Abstract
The COVID pandemic raging across the world since late 2019 has bestowed enormous additional power to state after state to biopolitically manage and discipline national populations, on the pretext of a planetary public health emergency. New technologies of monitoring, testing, treatment, vaccination, containment and the tracking of mutant strains of the Coronavirus have entered directly into the bodies, homes, hospitals, smart phones, airports, communities and countries of billions of people, bypassing concerns about political sovereignty that values individual rights and protects personal liberties (to different extents, of course, depending on whether we are referring to China or Western Europe or India or Brazil or the US or Russia or various African nations). State capacity, health infrastructure, science and technology, citizens’ rights, public culture, economic conditions and medical expertise vary widely across the world, and these factors have additionally constrained or enabled the ability of states to handle the emergency.
In 2021 and 2022, Afghanistan and Ukraine have descended into civil war and the pandemic stands forgotten. Throughout the pandemic, political, strategic and economic considerations rather than the demands of the disease have been the primary drivers of COVID response for governments, especially those under populist strongman leaders like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin. China, where SARS-CoV-2 originated (in Wuhan), has deployed the full force of the authoritarian state and its formidable scientific prowess to curb both the virus and the human population – the largest of any country – that it infects.
While the virus has afflicted and affected polities, economies and societies differentially across the world, many of its determining factors are not entirely of human making – for example, the role of climate, viral mutation and the emergence of new variants (like Alpha, Beta, Delta and Omicron), the behaviour of animal populations, the animal–human interface in localized ecosystems and the zoonotic origins of the deadly virus. To varying degrees, governments everywhere have been concerned with testing widely, inculcating habits of masking and social distancing, treating the sick, counting the dead, developing and administering vaccines and curbing the spread of the disease by whatever means possible, including the extreme measures taken in countries like New Zealand, China and Singapore to sequester their citizens and restrict movement.
International agencies like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations (UN) have played a crucial role in establishing baselines, setting standards, following precedents, issuing guidelines, watching trends and dispensing advice, so far as possible without fear or favour. The global vaccine effort has necessitated joint and highly coordinated efforts across scientific laboratories, pharmaceutical industries, national governments, biotech companies and the concerned regulatory bodies for public health and pandemic measures worldwide.
Needless to say, the data of health and disease, infection and transmission, recovery and mortality – statistics for every city and country, for every subsequent wave of the Coronavirus, for every population – have inundated our lives and taken over our media space since at least February–March 2020. This article focuses on India, and how the Hindu Nationalist BJP government under Prime Minister Modi has responded to the pandemic. In particular, we are concerned with how COVID data have been generated, communicated, withheld, manipulated, hidden, misinterpreted and selectively deployed to conceal the magnitude of sickness and death among Indians, and to defend faulty decision-making by the Indian state authorities.
Hindu religious festivals and massive electoral campaigns in different states have been allowed when they posed a clear risk of spreading the virus; large Muslim gatherings have been blamed, banned and vilified as being ‘super-spreaders’ ignoring basic principles of statistics; lockdowns, curfews and travel restrictions have all followed a logic that was sometimes more politically expedient rather than medically necessary. The huge loss of employment in the informal sector of the Indian economy; the irreparable setbacks to the Indian education system with schools, colleges and universities closed and online for 2 years; the massive scale of urban to rural reverse migration of casual labour; the staggering backslide of women from spaces of work, education, financial independence, personal autonomy and social mobility once more to the narrow confines of home and family, setting them back by more than a generation; capital flight and disinvestment from the Indian markets – all of these consequences of COVID mismanagement and data manipulation are plain to see.
But we wish to argue, further, that the impacts of the government’s mishandling of the pandemic and particularly its misuse of data are not just economic and societal, but also strike at the heart of the fundamental rights of Indian citizens. In particular, we will show that the Freedom of Speech and Expression, the Right to Information, the Right to Privacy and in the ultimate analysis, the Right to Life are all more easily violated through the manipulation of COVID data. This article was first presented to RESET in the summer of 2021 and revised for publication in the spring of 2022. By then, India had been through three waves of COVID – the first in 2020, the second in 2021 and the third in 2022. At some stage in the preparation of the presentation and later of the article, we had to call a halt to the statistics and events to which we would refer. But the point of our argument remains constant: that data was at the heart of the biopolitical (mis)use of the pandemic by the Indian government.
