 Hello and let's talk about the ever rising number of COVID-19 cases in the country. The numbers for yesterday announced today morning are staggering. India recorded 95,735 cases yesterday, the single highest number in one day, not only for our country but for the entire world. This is not really the kind of record to be proud about and one question that has emerged time and again is why did our graph never get flat? Most countries which reported a high number of cases after a while saw the numbers come down. Now some of these countries saw second wave of infections with fresh cases being reported in large numbers. A good example is the United States. However, there has not been any drastic decline in cases in India. So why is India's situation different? News Clips Prabhuporka Estha talks to immunologist Dr. Satyajit Rat on this issue. Yes, so clearly the situation in the two most populous countries of the world could not be more divergent where in one case the pandemic if you like began very early at the end of the last calendar year not even in 2020 and yet their total numbers in China are actually less than at least some of our recent daily numbers whereas the dramatically different trajectory that the pandemic took with us was that it started very much more slowly. One might almost say it started much later. It gained strong enduring footholds in communities in India much, much later. And I suspect that part of the reason for that please let us all keep in mind that much of this is guesswork of trying to make sense of a chaotic situation. But that said, our draconian nationwide lockdown with a four hour notice implemented as law and order policing problem quite clearly from day one will have had the effect as we have been saying since then of delaying establishment and foothold for the infection simply because people in the early weeks stayed at home with the resultant economic breakdown with the resultant non COVID-19 public health breakdown not simply treating illness but also in providing support to pregnant women for children's immunizations in all of this because people stayed at home. We simply delayed the takeoff but the takeoff was always going to happen because you're never going to stop the last possibility of infection. So the thing that we needed to have done which we do not clearly seem to have done with with any efficiency is put in place a genuine reliable community participating testing to scale contact tracing to scale and isolation in practicable human well supported fashion. We've never done this. Our response still continues to be a policing response. One of the major prominent pieces of COVID-19 pandemic related news in India over the past few days for example is that the police are collecting now X amounts of funds as fines from people who are not wearing masks and the interesting thing there is we're not discussing the failure of public outreach of information and true community participation in people not wearing masks instead we are simply addressing how much money we've collected for non wearing of masks and this is emblematic of what we've been saying all these months that a public health problem is being treated as a law and order problem. When that has been the consistent approach it's no surprise that what we are going to have is simply as I said a delay in the establishment of the infection in the community because of the draconian lockdown followed by an expansion of the pandemic. As the lockdown weekends a continued rise of numbers in any case the lockdown had to break down you need to give people food which you are not giving they had their poor migration. So we've done this in the past and since you bring it up let's underline it again the timetable for the unlockdown has been driven by in part by the socioeconomic inevitabilities that you point out that there's only so long that people can sustain it in socioeconomic terms and by a political trajectory of management of public relations if you will rather than responding to actual ground level pandemic situation. It's also interesting that even now it's a ministry of home that releases all the guidelines ministry of health has disappeared from view we don't even have the health minister come in on the television screens and when the prime minister does come he's seen with peacocks feeding them but you know all on red fourth but we don't really hear him talking about the Mahabharata war against COVID-19 we thought would be over in three weeks but leaving that out this is a political criticism of the public relations indicate out what we don't see is any evaluation of what has happened and what we need to do now except talking about in a very opaque fashion lockdown and unlockdown phases and saying that now the central government is going to look after districts directly minus the state governments even bypassing the state government again a completely stop down centralized law and order approach to the problem of course the emergency act that we have and we are under the state of emergency because of the Disaster Management Act which is in operation at the moment. Coming to a more specific issue since you are in Pune and Pune has emerged as the probably the largest growing numbers of any urban area at the moment what explains this in Pune? So as I have said repeatedly all these months there aren't necessarily rational explanations for every event in the chaotic landscape of an epidemic that said let's keep what I think of as the class dimension of the epidemic in mind. The epidemic was initiated by the extent of international travel in volume terms meaning large volume of international travel exchange this is not to blame one person bringing a disease or anything of this sort this is simply to point out that infection as a statistical phenomenon would spread from country to country from one original source point with likelihoods that would correlate with the volume of air travel and the volume