Blame game over pilgrims
shops inside residential colonies were also allowed to operate. When some of these shops opened on May 4, policemen came and forced them to down their shutters. A shopkeeper told Frontline: “I thought my shop came under that criteria, but the police came with lathis and made me close it. We repair and rent out air conditioners. Air coolers are in the essential category list but air conditioners are not.” Since there was a discrepancy between the stated rules and what was being allowed on the ground, most shopkeepers did not reopen for business but decided to play the wait-and-watch game.
Despite the relaxations, the city did not witness the kind of activity one might have expected to resume. But even the marginal increase of traffic on the roads prompted some mediapersons to declare that people were flouting rules. Some private offices opened with a staff strength of 30 per cent. There were long queues outside liquor shops, which the administration was ill-prepared for. The police resorted to lathicharge and threatened to seal the areas altogether.
Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal declared that he would seal all the areas where people were not following physical-distancing rules. Soon afterwards, his administration announced an astounding 70 per cent extra tax as a “special corona fee” on liquor sold in the capital from May 5 onwards.
State governments are opening liquor stores mainly because they have suffered huge revenue losses due to the lockdown and a major chunk of their revenue comes from the sale of liquor.
The Kejriwal government also increased value-added tax (VAT) on petrol by Rs.1.67 a litre and on diesel by Rs.7.10 a litre, thereby raising the price of petrol to Rs.71.26 a litre and diesel to Rs.69.39 a litre. While States such as Haryana and Tamil Nadu also hiked VAT on fuel, Delhi’s hike was the steepest. In the coming days, this is expected to inflate the cost of products across the shelf.
The prices of fruits, vegetables and other staples had already been hovering at dangerous levels in Delhi after its borders with neighbouring States, especially Haryana, were sealed. The wholesale markets in Delhi were also shut for a few days for sanitisation after 15 cases of COVID-19 were found in the Azadpur mandi. Uncertainties over an extension of the lockdown triggered panic buying and hoarding, which led to a further hike in the prices of commodities.
Meanwhile, the Kejriwal government entered into a tussle with residents’ welfare associations (RWAS) over the entry of service workers such as domestic helps and drivers into housing colonies. While the government gave the go-ahead for their return to their jobs, several RWAS were against it as the danger of the virus had not fully receded from the city. A member of the decisionmaking committee of an RWA told Frontline: “It is a big dilemma. The worker can be a carrier or, conversely, one of us residents who go out into the city could be a carrier who unwittingly passes it on to the maid. She goes back to her slum and becomes a spreader there. These are not easy decisions.”
The situation remains worrying as there is a steady spike in the number of cases of mild or asymptomatic infections. Contact tracing has failed to reveal the sources of all infections. This indicates the presence of silent carriers moving around undetected in communities. Delhi had conducted 2,300 tests per million population of the city, which is pretty high compared with the numbers in other States. Gujarat, for instance, which had 5,804 cases of coronavirus, had tested only 1,246 per million population, while Kerala, which did not report any new cases in the week preceding May 4, had tested only 500 people per million population. The Delhi government contacted 1,100 people who had recovered from COVID-19 and asked them to donate their plasma, which is being used as an experimental treatment procedure in Delhi hospitals.
Newer hotspots seem to be emerging in the city; on April 29 200 health workers tested positive for the virus. Very few of them were from the facilities dedicated for the treatment of coronavirus infections, said State Health Minister Satyendar Jain. The paramilitary forces became super spreaders after 137 personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were found to be positive. The entire battalion of 480 CRPF personnel based in Mayur Vihar had to be quarantined after one of them died of COVID-19 infection. Apart from that, personnel from the Central Industrial Security Force (9), the Indotibetan Border Police (21) and the Border Security Force (31) deployed in the Jama Masjid area were found to be positive for the virus.
An artist based out of Patna said: “But no media house hounded them or blamed them for spreading the virus deliberately as they had done with the Tablighi Jamaat congregation and rightly so. But here in Bihar, ordinary Muslims continue to be hounded and harassed by local residents, who blame them for ‘corona jehad’. The media’s hate propaganda has gone deep within an already Islamophobic society, and we will see its ill effects for a long time to come.”
