This article is part of a series from countries that have experienced an authoritarian turn from democracy. Access the rest of the symposium here
I have taken to calling people up to ask them how they are. After a few questions about their name, age and occupation, I ask what they remember of the pandemic.
I began this exercise three years ago, partly because I had just moved from New Delhi to London, was looking for a new book project and craved a connection to India that went beyond my friends and family (sorry, friends and family!). But mostly it was because I wanted to understand what a rapid contraction of freedoms during one of the world’s strictest Covid lockdowns had done to us as a country and as a people.
I had spent a decade writing about the boundary conditions of democracy in India, the spaces where the furniture of democracy—rights, courts, a free press—is considered too inconvenient to be put into use. Places where police are empowered to shoot on sight; where teenage civilians are recruited to state-backed militias, armed with rifles and let loose on neighbouring villages as part of counter-insurgency campaigns; where curfews are imposed and the internet suspended on the whims of district-level officials. Things that have long been part of the toolkit of public administration in India, and are deployed with increasing fervour under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
More recently, I had been trying to make sense of how, or if, India’s current ruling party was simply the latest in a long line of governments that paid lip service to democracy while bending institutions to their will, or if there was something fundamentally different about the regime headed by Modi since 2014.
As a friend put it: “Is this merely an intensification of things we’ve seen before, or is this something entirely new?”
As it turns out, it is both.
After six years in power, the government had already shown its autocratic tendencies. But Modi’s response to the pandemic was on an entirely different scale. Countries across the world were experimenting with lockdowns to contain the coronavirus, but nothing like this: overnight, 1.4bn people were put under an instant, punitive, months-long curfew at the whim of one man. Trains criss-crossing the country came to a halt in the dead of night, leaving passengers stranded midway through their journeys. We woke up to find every shop shuttered, every street emptied, every airplane grounded, every single thing frozen in place like a macabre game of statues. This was authoritarianism at its most distilled and potent.
It is hard to quantify just how oppressive the first month of the lockdown was, but some researchers did their best. In early April 2020, the lockdown in India was rated a 100/100 in the Covid-19 stringency index compiled by the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. China, known for its early lockdown, was at 73. The UK was at 79.
My initial conversations went as expected. Doctors and nurses described the horrors of coping with a novel and deadly virus with little prior knowledge and few resources. Some subjects spoke movingly about dropping off loved ones at the Covid wings of overwhelmed city hospitals and never seeing them again. A young woman spoke of how the lockdowns reminded her of her childhood in Kashmir, where curfews were woven into the fabric of daily life (and still are). A friend in eastern India spoke of how a young man from his village had died on a roadside as he desperately tried to walk home from a city thousands of miles away because the Modi government had suspended all trains and buses.
But as I cast my net wider, strange new strands of conversation emerged. Out in the countryside, parts of the state had simply melted away, as had the rhythms of wage labour, and workers who had spent decades grinding out long hours on factory floors without pause were suddenly confronted with a months-long, open-ended, holiday.
“I didn’t realise I was young when I first left my village as a teenager, and when I reached the city I forgot,” one worker told me. “When I returned home in the lockdown, I looked at myself in the mirror and thought: ‘Twenty years have passed, my mind is stressed, my body is tired, but I am still young.’” He spent the next three months walking in the forests, doing yoga every morning and playing cricket with the young boys of the village who, in his years of absence, had grown into young men.
A worker at a Suzuki factory spoke of hearing a strange sound one morning as he walked through his fields. “It was birdsong,” he said. “I hadn’t heard it in years because my ears were always ringing from the dhum, dhum, dhum, of the factory robots.” During his previous brief trips home, he had spent all his time sleeping off the exhaustion of city life. Now, for the first time in years, as millions around the world gasped for life, he felt awake, and alive, and rested.
Another factory worker said the skies had never been as clear, the air had never felt so clean, as they did during those months of lockdown.
When the lockdowns ended, most people returned to their working lives, but many carried within themselves the memory of another life: one of joy, leisure and community. A life that shouldn’t be shaped entirely by the diktats of India’s oligarchs, who think it acceptable to demand 90-hour weeks of their workers. In the words of one: “What do you do sitting at home? How long can you stare at your wife? How long can the wives stare at their husbands?” In those precious months, husbands and wives stared at each other for as long as they liked.
My pandemic conversations reminded me of why India retains such a deep hold on me. In even the darkest times (and things are dark right now), people create pockets of possibility, quiet spaces of refuge and free-thinking, that float like soap bubbles across this heaving land.
Living through an authoritarian moment is exhausting. Every day produces the compulsion to resist at all times and at all costs, even as the regime insists that resistance is futile. Your friends burn out, some are co-opted, some are imprisoned, others withdraw. Some days feel interminable, and the only respite is an ever-shrinking circle of conversations that begin: “Did you see what they just did? Did you hear about what just happened? Did you know… ”
Some days resisting can feel like stepping into quicksand: the harder you struggle, the more you get sucked into constantly thinking about the regime and its latest outrage. You feel like you must do something, but live in fear that there is nothing that can be done.
In moments like these, don’t let the autocrats colonise your mind. Go out into the world, leave the city behind, find some strangers blowing soap bubbles and allow yourself a moment of respite, beauty and wonder, of the enchantment of briefly cradling a passing rainbow in the palms of your outstretched hands.
The bubbles won’t last very long, but the bonds you will forge with these strangers will give you the strength to endure, and hopefully outlast, the most draconian autocrat.
