Is Narendra Modi a 21st century Walter Rand?

Indian Prime Minister's sudden lockdown of India to control COVID-19 is reminiscent of
Walter Charles Rand’s tough measures to curb 1896 plague in Bombay

The plague in India: Stricken natives in the Street at Bombay

Lord Sandhurst, in a speech, delivered the other day at Poona said that in spite of the measures taken to combat the plague in Bombay, it was spreading and that not only had they the plague in their midst, but owing to the failure of the monsoon, the grim visitor famine was staring at them. Europeans have been attacked by the disease, and a nurse has died from it. The scene represented in our illustration is from a photograph by Inspector H. A. Perry of the Bombay City Police, and is, unhappily, one too often to be witnessed in the streets where wretched plague-stricken natives are to be seen lying down until removed.

T

he havoc wrought globally by COVID-19 pandemic has yet to run its course. We are hopefully somewhere in the middle of pandemic’s curve and in the next couple of months, the rapid spread of the disease will plateau and begin to decline. It will have killed thousands and more, affecting millions more by then.

The outbreak has tested all governments and many have been found wanting in being able to control the spread of the virus and the number of fatalities. 

So far (and this is going to be a very long journey) Canada has managed the crisis rather well. Both the federal and the provincial governments have taken the general population into confidence and have been gradually exerting pressure to implement social distancing and alleviating the economic fallout of the pandemic. The Samara Centre for Democracy has produced a useful analysis of the state of democracy in Canada during the pandemic. Read it here: Parliament Under Pressure.  

In India, the federal (central) government has ordered a complete lockdown to ensure social distancing to prevent the community-based spread of the infection.

Swift & Sudden Decisions

The measure, tough and necessary, has caused utter misery to the tens of millions of migrant labourers and daily wage-earners, who have been forced to return home. Managing and ensuring a lockdown is not easy especially when its implementation is announced without adequate planning and adequate advance notice.

Whether it is demonetisation or tackling coronavirus, Narendra Modi has made such swift and sudden announcements his forte. It would appear that he doesn’t seem to weigh in on the overall impact his decisions would have on India’s massive population.

In implementing the lockdown, the government has used a colonial-era law – the Epidemic Disease act, 1897 – that was enacted to deal with the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the Bombay Presidency in 1896.

The outbreak of plague in Bombay is remembered for the wrong reasons – the assassination of Walter Rand, the head of the plague commission, by the Chapekar Brothers (Damodar and Balkrishna), and the arrest of Lokmanya Tilak on charges of sedition (both events occurring in 1897).

The wide and rapid spread of plague in Bombay and the adjoining cities also saw the heroic efforts of two doctors – Dr. Acacio Gabriel Viegas, a medical practitioner from Goa, who discovered the first incident of plague in September 1896, and Dr. Sir Waldemar Mordechai Wolff Haffkine, who developed the vaccine for the disease.

There is always a political story that underlies the decisions governments take in tackling pandemics and epidemics; it is clear now globally in the way governments are dealing with the coronavirus. It was evident then in Bombay in 1896, too.

Seemingly, the tough, no-nonsense totalitarian response by the Chinese government has yielded results, as compared to a soft, all-inclusive approach adopted by many countries in Europe and North America, which has proved to be an unmitigated disaster. China has been able to control COVID-19 but the virus is swallowing all of the developed world.

Tough action

The differing experiences of different countries indicate that the way forward is to strictly enforce lockdowns everywhere. But that cannot be done hastily. It is necessary to take the people into confidence, have their involvement in finding a lasting and permanent solution. That is the true essence of participatory democracy. The dilemma, of course, is to ensure that while people become aware of the gravity of the situation, the death toll is controlled. 

In 1896, at the behest of Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India in London, the British government representatives in India – Lord Elgin the Viceroy in Delhi and Lord Sandhurst the Governor in Bombay – attempted various ways to curb the rapid spread of the plague.

Lord Hamilton (the Canadian city of Hamilton gets its name from George Hamilton) was adamant that strictest measure should be adopted to curb the spread of the plague because the ships from Bombay were being denied entry into all the ports on the way to England. Both Elgin and Sandhurst, aware of the prevailing sociopolitical and cultural circumstances in Bombay Presidency, were less than enthusiastic to implement such strict measures.

At that time, Governor Sandhurst organised the diamond jubilee celebrations of Queen Victoria in Poona on 22 June 1897. In his editorial, Lokmanya Tilak observed that at the time when the city was suffering from the plague epidemic, the celebration was “the sixtieth anniversary not of our prosperity, but of our decline…” Tilak’s journalism was incendiary; his editorials in Kesri left nothing to the imagination even as he took the necessary precaution not to circumvent any imperial laws.

