It happens that I was at the Delhi airport waiting to catch a flight to Jodhpur when the health minister set off his weird Covid alarm last week. Weird because instead of a serious warning to the general populace, he chose to write a letter to Rahul Gandhi to warn him that if Covid protocols were not followed, the Bharat Jodo Yatra would be stopped. Weird also because this new variant seems to be both partisan and political, or it would have surely shown up when the Prime Minister and his senior ministers were addressing vast rallies in Gujarat and Himachal days ago. If this variant is truly a matter of concern, should it not have made its presence felt at those election rallies where not a single political leader or anyone in the audience was masked?
Why did it choose to manifest itself only when the dust of the elections had settled, and the only political show left in town was the Bharat Jodo Yatra? The health minister was not the only one who created alarm and panic. Within hours of his warning, the Prime Minister appeared in Parliament masked and somber. And, once more on TV appeared those members of his Covid task force that plunged us into the Delta disaster in the summer of 2021 because they forgot to order sufficient supplies of vaccinations, oxygen, and medications. It is important to remember that none of them were punished for their criminal negligence.
Back now to the present crisis. On Thursday, the Prime Minister called a crisis meeting at which everyone was masked. Luckily for us, the conclusion that emerged from this meeting was that there was no reason for panic, but by then the stock market had already panicked and every news channel was leading with the Covid story. None of this was necessary. What is happening in China has nothing to do with India. The Chinese government’s Zero-Covid policy has been such a catastrophe that despite the totalitarian nature of that regime, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets to demand that Zero-Covid be scrapped. When they were released from the confinement of their homes, many, many people got sick because of being unvaccinated or vaccinated with Chinese vaccines that have proved utterly useless.
The question is why what happens in China should suddenly have anything to do with us except when our old foe attacks our borders? There is no clear answer yet, and we must hope that the Prime Minister calms the panic down in the next few days because we are in the middle of our first real tourist season in three years. On my flight to Jodhpur were many, many foreign visitors who are more than welcome in this city, whose economy is so dependent on tourism. I have been coming to Jodhpur since the seventies when it was a shabby little town and have watched it grow into a delightful, flourishing city and all because of tourism. The first prime minister to acknowledge that tourism is a vital pillar of the economy was Narendra Modi, which makes it so very puzzling that he should have allowed his health minister to cause such hysteria last week.
The real importance of tourism is that it affects so many different things. Old monuments, forts, palaces, and temples that were allowed in those socialist decades to crumble came back to life once tourists started arriving from foreign lands. And, because tourists only go to places that offer clean water, reliable electricity, good roads, and the Internet, these basic things get built and bring enormous benefit to local communities. In socialist times when tourism was disdained as a frivolity, most Indians were forced to live without these basic needs of our times.
Then along came the pandemic and in the three years in which travelling anywhere became almost impossible, the tourism industry was crippled. Many small hotels and restaurants folded under the pressures the pandemic brought, which makes it essential that this first real tourist season in three years should not be brought to an abrupt end by manufacturing frenzy over Covid. Now that hysteria has been kick-started, many so-called ‘experts’ have come forward to declare that Covid has not gone away. True, and it is not going to go away either. But it needs to be treated now as just another severe flu.
In New York, where I was last month, there are more cases of Covid than in India, but people are going to theatres, museums, shops and restaurants, and the only sign that the virus is still with us are the testing booths that have been set up around every corner. Everyone is advised to be vaccinated and boosted and to get tested when in doubt, but there is no sign of the insane panic we saw in India last week.
The health minister made his announcement with a recklessness not expected from a high official of the Government of India. And he infused it with a weirdness that remains a mystery. If the Congress sees it as a plot to end the Bharat Jodo Yatra before it gets to Delhi, who can blame them. For more than a hundred days, Rahul Gandhi has walked across the country with crowds following in his wake and without anyone noticing that he is violating Covid protocols. What suddenly changed last week?
