United States of America eSeries: All Eyes on India

All Eyes on India

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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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April 28, 2021

All Eyes on India

As Guardian South Asia correspondent Hannah Ellis-Petersen detailed on Sunday's GPS, India is being devastated by a horrific wave of Covid-19, mere months after it was noted as an odd exception to the global chaos, having suffered relatively few cases and deaths through the winter.

India's rapid deterioration is now attracting global concern. "[W]ith reports of people dying in the streets outside overwhelmed hospitals running short of oxygen, India today perhaps most closely resembles the worst-case scenarios painted when the virus was identified 16 months ago," the Financial Times editorial board observes. In a dispatch for The New York Times, Jeffrey Gettleman writes, "Crematories are so full of bodies, it's as if a war just happened. … India is now recording more infections per day—as many as 350,000—than any other country has since the pandemic began, and that's just the official number, which most experts think is a vast underestimation." The UK "has begun sending ventilators and oxygen concentrator devices," the BBC reports, and the US has lifted a ban on the export of raw materials for vaccines and will send other supplies, such as protective equipment and rapid tests.

How did India get here? In a panel discussion hosted by Brown University's Center for Contemporary South Asia, public-health dean Dr. Ashish Jha recounted a low point of daily new infections in India of fewer than 10,000 on Feb. 11; when that figure rose to around 18,000 roughly two weeks later, the near doubling was worrisome, but the low total made it "easy to ignore." Since then, the country has taken a lax approach, especially to large, outdoor gatherings.

"We've seen the political rallies, we've seen the Kumbh Mela"—a massive Hindu religious gathering on the banks of the Ganges—"we've seen packed stadiums with cricket matches and movie halls, all the things that one cannot afford to do in the middle of a global pandemic," Jha said. While a so-called "double mutant" Covid-19 variant has drawn attention, Jha noted that spike-protein mutations are not uncommon among variants, suggesting the sensational moniker is overblown; meanwhile, the rise in India of another variant, known as B.1.1.7 (which was first detected in the UK, is believed to be more transmissible, and is now dominant in the US and Europe) is probably a "major" factor in India's plight.

What we knew about the virus last year is still true, according to Jha: Mask-wearing "dramatically" reduces spread, which can happen outdoors when people are packed together, and asymptomatic transmission is a big risk. India, he suggested, has gambled on those fronts.

The Weeks Ahead Could Be Even Worse

Things will almost certainly get much worse, according to Jha, who pointed to a high rate of daily positive Covid-19 tests in New Delhi, especially. At more than seven times the US seven-day average, that indicates to Jha that India's testing isn't capturing the full extent of Covid-19's spread. "It will be many, many weeks of things likely getting meaningfully worse," Jha suggested.

Navalny and the Evolution of Russian Dissent

At Foreign Policy, Anastasia Edel writes that despite the intolerant stance of President Vladimir Putin's government, Russia has a long and rich history of protests, from its early-1900s revolutionary era through the fall of communism and the country's transition to a market economy. A "point of no return" for Russia in its trajectory toward becoming an anti-protest "police state," Edel argues, may have been the murder of former opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in 2015; it was "in that barren soil" that Russia's current opposition star, Alexey Navalny, "planted his bid for the 2018 presidential election." Navalny's arrest earlier this year sparked widespread protests, and Edel writes that in Putin's Russia, Navalny's anti-corruption message has taken hold.

Navalny's appeal has revealed something about protest and repression, Edel suggests: "The problem with tightening the screws to fight expressions of discontent is it is impotent against the discontent itself … when outrage spreads across Russia's vast territory, like it did in January and February, the repressive machine sputters. There's simply not enough troops to deploy on every street in every town." And yet, as Navalny now languishes in prison, Edel writes that the "odds are frighteningly against him" in his quest to reshape the country.

On Scottish Independence, Should London Copy Ottawa?

As talk of Scottish independence grows in the wake of Brexit, historian and independence opponent Niall Ferguson rails against the "rubbish" of it in a Bloomberg column, pointing out that Scotland would have to wait in line behind other hopeful applicants before joining the EU and that conundrums like national defense seem to have gone underappreciated.

Rather than seeking to placate Scottish nationalists, Ferguson argues, London should imitate how Ottawa approached separatists in Quebec, which voted narrowly against independence in 1995, as Scotland did in 2014. "The subsequent 'tough love' argument of Prime Minister Jean Chretien's government was that it could not solely be up to a slim majority of the voters of Quebec if Canada broke up," Ferguson writes. "… This is how to play the game against secessionists—and it is high time that the Johnson government adopted this approach, rather than unthinkingly accepting the [Scottish National Party]'s argument that it has a moral right to a referendum on secession every time it wins a parliamentary election." In Canada, Ferguson writes, the result has been "an enduring decline in support for secession in Quebec."