DailyOh! Arvind Kejriwal to take Covid test, to how ‘racist’ Churchill killed 3 mn Indians
Hey there,
Many things start on Monday, including the week, and so did Unlock 1.0. India began relaxing curbs from April 15, when the first phase of lockdown ended, but no relaxation allowed us to go to public places like malls or restaurants. If you are a believer and can leave it to ‘whoever’ you believe in, you can even head to a temple or mosque or church because places of worship have also opened up.
You can go to a temple to ask for an early relief from corona, but there is no reason why you, or anybody, would be going to a mall in Uttar Pradesh. In Yogi-land, the trader body has decided all shopping malls of Uttar Pradesh, including Lucknow, will open but all shops inside the malls will remain closed. So why would you visit a mall?
Perhaps for some cool ‘AC ki hawa’. When malls opened in India, some people used to head there just for some respite from the scorching heat. But how do malls benefit by offering this hawa-hawai opening? Ask the trader’s association that.
But don’t mistake this for a retreat of the virus. That is likely to happen only by September, not before. Says who? Not WHO.
The claim has been made by two public health experts from the Ministry of Health. Their analysis says that when the number of those infected becomes equal to those ‘removed’ from circulation, the epidemic will be “extinguished”. People will be ‘removed’ from circulation either by getting infected and recovering or by getting infected and dying because of the virus.
If you want more details on how this will work, this is what you need to read.
India is months away from being corona-free but one country today declared it has beaten the virus – with 1,500 positive cases and 22 deaths. That country is New Zealand. The last Covid-19 patient has recovered and been sent home. It has been 17 days since the last new case was reported in the country, and Monday marked the first time since late February without reporting any active cases.
When countries flounder, it’s their leaders who draw flak. So when nations do the impossible, it’s the leader who deserves praise. In this case, it is Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
Ardern says she danced around a little in the living room when told about the milestone. And that dance must have come very naturally to her.
Two years ago at 37, at the time of her appointment as Prime Minister, Arden was the world's youngest female head of government. But do you know what she did before she became PM?
Years before assuming charge as PM, Ardern was a budding disco jockey (DJ) who played tunes ranging from Spice Girls to Judas Priest.
Music sure helps keep a cool head. And a cool head is all you need to deal with the times at hand. Now, if you have a population the size of New Zealand – 50,00,000 - you can keep a cool head in dealing with a pandemic. You can’t do that in India with 135.26 crore people whether you are a DJ or into classical music. Our population is a pandemic in itself.
From New Zealand, let’s come back to India. And the news is not good. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is unwell. We do not know if it is the virus because he hasn’t been tested yet. He is likely to be tested tomorrow. Now, Kejriwal apparently has been experiencing soreness in the throat and slight fever since Sunday.
It is scary to fall sick these days. We could be sick of just what we used to be sick of earlier - ‘viral’, but all things viral now remind us of the virus out there. Since we are in India, let’s talk a little more about India before we take you to London.
In India, there is a plan underway to make Indian women Sashakt. That plan looks at women-led development, not just women development. Perhaps, there is no better place to look at women-led development today than New Zealand. But we are in the times of Aatmanirbhar Bharat so we would look within.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's own website tweeted in a series of tweets about the initiatives his government has undertaken to make #SashaktNari. The tweets ask you to visit narendramodi.in to find out what the government has done for the cause.
We leave it to you to decide if you want to do it, but we want you to know that Indian Parliament is still men-led with just 78 women being elected MPs in a House of 543 members. BJP, PM Modi’s own party, saw just 34 MPs of the 282 people who made it to the 17th Lok Sabha. When it came to Cabinet berth allocations, just six women could find a place among 58 ministers.
A visit to narendramodi.in does not give you any information about any step on that front, but we hope work is on in getting more #SashaktNari in Parliament and then Modi’s Cabinet too. But who is a sashakt nari or sashakt nar anyway?
Sashakt, our Word Of The Day, is a Hindi word and means someone who has shakti (power). To give someone power is empowerment, or sashaktikaran.
What PM Modi is talking about are the steps his government has taken to empower women. He is doing the accounting of what’s done and what’s to be done because his government has completed one year in office the second time round, and now is the time to present report cards. The thing about government report cards is that you can’t forge your parents’ signatures on them. People sign it every five years. Whoever the majority signs for, wins.
Guess who the majority brought down from a high pedestal in the UK? Former Prime Minister Winston Churchill. You do know that protests over the death of George Floyd have spread to Europe.
So, in Europe’s UK, a central London statue of Winston Churchill was ‘vandalised’ with protesters scribbling 'Churchill was a racist' on the statue.
When the going is good, we forget that the going can get bad too. At one point Churchill had said, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
Now, Churchill is no more and history is being rewritten. The word ‘racist’ written on Churchill’s statue has set many tongues wagging about his legacy as just that – a racist.
The man, considered a war hero in the UK, was solely responsible for the loss of about three millions lives in 1943. That was the time when India saw one of its worst famines, and guess what, it happened even when there was no draught. The famine struck Bengal due to Churchill’s policies.
A little before 1943, food supplies to Bengal were reduced because of natural disasters, outbreaks of infections in crops and the fall of Burma (now Myanmar), which was a major source of rice imports. British forces had lost Burma to Japan. Newspapers were publishing photos of people dying in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on roads, much to the embarrassment of the British government.
Despite this, Churchill kept diverting crucial resources to the war. In fact, rice stocks continued to leave India even as Churchill denied urgent requests from India’s viceroy for more than 1 million tonnes of emergency wheat supplies in early 1940s.
It might shock you but Churchill did have a defence. He blamed Indians “breeding like rats” as the reason behind the famine. He even went on to ask if the shortages were so bad, how was Mahatma Gandhi alive.
He did all this, perhaps, thinking he would never make a mention of this episode when he wrote his history. He may have thought someone would challenge his account, but we wonder if he ever thought people would write ‘history’ straight on his statue, calling him what he was – a racist. What Churchill did to Indians in India must be an embarrassment to Britons in Britain.
But guess who did India proud? Lyricist Javed Akhtar. Akhtar has become the first Indian to be conferred with the Richard Dawkins Award by the Center For Inquiry (CFI). Who gets to get the award? According to CFI, “The recipient will be a distinguished individual from the worlds of science, scholarship, education, or entertainment, who publicly proclaims the values of secularism and rationalism, upholding scientific truth wherever it may lead.”
That is what Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene, believed in. Seventy-nine-year-old Dawkins is a well-known critic of creationism. A theory that believes that humanity, life, and the universe were created by a deity. This theory, of course, discounts evolution.
According to Dawkins, the view that the Earth is only a few thousand years old is "a preposterous, mind-shrinking falsehood". Akhtar is elated to have received the award named after a man the lyricist is a fan of. Guess who is even more elated? His wife Shabana Azmi.
We will leave you with that for today.
See you tomorrow.
Also read: How CM Arvind Kejriwal's leadership failure is worsening the Delhi Coronavirus crisis