India (Tushya Mehta)
Fact-Checked Source
The Economic Times. (2020, March 24). PM Modi announces nationwide lockdown to fight coronavirus pandemic.
[Full speech Video]. YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQAOnUZt9BA
This perspective page explores the early days of the lockdown imposed in India. The page uses PM Modi's speech as the main source to understand what India is doing to curb COVID-19 spread and why it is doing so. The page also uses additional journalistic sources and scholarly sources to understand the whole situation better. The perspective is of India as a whole, and how India is acting according to the information from the outside world."Understanding the Why?" Five Facts Checked
I am going to Fact check five facts made by PM Modi during his speech about COVID-19. This speech announced the 21-day nationwide lockdown and implored people to support the lockdown. I traced the original sources of these facts and also added some personal opinions to the fact check.
“Some people have the misconception that social distancing is only for the people suffering from COVID-19. This is not right. It is for everyone as well as the PM” (PM Modi, 24th March 2020)
PM Modi makes this bold statement to implore people to follow social distancing. He uses himself as an example of someone who must follow social distancing. It is clear that if a nation’s leader is following social distancing so must all it’s citizens. After a fact check, I found out that WHO suggests ‘maintaining at least 1 meter (3 feet) distance between yourself and anyone who is coughing or sneezing’.[1] Even though WHO suggests that only maintain distance from someone who is sneezing or coughing, India wants everyone to practice social distancing as it would help contain the virus even more.
“As per health experts, a minimum of 21 days is most crucial to breaking the cycle of infection”(PM Modi, 24th March 2020)
This is the fact that PM Modi uses to justify the duration of the lockdown. He believes this piece of information given by the ‘Health Experts’ and uses it to take action. This suggests that PM Modi’s decisions are driven by proper health experts and their valuable inputs. The fact can be traced back to many scholarly resources suggesting how to break the spread. No direct online source suggests 21 days as the time period but a mathematical model[2] shows something similar.
“The person who is infected may not show symptoms in the beginning and may seem completely healthy but they can spread COVID-19”(PM Modi, 24th March 2020)
In this statement, PM Modi refers to the Pre-symptomatic transmission and Asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19. He uses these facts in order to support his lockdown measures. This fact can be traced to a Situation report[3] given by the WHO where WHO explains many different aspects of the disease. This statement is very scientific and shows how the measures endorsed by science.
“According to WHO, in a week to 10 days, one person can infect hundreds of people ”(PM Modi, 24th March 2020)
This statement begins with the mention of a trusted source to bring weight to the statement. The fact shows the severity of the spread of COVID-19. This piece of information was essential given the population of India. If the lockdown was not initiated the spread would have been magnanimous. This information can be traced back to many publications[4] under the COVID-19 page on the WHO website.
“World’s most empowered nations have become helpless in the face of this pandemic ”(PM Modi, 24th March 2020)
In this bold statement, PM Modi recognizes the helplessness of many developed nations across the globe. He also implies that India’s healthcare system is weaker compared to those countries and so it must take drastic measures to save lives. This fact can be said to represent a general or journalistic opinion in India about the response of the ‘empowered nations’.This statement is controversial as well as crucial to understanding India’s perspective. No clear fact source was traced but it can be concluded that the statement is the public opinion about the COVID-19 response.
Image Source- [3]
'The Mahabharata of the Modern Age'
Image source -[3]How are more than a billion Indian citizens fighting the COVID-19 pandemic?
First of all, what is COVID-19?
COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. The disease was identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, the capital of China's Hubei province, and has since spread globally[5] This lead to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic which has also managed to reach India. With the continuous rise in COVID-19 cases, India decided to initiate a 21-day nationwide lockdown on March 24th, 2020. The essay explores the speech made by PM Modi on Tuesday of March the 24th to understand what the country is thinking. The PM addressed the nation via national television and radio and so he managed to approach the majority of India’s citizens.
Every community looks towards their leader for guidance and support and often trust them completely. The leader of a country is an individual who understands the country better than anyone. In our case, PM Modi is the individual who has been burdened by the responsibility of saving his 1.3 billion citizens from the novel Coronavirus. Every citizen looks towards him as someone who will give our accurate information on the disease and what measure they need to take to protect themselves. For PM Modi this is one of the biggest challenges of his life as he is responsible for every citizen’s life. The PM needs to understand every angle of the situation and so he uses the advice of his ministers, health experts and WHO, economic experts, and military experts to plan the lockdown. We see that understanding different standpoints is crucial for any scientific measure. This can be explained by Megan Halpern’s ‘Feminist standpoint theory and science communication’[6] where she says “practitioners and researchers alike should seek insights from marginalized groups to help inform the ways the dominant view of science reflects hegemonic social and cultural norms”[6]. This is crucial in a diverse country like India with many marginalized groups. The PM needs to act as a science practitioner and take into account Megan Halpern’s theory as he is running one of the biggest science experiments which directly affects millions of lives. In his speech, PM Modi is communicating science to every class of the society and so he uses claims from many trusted sources like WHO to appeal to the people. He is in direct collaboration with almost all parts of society and his decisions show that.
Is it time for another Mahabharata?
