 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are extremely fortunate to have one of the world's most important journalists P. Sainath used to be with the Hindu author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought and the founder of the People's Archive of Rural India Pari. Sainath, welcome to NewsClick. Hi Vijay. Good to see you. Well, today we're going to talk about the state of India months into both the coronavirus pandemic and into the haphazard lockdown as organized by the government of Narendra Modi. What is the pulse now as we enter July in India regarding the coronavirus recession, the pandemic and the lockdown? For one thing, there's an extraordinary rush towards privatizing what public resources remain in public hands. Now they're going to let out 5% of the railways of trains, 5% of trains for private trains. Now had you had private trains, would you have been able to transport 10 million migrants back to their homes? You wouldn't have had a chance of doing it. In fact, they're doing the opposite of everything. They're going against the lessons that every other nation seems to be drawing. Take Spain, Ireland, which immediately after COVID broke out, they actually nationalized all the medical facilities. Maybe they'll reprioritize them or denationalize them later, but they immediately nationalized. We took two months to start saying, okay, 80% of private hospital beds are commanded for COVID, whatever. And just before this, the previous budget of this government put up district level government hospitals on the block for private management. And you'd think that after COVID, they would rethink that process. No, they're moving towards it even faster. In the control room for their war room on COVID, you have Boston Consulting Group sitting there. So you're actually allowing privateers, profit seeking, representing hundreds of extremely rapacious clients to be sitting in the control room of the fight against the pandemic. That's one set. Another area where gigantic monies are already being made, you just have to look at the stocks and shares of companies like Baiju and others. This is online education. This is simply incredible the way it's playing out. The amount of, if you look at all the websites of the business newspapers, the business magazines or business websites, you can see them salivating. I mean, they're just salivating saying, hey, this is where the money is. This is where it is. We can do fantastic things now. Because anyway, you had no intention of worrying about the tens of millions of children in government schools, tens of millions, over 10, 15, 20 million in just Uttar Pradesh alone. What's happening with the online education? First, consider that from preschool to primary and even upper primary, how many kids own a smart phone? That's one. Second, the parents are saying, even if the parents manage to get a phone, they're saying, we don't know how to use this stuff. How are we going to teach the child? And that's even for older children up to the age of 15, 16. So take a place like Palgar, what used to be part of Thane district. It's a heavily Adivasi area. The National Sample Survey organization's 2018 report tells us that only one in six people in rural Maharashtra, one in six, had the ability to use the internet. Not about ownership of products and gadgets. Only one in six people and for women, that was one in 11. And even more recent, the same, they also did a survey who actually used the 30 days preceding and that was one in seven overall and for women, one in 12. Now then, if you have a phone, you don't have goddamn network. You don't have power supply, so sometimes you can go days without recharging your phone. In fact, in Bengal, it's created a little profession in the last three, four years. There's a guy who comes to the village in the morning, collects in the night, collects everybody's phones and goes and charges them somewhere where there's electricity and comes back in the morning and distributes the phones, things like that. So you don't have electricity, you don't have the thing. These smartphones are extremely expensive and by the way, they would now have a ban on the cheapest apps which are all Chinese. Now, how do you download on that kind of limited bandwidth that people have? You pay 200 rupees a month for two GB a day. If you go into a higher bracket, it becomes much more expensive. Two kids in a school, older brother, younger sister. First, that older brother has to be persuaded to share his phone with the kid. Second, downloading PDFs, you can't print them out, you don't have access of that kind. This is the kind of stuff that's going on. So you're having entirely the basic issue of India is and has been for a very long time, extreme inequality. Now, what COVID did and what COVID continues to do, what COVID-19 continues to do, it's given you an incredible, complete and thorough autopsy of neoliberalism and our path of development in the last 28-30 years. So you really are now looking at the corpse of neoliberal ideology and it gives you an incredible, COVID has also given, say, to someone like me, an incredible brain scan of our media and elite. These are the two things. The next thing, so online education is a racket, is becoming a racket. Incidentally, at Pari in the People's Archive of Rural India, in a few days, we are launching Pari education because there is a serious class differentiation even within those who have access. Now