This is my work, but I would like to thank Dr Soumya Mishra, who graduated with a doctorate in development studies from St Anthony’s College, University of Oxford in 2021, for helping me with the article. Special thanks also to Professor Gautam I. Menon at Ashoka University for his advice in understanding the meaning, purpose and value of the correct interpretation of data in the context of one of the worst global health emergencies we have seen since the Spanish Flu of 1918.
Introduction
In recent years, Indian democracy has undergone a transformation from a constitutionally based secular, egalitarian concept of citizenship. Instead, we are witnessing what Christophe Jaffrelot calls the rise of ‘ethnic democracy’.1 In this changed political scenario, electoral majority coincides with the majority religious community and tends to capture political power, the state and its institutions. Minority communities are increasingly treated as second-class citizens. The assault on the rights of citizens disproportionately impacts those who do not belong to the majority community.
Ever since the beginning of the pandemic in February–March 2020, the Modi Government has used the public health emergency to further constrain the rights of citizens. Ostensibly, this is for their own safety and protection from the coronavirus. But the overall effect of these various emergency measures has been deleterious for civil rights, freedom of speech and expression, the right to privacy, the right to information, as well as the individual’s ability to take decisions in the best interest of her life, health and livelihood.
India has seen two waves of the pandemic in March–May 2020 and April–June 2021 that have resulted in some of the highest figures of job loss, unemployment, infections, hospitalizations, death and disruption to schools and colleges of any country in the world. The economy has slowed down, with the GDP shrinking 7.3% and unemployment rising to 7.1% of the total labour force 2020–21.2 Unemployment in India was already at a 45-years high in 2019 3 and the situation deteriorated in the pandemic. Further, several recent surveys and reports from international organizations have also shown that India has fallen sharply on various indices of democracy, institutional performance, fundamental rights and the freedom of the press and media. Pillai and Lindberg (2021) demonstrate in their analysis that India has transformed from the world’s largest democracy to an electoral autocracy (p. 20) 4 pushing India into the bottom 50% of the countries. The Economist Intelligence Unit places India at 53rd position in the Democracy Index2020 5 , two places lower than in 2018.
Since 2014, when the BJP won a landslide victory, indicators for democratic freedom have continuously deteriorated. With the pandemic tearing through the Indian population, the Indian government has dispensed with all safeguards to protect the privacy of citizens. But the biggest new means by which the freedom of expression and the right to information have been curtailed, especially since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, is through the government’s use, withholding and manipulation of data. Data regarding infections, mortality, comorbidities, recovery rates, vaccinations, emerging variants of the virus, sero-prevalence studies, the availability of hospital beds and of medical personnel, ambulances, oxygen supply, medicines and infrastructure to deal with bodies of the COVID; indeed all the data that guides policy decisions and public responses to the pandemic has not been used transparently. Scientific reports and studies conducted by academic, medical and research bodies and guidelines provided by international organizations like the WHO, etc., have contradicted the picture that the Government of India has tried to present. It would appear that some of the decisions that were made were politically driven rather than scientifically based.
This article argues that there is a direct link to be made between the general trend towards authoritarianism, illiberalism and diminishing democracy and the specific manner in which this government has handled the pandemic. It is our contention that the state of exception or the state of emergency produced by the pandemic has allowed the government to violate basic principles of freedom self-determination, rights and liberties, specifically the right to information, the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression. These have been seriously undermined using the pandemic as an alibi. In other words, the anti-democratic tendency of the current administration has found fresh impetus during the pandemic.
We will examine how several key features of the Indian constitution, especially concerning free expression, privacy, information as well as hate speech and fake news, have been continuously violated in the last 2 years.
The question of the politics of epidemiological data and public health data concerning life and death opens up a new front for the politics of free speech in India. The structure of the article is as follows: First, it briefly contextualizes the legal framework surrounding free speech in India; second, it examines how scientific accuracy was compromised much before the actual effects began to show during the second wave of COVID-19 in India; third, it demonstrates that while simultaneously denying citizens rightful access to data, the government was collecting citizens data in serious violation of their privacy.
The legal context of free speech
There are three main legal components surrounding free speech in India drawing on the Constitution of India and the Criminal Penal Code. The detailed articles are attached in the Appendix.
