Tharoor himself seems to have acknowledged this. Answering a query, he said India was identifying more cases due to ramped-up testing and a lot of people in Pakistan may have been or were coronavirus positive and just not being counted because they are asymptomatic and not being tested.
“Partly, of course, the more you test the more you find and, therefore, as the testing has been ramped up considerably we are identifying more and more people infected and I don’t know how many people or percentage of the population you have been able to test in Pakistan. So it is possible that a lot of people in Pakistan may have had it and are just not being counted because they are asymptomatic,” he said.
Lockdown woes
However, the major factor, experts agree, that lies behind India’s dismal data is the ineffective administration of the countrywide lockdown.
On March 22, India observed a 14-hour voluntary public curfew at the insistence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It was followed by mandatory lockdowns in COVID-19 hotspots and all major cities. From March 24 onwards, the prime minister ordered a nationwide lockdown for 21 days, affecting the entire 1.3 billion-person population of India.
On April 14, India extended the nationwide lockdown till May 3 which was followed by two-week extensions starting May 3 and 17 with substantial relaxations. From 1 June, the government started “unlocking” the country (barring “containment zones”) in three unlock phases.
On the other hand, Pakistan opted for a limited lockdown, with its prime minister Imran Khan actively going vocal against the idea of a total lockdown in the country. It was not so much a conscious smart decision as it was a necessity born out of the sheer fact that Pakistan was admittedly too poor to afford a total lockdown and risk injuring the economy.
“If we were like Italy, France, America or England, I would have locked Pakistan down completely,” Khan said in an address to the nation on March 22, “But our problem is that 25% of Pakistanis are below the poverty line. They can’t even afford two square meals a day. If working class Pakistanis are locked up for two weeks, how will they feed their families?”
India, being one of the earliest countries to enter into a state of total lockdown, might have inadvertently boomeranged the coronavirus into being more of a menace that it would perhaps have originally been. This was coupled with the impromptu nature of the announcement, which generated haphazard movements of large tracts of people, at the butt end of which were migrant workers. With factories and workplaces shut down, many of these migrants were left with no livelihood and thus decided to walk hundreds of kilometres to go back to their native villages, accompanied by their families in many cases. The immediate failure of the administration to plan for this mighty relocation, which some observed as the largest movement of people on foot since Partition, might have actually hurt India badly. The virus is presumed to have spread to the countryside in this manner, and did not stay limited to the big cities where it would be had not such fortuitous decisions been taken.
In a column for the Indian Express, economist Kaushik Basu argues that the way in which the lockdown was executed, there’s reason to believe that the lockdown itself became the source of the virus’s spread.
“By having people huddle together, infecting one another, and then having the same people travel hundreds of miles, the pandemic has been made much worse than it need have been,” he wrote.
It doesn’t take much to reflexively lambaste anyone who might be critical of government response in India; however, for the sake of the 1.3 billion-strong citizens of the country desperately struggling against an unprecedented threat, constructive criticism is the only way forward.
(The views and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Free Press Journal)