in Mumbai, many kids have broadband. In Vidarbha, many kids don't have any back. So what happens, you'll find year after year, the topper in the school board exams might be from Latour, Marathwada, Vidarbha, but the past person pages in Mumbai will be excellent, not because the students here are more brilliant, but because they have access to broadband 24 hours network in Vidarbha, around exam time, they are having 12 to 15 hour power cuts each year, every year. So there has not been a bulb in the panchayat bubble. Where does that village kids study? So the thing, the online education thing is, I think it's the way I see it, it's moving from digital divide to what Bhav Chaskar has called digital partition. From digital divide to digital partition. Absolute separation of two words, a dividing line that you cannot, it's a border which you cannot cross. So that is going to, Karnataka in fact has put a ban on online classes up to class 5 and the beautiful people are outraged. But the fact is that thousands of families of government school children are saying, how the heck will we do our exams? We can't teach the children, we don't know how to use these instruments and we can't afford them. So that's one area. The second is the gigantic racketeering that's happening in the health sector. Now I live in close proximity of, well very close proximity of one, but in decent proximity of three 5 star hospitals. These guys are charging 6,500 rupees and more for COVID testing. 6,500 rupees and more. And at the very time that you need to be thinking, heck we lost an opportunity to build a national health system, which by the way was recommended in the first commission of one of the first commissions India made as going towards independence, the Bore commission. They said this, build something on the lines of what was coming up in Britain, which served Britain very well until Thatcher came along and picked its bones out. But we don't have a national health system and health racketeering is getting, let me tell you from Mumbai. I said this, if you go back to the piece of March 26th, which I published in the wire, you're going to have a lot more deaths from non COVID diseases than from COVID, because we have come up, we have focused the every bit of the limited medical resources India has on COVID. Heck of a lot of people are dying of other diseases. The migrants on those 800 kilometer walks, 800 mile walks too, they were dying of dehydration. They were dying of diarrhea. They were dying of all the old usual suspects in Indian morbidity. So that that was another thing. The hospitals now to get a someone dies, a person dies of another disease. You can't get a medical certificate without paying 10,000 rupees or more in mobile. Without paying 10,000 or more. So because the government hospitals cannot give you a death certificate until they conduct an autopsy. They are in no position. They're cracking at the seams. They are in no position to do autopsy. So you go around a classmate of mine in Chennai. Madan Kumar died. It was not at all, it's not at all clear what he died of. It's not at all clear. There were no COVID like symptoms or anything. And my literally my classmate from MCC school. The family was forced to dispose of the body fast by the rest of the society, buildings, etc. saying, do this because you know it's problematic for everyone. So they ran around for a death certificate. And he has been cremated without the without any examination of what went wrong with it. So people suffering from diseases other than COVID, heart patients, diabetes patients are in a very bad way. That's so that's the health sector. Third, in the education sector, all the private universities are recalibrating. They all built huge infrastructure, giant buildings, conference centers, etc. Now they are racing to, and this has a lot to do with labor, they are racing to seize the online world where they know that they are a thousand miles ahead of government schools and colleges. You're going to watch the dismantling of teachers' unions. You're going to watch, it's already begun, you're going to watch the dismantling of the entire, you know, you're going to see a lot of faculty members laid off. Yeah, because by the way, this situation favors guys like us because what the universities are going to do is to try getting a lot of freelance lecturers. Yeah, who come and speak about whatever they speak about and you pay them 5K, 10K, whatever it is. You're not giving the students a full-time teacher. So you're going to find actually a reduction in the number of students. Those students completely excluded, Swetha and I is free software movement, Andhra chapter. We are trying to see how to reach non-students excluded from that whole process. Then you come to the sector of labor. It's astonishing, we have reversed the 100-year gold standard of labor law, taking the 8-hour day and making it a 12-hour day, and the BJP states have made it 12 hours without over-type payment. Okay, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat have extended the working hours to 12 without overtime. I'm sorry, I'm saying Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat. Rajasthan has also extended to 12 hours but is paying overtime for those 4 hours with a limit of 20 hours a week overtime, which means 6 days in a week people are going to be working like, what the heck, they'll be working. And the kind of, you know, another thing is, it's common to the