26-07-2021

MondAy, JUly 26, 2021
4
Acting Editor & Publisher : Jobaer Alam
e-mail: editor@thebangladeshtoday.com
Monday, July 26, 2021
Strategies to cope
with Covid-19
It is predictable that during a pandemic, a humanitarian crisis may
arise in a developing country like Bangladesh. In most incidents, it
will be the combined effects of a variety of shortages. This can lead
to a shortage of basic needs including foods, goods, and services such
as job loss, economic and financial loss, food insecurity, famine, social
conflicts, and deaths. Besides, the psychosocial and socio-economic
and health and well-being of the citizens may be affected . While
predicting all the subsequent impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is
challenging, early strategic planning and groundwork for the evolving
and established challenges will be crucial to assemble resources and
react in an appropriate timely manner.
This write-up, therefore, focuses on the public perception of
comparative lockdown scenario analysis and the strategic
management regime of COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh. As there
is no such prediction on how long the situation prevails, the
absence/lack of management strategy for an epidemiological and
socio-economic emergency response might be a tool to assess the
forthcoming situation under a set of specific scenarios. Therefore, the
objective ought to be analyzing long-term strategic management of the
pandemic in different lengths of scenarios in a resource-limited setting
of the so-called lockdown of the country. The outcome can play a
crucial role to formulate emergency response strategies to tackle the
COVID-19 pandemic both epidemiologically and socio-economically
in Bangladesh.
For management strategies, deep analysis of the situation should be
carried out and go for full lockdown with relief support to the poor and
most vulnerable urgently needed due to the rapid community
transmission of COVID-19 . First of all, the government should come
up with a comprehensive strategic plan accompanied by nongovernmental
and social organizations and law enforcement to analyse
the spread of the virus, identifying the most vulnerable hosts, properly
track the movement of general people, precise estimation of economic
losses from different financial and industrial sectors, educational
diminutions and professional and informal employment disruption to
picture an integrated scenario of the current situation and future
predictions by which negative aspects of the situation can be managed.
There must be two types of the strategic plan under the category
of the emergency response plan (short-term) by ensuring basic
supplies to all citizens who are in real needs, motivate and/or force the
people to abide by the COVID-19 guidelines by the GoB and WHO,
prepare a complete but accurate list of vulnerable population in terms
of COVID-19 spreading, co-morbidities, and economic stress, activate
all the local wings of the GoB such as local government representatives
at the village level, and construct a COVID-19 response task force to
monitor and handle the country situation through application of
information and communication technologies (ICT). The government
should implement those plans with proper timing, transparency, and
resources.
The GoB has already been taking a lot of initiatives to tackle COVID-
19 pandemic, but there seems lacking proper risk assessment and weak
coordination among stakeholders from medical to social welfare.
However, deep research complied with massive surveillance could help
in making decisions whether the lockdown must be further carried on
or not and this must have to be based on evidence. Miscommunication
and miscalculation of the strategy may worsen the situation.
Communicating the disease risk in the local language is also necessary
to increase awareness about the disease. "Lockdown" is an unfamiliar
word or term to the people of Bangladesh. According to scenario one,
a partial lockdown is a hoax. People recommended to use a more
familiar term "curfew" (legal section 144) to maintain strict control and
there is no alternative to reduce COVID-19 transmission. In
Bangladesh, section 144 of The Penal code 1860 prohibits assembly of
five or more people, holding of public meetings, and carrying of
firearms and this law can be invoked for up to two months . It could
have been a much more effective strategy to contain the infection.
78.6% of the participants in a survey agreed that community
transmission of COVID-19 will increase due to the people's movement
and mass gathering, 57.9% agreed to continue the partial lockdown,
whereas approximately 73% of respondents agreed that deep analysis
of the situation is required and go for full lockdown with the relief
support to the poor and the most vulnerable. Overall, the participants
had a positive view about lockdown to stop/slow down the spreading
out of COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh.
