Indians in limbo amid lockdown
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week made a very big call by announcing a stringent 21-day lockdown — beginning just four hours after his announcement — on everything but essential services. He chose this shock over the prospect of the coronavirus spreading like wildfire and reaching the stage of community transmission, as it has in several European countries.
It is the second time in 40 months that Modi has choked the flow of goods and services in the Indian economy. But the contrasts between the two situations are instructive.
In November 2016, Modi abruptly “demonetized” the economy by declaring certain currency notes in circulation invalid, ostensibly to flush out the stashes of black money hoarded by the corrupt. It was a crude policy instrument that failed in its stated goals.
But the current shutdown of the economy, one could argue, is less an action than a reaction; less an arbitrary move than an inevitable and even foresighted conclusion — especially given India’s massive population and rickety and overburdened public health care system. Let’s take Modi’s decision in good faith and proceed, for a moment, down the uncontroversial line that every kind of problem-solving in policy itself generates certain other problems. In the case of the lockdown, what would those be? The two most obvious ones involve the question of state capacity and control, and a democratic version of moral hazard.
In terms of state capacity,
Modi has suddenly reloaded the Indian economy in such a way as to thrust a much greater onus of power and responsibility, control and authority, into the hands of the state — not an inconsequential matter in a country where the state is already often guilty of overreach.
Second is the question of moral hazard: A situation where a person, or class of people, generates a risk in the knowledge that another party or class will bear its consequences. Strangely for a leader who is thought to have his ear to the ground, Modi, in his lockdown announcement, made no special provisions for the millions of Indians who are internal migrants and work in the informal sector in cities, their access to consumption tied very tightly to their immediate income. By shutting down the economy and making food, shelter and livelihoods precarious, Modi has given a section of the population troubles much more immediate and stressful than the coronavirus. Without adequate planning for such eventualities, boldness in policy is merely bravado.
There is a sense that the shadow of demonetization hangs over the hush in India today.
The two situations may be very different, but the same authority presided over them.
The current 21-day lockdown may not be the first that India will have to endure in the coming months. As the current one, arriving like a bolt from the blue and leaving millions in limbo, struggles to stay solid, it would be refreshing to see the government show a willingness to acknowledge its mistakes and build a more inclusive platform for future fights against the coronavirus.
Chandrahas Choudhury is a writer based in New Delhi. His work also appears in Bloomberg View and Foreign Policy. Twitter: @Hashestweets
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