Coronavirus Lockdown: Tech, tap, toe the line

Sickular Libtard

What crazy old days those were, remember? We shook hands with strangers, hugged friends, travelled, went out to dinner. We left the house for no reason at all. We ran our hands along public bannisters. We talked to people without thinking, “Back up, you germy vector.”

Back then, we thought that cricket and war brought the country together. But it turns out that nothing brings a country together like a pandemic. In a pandemic, everybody—literally everybody—has skin in the game, and only the government can respond at scale. It rankles us to stay indoors, but fear of our lives makes us cooperative. We need the government to keep us alive, to figure out survival systems to slalom around the pandemic until it ends. Fearful people are quite capable of pushing mummy down the stairs in order to take her place on the lifeboat. We will let the government lead.

That puts an awful lot of power and blind trust in the hands of people who aren’t necessarily worthy of either. Not just the government—the police is humiliating and beating lockdown violators instead of a warning, fining or arresting people. Even RWA administrators are strutting around like tiny tinpot dictators, enforcing arbitrary rules as if a printout stuck on a gate equals the law of the land.

Fear around COVID-19 has been a godsend to control-freak governments around the world. In India, it eliminated the anti-CAA, pro-democracy protests, and ended the political heat from the 2020 Delhi pogrom. And —win-win! — the Tablighi Jamaat meeting, by no means the only large congregation at the time, has given the BJP a timely stick with which to keep beating Muslims. Having spent years painting them as a demographic, cultural, sexual, and security threat, it is now busily painting them as a biohazard.

So, it is good to chafe against the withdrawal of normality and normal rights, to remind us of what we are giving up, and why. We must bear with uncomfortable measures, but no more than absolutely necessary, and not for one second longer than necessary. And we must insist that less privileged citizens are cared for.

When a government solution begins to look less like a health crisis fix, and more like a power trip, it needs to be called out. Governments that are willingly granted special powers in times of crisis don’t always feel like giving them up when the crisis ends; so, it’s best not to agree, in a blind panic, to all their conditions. And politicians who can make you feel good about suffering also get used to making you suffer pointlessly for their own benefit.

So, before you download the Aarogya Setu app, which everyone from the Prime Minister to your potted plant is trying to get you to do, consider its functionality and privacy. Should you be bamboozled into needing it to get a job, or travel, or get an e-pass? Should it link to your health records? Will data end up in private hands? Would this government or a future one be able to control, profile, surveil, frame, or disappear you? The app depends on half the country downloading it—does its usefulness warrant the pressure? Oh, and is there maybe another app that will help feed stranded migrants?

As for PM-CARES—why yet another fund, with outside auditors, exempt from regulations on foreign contributions? Why are doctors and government personnel and CSR departments being leaned on to donate to it?

Finally, special powers do not revoke the people’s right to an accounting—they sharpen it. The government needs to hold a media briefing every day on more than just coronavirus numbers, and the Prime Minister needs to answer questions. He’s never done it before, but he could get some tips from Rahul Gandhi--that guy is braver and takes unscripted questions from the press all the time.