IndiaScope: The Year of Changing Fortunes
It’s been an unpredictable 2021—up one month, down another, says TINAZ PAVRI.
When we began 2021, the world’s long (Covid-19) nightmare seemed to be ending. This especially seemed to be the case for us in the United States. For those inclined to loathe the former president, their political suffering seemed to be ending. Trump had been defeated, vaccines were starting to be distributed across the country, and although one couldn’t call the new president a fresh face, many Indian-Americans were enthused at the election of the first woman, African American, Indian-heritage vice president. With the election, it seemed easy to put the trials and suffering of 2020 in the past, too. A slate had been cleaned, vaccines were promising a return to normalcy and people were eager to accept it. Let’s just turn the page, we seemed to be collectively saying; 2021 has to be better.
And for a while, it was. Vaccines became widely available and travel ramped up as vaccine travel protocols were developed. Restricted states in the U.S. started to open up, and economies across the world started to limp back. But in May, in marginally vaccinated India, a new variant of the virus, Delta, hit with a ferociousness that India had been saved from during the first wave. People were succumbing across the country within days of acquiring the virus, and sometimes without knowing they had contracted it— rich, poor, in cities and rural areas, young and old. We heard the horrific stories from afar—of crematoriums with no space and patients dying outside hospitals waiting for a bed.Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had escaped the worst opprobrium for the first severe shutdown in 2020 because people accepted that lives needed protection even as other lives were lost in the brutality of the shutdown, now came under tremendous fire, the worst of his governance. Devastated Indians’ sorrow turned to anger and they lay into the BJP government in a way that the BJP had not experienced before. For the first time, Modi seemed vulnerable and in retreat.
In the U.S., even though vaccination rates were high, people saw deaths from the Delta variant. A new and vicious divide formed in the already-divided country, between those who were vaccinated and those who weren’t. With high vaccination rates, things still did not seem normal, or even acceptable. There were widespread shortages around the country, supply-chain issues were choking economic recovery, and a new inflationary spiral had taken hold and was affecting prices at all levels. Many in the labor force had simply gone missing, leading to fresh business shutdowns. The shine had already gone from the Biden administration when the debacle of the Afghanistan pullout happened, adding to the general sense of malaise and wreckage. Struggling to cope with crisis after crisis, this wasn’t a confident country.
And that’s where we find ourselves at the close of 2021. The early glimpses of hope seem to have given in to—not despair—but a grim acceptance. People made their displeasure and unease known in state elections, most visibly in Virginia. Overnight a Republican governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general were elected and the state house flipped, in a state Biden had won by 10 points a year ago. And, without much recognition, the U.S. crossed another sad milestone: 750,000 deaths from the virus.
But politics, not to mention life, can be funny and unpredictable. The picture in India seems to have perceptibly improved. Rates of infection and deaths from Covid-19 are very much in decline, and Diwali was celebrated with optimism. Modi’s star is rising again, with a recent poll putting his popularity at an enviable 70 percent.
This seems to be our pattern now. Moving forward and having to step back. Harnessing our scientific resources as a world to battle this virus, only to have it mutate and elude a final reckoning. And so I think the end of 2021 finds us wary. We are not confident, we are timid. We are still hopeful, because that is the human condition. But we’ve taken some blows, and we are moving cautiously towards what 2022 brings.
Tinaz Pavri is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Spelman College, Atlanta. A recipient of the Donald Wells Award from the Georgia Political Science Association, she’s the author of the memoir Bombay in the Age of Disco: City, Community, Life.
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