Around 34 million people, or 20.5% of the population, live below the
poverty line and based on the current rate of poverty reduction,
Bangladesh was projected to eliminate extreme poverty by 2022 . Yet,
as COVID-19 pandemic hit the country poverty rate in Bangladesh rose
to 40.9% as 25% of family incomes fell . So, it was the choice between
life versus livelihood . The public is not confident somehow with the
administrative decisions, policies, and their implementation related to
COVID-19 emergency response such as lockdown on their livelihoods.
There was also a lack of coordination among the different government
stakeholders to tackle emergency healthcare and crisis management in
the field. For instance, people usually made different excuses to go
outside and a regular crowd was common in the kitchen market,
streets, and small bazaars. Only the government, semi-government,
autonomous institutes/organizations, and educational institutions
were maintaining the rules/guidelines.
This situation was well visualized in different mass media that people
were in movement for relief, road blockage, corruption by the
government representatives, mismanagement in relief distribution,
biases to party supporters, bureaucratic administrators to look after the
response activities, and so on. Likewise, the potential danger of
COVID-19 pandemic from the very beginning has been overlooked by
the people due to the presence of misinformation in the social and
mass media that it was general flue, and that the virus cannot infect too
seriously in a humid country like Bangladesh.
So, the government should try to implement a stringent policy of
risk communication and media communication during this emergency
for the most vulnerable communities. The vulnerable groups such as
disabled and disadvantaged persons, young children and orphans, and
aged citizens should be taken under protection for their well-being.
Although the extension of partial lockdown was not a solution in
Bangladesh, it could have been an effective option continued to slower
the infection rate. The lockdown should have been partially continued
with necessary financial support for the vulnerable. It would have been
a crisis for a short time, but it would be a saviour for the future.
However, to run the economy, the hotspots of the infection and the
cluster areas could remain under lockdown, while economic activities
could have been maintained by strongly abiding public health
guidelines and social distancing. Moreover, for the next couple of years,
it will be extremely hard for the country especially as far as the financial
issues are concerned to achieve the current development as well as
SDG targets.
Staring into India's dark night from Hong Kong's twilight
The world of "Asia's world city" is in a
whirl. Hong Kong's streets are
crawling with cops. Stop and search
operations are commonplace.
From roadside billboards to its iconic
ding dings (trams), government ads
warning of terrorists are everywhere. A
fresh round of political purge is on the
horizon, with opposition figures stepping
down from public offices in anticipation of
a government move to weed out
"unpatriotic" office-holders, in line with a
sweeping sedition law.
A year after its introduction, the
National Security Law is changing Hong
Kong fundamentally as Beijing tightens its
grip on city. No one knows where the
heavy hand of the state will land next.
For the first time, police this year
banned the annual July 1 democracy
march marking the day of the city's return
to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. The
popular pro-democracy newspaper Apple
Daily was forced to shut down after its
bank accounts were frozen, owner and
several journalists arrested, and the
newsroom raided under the new law.
US President Joe Biden called the
paper's closure "a sad day for media
freedom in Hong Kong and around the
world." A joint front-page editorial in the
four largest Nordic newspapers declared:
"The world can no longer stand idly by as
China gradually sucks the air out of
freedom of the press in Hong Kong." The
European Parliament warns that the city
faces a "human rights emergency."
That's because the new law allows the
authorities to mete out punishment for
secession, subversion, terrorism and
collusion with foreign forces. All of these
seditious offenses can be defined at the
discretion of the authorities, allowing
them unprecedented power in curtailing
protest and freedom of speech.
The unceremonious end of Apple Daily
has added to fears that if used arbitrarily,
the law will be turned into a tool to gag
free speech, stifle peaceful dissent, punish
thought crimes, curb personal liberty and
subvert the rule of law.
Welcome to the world of the "world's
largest democracy," where those fears are
now a daily reality.
An 84-year-old Jesuit priest and lifelong
social activist died this month in
custody in India after his Parkinson'sravaged
body contracted Covid-19 in jail.
Father Stan Swamy was arrested last
October on trumped-up charges under a
draconian anti-terror law, and had
petitioned the authorities repeatedly to be
allowed to die in his home, in the presence
of his family. Instead, they chained him to
his hospital bed.
