India, Stepping Up, Locking Down

INDIA is on lock down. One point three billion people, confined to quarters. Like china, when the Indian government speaks, it means business. Prime minister Modi, another of these right wing populists remindful of Trump, Putin, Boris Johnson, and Hitler, inexplicably popular, merely snapped his fingers and five million Indian teamsters pulled over and stopped in their tracks, and camped, until further notice. Impressive organization and discipline for such a large, amorphous country, one must say. Like china, the all out discipline strategy seems to be working. As of the first day of spring, only a few hundred people have contracted Covid 19, and fewer than twenty have died. Considering the population density of India, with its many huge teeming cities of millions of people, mostly immersed in poverty and consigned by caste to crowded ghettos, the concern is that the virus, any virus which takes hold in the subcontinent could wreak havoc and render death in cataclysmic proportions. And yet, not so. In fact, never so. Viral and bacterial epidemics rarely plague India in substantial measure, despite the widespread squalid sanitary conditions. A good friend of mine who traveled widely in India once told me that if ever a pandemic were to plague humanity, it would have done so by now, because it would have originated in India, and that since it hasn't, we are probably safe. Shows how much he knew. He had a point, but neglected to mention China, whose public sanitation is far superior to India's. The right wing racists, once again, are out of the woodwork in these United states, but in fact an epidemic can originate anywhere, at any time, even among right wing white Christian Americans.