First is Article 19 of the Constitution that allows freedom of speech and expression, while also restricting absolute freedom under certain conditions, and justifying when and why constraints are necessary. For example, in the interest of the sovereignty and integrity of the nation state, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency contempt of court, defamation, incitement to violence, etc. This has been a contentious issue in India.6
Second, there are two sections of the Indian Penal Code related to hate speech: Section 153 that acts as a refinement upon any unlimited freedom of expression to do with speech that could potentially cause enmity between groups or promote prejudice; Section 295A deals specifically with outraging religious feelings of particular groups and these assume an enormous importance in India because of its multi-religious, plural and diverse character.
Third, there are two recent innovations in Indian law specifically relating to data and information. The first of which is Right to Information Act 2005 which essentially allows citizens to demand certain types of information that the government may otherwise withhold or not release in the public domain. This is used quite actively by many citizens to access various types of information from an opaque bureaucracy. This has implications for what happens to information in our society and is of an increased importance in the age of the Internet.
The second innovation is the Right to Privacy based on a court judgement derived from and dependent on Article 14 (the right to equality), Article 19 (the right through the protection of certain rights regarding the freedom of expression) and Article 21 (the right to life). For this article, privacy is of primary importance when the question of personal data arises. One of the largest operations of the Indian state in the last few years has been to establish a universal citizens database creating a universal ID for all Indian citizens. Given such an ID, called Aadhaar, further data can be captured on citizens, as well as consolidated. The question arises if the process of eliciting information from citizens violates their privacy, how is the data used and to what extent is the data confidential.
Politics of data: March 2020–May 2021
In this section, three different types of politics of data are examined: first, the suppression of accurate scientific data; second; suppression of scientific opinion and analysis; and third, the threat to privacy of citizens due to government’s method of access and storing individuals’ data. There are three types of data suppression. First, hiding data or information on COVID-19 that could help citizens. Second, manipulating data and evidence to suit a particular political agenda with lack of respect for life. Third, creating fake data and fake news including inciting hate speech and targeting minority communities. Regarding the third, in 2020, the Tablighi Jamaat, an organization associated with Muslims, a minority community in India, was banned in India, based on a superspreader event that could be traced to the meeting of a congregation of its members. This was a statistical consequence of the simple fact that an overwhelming number of tests were performed on the members of this congregation while other similar congregations elsewhere were not tested in this manner. In 2021, the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu event, was allowed to continue despite the fact that the inherent risks of such a large event were pointed out by a number of independent public health researchers and practitioners.
Hiding and faking data
Between May and June 2020, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) carried out a sero-prevalence survey, its first. Such surveys check for antibodies in population samples in order to estimate the fraction of the population that was infected. When the Indian Council of Medical Research published these results in September 2020 in the Indian Journal of Medical Research – also considerably after the survey was conducted – it omitted data from a number of high prevalence zones, where the infection numbers were high enough to suggest that steps taken by the government had not worked. This omission was deliberate. The suppression of data is an attack of free speech as well as on the right to information.
In April 2021, few months later when the second wave was raging in India, close to 900 of scientists signed an open letter directed to the Prime Minister. The scientists protested that the lack of access to actual data was significantly affecting estimates of the spread of the disease in different parts of the country. They wrote 7 :
‘The current situation demands rapid and systematic data collection, reporting and release, so that data-driven mitigation measures can be implemented.
Access to clinical data (with appropriate safeguards for maintaining patient privacy), which is required for analysis and predictions, and for estimation of the requirements for oxygen, medical supplies, ventilators, ICU beds, etc. Many scientists have been trying to get data on comorbidities and blood analysis of hospitalized COVID-19 patients, without success’.
Earlier, In January 2021, the political narrative by the government was of ‘India’s Covid exceptionalism’ arguing that India had successfully managed to tackle COVID-19. The COVID Task Force set up by the government also stopped meeting after January 2021. On 28 January 2021, the Prime Minister attended the World Economic Forum, Davos (28th January’21) and declared India’s premature victory over the pandemic: ‘We transformed the fight against coronavirus into a people’s movement and today India is among the most successful countries in saving lives’. Hailing India as a ‘Vishwaguru’ (Global Guru) for setting an example in COVID-19 management, the narrative ran that India had inspired the world with its ‘human-centric’ approach to fighting COVID-19.