This wasn't the first time for such
ruthless abuse of the law. India has long
lived with oppressive security laws - with
all their attendant distortions - without a
fraction of the noise the world now makes
for Hong Kong.
As an Indian journalist based in Hong
Kong, I once tracked with fascination the
struggle for democracy in my adopted city
even as my country of birth was growing
disenchanted with the outcome of that
system of governance.
Before Prime Minister Narendra Modi's
rise to national power in 2014, World
Bank surveys consistently showed public
trust in politicians in China and Hong
EBASiSh Roy ChowdhURy
Kong far exceeded that in India. The
corruption and directionless of the then
Congress-party-led coalition government
bred popular anger, paving the way for
Modi.
After seven years of Modi, I now watch
democracy die quietly in India from
faraway Hong Kong, where democracy
was never born but it never felt that way,
and its supposed passing is widely
mourned.
That's because even though Hong Kong
never had representative democracy, it
instituted rights, freedoms and standards
of governance that were so enviable that
their fraying evokes lament. Much more,
say, than for the current institutional
capture and attacks on civil rights in India,
whose geopolitical alignment with the
Western world and chronically poor
governing standards temper global
expectations of it.
Otherwise, there would be a lot to
lament about.
Modi's government has been
conducting widespread surveillance on
journalists, businesspeople, judges,
politicians, and even virologists, reveals
the unfolding Pegasus snooping scandal.
Forty Indian journalists have been found
to be on the Pegasus hacking list so far.
More insidious than snooping is the
ability of software like Pegasus to plant
false evidence that can be used against
surveillance targets. Draconian security
laws help the authorities stuff jails with
social activists, writers, poets, and just
regular people going about their lives -
sometimes with the help of planted
"evidence," as may have been done in the
case of Father Stan Swamy.
Actually, there's no need for evidence
even. Recently, 124 Muslim men were
acquitted after 19 years in jail. They were
released as police could not present any
evidence against them that could stick.
They rarely can, and it doesn't matter.
For when it comes to "sedition" and
"terror" trials, the process itself is the
punishment. Non-violent citizens are
thrown into jail for charges as ridiculous
as "critical" or "derogatory" remarks
against an elected executive, or even for
spreading "disaffection toward the
government."
Bails are difficult as national security is
privileged over fundamental rights, and
by the time India's excruciatingly slow
judiciary gets around to delivering
"justice" by disproving baseless charges,
punishment has already been served. This
makes security laws handy for India's
rulers.
Even as I am writing this, a journalist is
languishing in jail, booked under the
National Security Act for Facebook posts
warning people that cow dung and cow
urine do not cure Covid-19.
A journalist in Kashmir has now spent
more than 1,000 days in jail under the
dreaded Unlawful Activities (Prevention)
Act, or UAPA, after writing a news feature
profiling a young terrorist.
Another journalist has spent 10 months
in jail for the seditious act of trying to
report on the gang rape and murder of a
minor girl.
I am quite sure I haven't heard
President Biden or Nordic papers
fulminate about press freedom in India
over any of this.
The Modi government makes frequent
use of the UAPA (also used against Father
Stan Swamy) to neutralize the regime's
discontents. Opposition Congress
grandee Mani Shankar Aiyar calculates
there were nearly 4,000 UAPA arrests
and 3,005 cases in two years (compared
with about 100 arrests and 61 cases filed
under Hong Kong's National Security Law
in the one year of its existence).
But Modi did not invent the practice of
wanton terror charges. Aiyar's party holds
the patent on that one. UAPA has been
around since 1967. Modi just scaled it up
with new amendments that make
detentions under terror charges even
But Modi did not invent the practice of wanton terror
charges. Aiyar's party holds the patent on that one. UAPA
has been around since 1967. Modi just scaled it up with
new amendments that make detentions under terror
charges even easier. Cases under sedition laws, which
have been around even longer, from the colonial times,
have similarly jumped, by 28%, since Modi took power.
easier. Cases under sedition laws, which
have been around even longer, from the
colonial times, have similarly jumped, by
28%, since Modi took power.