US, the complete bankruptcy of the ruling elite in terms of people who can think, who can actually think, you see, no one in this generation is aware, for instance, that after the 8, when the 8-hour day came up, Henry Ford was one of the first to accept the 8-hour day, not because of his love for the working class, but because they had done studies that showed that after 8 hours, productivity sharply fell off and you would be paying more for less. Ford actually embraced that and he was roundly criticized by his contemporaries all of them went into it 2 years later when they saw that the year he adopted the 8-hour day, Ford's profits doubled from 34 to 60 million. Okay, so at least you had some self-enlightened capitalist interest, a self-interested enlightenment, if you might want to call it that. Here, the Uttar Pradesh government, apart from an ordinance which it claims to have withdrawn, suspended 38 laws, labor laws. All the basic labor laws of the country are now in limbo. Some are saying it openly, some are not, but you are just unable. The first, of course, was Mr. Modi's Gujarat Chamber of Commerce. The moment the migrant laborer problem started, they made an appeal for a ban on trade union activity for a year, no formation of trade unions. So this is on the labor sector. You are in every extent moving to a neoliberal nightmare and you have people, every newspaper magazine is having something saying, don't waste a good crisis. You know, paraphrasing Winston Churchill's absurd speech. One of the senior most of Indian editors, Shekhar Gupta, says on his online TV, without attributing it to Churchill where it came from, never waste a good crisis. You see, in other words, this is the time you've got the working class on its knees, rammed through what you have to ram through on labor. That's happening on the labor front. On the food front, at a time we are witnessing unprecedented levels of hunger. You know, really unprecedented levels of hunger. Vijay the so-called surplus or buffer stock with the government of India crossed 104 million tonnes on June 1st. Can you believe that? 104 million tonnes. Yesterday the Prime Minister makes a speech to say, wow, you know what we are going to do? We are going to extend that 5 kgs per person free for another three months. Incredible generosity considering that it's going to, it's limited to those coming under the National Food Security Act, which excludes 30% of the country's population. So you're having that hunger situation. And you are having states encouraging their farmers to repeat the crops of Rabi, which this is my personal biggest nightmare. You know, to try growing cash crops again. Vijay 80 lakh quintals of cotton are lying unsold and all the cotton growing states are repeating cotton. And Punjab and Haryana are giving up paddy to grow cotton on the splee that paddy is water-gussling. BT cotton is no less water-gussling. But the problem is, by all means give up paddy. Go to millets. You'll be safe, you know, in one acre, the water you use for one acre of paddy, you can grow, cultivate 12 to 15 acres of jowar. You're going for another cotton water-gussling crop. We are going, now here's another terrible situation. You know, who was our biggest export market in cotton last year? Yes, China. Okay, now you're sitting with 80 lakh tons, 80 lakh quintals of unsold cotton, more piling up, some with the cotton corporation of India, some with the state governments and many 30 lakhs with the farmers in Maharashtra along 30 lakh quintals with the farmers. State governments have no more money to buy. Perishable cash crops are dying in the fields. Watermelons, okay, those things are dying. Sugarcane, lakhs of tons and quintals and tons are lying with the sugar mills and the farmer. Now, if we repeat it, please, hello, you know, all over the world, there's a huge income crash, a huge consumption crash. Who's going to buy your stuff? I have been begging, begging from the Kisan Sabha downwards to every farmer. For God's sake, this kharif crop, grow food crop or at least damn it, half your acreage you put to food crop. You've got a government in power that is not distributing, it's piling up. It was 60 million tons when the crisis stood, it's now 104 million tons. And what do you think they announced? Not a single editorial, not a single condemnation on April 12 or April 15. They announced that the cabinet had given permission for the conversion of an unspecified amount, no cap, unspecified amount of rice to be converted into ethanol. You're having an unprecedented level of hunger and you're going to destroy food grain to create ethanol. I mean, where are we living? So you very rightly characterised the situation saying that this is an autopsy of the economic and political model that India has been following for the last four decades. You said it quite directly, the cops is on the table, an overworked doctor is now looking inside it and what they see is a digital partition, what they see is education hemorrhaging, they see employment hemorrhaging, they see health hemorrhaging, they see basically hunger increasing, a hunger pandemic if you can put this sharply. I mean, let me ask you a question and you can say the answer in just a few sentences but is this government a malevolent government? Is it an incompetent government? How would you characterise this government? Because everything you say is so logical. So just characterise the government for us. You know, even