In stark contrast to the government’s reading of the situation, the scientific community was raising an alarm. In March 2021, the INSACOG (Indian SARS Cov-2 Genetic Consortium) alerted the National Centre for Disease Control that infections could rise quickly. The head of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Dr Rakesh Mishra, was worried that the ‘variants were very prolific’ and an ‘exponential growth’ of cases could be expected which would be ‘very dangerous’ with ‘much more mortality’. He gave an interview to a leading journalist expressing concern: ‘It’s hard to believe such a warning would not have been communicated to the head of the government’. The INSACOG had been ‘dreading something bad would happen’.
Instead, in the same month, the Indian Health Minister, Dr Harsh Vardhan, prematurely celebrated the ‘endgame of the Covid-19 pandemic’ in India on Twitter.
Indian Health Minister, Harsh Vardhan, celebrates ‘endgame of the Covid-19 pandemic’, even as daily COVID cases rise by 18,000 (7 March 2021).
A scientist known to be sympathetic to the government’s position, the computer scientist Manindra Agrawal, confidently declared on Twitter that there will be no ‘second wave’ (Twitter, 9 March 2021).
Manindra Agrawal, appointed by government to model and author of the ‘Indian Supermodel’ for fighting COVID, confidently says that there will be no ‘second wave’ (9 March 2021).
But by March 2021, the COVID cases had risen to 18,000 on a single day (7 March 2021) and a highly infectious and resistant strain of virus B.1.617 (delta strain) was detected in India. Dr Murad Banaji, a UK-based mathematician, stressed that there was a grave concern that infections were going unrecorded and were spreading to rural areas in India, cautioning that this could lead to dramatic increases in cases and deaths in subsequent months.
The Economic Survey of India, in 2021, used unreliable data to claim: ‘India has been able to effectively manage both the spread of COVID-19 and the fatalities’. For the 2019 data, it has been argued that GDP and unemployment data were manipulated by the government to hide India’s economic slowdown and rampant joblessness.
In COVID-19, the government was also relying on an inadequate data infrastructure. When it came to death counts too, it is important to note that normally only 80% of deaths are registered in India, and only 22% are assigned a cause, even outside of pandemic conditions. Relying on such inadequate data is dangerous as it can inhibit correct disease modeling (Banaji 2021) and demonstrates a false reduction in cases (Khera 2021). The suppression and denial of data, together with inadequate data infrastructure, contributed to the lack of preparedness for the second wave.
A similar complacency was also seen at the start of the COVID-19 lockdown in India in March 2020. Before the first lockdown was declared in India, the officials from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had declared that ‘Coronavirus is not a health emergency and that there is no need to panic’ and the Prime Minister tweeted:
In the same month, March 2020, the Prime Minister had asked 20 key mainstream newspapers to publish ‘positive stories’ about COVID-19.8 In April 2020, India’s Federal Planning Body, NITI Aayog, predicted that there would be no cases by 16 May 2020, whereas in fact, a high single-day spike (∼5000 new cases) was recorded on 16 May 2020.
In October 2020, a leading biophysicist, Dr Gautam Menon, emphatically argued in a public science piece in The Hindu (Oct 2020) against the ‘Indian supermodel’, a model proposed by Manindra Agarwal of IIT Kanpur and collaborators, by listing flaws in its methodology. He added: ‘Basing public health policies on models that are flawed is dangerous, since the lives of people are at stake and false optimism carries risks with it’. Pre-empting the disaster to follow in a few months, he expressed the dangers of using science to serve political ends. However, as the next section demonstrates, there were other scientists and activists who raised concerns too and were severely censored which deterred a free debate on science related to COVID-19 in India. This limited access to scientific opinion, keeping the public in the dark about the dangers of the virus’s penetration into the population.
In January of 2021, the government stopped regular meetings of its COVID Task Force. The Prime Minister then attended the World Economic Forum in Dallas and even announced India’s victory over the pandemic. However, the situation changed with the arrival of the Delta variant in India. Disparities between official data and what was seen on the ground became increasingly apparent. During the Delta wave, approximately between mid-February and early June of 2020, a large number of deaths occurred, but these were not reflected in official records. Cremation sites and burial grounds were full. In June 2021, thousands of un-cremated dead bodies were found floating in the Ganga or buried along the banks of the river.
