India struggles in imposing lockdown
NEW DELHI: Indian police are struggling to impose the lockdown in the over 4-million-square-kilometer country as the government began the gargantuan task of keeping 1.3 billion people indoors.
Official assurances that essentials would not run out clashed with people’s fears that the disease toll could soon worsen, gutting food and other critical supplies.
In five days, the number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus has jumped from about 200 to 519 and experts say the real toll is likely to be much higher because of insufficient testing.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a three-week countrywide lockdown covering nearly one-fifth of the world’s population “to save India and Indians.”
He said the lockdown would be “total,” but officials after his speech released advisories explaining that medical, law enforcement, media and other sectors were exempted and that stores selling food and other essentials would remain open.
Television images from many cities and towns on Wednesday showed shuttered markets and offices. Normally bustling railway stations stood empty. Joggers awkwardly avoided each other to maintain safe distances.
Still, Modi’s speech triggered panic buying as online retailers Amazon and Big Basket, an Indian grocery delivery service, began canceling previously placed orders and said they had no delivery slots available.
That spurred people to risk fines and other penalties for violating the lockdown by going out to shop at local stores.
Social distancing was forgotten at a grocery store in the Nizamuddin neighborhood of New Delhi as panicked residents swarmed inside and jostled with each other to get fast-disappearing supplies.
An elderly couple who waited to enter the shop for nearly 30 minutes eventually returned home empty-handed.
Although the lockdown made provisions for people to leave their homes to buy food, TV news and social media showed police striking would-be shoppers in the streets with batons in the southern state of Kerala, the financial hub of Mumbai and New Delhi.
Alok Barman, a servant who works in several well-to-do south Delhi households, said he was beaten up by police when he ventured outside his home in the city’s outskirts.
“Some homes that I work in paid me some money and I thought it was best to get some food in the house. But the police attacked us with sticks and beat us,” he said. “Now we have nothing to eat.”
Tarique Anwar, a former banker, said he went out to buy milk and vegetables at a grocery store in Delhi’s Jamia Nagar neighborhood when he was confronted by a group of policemen who ordered him to go back. He only managed to get vegetables.
A video shot by a passerby showed a policeman using his baton to smash the interior of a meat shop in the capital’s Zakir Nagar neighborhood. The shop’s owner said police also beat him up and told him he should not have opened his shop.
“They charged inside and started abusing and beating me,” said Parvez, who uses only one name. New Delhi police spokesman Anil Mittal denied that police were beating people.
Similar scenes occurred in India’s northeast, an eight- state region where only two of the country’s coronavirus cases have been reported. Others defied the shutdown order not in order to shop but rather to pray.