The summer of 2021 saw a massive rise in the number of infections and deaths from
Covid-19 in India. Even by conservative estimates, at least 1.5 million people had
lost their lives by June; several times the official figure. As in the first wave of the
pandemic, this time, too, the chaos and suffering was in large measure, as Harsh
Mander shows, due to mismanagement by an uncaring and cynical state.
The first part of the book, 'Locking Down the Poor', describes the grave humanitarian
crisis of 2020, which pushed the urban poor to the brink of starvation. It shows how
this was a direct consequence of public policy choices that the central government
made, particularly of imposing the world's longest and most stringent lockdown,
with the smallest relief package. Mander brings us voices of out-of-work daily-wage
and informal workers, the homeless and the destitute, all overwhelmed by hunger,
humiliation and dread. From the highways and overcrowded quarantine centres, he
brings us stories of the estimated 3 crore migrant workers whose livelihoods were
destroyed, forcing them to walk hundreds of kilometres to their villages.
The second part of the book, 'Burning Pyres, Mass Graves', records the horrors
of the following year, when everything from hospital beds to oxygen and essential
medicines fell disastrously short. Mander traces the causes for these shortages to the
criminal neglect of public health in India, a situation made worse under the Narendra
Modi government, leading to the extortion of a beleaguered population by everyone
from suppliers of oxygen cylinders to pharma billionaires. He holds the state culpable
for indulging in pageantry-with the PM advertising himself as a messiah-when the
country needed to brace for the impact of the second wave.
Combining ground reports with hard data and first-hand knowledge, Mander chronicles
the greatest humanitarian catastrophe India has faced in a century, the effects of which
will be felt for decades. This powerful, even shattering, book is a necessary record of
a national tragedy that too many of us want to forget, when remembering is our only
defence against a similar disaster in the future.