(Source: Twitter, May 2021)
While the official count of deaths was very low, the actual number of deaths was much higher. The Hindi newspaper Dainik sent out reporters along the banks found at least 2000 bodies buried in the sand alongside the river banks. The actual number of deaths across the first two COVID-19 waves has been estimated to lie between three and six million, using a number of different data sources.
(Source: John Burn-Murdoch)
Scientists and journalists were censored
The previous section examined how fake data, data denial and inadequate data infrastructure contributed to crafting a narrative that was distanced from the reality of the spread of the virus. Simultaneously, there was independent data analysis and critical media coverage both from reports in the vernacular press, by the national press in English and Hindi and by international media.
In North Bihar, Pawan Choudhry was arrested for covering COVID-19 related deaths and reporting in an online forum. A popular Gujarati poet, Parul Khakhar, was cyber bullied on social media for speaking up. Freelance Journalist, Vidya Krishnan, faced cyber harassment from the ruling party-linked accounts for her critical reporting in the American magazine, The Atlantic.
At the same time, the Health Ministry described any critical reporting as ‘fake news’ and discouraged people from believing it. While empirical reports from the field were suppressed, scientists were censured when they spoke up in the public interest.
A senior Indian virologist and the head of INSACOG, Dr Shahid Jameel, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times (13 May 2021) highlighting the dangers of opposing scientific evidence: ‘What worries me is that we may not even be able to measure the peak cases accurately. Data show that testing is increasing at a far slower rate than cases. In this scenario, numbers will reach a plateau — not because case numbers have stopped rising but because testing capacity will be tapped out’. Following this, Dr Jameel stepped down from his role. This was a direct attack on free speech, in particular of an expert in the field. In his article, Dr Jameel had stressed that his proposed measures ‘have wide support among my fellow scientists in India. But they are facing stubborn resistance to evidence-based policymaking’.
This is evident by the fact that in the same month, as the second wave of the pandemic raged, nearly 900 scientists wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister emphasizing the urgency of the collection of systematic data, as discussed earlier. The plea for access to clinical data and systematic collection of data emphasize how the government had neglected the right to information and free speech of the citizens in a situation where false information costs human lives.9 Even as citizens lacked access to information and accurate scientific data, the government used media applications to track citizens’ movement. The one-sided monopoly over data caused breaches to citizens’ privacy because, a number of experts have argued, there were possible privacy breaches associated with the fact that the applications did not store the data safely, thus threatening the three fundamental rights (14, 19 and 21) as the next section demonstrates.
Privacy
A parallel and serious attack on citizens’ rights besides data manipulation, censoring of crucial information and penalization of those who spoke up was the use of new and non-secure mobile applications of the government that were linked to biometric Aadhaar cards. The applications performed the function of tracking movement of people and booking vaccines, respectively. The apps ‘Aarogya Setu’ and ‘CoWin’ linked with state-managed databases allow the government to gather and monitor personal data of citizens as they were made mandatory. Alongside, despite pleas from scientists, the government was concealing data from its citizens as well as other stakeholders.
‘Aarogya Setu’ (‘Bridge of Health’) was an app introduced to help in contact tracing for those COVID-infected who tested positive. During the lockdown, via plane or train, the use of the app was made mandatory. The ‘CoWin’ app was introduced later to facilitate access to vaccination. Both these apps were largely based on a universal ID (Aadhaar) which was earlier created and set up. There are troubling implications to the ability of governments to access data that could represent a form of state surveillance enabling the state to further control the lives, decisions and choices of individuals.
The design of the application disregarded conventional framework of ethics and secure data storage. This caused concerns among citizens and civil society organizations. Citizens had limited say in how they wanted to share their data or which data they wanted to keep private. A number of bodies that concerned with the right to privacy wrote a joint letter to the Government of India in September 2020 stressing their concerns about the violation of privacy inherent in the way these apps were designed, especially Aarogya Setu.
Grassroots organizations in India such as the Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (JSA), Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), Forum for Medical Ethics Society (FMES), All India People’s Science Network (AIPSN) and others wrote a joint letter to the Government of India on 19 September 2020 reflecting this concern: “We are deeply concerned about violation of privacy, and compromised ethical principles and values, due to the App’s design, its deployment, related policies regarding data storage, preservation of privacy and data sharing, as well as overall policy implementation and inadequate legal frameworks for data protection and grievance redressal for users.”