of air travel is driven even today by and large by business considerations. So in a certain sense it is the socio-economic class category of business travelers who are in a statistical sense the transmitters across international boundaries but once you have the virus beginning to spread locally the local spread depends on on a completely different set of socio-economic conditions it depends on crowding and not just crowding as in the marketplace but crowding over a full 24-hour period with housing very close to each other with crowding within houses with shared toilet facilities with extraordinarily narrow lanes and so on and so forth. Now if you think about it in those terms then the largest labour concentration urban labour concentration which lives in India in the most crowded apartment colony conditions or tenement colony conditions what in the Mumbai Pune sector would be called Jhopadpatti which in Delhi would be called the Chukhi Jhopadi residential conditions or one step above built crowded flats but with shared toilet facilities that are called the Cholls in the Mumbai Pune sector which are essentially tenement houses. The Mumbai Pune urban conglomerate is the largest urban apartment and tenement colony community in the country connected to the largest international transit point of travel which is Mumbai. The extent of crowding is much more in quantitative terms in a variety of parameters than in Delhi. So for me it's not surprising that it's over this sector that steady relentless growth please keep in mind that the relentless growth is also a something of an artifact of our political definitions. The virus is still popping up in different small neighbourhoods and dying down and popping up and dying down but it's all happening within this what I'm calling extremely high density working class communities. In our next segment we bring you a chunk of a conversation between writer Vijay Prashad and Marxist intellectual Ajaz Ahmed. They're talking about the recent New York Times report on comments made or comments about India made by former US President Richard Nixon during the time of the Bangladesh Liberation War. These hateful racist and misogynist comments have been rightly condemned but Professor Ajaz Ahmed talks about how racism and supremacism have been an integral part of US foreign policy for ages. Coming back again to the question of independence of India's foreign policy in this period or you know however one understands it there were atrocities committed in East Pakistan. Indian Army did end up intervening. I mean there is something interesting because in Gary Bass's book The Blood Telegram he does talk a lot about the indifference of US diplomacy to this level of suffering and I think that bears some comment that it's not just Kissinger and Nixon being nasty about Indian women in general or Indira Gandhi in particular. That misogyny and vulgarity. Quite a border there. Yeah actually but yeah you see first of all that indifference there indifference to the people they themselves killed and you know Iraq, Syria, Libya you begin to understand that this is an imperial mentality which is completely indifferent to human suffering. You know this reflects very very deeply. In the United States again the history of atrocities on their own people and this misogyny and you know they're unattractive etc etc they produce two children etc. This is their own history from the time of slavery on this this is this is part of what in these days is called white supremacy. You know indifferent to the lives of people of these countries. Deep misogyny, deep racism and their own interest. Their own interest overrides everything. I need to just make this visit. Now you could pay they could pay attention to what was actually going on in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and say okay we go to Beijing some other day. It isn't as if the Chinese would object to some postponement of it. So overriding preoccupation with their own geopolitics and this mass suffering of people mass suffering imposed by your ally and in fact with your weapons completely indifferent and because India has has had this independent policy or whatever and it really was independent at the time of Indira Gandhi. Therefore you dislike them and therefore this immense burden of having you know hundreds of thousands maybe a million or whatever the number of the refugees and so on. None of it matters to you know they aren't even words of sympathy for India having to play this role and interestingly there's no discussion of the fact that India effectively will break up the country of their ally. They're not even interested in that. So share indifference you are just background material for their ambitions. One of the the outside contexts of this is that 1971 was a particularly difficult year for the Vietnamese liberation movement. It's also a year where a number of scandals came to court including William Kelly of the Mai Lai. You know while they're talking in the White House these scandals are swirling about. There was Operation Texas Star taking place as they are talking. I mean the sheer violence against the Vietnamese people they use of you know chemical weapons and so on. Eventually the final bombings of Hanoi the TNT was greater than the two atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But so that is another way of looking at it that these are people who are indifferent to their own victims. Whatever takes it doesn't matter if you kill every Vietnamese which they tried very hard. So you know there is certain you learn something about the imperial mindset. It is vulgar, it is misogynistic, it is racist and it is indifferent to human suffering. And these are the people who talk about democracy, human rights, this that and the other. It's an extraordinary disjunction. That's all your time today. We'll be back tomorrow with more news from the country in the world. Until then keep watching NewsClick.