PROJECT

OF

SOCIOLOGY

ON

TOPIC: COVID-19: DIVERSITY OF SOCIAL EXPERIENCE,

CHALLENGES AND IMAGINATION OF FUTURES

SUBMITTED BY: SUBMITTED TO:

MEHAK ANSARI Prof. KHALID ANIS ANSARI

(GU19R0224) (Assistant Professor)

SEMESTER-II

GLOCAL LAW SCHOOL

MEANING

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COVID-19 is a highly infectious respiratory disease caused by a new coronavirus. The
disease was discovered in China in December 2019 and has since spread around the world,
causing an unprecedented public health crises.

COVID-19, also called coronavirus disease, is the name of the disease caused by a newly
discovered coronavirus. The virus and disease were first detected in Wuhan, China on
December 31, 2019, and, as of the beginning of March 2020, have led to an outbreak in over
60 countries across the globe, including the US.

While the coronavirus disease is popularly referred to as just coronavirus, coronavirus

actually refers to a large family of viruses which can cause illnesses in human and many
animals. Some of these illnesses are rare but severe respiratory infections, including Middle
East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and, as
most recently discovered, COVID-19.

The source of the new coronavirus is believed to be an animal. The virus spreads through
droplets from the mouth and nose of a person with COVID-19 after coughing, sneezing, and
exhaling.

Other people can then pick up the virus by breathing in these droplets or coming into contact
with surfaces that have been contaminated with the droplets (such as by touching an object
and then touching parts of the face).

The World Health Organisation (WHO), on March 11, declared the coronavirus outbreak a
‘pandemic’, adding that it is not a term to be used ‘lightly or carelessly’. A pandemic is the
worldwide spread of a new disease, according to the WHO.

"It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the
fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the
Director-General of WHO said in a media briefing. The global death toll due to coronavirus
is currently 4,292, with 118,326 confirmed cases, according to WHO's latest situation report.

The WHO has taken stock of the number of cases across the world and assessed the rate at
which cases of COVID-19 cases are spreading.

"WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both
by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction," the
WHO Director-General said.

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The WHO added that this is a pandemic that can be controlled and the first one caused by a
coronavirus.

The organisation usually does not declare public health situations that do not involve flu as
pandemic. The last official pandemic was in 2009, caused by an outbreak of the H1NI virus,
commonly called "swine flu". In recent history, HIV/AIDS Pandemic at its peak killed 36
million during 2005-2012. Flu Pandemic killed a million in 1968 and Asian Flu killed two
million during 1956-1958.0

Humankind is now facing a global crisis. Perhaps the biggest crisis of our generation. The
decisions people and governments take in the next few weeks will probably shape the world
for years to come. They will shape not just our healthcare systems but also our economy,
politics and culture. We must act quickly and decisively. We should also take into account
the long-term consequences of our actions. When choosing between alternatives, we should
ask ourselves not only how to overcome the immediate threat, but also what kind of world we
will inhabit once the storm passes. Yes, the storm will pass, humankind will survive, most of
us will still be alive — but we will inhabit a different world.

Many short-term emergency measures will become a fixture of life. That is the nature of
emergencies. They fast-forward historical processes. Decisions that in normal times could
take years of deliberation are passed in a matter of hours. Immature and even dangerous
technologies are pressed into service, because the risks of doing nothing are bigger. Entire
countries serve as guinea-pigs in large-scale social experiments. What happens when
everybody works from home and communicates only at a distance? What happens when
entire schools and universities go online? In normal times, governments, businesses and
educational boards would never agree to conduct such experiments. But these aren’t normal
times. In this time of crisis, we face two particularly important choices. The first is between
totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. The second is between nationalist
isolation and global solidarity.

Under-the-skin surveillance

In order to stop the epidemic, entire populations need to comply with certain guidelines.
There are two main ways of achieving this. One method is for the government to monitor
people, and punish those who break the rules. Today, for the first time in human history,
technology makes it possible to monitor everyone all the time. Fifty years ago, the KGB
couldn’t follow 240m Soviet citizens 24 hours a day, nor could the KGB hope to effectively

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process all the information gathered. The KGB relied on human agents and analysts, and it
just couldn’t place a human agent to follow every citizen. But now governments can rely on
ubiquitous sensors and powerful algorithms instead of flesh-and-blood spooks.

In their battle against the coronavirus epidemic several governments have already deployed
the new surveillance tools. The most notable case is China. By closely monitoring people’s
smartphones, making use of hundreds of millions of face-recognising cameras, and obliging
people to check and report their body temperature and medical condition, the Chinese
authorities can not only quickly identify suspected coronavirus carriers, but also track their
movements and identify anyone they came into contact with. A range of mobile apps warn
citizens about their proximity to infected patients.

