Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha
Title: Burning Pyres, Mass Graves and A State That Failed Its People : India’s Covid Tragedy
Author: Harsh Mander
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
Many parts of India were in a state of frenzy as a result of the pandemic. The official figures of sickness and mortality have been widely disputed, and most agree that they have been significantly underestimated.
Burning Pyres, Mass Graves and A State That Failed Its People: India’s Covid Tragedy by Harsh Mander is a comprehensive account of the humanitarian crisis and the appalling state response. Human rights campaigner Harsh Mander is one of India’s most trusted and courageous activists. He is also the author of several acclaimed books on contemporary India, among them, Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India; Ash in the Belly: India’s Unfinished Battle Against Hunger; Fatal Accidents of Birth: Stories of Suffering, Oppression and Resistance; and This Land Is Mine, I Am Not of This Land: CAA–NRC and the Manufacture of Statelessness.
The book examines the events around the year 2020, that led to food shortages for the urban poor and pushed them to the brink of starvation due to food scarcity. There is a compelling argument to be made that the timing of the lockdown was directly related to public policy choices, specifically the decision to impose the lockdown with only four hours’ notice to the media. As Mander recounts in his book, things got even worse in the following year, as everything from hospital beds to medical oxygen to essential medicines ran short of supplies to function properly. Mander chronicles the disaster in an in-depth manner by combining ground reports with hard data from the scene.
According to the book’s blurb: “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.”
This book contains two parts. The first part, titled ‘Locking Down the Poor’, describes how the urban poor were being driven to the brink of starvation due to the severe humanitarian crisis that was sweeping across the globe in 2020. According to the study, this was a direct consequence of the policy decisions that the government made. It led to the imposition of the world’s longest and most stringent lockdown, along with the smallest relief packages, as a direct result of the government’s public policy choices.
As the story unfolds, we hear the voices of out-of-work daily-wage and informal workers, the homeless and the destitute, all of whom overwhelmed by hunger, humiliation, and a sense of dread. There are over 3 crore migrant workers in India whose livelihoods have been destroyed and they had been forced to walk hundreds of kilometres back to their villages as they had no means of surviving in the cities and no way to get home other than by foot. He brings us stories of those migrant workers from the highways and overcrowded quarantine centres.
The second part of the book, entitled ‘Burning Pyres, Mass Graves,’ is the account of what took place the following year, when everything from hospital beds to oxygen and essential medicines were still in short supply. The underlying cause of these shortages, according to Mander, is the criminal neglect of public health care in India, a situation which worsened under the Narendra Modi government, resulting in the extortion of a beleaguered population by everyone from oxygen suppliers to pharmaceutical billionaires. The author 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 of terrorism.
Using an invaluable combination of ground reports, hard data, and firsthand experiences to describe the worst humanitarian catastrophe India has experienced in a century, and which will have a lasting impact on the country for decades to come, Mander provides a detailed account of this cataclysmic phase. It is a powerful book and sometimes it is even shattering. In a way, the narrative is a live remembrance of a national tragedy that too many of us wish to forget when we should, instead, etch it in our minds so that we can prevent another national tragedy like this one from recurring in the future.
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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.
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