There was a severe, irreparable divide between the moderates and the extremists of the Indian National Congress, with Mahadev Govind Ranade and Gopal Krishna Gokhale leading the moderates, and Lokmanya Tilak leading the militants. Their difference would split many institutions in Poona that they had co-founded and were a part of, and cause a vertical spit in the Congress in 1905.

Tilak’s maneuvers

Tilak, when he realised that he was sidelined in the maneuvering and jostling for public space by his more astute moderate comrades, began to pursue stringent advocacy of orthodox Hindu religion, opposing the Age of Consent bill introduced by the British rulers to increase the age of marriage of girls to 12.

When his opposition didn’t prevent the passage of the bill, he launched the public celebration of the Ganeshotsav in 1893 – a political masterstroke that catapulted him to top of the pantheon of Indian leaders. He maintained his stridency in 1895 when he relaunched the Shiv Jayanti – the annual celebration of Shivaji Maharaj’s birthday (February 19), which had been started by Mahatma Phule. 

Walter Charles Rand was appointed the Plague Commissioner of Poona in 1896. He went about his task with the zealousness of a civil servant unconcerned with local customs or local sensitivities. Poona in 1896 was in political, social, ideological, and economic ferment. There was an ongoing famine across Deccan, which had crippled the economy. When the cleaning operations began in Poona and Bombay, the British administration was expectedly thorough, and ruthless.

Stanley Wolpert notes in Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India, notes:

“As chairman of the newly created Plague Committee, (Walter Charles) Rand was invested with dictatorial powers. He arrived in Poona preceded by his reputation as a stern disciplinarian for having sentenced eleven “respectable Hindus” to jail for instigating the Wai communal riots of 1894 when he served as the magistrate of Satara District. After passing the sentence, he had obliged these convicted Brahmans to walk under a blistering sun for more than twenty miles from Wai to their Satara prison. But if Rand was regarded with hostility by the orthodox Hindu of Poona before his arrival there, a brief period in the office at his new job in that city sufficed to arouse the hatred of most of its inhabitants against him. Even the Liberal newspaper, which had so recently advocated the appointment of a “strong officer” moaned “for heavens forbear,” explaining that this

Is the universal wail of blank despair that goes up from the suffering inhabitants of this ill-fated city. There is a limit to human patience and human suffering which has long since been overstepped…The accounts we have been from time to time publishing in our Marathi series will, we have no doubt bear sufficient testimony to the unparalleled distress and the misery caused to the people of this city in consequence of the operations of the Plague Commission as at present directed.”

Gopal Krishna Gokhale, at that time in London, even accused the imperial police of molesting women during the plague searches. Mahadev Govind Ranade, a judge in the Bombay High Court, Gokhale’s political guru, and the undisputed leader of the moderates, prevailed upon Gokhale to withdraw the allegations.

Chapekar Brothers

When Rand was returning to his carriage after participating in the celebrations of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee in Poona that Bombay's Governor Lord Sandhurst had organised on 22 June 1897, along with an associate, the Chapekar brothers shot Rand and Lt. Ayerst. Ayerst died on the spot and Rand succumbed to his bullet wounds after 11 days.

Tilak was aware of this conspiracy had given tacit approval of the plot to kill Rand and helped the Chapekar brothers escape and hide. The British administration was probably aware of the linkages between Chapekar brothers and Tilak, it had no substantive evidence. But it nevertheless wanted to ensure that Tilak wouldn't go unpunished and arrested him under charges of sedition on 27 July 1897. He was tried for disaffection, found guilty and sentenced to 18 months of rigorous imprisonment. Justice Ranade and Parsons denied Tilak bail.

Disaffection

Richard P. Tucker notes in Ranade and the Roots of Indian Nationalism, Justice Ranade defined “disaffection” in a related case, which laid down the rules of engagement between the British administration and Indian leaders agitating for freedom. 

Justice Ranade defined disaffection thus: “disaffection is a positive political distemper and not a mere absence or negation of love or goodwill. It is defiant insubordination of authority, or when it is not defiant, it secretly seeks to alienate the people and weaken the bond of allegiance. It is a feeling which makes men indisposed to obey or support the laws of the realm, and promotes discontent and public disorder.”

The public outrage of orthodox Hindus at the tough measures implemented to control the plague epidemic forced the British administration to adopt softer measures. This prolonged the disease for several years. According to Tim Wallasey-Wilsey, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, Department of War Studies, King’s College, London, “…the stark truth is that cultural sensitivity had its consequences. The plague was not stamped out – and continued to kill until the mid-1920s. As many as 10 million Indians may have died.”

Image credit: https://qz.com/india/286559/19th-century-mumbai-plague-may-offer-clues-in-dealing-with-

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