In his speech, PM Modi uses the example of Mahabharata an ancient Hindu Epic that explores the 18 days long battle of Kurukshetra in his speech to battle COVID-19. He compares the 18-day battle to the 21-day lockdown that the citizens of India will be under due to COVID-19. This an interesting approach to help most of the Hindu majority(79.8%)[7] to understand the graveness of the lockdown. This also suggests that the appeal is through fear of COVID-19 as it is being compared to a deadly battle. Even though we hear in Shankar Vedantam’s podcast “Facts Aren’t Enough” that hope works better than fear when communicating scientific or healthcare measures, PM Modi still uses fear.8 This shows that the country is in a state of panic and is fearful of what is coming.
In an interview with The New Yorker’s journalist Isaac Chotiner, Ramanan Laxminarayan, an epidemiologist and economist who directs the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics, and Policy in Washington, D.C., and who is currently in New Delhi, suggested that PM Modi’s action was quick and necessary due to India’s poor health conditions. Laxminarayan said that “And, generally, for politicians to act proactively to prevent death is not very popular, because the public will never give credit for deaths they averted. The public will only blame them for the damage they caused. So, from that perspective, Modi was very decisive and acted quickly”.[Secondary source 2]
Even though the decision was quick the country faces many challenges ahead and every citizen is very concerned. It can be seen from a research paper where Dr.Arvind Kasthuri, a Professor in the Department of Community Health at St John's Medical College, Bengaluru, states that
“The Indian healthcare scenario presents a spectrum of contrasting landscapes. At one end of the spectrum are the glitzy steel and glass structures delivering high tech medicare to the well-heeled, mostly urban Indian. At the other end are the ramshackle outposts in the remote reaches of the “other India” trying desperately to live up to their identity as health subcenters”.[Secondary source 3] This explains why the drastic actions are being taken.
In a nutshell, we can see that it is trying to reach the shore with minimal COVID-19 cases with an uneven motorboat with several holes. There is fear but there is also hope and we see that the nation is coming together to fight the COVID-19 pandemic in its unique ways.
Bibliography
Main Sources
Perspective Source
The Economic Times. (2020, March 24). PM Modi announces nationwide lockdown to fight coronavirus pandemic. [Full speech Video]. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQAOnUZt9BA
I believe this source was very crucial as it affects every minister, multi-national company, police, local businesses, and farmers alike. And every future decision in India is made in response to this speech so it reflects exactly what the nation’s plan is and how they feel. It is also important as the purpose of this source is to educate every citizen of India about what is COVID-19 and how the country has to deal with it. It is also telling the people about what steps they need to take in order to prevent the crisis/ and also announces that the country will be going in a complete lockdown for 21-days.
Secondary sources
Abhishyant Kidangoor( 2020, MARCH 31). Modi's Hasty Coronavirus Lockdown of India Leaves Many Fearful for What Comes Next.TIME https://time.com/5812394/india-coronavirus-lockdown-modi/
It’s a journalistic source on the after-effects of the speech given by PM Modi. It is from TIME and analyzes comments made by Indian citizens from different backgrounds and shows what they are experiencing.
Isaac Chotiner (2020, April 1). How COVID-19 Will Hit India. New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-covid-19-will-hit-india
It’s a journalistic source(an interview with an expert in India) on how COVID-19 will hit India. It is from the New Yorker and answers questions on COVID-19 with respect to India and shows what India is experiencing. It also gives opinions on many different aspects of the execution of the lockdown and future plans.
Arvind Kasthuri (2018, July-Dec). Challenges to Healthcare in India - The Five A's. Indian J Community Med. 2018 Jul-Sep; 43(3): 141–143. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6166510/
The author Dr. Arvind Kasthuri is a Professor in the Department of Community Health at St John's Medical College, Bengaluru - 560 034, Karnataka, India. The source of the article is the Indian Journal of Community Medicine. This is one of the most trustable sources to analyze India’s healthcare system and understand its strengths. This was used to see the why behind India’s actions.
Additional Sources
WHO (2020). Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) advice for the public. WHO International
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-publicMarcus Lu (2020, March 28). The Math behind Social Distancing. Visual Capitalist
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-math-behind-social-distancing/WHO (2020). Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) Situation Report – 73.
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200402-sitrep-73-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=5ae25bc7_6WHO (2020). Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) Pandemic.
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019Hui DS, I Azhar E, Madani TA, Ntoumi F, Kock R, Dar O, et al. (February 2020). "The continuing 2019-nCoV epidemic threat of novel coronaviruses to global health—The latest 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China". Int J Infect Dis.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7128332/Megan Halpern (2019). ‘Feminist standpoint theory and science communication’. JCOM 18 (04), C02.
doi.org/10.22323/2.18040302"India has 79.8% Hindus, 14.2% Muslims, says 2011 census data on religion". Firstpost. 26 August 2016. Retrieved 14 August 2016.
http://m.firstpost.com/india/india-has-79-8-percent-hindus-14-2-percent-muslims-2016-census-data-on-religion-2407708.html- Shankar Vedantam (July 2019) “Facts Aren’t Enough” Hidden Brain podcast (51 min)
