Burning Pyres Mass Graves and A State That Failed Its People: India’s Covid Tragedy

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name

 A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595) by William Shakespeare

Famous lines by Shakespeare that reflect on one of the most unique qualities in not only poets — as he states — but also in all humans, imagination, which helps us create our own constructs, build walls, draw boundaries as well as create wonderful paintings, invent planes, fly to the moon and write beautiful poetry. I wonder if animals or plants have the same ability? Then, there are some who, react to the impact of imagined constructs that hurt humanity. They write fabulous poetry or lyrics protesting war as well as dream of a world without war. Could we in times such as these imagine a world at peace, and — even more unusually — filled with consideration, kindness, love and brotherhood as suggested by Lennon’s lyrics in ‘Imagine’ – “Imagine all the people/ Livin’ life in peace…”. These are ideas that have been wafting in the world since times immemorial. And yet, they seem to be drifting in a breeze that caresses but continues to elude our grasp.

Under such circumstances, what can be more alluring than reflective Sufi poetry by an empathetic soul. Featuring an interview and poetry by such a poet, Afsar Mohammad, we bring to you his journey from a “small rural setting” in Telangana to University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches South Asian Studies. He is bilingual and has brought out many books, including one with his translated poetry. Translations this time start with Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s advice to new writers in Bengali, introduced and brought to us by Abdullah-Al-Musayeb. Tagore’s seasonal poem, ‘Megh or Cloud’, has been transcreated to harmonise with the onset of monsoons. However, this year with the El Nino and as the impact of climate change sets in, the monsoons have turned awry and are flooding the world. At a spiritual plane, the maestro’s lines in this poem do reflect on the transience of nature (and life). Professor Fakrul Alam’s translation of Masud Khan’s heartfelt poetry on rain brings to the fore the discontent of the age while conveying the migrant’s dilemma of being divided between two lands. Fazal Baloch has brought us a powerful Balochi poet from the 1960s in translation, Bashir Baidar. His poetry cries out with compassion yet overpowers with its brutality. Sangita Swechcha’s Nepali poem celebrating a girl child has been translated by Hem Bishwakarma while Ihlwha Choi has brought his own Korean poem to readers in English.

An imagined but divided world has been explored by Michael Burch with his powerful poetry. Heath Brougher has shared with us lines that discomfit, convey with vehemence and is deeply reflective of the world we live in. Masha Hassan is a voice that dwells on such an imagined divide that ripped many parts of the world — division that history dubs as the Partition. Don Webb upends Heraclitus’s wisdom: “War is the Father of All, / War is the King of All.” War, as we all know, is entirely a human-made construct and destroys humanity and one cannot but agree with Webb’s conclusion. We have more from Kirpal Singh, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Nivedita N, John Grey, Carol D’Souza, Vernon Daim, George Freek, Saranyan BV, Samantha Underhill and among the many others, of course Rhys Hughes, who has given us poetry with a unique alphabetical rhyme scheme invented by him and it’s funny too… much like his perceptions on ‘Productivity’, where laziness accounts for an increase in output!

Keith Lyons has mused on attitudes too, though with a more candid outlook as has Devraj Singh Kalsi with a touch of nostalgia. Ramona Sen has brought in humour to the non-fiction section with her tasteful palate. Meredith Stephens takes us on a picturesque adventure to Sierra Nevada Mountains with her camera and narrative while Ravi Shankar journeys through museums in Kuala Lumpur. We travel to Japan with Suzanne Kamata and, through fiction, to different parts of the Earth as the narratives hail from Bangladesh, France and Singapore.

Ratnottama Sengupta takes us back to how imagined differences can rip humanity by sharing a letter from her brother stationed in Bosnia during the war that broke Yugoslavia (1992-1995). He writes: “It is hard to be surrounded by so much tragedy and not be repulsed by war and the people who lead nations into them.” This tone flows into our book excerpts section with Red Sky Over Kabul: A Memoir of a Father and Son in Afghanistan by Baryalai Popalzai and Kevin McLean. Popalzai was affected by the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 and had to flee. A different kind of battle can be found in the other excerpt from The Blue Dragonfly – healing through poetry by Veronica Eley – a spiritual battle to heal from experiences that break.

In our reviews section, KPP Nambiar reviews The Stolen Necklace: A Small Crime in a Small Town by Shevlin Sebastian and VK Thajudheen, a book that retells a true story. Sangeetha G’s novel, Drop of the Last Cloud, we are told by Rakhi Dalal, explores the matrilineal heritage of Kerala, that changed to patriarchal over time. Bhaskar Parichha reviews Burning Pyres, Mass Graves and A State That Failed Its People: India’s Covid Tragedy by Harsh Mander. Parichha emphasises the need never to forget the past: “It is a powerful book and sometimes it is even shattering. 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.” While we need to learn from the past as Parichha suggests, Somdatta Mandal has given a review that makes us want to read Ujjal Dosanjh’s book, The Past is Never Dead: A Novel. She concludes that it “pays tribute to the courage and tenacity of the human spirit and its capacity for hope despite all odds.”

We have more content than mentioned here… all of it enhances the texture of our journal. Do pause by our July issue to savour all the writings. Huge thanks to all our contributors, artists, all our readers and our wonderful team. Without each one of you, this edition would not have been what it is.

Thank you all.

Have a wonderful month!

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

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The Many Dimensions of India’s Covid Tragedy

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.

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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