The invasive nature of these apps in principle allows the government to violate citizens’ privacy in the name of protecting them.
Conclusion
This article argues that the method of management of COVID-19 in India through suppression of epidemiological and public health data has implications for free speech, right to information and fundamental rights of the citizens. The article presents several illustrations of data suppression, demonstrating its adverse impact on public health. Assaults on free speech are not a new phenomenon related to the pandemic. However, they represent continuity with previous efforts by the government to manipulate data concerning the economy and growth. By using the legal rights of citizens such as free speech, hate speech regulations and right to information and privacy as an analytical lens, we argue that the various incidents of suppression of data, suppression of scientific opinion and the threat to privacy of citizens have been an attack on the legal spirit of the nation.
As we have learned from the scholarship of Bernard Cohn, Arjun Appadurai, Nicholas Dirks and others, colonialism and its forms of knowledge – philology, ethnology, historiography, archaeology, anthropology, evolutionary biology and epidemiology – did not just colonize and exploit the non-White world. Rather, these and other disciplines of the modern social and physical sciences, in significant ways, became part of the disciplinary apparatuses of the colonial and post-colonial state as such, significant for colonizer and colonized alike in germinating the epistemologies of modernity. India was from the beginning a singularly fertile site for the production of the knowledge forms that sought to enumerate, classify, quantify, subjugate and manage diverse populations, whether for the colonial empire or later the democratic nation.
India’s ‘native’ systems of ritual classification, hierarchical arrangement, social stratification and elite domination, including those emergent from formations of self and society designated very broadly and imprecisely by terms like ‘caste’ and ‘religion’, flowed well into the elaborate epistemological constructions of the British Raj. As Ranajit Guha has shown, discursive hegemony was, implicitly or explicitly, a cooperative project between the rulers and the ruled. Thus there appeared and proliferated, on a fecund seedbed of colonial categories, not only just citizens and subjects but also races and tribes, languages and dialects, histories and mythologies, cosmopolitan and vernacular, classical and popular, liberal and imperial, in a long series of such unequal pairings that set above and apart the masters from their slaves.
The moment of global decolonization may have passed around the middle of the 20th century, but in many instances this merely shifted the perpetrators and victims from the original setting of the conflict – Europe going out to conquer the world -- into the bounds of the newly formed nation-states. Colonialism became internalized; neo-colonialism, partitions, fratricide and intimate enemies supplanted the White oppressor. Palestinians, Kashmiris, Tamils, Kurds, Uighurs, Tibetans, Chechens, Native Americans, Indigenous Peoples and so many other marginal groups and minority communities were denied their identity, their rights and their autonomy in an ostensibly decolonized, post-colonial and democratized world.
Disciplinary, penal and carceral technologies, up to and including mass murder, perfected under Fascist and Communist totalitarian regimes, were added to the already formidable arsenal of the modern state. Hence, bio-politics, state of exception, panoptical surveillance, racism, apartheid, camps and refugees, religious nationalism, right-wing mobilization and genocide were normalized by otherwise politically independent and self-governing national states. The vast oeuvre of Foucault and Said, Fanon and Nandy, Agamben and Mbembe on these aspects of post-war state power cannot be reprised here. But suffice it to say that ideologies of control and practices of subjugation have been so smoothly and seamlessly incorporated into ordinary protocols of ‘governance’ that most of the time most of the people are not even aware that their existence and survival are utterly subject to the faceless operations of the state’s bio-power.
In conclusion, the mishandling and mismanagement of data had severe consequences for public health in India. It can be estimated that between three and six million lives were lost based on individual evaluations of data and models by scientists, even as official estimates placed this number only at about 400,000. Many people lost their livelihoods and there was a large-scale disruption of public life. The stringent lockdown in early 2020 led to multiple closures, of public transport, schools, colleges and offices. The migrant exodus, from their workplaces in Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad and similar cities, was an important consequence of the lockdown. Had transparency and constitutional values been upheld, it is possible that these more severe consequences could have been avoided. The larger implications of these questions, in particular those that deal with the rights that are constitutionally guaranteed to Indian citizens, remain to be addressed.