The Language of Containment: Did the administration fare well in conveying the right message? Part 1 of 2

In times when the global order looks for change, and national veins pulsate in anticipation of a "post-COVID" era, pre-existing challenges come without pretensions, and threaten to persist all along the end of the tunnel. 

Among other things, efficient political and crisis communication became too high a standard for our leaders to meet. Perhaps, it’s a virus with a different symptom, needing a different vaccine in varying doses. For now, the stench of its decay refuses to wane.

The clerical burden of political communication

The fact remains that as each official notification of key COVID measures reached the masses waiting for information, a downpour of subsequent circulars with point-wise exegesis became, by its own virtue, one of the most serene emblems of India’s bureaucratic dealing of the pandemic. Day after day as the government shuffled to find ways to balance the public health-economy dyad, draughtsmen at high ranks left no stone unturned in making space for inefficient communication. 

In a notable instance, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) issued a total of 5 orders in a single week on the subject of opening shops selling non-essential goods in Mumbai. From giving green signal to all standalone non-essential shops even in red-zoned regions, to limiting them to five per lane, and a subsequent clarification on closure of all shops, followed by a total re-opening with another complicated instruction, the ruckus couldn’t be stirred up more. The very definition of essential and non-essential goods at the centre of the economic tangent during the COVID lockdown was convoluted. The dichotomy of genuine and non-genuine reasons for breaking the curfew, traffic congestions stemming from unclear, and at times, uncommunicated notifications, among other things, led to a sight of its own making. For some, it was chaos even in death. 

Perhaps, the blame lies with age-old praxis of administrative operations in India. But as one report suggests, the introduction of technology appeared to be changing this dimension. As such, manoeuvres like “post-facto approvals” make it undeniable that most power of crisis-communication had been concentrated in the higher echelons of the bureaucratic stronghold during the lockdown when common citizens attempted to look for their elected representatives for answers. 

Unfortunately, the trail hardly stopped in the chambers of bureaucracy. From press conferences to other-worldly orations, elected representatives have been high on the sermonic wine throughout the course of the pandemic. And political miscommunication was a norm that went on to inspire even the topmost rung of the government. 

The PM’s publicity model of communication stood on an unyielding, blurry terrain– his live addresses to his countrymen received much attention, but the actual dissection of his grand economic package lost focus in clerical pronouncements not many cared to notice, while his words were questioned for being too ambivalent in regards to, perhaps, the migrant crisis, and for leaving important questions for the red tape. 

PM Modi’s later addresses were often critiqued for circumventing relevant questions by chaotically fusing, what is known in communication theory, redundancy and entropy of information. While it is generally taken as a skilful tactic in mass-communication, Modi’s use of long-drawn self-aggrandising and electoral rhetoric in the middle of a crisis must also be looked at with a sceptical eye. The dramatic value of the plea for a ­taali and thaali ceremony overtook other aspects in the same address, such as the establishment of a COVID-19 taskforce under Sitharaman, and the panic-inducing manner of announcing Lockdown 1.0 can only be described as too myopic for a government at the helm of India’s intrinsic chaos for no less than six years. 

Noise from the Delhi circuit

One major critical paradigm underlining the administrative handling of the pandemic was the noted resurgence in the Centre-State discord. 

For starters, Delhi is a classic political quagmire. Headed by a party in opposition to the Centre, internal administrative fissures with the BJP-appointed governor have always been a raw nerve in the Capital’s political boardrooms. 

On the face of it, Centre’s communication with the Kejriwal led Delhi government seemed amicable. After a long year of the battle of words and tussle for the electorate, the political steam seemed to be settling and the management of the pandemic in Delhi was apparently characterised by mutual cooperation between the two federal hierarchies. 

Perhaps, it began after the Tablighi Jamaat cluster was unveiled in broad daylight, or perhaps, large after accusations of obfuscating the actual number of COVID cases began to surface, that friction started cumulating more and more between the two fronts. 

The Kejriwal government has been slammed on several accounts, some of which have to do with the oblique ways of communicating messages and cultivating a conflicting public opinion. As reports of an unreported death toll began to make rounds, it was the honest model of governance averred by his party that came to be surrounded by accusations of opacity and distortion. Earlier in April, it had charged the Centre of keeping its coffers closed for the territory, brought out vestiges of impending non-cooperation, and cried politicisation of a national crisis. 

Tussle between the two power centres, however, took a quasi-novel turn as the Delhi government’s order of reserving all public and private hospitals under it strictly for Delhi’s natives attracted vehement criticism. Although intended for utilitarian aims given the system’s inability to saturate rising cases, the order was seen as atrociously exclusive and incorrectly measured for Delhi’s diverse demography. How exactly do you define a native in the capital of arguably the most heterogenous nation on the planet? What happens to migrants– what happens to people who hop on to the place seeking solace in the midst of a national crisis? It was about time when Lieutenant Governor, Anil Baijal, passed a counter-order and struck the debate, one based on the vacuum of interpersonal communication– who was to lead the people of Delhi, the elected CM or an appointed representative of the Centre?

The discord becomes more and more taut with each passing day. On June 19, Baijal announced compulsory institutional quarantine for new cases against the AAP government’s litany to its people for self-isolative measures, and little to predict, it stood rescinded within a day. I type this piece sitting in a recently-declared containment zone, and as a spectator dealing with pulmonary ailments surrounded by people with co-morbidities, the order reeks of fire, not from a microscopic virus, but from the threat of the whip, the claims of recovery under the eyes of a clamorous state. Perhaps, the power-clusters in Delhi mean well, but the constant lack of a coherent dialectic induces nothing but fear, disillusionment, and an erosion of trust, all of which rank the lowest among the objectives of crisis communication. 

As the Union Home Minister enters the scene and seeks to salvage the situation, the AAP looks mellow and submissive, perhaps in an attempt to pull out the fact of a discourse, the ritual idea of communication. But is the mere belief, that two parties perpetually at logger-heads now seek to cooperate, enough to translate to ground realities? Time will show.