UAPA comes in a long line of abusive
national-security laws, some of which are
now defunct but remembered by their
menacing abbreviations.
Take TADA, the Terrorism and Anti-
Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act; in
its decade-long existence until it was
repealed in the mid-1990s, only 1% of the
more than 75,000 arrested under the Act,
mostly Muslims and Sikhs, were
convicted.
It was succeeded by POTA, the
Prevention of Terrorism Act, which
gained even more notoriety with an even
poorer conviction rate, before it was
repealed in 2004.
Hong Kong's security law is considered
the end of the city's freedoms, the twilight
of its days as a center of uninhibited
capital and information flows. But
curiously, throughout the decades that
India has lived with its myriad security
laws, none of these instruments of legal
torture ever seemed to raise any alarm
worldwide for the state of its free-market
democracy, or dent its ever-growing
attraction for global capital.
It still doesn't, as the US happily
overlooks all of Modi's rights abuses.
For the first time, the Biden
administration last week issued an
advisory to American businesses warning
of the dangers of operating in Hong Kong.
The National Security Law, it warns,
"could adversely affect businesses and
SPEnGlER
individuals operating in Hong Kong."
The "2021 Investment Statement" for
India, however, makes no reference to the
flagrant abuse of its security laws. Instead,
it praises India for "ambitious structural
economic reforms" and sees no concerns
regarding doing business in India beyond
"protectionist measures."
Next week, US Secretary of State Antony
Blinken is heading to New Delhi to
prepare the ground for the next summit of
the Quad group of "democracies"
comprising India, Japan, Australia and
the US. India is simply too important a
partner in America's strategy of
containing China to allow for trifles such
as tyrannical laws to get in the way.
Or media freedom, for that matter.
India has seen egregious media controls
in recent years, thanks to a mix of
intimidation and inducements by Modi's
headline-obsessed government.
On Thursday, taxmen raided the offices
of media houses that have been
painstakingly recording the true extent of
deaths in the Covid second wave, exposing
the government's lies and data fudge.
Just as the government punishes those
who refuse to gramophone its narrative of
Modi's relentless successes, it showers
government advertisements on those who
do. It spends nearly US$100 million a
year on media outreach.
And it shows. Most national-level
television channels are unabashedly pro-
Modi and take the lead in framing his
critics as "anti-nationals." Media trials
have their verdicts ready long before the
courts get to try the so-called sedition and
terror cases.
Unsurprisingly, from 80th in 2002,
India's rank on the World Press Freedom
Index has plunged to 142nd out of 180
territories - behind Myanmar and
Afghanistan. Reporters Without Borders
counts Modi among 37 "predators of press
freedom" such as Kim Jong Un, Bashar al-
Assad and Ali Khamenei.
Having tamed many of the legacy
media, the government is now trying to
"regulate" digital news media and
streaming platforms through intrusive
new IT rules that the United Nations sees
as infringements on human rights. But I
can't remember any parliamentary
motion in the European Union on India's
endangered media freedom.
India's application of security laws and
its media landscape offer snapshots of
how a despotic state corrodes civil
liberties and slowly captures governing
and oversight institutions even as it
maintains the facade of democracy.
Unlike the conspicuous show of control
in Hong Kong, the despots in India
operate in stealth. They disguise media
crackdowns in tax probes. They don't raid
newsrooms, they weaponize them against
the regime's enemies. They keep
newspapers going even as they shut down
free flow of information. They hack
democracy by breaking into journalists'
phones, but they never cease to feign their
allegiance to democracy.
That's all it takes to keep moralizing
Western politicians at bay.
Debasish Roy Chowdhury has coauthored
To Kill a Democracy: India's
Passage to Despotism with John Keane.
Read Asia Times' book review here.
Wake up, America: The world just isn't that into you
Republicans, including many old
friends, are outraged that the
Biden administration gave up on
sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 gas
pipeline that will pump Russian gas to
Germany.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX)-on whose
foreign policy team I served during the
2016 campaign-declared that he would
block Senate confirmation of all of Biden's
ambassadorial appointments until the
sanctions are reinstated. Daniel Kochis of
the Heritage Foundation titled his piece
today, "The US will regret this shameful
appeasement of Russia."
