Politics and pandemics in the age of social media
Behind Trump and Modi’s contrasting approaches, there is a similarity. Both are playing to their strengths
Unit ed States ( US) President Donald Trump repeatedly said in March that he wanted the country open for business by Easter Sunday (April 12). Of late, he has somewhat reversed his Panglossian outlook. But he has touted the anti-malarial drug, hydroxychloroquine, as a magic cure, railed against the mainstream media for misreporting, and continued to excoriate the Chinese government for the spread of the virus.
In stark contrast, Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered a 21-day nationwide lockdown of India till April 14, two days after Easter. He has not provided any magic bullet solutions. Instead, he has warned of tough times ahead and asked citizens to light candles to signal their collective strength.
The di vergence between t he t wo approaches is seemingly bewildering. Is Modi’s reaction disproportionate? Or is Trump foolhardy and refusing to confront reality?
Only time and the medical fraternity will have the answer to these questions. But the contrasting responses are functions of political leaders grappling with a pandemic in a social media age.
At a time when almost every citizen is bombarded with news, real and fake, on what caused the virus to spread and how to stave it off, panic is pervasive. In this scenario, the differences in their public positions conceal a more fundamental similarity — both men are doubling down on what made them popular in the first place.
The lockdown is symptomatic of two traits that have characterised Modi — sacrifice and bolstering India’s international standing. Asking people to stay at home, reduce visits to the grocery, cut out all forms of recreation amounts to a call for citizens to sacrifice their individual needs for the greater good.
This has been the leitmotif of Brand Modi — a boy who sacrificed his childhood to help his father sell tea; forsook his family for the country; and now travels the world to make India regain its rightful place on the global stage. Because of the lockdown, Modi has been hailed by the World Health Organization (WHO), which held that only such an extreme measure could contain the spread of the virus.
If the lockdown works, not only will it help preserve India, but its international reputation, which suffered in recent months, primarily due to the Citizen (Amendment) Act-national Register of Citizens episode and protests against it, will be restored almost immediately.
For Trump, a man who was elected with the promise of creating jobs for the average Joe, his initial Captain America talk was unsurprising. His recent utterances, more in tune with the gravity of the pandemic, have, however, remained combative — interrupting the country’s leading infectious diseases expert to answer a question on medical science, criticising The New York Times and Washington Post for grim fake news, and attacking WHO. These may appear inexplicable but they are consistent with his carefully-cultivated image of a folksy American hero cocking a snook at the world and its established wisdom.
Both Modi and Trump have correctly understood that in the information age, assuaging citizens matters more than taking nuanced decisions. With people receiving all kinds of mixed messages from wearing N95 masks to not wearing masks at all, and everything else in the middle, it is important to be clear, simple and authoritative. The moment does not lend itself to nuance.
This is why, for democratically-elected leaders in the social media age, reacting to a pandemic is different from how epidemics were tackled at other times. In colonial times, neither did the views of people matter nor did their lives. Epidemics of cholera in colonial India were allowed to spread rampantly in native colonies. Even when this strategy changed with active government intervention to tackle the deadly plague in Bombay in 1896, they rode entirely roughshod on people’s rights and their views.
In a democracy like India or America, getting the response to a pandemic right is only partly about getting the public health i ntervention ri ght. That’s because straightforward public health criteria, such as the number of deaths, don’t alone cause global pandemics — if that were the case, with 1.5 million deaths in 2018 alone, 20 times the number of coronavirus deaths so far, tuberculosis should have been the pandemic of pandemics. It wasn’t.
Instead, what creates a pandemic in the information age is the fear of an already deadly disease being multiplied by millions of informed and uninformed commentators incessantly sharing billions of views with each other, all on the same subject, day and night.
Both, Modi and Trump are world leaders in this age because they know how to cut through this clutter with contrasting, yet simple messages. Needless to say, time will prove one of them right. For the other, there will always be someone else to blame with another equally simple message.
IN DEMOCRACIES, GETTING THE RESPONSE TO A PANDEMIC RIGHT IS ONLY PARTLY ABOUT PUBLIC HEALTH INTERVENTION. IT IS ALSO ABOUT CUTTING THROUGH THE CLUTTER OF INFORMATION WITH SIMPLE AND DIRECT MESSAGES FOR CITIZENS