India’s War Against the Virus offers a lenient view of govt’s Covid response
“India with its distinct challenges – population, poverty and poor literacy – has faced the virus with sheer grit and innovative temperament,” says the Discovery documentary, Covid-19: India’s War Against the Virus, which releases on Netflix on July 16.
The 54-minute documentary captures the three-month fight India has waged against the virus, tracing its first arrival in the country from Wuhan in January. Many would know the first arrival was in Kerala, but India’s Patient Zero had in fact first landed in West Bengal’s Kolkata from Wuhan. She then travelled to Kerala’s Kochi and from there to Thrissur.
If you were tired of India being presented as a country of snake charmers and mahouts of traditionally decorated elephants, India’s War Against the Virus talks about the potential India has in facing the virus, being a pharmaceutical hub, and the contributions the country has made as a global vaccine-manufacturing destination.
The documentary is a quick recap of how the virus entered and spread in India. The research team of India’s War Against the Virus, however, provides Indian authorities a lot of leeway using the population size and density as grounds for the areas in which a coherent and robust government response went missing. It talks about the gruelling hardships the migrants were exposed to without getting anyone to talk about how this problem could have been avoided. There is no mention of people who died moving from one hospital to the next in search of beds.
The makers do get people to talk about how Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to ask a 1.33 billion people to stay where they are and not move was a bold decision. The easily avoidable hardships it exposed people to, with many losing lives because of them, are passed off as collateral damage.
A documentary is a mere documentation of facts but what facts you tell and who you choose to tell those facts to assign a motive to what’s being told. At the same time, the facts ignored in a storytelling exercise could end up doing injustice to the real story.
So far, India with its low mortality rate and high recovery rate, seems to be doing a good job in managing the virus. India gets extra points from global observers such as Bill Gates because they expected a catastrophe once the virus entered India. With the catastrophe avoided for now, India can pat itself on the back but it needs to be mindful of the many mistakes it made.
Lockdowns are being reimposed in states and night curfews, without any justification on how they help fight the virus, are being enforced as part of living with the virus. The definition of MSMEs has been tweaked to accommodate more businesses but extended lockdowns are set to force a greater number of them out of business. There isn’t enough advocacy on wearing masks and maintaining social distancing, with the thrust still being on lockdowns when cases spike exponentially.
India’s War Against the Virus draws on just three months of a fight which, experts say, could run into several years.