Calm down, everyone. After Donald
Trump imposed sanctions on firms laying
the Nord Stream 2 pipe across the Baltic
Sea, the Russians sent their own ship, and
the work is finished. The Germans will go
ahead regardless, so the least humiliating
thing that Biden could do was to
acknowledge reality and stand down.
No one in Europe really cares what
Washington thinks about Nord Steam 2
(and a lot of other issues). Once upon a
time, about five years ago, America was
going to be the new Saudi Arabia,
providing Europe with liquefied natural
gas to replace Vladimir Putin's product-at
a higher price, to be sure, but wrapped in
the blessings of liberty. Trump demanded
that Europe eschew Russian gas and buy
American LNG instead.
When Trump took office, the energy
companies in the S&P 500 were devoting
US$70 to $80 billion a year in capital
expenditures. This year it will be about
$20 billion, barely a quarter as much as
the last peak, and analysts polled by
Bloomberg put next year's total at less
than $30 billion, despite the strong
recovery in energy prices. Natural gas
production is down by about 10% from
the 2019 peak, and oil production is down
by 20%.
The people with big jobs in Washington
came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, when
America was the technological marvel of
the world, and American inventions
created the digital age. We haven't done a
lot lately except code some complicated
software.
China has installed about 80% of the
world's 5G mobile broadband capacity,
the carrier for the Fourth Industrial
Revolution as much as railroads were for
the First Industrial Revolution, and is
moving much faster towards smart cities,
automated ports, autonomous vehicles,
self-programming robots and a wealth of
other 5G applications.
American supply chains can't keep up
with the $5 trillion in demand that the US
Treasury dumped onto consumers, so
America is running a $1 trillion a year
balance of payments deficit. The pull of
demand has spiked the inflation rate
above 5%.
The Federal Reserve and the White
House say this is transitory, but US
industries aren't investing in new
equipment. In fact, capital expenditures
for US industrial companies this year will
be 35% lower than in 2019, and not much
better next year.
The US isn't investing in energy, or
much else. It doesn't boast a single
company to compete with Huawei,
Europeans view with distaste the American version of Mao's
Cultural Revolution, where the "woke" equivalent of Red Guards
hold self-criticism sessions at corporations and universities to
extract confessions of racism, homophobia, transphobia and so
forth. The last thing that German Chancellor Angela Merkel or
French President Emmanuel Macron want is to tangle with Russia.
Ericsson, or Nokia in 5G broadband.
China, with its robust supply chains and
abundance and diversity of skilled
workers and engineers, is likely to get a
jump on the United States in the new
technologies that will transform economic
life.
That includes hydrogen fuel cells:
China's chemical industry produces 30%
of the world's hydrogen as a by-product.
At the same time, America's allies don't
have a lot of confidence in Washington's
will to defend them-surely not after the
humiliating spectacle of another Vietnamstyle
run from a country where American
forces fought a 20-year war, namely in
Afghanistan. Europeans view with
distaste the American version of Mao's
Cultural Revolution, where the "woke"
equivalent of Red Guards hold selfcriticism
sessions at corporations and
universities to extract confessions of
racism, homophobia, transphobia and so
forth. The last thing that German
Chancellor Angela Merkel or French
President Emmanuel Macron want is to
tangle with Russia.
According to the German business daily
Handelsblatt, Germans support the
completion of Nord Stream 2 by a margin
of 75 to 17. Even members of the
opposition Green Party who abhor
anything to do with fossil fuels back the
pipeline by a margin of 69 to 21.
It's pointless to complain when
America's allies ask in so many words,
"What have you done for us lately?" To the
rest of the world, America looks like a
declining power, because it is a declining
power.
If America wants to get the world's
attention, it should try doing the things
that captured the world's imagination a
few decades ago. America needs the moral
equivalent of a moonshot, a rededication
to manufacturing leadership, a revived
meritocracy that produces business and
scientific leadership.
Instead of complaining about how the
Germans jilted them, American
politicians should take a hard look at
where America is going, and do
something about it.
Source : Asia Times