This kind of technology is not limited to east Asia. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of
Israel recently authorised the Israel Security Agency to deploy surveillance technology
normally reserved for battling terrorists to track coronavirus patients. When the relevant
parliamentary subcommittee refused to authorise the measure, Netanyahu rammed it through
with an “emergency decree”.

In recent years both governments and corporations have been using ever more sophisticated
technologies to track, monitor and manipulate people. Yet if we are not careful, the epidemic
might nevertheless mark an important watershed in the history of surveillance. Not only
because it might normalise the deployment of mass surveillance tools in countries that have
so far rejected them, but even more so because it signifies a dramatic transition from “over
the skin” to “under the skin” surveillance. Hitherto, when your finger touched the screen of
your smartphone and clicked on a link, the government wanted to know what exactly your
finger was clicking on. But with coronavirus, the focus of interest shifts. Now the
government wants to know the temperature of your finger and the blood-pressure under its
skin.

India's Pandemic Response Is A Caste Atrocity

India has a sickness so serious, that even its response to the Covid-19 pandemic betrays a
fatal infection. Nowhere in the world has a lockdown been as inhuman or imposed with such
contempt for the lives of its millions of working poor. The Modi government's turning of a
health challenge into a human catastrophe and the approval of a large section of India's elites

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can only be explained by casteism, which grades people on a hereditary hierarchy of worth,
and legitimises the brutalization of 'lesser beings'.
The lockdown is in effect a caste atrocity i.e. a wilful act of violence inflicted on
marginalized castes, and invisibilized in the name of halting a virus.

On March 23, PM Modi proclaimed he was locking down the country in four hours. Absent
wages, work or relief, millions were pushed to the brink, sparking an exodus which is yet to
let up or be officially acknowledged. When people have protested in sheer desperation, the
state has responded with teargas, thrashings and detentions.
Policymakers, the judiciary, media and academia - all dominated by the upper castes - call
these millions 'migrant workers'. But this anodyne term obfuscates how deeply caste is
intertwined with class, and how the lockdown has unleashed a mass trauma being primarily
borne by the Adivasi, Dalit and 'backward' castes of India. Cutting across religions, they are
the footloose millions who keep India's farms, workshops and factories running, toil on roads
and construction sites, service the homes of the rich and middle classes, care for their babies,
and clear city streets and sewage lines. Among them were the Adivasi workers crushed by a
goods train, Roshan Lal, a Dalit electrician who committed suicide, and 12-year-old chilly-
plucker Jamlo Madkam who collapsed after walking for four days.

The very preventable saga of distress and lockdown-induced deaths of the last 60 days is
apiece with the intensifying brutalisation of the lower castes over the past three decades. Year
upon year of high economic growth has masked the unfreedom and fragile existence of the
millions who power it, and the shoring up of upper caste dominance. Effectively,
liberalization has fused with caste power, hardly an accident when caste circumscribes access
to land, capital, education, justice, and healthcare.

Juxtapose the fact that India's top 10% now hold as much wealth as the bottom 70%, with the
fact that India's private companies are almost exclusively upper caste-owned, with just two
high caste groups, a small minority of the population, constituting 90% of corporate boards.
The richest 1% has four times the wealth of the bottom 70%, in large part via a takeover and
monetization of the land, waters, forests and resources that were the lifeblood of those at the
bottom end of the caste spectrum. Whichever the party in power, this upward redistribution of
wealth has remained uninterrupted.

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Meanwhile, the joblessness which has come to characterise the economy keeps the lower
castes segregated in wage-hunting and piece-work - invariably at below-minimum pay, and
without benefits or protections. And so they retain one foot in the village while crisscrossing
the country for work, hoping for a better life from the very processes that rob them of dignity
in the first place. They end up in slums, cram into work units, or become the homeless
millions - enduring immense precarity and exploitation, even through 'normal' times.

The BJP, an upper-caste party at the core, papered over these contradictions under the
Brahmin Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. But its 'India Shining' campaign of 2004
failed. A decade on, Modi has triumphed electorally twice, aided by relentless image-making
as a bold leader, and a party-machinery flush with contributions from Big Business. What has
remained unchanged are the fundamental contours of the upper caste discourse: a fevered
nationalism which refuses to acknowledge systematic winners and losers in the new
economy, and little security for the vulnerable, beyond the fig leaf of chronically under-
funded welfare programs framed in the interregnum years of the Congress-party led
governments.

