release, several political leaders in J&K remain under detention. For example, former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, who was in a coalition government with the BJP in the state until 2018, remains under detention. However, looking at the bigger picture, the Modi-led government is going to face a major trust deficit in J&K as it begins to release such leaders and restore telephone and internet access after months of enforcing a communications blackout.
Clearly, however, the government’s strategy of revoking the special Constitutional status and keeping the people of J&K under a strict and draconian communications blackout wasn’t about winning hearts and minds. The government has argued that development, particularly by incentivizing private investment in the state, will usher in a new era of relations between J&K and the Indian state. However, I’m not so sure of that, and I’m not alone. Here is Ashutosh Varshney, an academic I deeply admire and a professor at Brown University, echoing the same sentiments in a panel at the Council on Foreign Relations::
Delhi could in principle—and Jaishankar—Foreign Minister Jaishankar has made this argument in a couple of interviews that we need time to slide back to normalcy. But that argument—if the argument only is that development will deliver Kashmiri hearts and minds to India, then first of all that argument is wrong in principle because it’s democracy and development which might do it, as opposed to only development.
Secondly, if the—if the security situation remains tricky, it’s not clear why private investors would go into the valley. Private investors will go into Jammu, and there is enough money to be made in Jammu. And now you can legally buy land there if you’re a non-Kashmiri. You can buy land for whatever you have to do. So they will do it in Jammu. Why would they go to the valley, where there might be attacks on their—on their business installations?
So I think—I don’t see how development alone, were it to happen, would do it, right? There has to be some that turn to democracies, you know, however wish to conceptualize it, that important experience of life.
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Also in non-coronavirus news:
India and France, for the first time in their bilateral relationship, conducted joint patrols in the Indian Ocean. Having previously only conducted such joint patrols with its maritime neighbors, India is therefore signaling a greater comfort, and potentially future intent, to collaborate with key partners in the Indian Ocean, which India has long considered its strategic backyard. Given that India had apparently rejected a similar offer from the United States to conduct such joint patrols in the region, the choice to proceed with French suggests India careful approach to continue advancing its “Free, Open, and Inclusive Indo-Pacific” concept, while avoiding pouring gasoline on concerns of India’s chief competitor in the Indian Ocean: China.
India’s Parliament adjourned its Budget Session 2020 early due to coronavirus. Since the Budget Session was divided into two phases, the Parliament sat in session a total of 23 times: 9 sittings during the first phase and 14 sittings the second phase. During these sessions, both houses of Parliament passed several important pieces of legislation which included topics beyond COVID-19, such as India’s Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, Appropriations for the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, Mineral Laws, and Direct Taxes. You can see the full list of legislations introduction, considered, and passed here.
India’s government announced new incentives to promote the manufacture of electronic components and semiconductors in India. Specifically, the government aims to provide companies with incentives equivalent 25% of their capital expenditures on plant, machinery, equipment, associated utilities and technology. In doing so, the government hopes to support the direct employment of approximately 150,000 employees in this sector.
India’s Ministry of Defense released the latest draft of India’s “Defence Procurement Procedure 2020.” Among the major developments included in this draft is a nearly 10% increase in required ratio of “Indigenous Content” in procurement of defense products in order to support the Modi government’s “Make in India” program. The full draft of the new Defence Procurement Procedure is available here.
Three to Read
From cogent analysis to big news that you should keep an eye on, here are a few stories and commentaries that I found particularly enlightening:
Yun Sun writes in War on the Rocks: “Despite China’s public embrace of India and the official elevation of Sino-Indian relations to an unprecedented level, Beijing’s distrust and hostility toward India run deep, and vice versa. While the two countries have incompatible interests on a range of key issues, there’s little chance of reconciling those differences any time soon. In the meantime, China is trying to both stabilize ties with India and prepare for future disruptions.”
Anjli Raval, Tim Bradshaw, and Benjamin Parkin of the Financial Times report: “Facebook is seeking to buy a multibillion-dollar stake in Reliance Jio, whose cut-price mobile internet service has attracted 370m Indians in just three years.”
Rana Ayyub, for Foreign Policy, argues: “While New Delhi’s decision to lock down has been belated, it has the potential to minimize damage: With all forms of public transport canceled, included [sic] domestic and international airlines, travel and co-mingling will be sharply reduced. But a bold stroke like this needs to be accompanied with a healing hand for the economically and socially disadvantaged. The next few weeks will be crucial for all of India but especially for its poor.”
Thanks for reading this latest edition of Indialogue. Please let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback by emailing me at aman@amanthakker.com.