before Covid, I was making this point that say the emergency marked the consolidation of the authoritarian state and I say this every, I say two things every June 25th, that on June 25th, we ritualise our remembrance of the emergency and institutionalise our embrace of it every day of the year. We ritualise our remembrance of the emergency on one day in a year. We institutionalise our emergency every day of the year for the last 30 years. It's not just this government. A hell of a lot happened with the previous UPA government as well but this government is, I think Arun Shauri described it very well when he said the BJP is the Congress plus cow. I think that's a wonderful description of the Congress plus cow. However, I would also say this, whatever the Congress did on the damage that they did in economics, in the economy, these guys do that on steroids. They do it on steroids. So I was saying that the emergency saw the consolidation of an authoritarian state but when I look at the last six years and I look at the outsourcing of terror to mob violence, see the emergency, all of us, everybody in the so-called civil society, everybody developed the next 20 years of their activity in terms of fighting the state, in terms of combating state oppression. But from 2014, it wasn't any longer just the state. The state was outsourcing terror. You had the VHP, the Bajrang Dal. None of us were prepared for this. I'm saying Indian society was not prepared for this, this outsourcing of terror. So you're looking at and the kind of attacks on minorities, the kind of violence, the kind of bloodshed. It's almost like you're moving from the consolidation of the authoritarian state to the state as sociopath. You have never seen governments, I mean all governments have been vindictive, nasty. It's not true. I will not pin one government. I will not say the government of Mr. Modi is vindictive and nasty and the government of Manmohan Singh was. So that would be untrue. I know in the countryside what was the criminalization of dissent had been going on for two decades, two, three decades, no less under the U.P. But these guys have taken that to an entirely different level. It's an entirely different level that makes a lot of the previous stuff look rather benign. There is somehow what I can never understand is it is not enough in the current Indian elite and society. It is not enough to defeat your adversary. It is imperative to smash him, humiliate him, trample on him, assassinate character, then the person, everything, everything. That is what is telling me about, are we seeing the state as sociopath? Because an authoritarian state locked people up here. The police came and dealt with you. And you ran away from the police or whatever you could do. Here you are attacked in communication terms. You have the largest army of paid trolls in the planet. Going after anyone, everyone. And how do we say that they are paid and they don't know a damn thing? I mean, the trolls of the BJP give stupidity a bad name. Now, for instance, I write something on farmer's suicides. And there will be 200 guys that are saying, did he ever say one word about farmer's suicides when the Congress was in power? I was the guy who broke the damn story and stayed with it for 20 years. So, it's pre-formatted responses that they're going to put out without knowing a damn thing. And by the way, you'll find that the attacks are usually between 9 and 5 because these are 9 to 5 jobs and on weekdays. Okay, so it's a fact. So you have this huge thing and then you have the Indian media at its worst in 200 years. I've been shouting for 20 years about what corporatization will do to the media. It's done it to the Hindu. I mean, the times and age thing, over a thousand journalists in my estimate have been laid off in the last two months. Many of these journalists were going to be laid off anyway. The pandemic gave these guys an excuse to throw them out. The times and many other groups did this after the 2008 Wall Street collapse. In 2009, before the elections, at the same newspapers were saying, India unaffected by the times of India had a thing. One headline said, what recession? The economy is soaring and they were laying off people. It again happened after demonetization. Again, there was another round. Thousands and thousands of jobs have been lost in journalism since 2008. This year, journalists and non-journalist employees also. Must be about a 1500 in the last few months. Look at this fact. At the time, you need journalism and journalists the most. You are responding to the pandemic by laying off a thousand journalists and restricting the coverage of what you need to cover so clearly. There's so desperately need to cover. And therefore, you have a situation where much of the coverage was on the edge of the cities as the migrants marched out, you did your TV stuff and one or two went around. Again, it's the problem of journalism of covering the event versus covering the process. The media have simply been unable to ask the right questions because they never had beats on this. The media has never been able to ask the right questions. They've never had beats on this. But you have, after all, spent a lifetime asking exactly these questions. This interview will run on news click. We'll receive real assault from that barrage of trolls that you talked about. Looking forward to that. This was a very insightful conversation. Thank you very much for joining us.