This explains why Modi could slam shut the economy on March 23 and say nothing of how
millions of Indians without any buffer were to survive his plan. Through April, as the exodus
on foot intensified in a throwback to Partition, he glossed over the pain of migrants as a
necessary sacrifice. His remarks drew little condemnation in a country that thrives on the
'sacrifice' of life, limbs and dignity of the lower castes. Even the term 'social distancing,' to
which elites have taken like fish to water, is characteristically tone deaf: for the vast majority,
it evokes caste humiliations and proscriptions of touch, dining and social relations.

As the economy tanks and unemployment soars, announcements in the name of pandemic
relief will further squeeze the lower castes. Opening up fresh frontiers for coal mining,
privatizing airports, defence deals and bizarrely, space travel, are sops to India's richest. Inter-
state workers meanwhile still run helter-skelter for transport, and trains are turning into death
traps.
The alacrity with which many states are extending the legal workday to 12 hours, and rolling
back worker safety regulations, collective bargaining rights, and minimum wage protections
won over a century of struggles, points to something ominous. As a worker abandoned in an
industrial park with thousands of others said, "It feels like we have been locked up in a jail."

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Pleas to release trade unionists, minority-rights, Dalit, Adivasi and student activists, in light
of the risk of contracting the virus in over-crowded prisons, have gone unheard. In fact, the
pandemic has barely stopped the government's arrests spree.

Servitude for the lower castes, 'social distancing' for the upper, India's response to Covid-19
is resurrecting the worst excesses of its casteist past. The virus will eventually pass but there
is no recovering from the collapse of values of solidarity and fraternity which were the moral
inheritance of a republic born in the crucible of anti-colonial struggles. They have always
only flickered in the world's largest democracy, but now their light is going out.

We need a global plan

The second important choice we confront is between nationalist isolation and global
solidarity. Both the epidemic itself and the resulting economic crisis are global problems.
They can be solved effectively only by global co-operation. First and foremost, in order to
defeat the virus we need to share information globally. That’s the big advantage of humans
over viruses.

A coronavirus in China and a coronavirus in the US cannot swap tips about how to infect
humans. But China can teach the US many valuable lessons about coronavirus and how to
deal with it. What an Italian doctor discovers in Milan in the early morning might well save
lives in Tehran by evening. When the UK government hesitates between several policies, it
can get advice from the Koreans who have already faced a similar dilemma a month ago. But
for this to happen, we need a spirit of global co-operation and trust.

In the days ahead, each one of us should choose to trust scientific data and healthcare experts
over unfounded conspiracy theories and self-serving politicians Countries should be willing
to share information openly and humbly seek advice, and should be able to trust the data and
the insights they receive. We also need a global effort to produce and distribute medical
equipment, most notably testing kits and respiratory machines. Instead of every country
trying to do it locally and hoarding whatever equipment it can get, a co-ordinated global
effort could greatly accelerate production and make sure life-saving equipment is distributed

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more fairly. Just as countries nationalise key industries during a war, the human war against
coronavirus may require us to “humanise” the crucial production lines.

A rich country with few coronavirus cases should be willing to send precious equipment to a
poorer country with many cases, trusting that if and when it subsequently needs help, other
countries will come to its assistance. We might consider a similar global effort to pool
medical personnel. Countries currently less affected could send medical staff to the worst-hit
regions of the world, both in order to help them in their hour of need, and in order to gain
valuable experience. If later on the focus of the epidemic shifts, help could start flowing in
the opposite direction.

Global co-operation is vitally needed on the economic front too. Given the global nature of
the economy and of supply chains, if each government does its own thing in complete
disregard of the others, the result will be chaos and a deepening crisis. We need a global plan
of action, and we need it fast. Another requirement is reaching a global agreement on travel.
Suspending all international travel for months will cause tremendous hardships, and hamper
the war against coronavirus. Countries need to co-operate in order to allow at least a trickle of
essential travellers to continue crossing borders: scientists, doctors, journalists, politicians,
businesspeople. This can be done by reaching a global agreement on the pre-screening of
travellers by their home country.

Yet every crisis is also an opportunity. We must hope that the current epidemic will help
humankind realise the acute danger posed by global disunity. Humanity needs to make a
choice. Will we travel down the route of disunity, or will we adopt the path of global
solidarity? If we choose disunity, this will not only prolong the crisis, but will probably result
in even worse catastrophes in the future. If we choose global solidarity, it will be a victory
not only against the coronavirus, but against all future epidemics and crises that might assail
humankind in the 21st century