The COVID-19 contagion is increasing at an alarming rate in Punjab following the return of Sikh devotees who had got stranded in Nanded in Maharashtra after the lockdown was announced. From May 1 to May 3, as an estimated 4,000 pilgrims flooded back into the State, the total number of positive COVID-19 cases jumped to 1,102 with 21 deaths. As of May 3, as many as 609 pilgrims who returned from Maharashtra had been found to be infected. The steepest spike was recorded on May 3: of the 331 cases recorded that day, 326 were pilgrims.
The spike sharpened the political blame game. The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), principal opposition party in Punjab, accused the Amarinder Singh-led Congress government of negligent handling of the devotees’ transportation from Maharashtra. The Congress alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party (Bjp)-led Centre was discriminating against opposition-ruled States.
The pilgrims had travelled to Nanded (Maharashtra) to pay obeisance at Gurudwara Hazur Sahib. The announcement of the lockdown on March 24 at four hours’ notice forced them to stay back at the shrine complex. In the absence of adequate space and amenities at the complex, social distancing norms presumably could not be followed.
The Punjab government initially recommended home quarantine for returnees who showed no symptoms on arrival. The situation changed after eight pilgrims in Tarn Taran and Kapurthala tested positive. The Home Department issued strict orders that all those who were arriving in Punjab would be first screened at a government facility and then allowed to go home only if they tested negative.
Much controversy has arisen regarding the mode of transport of the pilgrims and the difficulties they encountered at the government quarantine centres. SAD leader Bikram Singh Majithia demanded that Health Minister Balbir Singh Sidhu be sacked and alleged that the State government mismanaged the transportation of the pilgrims by not sticking to Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) guidelines; he pointed to the use of air-conditioned buses for the purpose. “The social distancing norm was not followed. The buses passed through red zones, and it was because of this mishandling that pilgrims who were in good health in Nanded for more than one month tested positive for COVID-19 on their return to Punjab,” Majithia said.
In response, Balbir Singh Sidhu alleged that Majithia was conducting a misleading propaganda and emphasised that the pilgrims contracted the disease during their stay at the Hazur Sahib Gurudwara and not on their way back to Punjab. He justified his claim citing the fact that some “sevadars” of the gurudwara had also tested positive. Sidhu also criticised Union Minister Harsimrat Kaur of SAD for her comment that the Centre had been generous with funds. He dared her to prevail on the Union government to clear the State’s Goods and Services Tax arrears amounting to Rs.4,400 crore. In a video message on his Facebook page, he said: “A sum of Rs.71 crore has been given to Punjab under the National Health Mission to fight the coronavirus. It comes to even less than Rs.3 crore per district. Besides that, we have not got a single penny from the Government of India in the fight against COVID-19”.
The opposition in the State criticised facilities at the quarantine centres as poor. Some senior people associated with Health Department who were running the administration of the hospitals where most suspected coronavirus patients have been quarantined agreed with the criticism. A source told Frontline: “You know the condition of government health facilities. Would you expect them to change overnight?”
Congress spokesperson Raman Balasubraminan, who is also the chairman of Ludhiana Improvement Trust, said there might have been irregularities in the beginning but claimed that the situation had since improved. “One cannot deny that there were some difficulties in the beginning given the sudden spurt in cases, but we acted fast. We have significantly upgraded the amenities at the quarantine centres,” he told this reporter. In view of the spiralling number of cases, the government has started a drive to increase the number of isolation centres. On May 2, 2,081 government schools were declared quarantine facilities until further orders in Patiala alone.
INTER-COMMUNITY EFFORTS
Punjab has seen robust inter-community efforts to aid the overall preparations and action plan to deal with the pandemic. As in the rest of the country, civil society has come out strongly in support of efforts made by independent non-governmental organisations (NGOS) to ensure supply of food and other essentials to the poor. Volunteers of Voice of Amritsar (VOA), a prominent NGO that has handed over 50 PPE kits, 100 face shields and 10 litres of handsanitiser to the administration, said they got a tremendous response from the people, especially, small shopkeepers and grocers. Voa’s founding director, Rakesh Sharma, Professor in Surgery at the Government Medical College Amritsar and Convener of Special Coordination Committee on COVID-19, said that at least 10 of its staff secured travel permits in the first week of the lockdown and were instrumental in distributing food supplies and protective gear.
Sharma told this writer over the phone from Amrit