Hidden behind the Tabligh witch-hunt

New Delhi: The retired psychology professor of TKM College, Kollam in Kerala,  now in the Surgical Block of Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan (LNJP) Hospital has been asking the hospital staff for a simple thing for the last two days: some soap to wash hands.  The medicines left with him for hypertension will last hime only two more days; he is wondering whether there is any way to get it.  Ever since the soap supplied on the day the 32 patients in the isolation ward was exhausted,  none of the 32 has got soap to wash their hands with.  Nor does their ward have the mandatory supply of sanitiser.  In the last two days, when they asked the cleaning staff of the ward with money to buy the items from outside,  his reply was shops around were not open and there was no way to have soap.  Ultimately,  when they called Kollams' MP Premachandran,  they were assured about the soap, said the professor.

His narration goes thus:  On 29 March three Keralites including himself were put on a bus from the Tabligh headquarters in Nizamuddin.  All the others  in the bus were from Madhya Pradesh – most of them youths.   Although none of them had any symptoms of Covid infection,  every one in the bus were admitted in the ward on the second floor of the hospital.  The sample of none of the 32 persons in this ward was taken for testing.   Not surprisingly, the professor was aghast to see in several prominent newspapers of Kerala that he had tested positive.  When he questioned how it could be reported that some body had been infected when even his sample was not taken,  they apologised three times.

The picture given by LNJP Hospital staff, by turning those not affected by Covid as testing positive,  is not much different.  What Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and health minister Satyendra Jain informed was that those who had been shifted to several hospitals in Delhi were those with symptoms of the disease,  and others were accommodated in quarantine in various centres in Delhi.  But the picture in the hospital would tell a different tale.  Even the staff there had not been provided with N95 mask or Personal Protective Equipment (PEE),  not to speak of patients getting soap and sanitiser.  

When the sample extraction of the Tablighi workers had not even been completed,  the employees there wonder from where the Covid positive reports were originating.  In another ward,  there are 34 from Tablighi Jamaat.   Samples were collected of 11 of them till Friday and one tested positive.  The staff say that the anxiety is that all others in the ward would turn positive,  but for the moment they are all in conditions lacking any precautions or facilities.  In yet another adjoining ward with 34 patients, three tested positive on Friday,  for the first time.  They are also made to use beds without observing physical distance and interspersed between 31 others so far uninfected.   Since the people brought in were not allowed to carry their bags in with their clothes from the buses,  many of them do not have even tooth brush on hand,  said another staff. 

The clamour for food

When people,  whom the nursing staff themselves find having no symptoms,  were bracketed with those with symptoms and therefore transferred to hospital wards,  there were others outside these categories who were moved to another centre in the name of isolation.  One such centre is the vacant apartments in the housing complex in Narela of Delhi Development Authority.    Those in Narela quarantine have a more woeful narration:  when those including some suffering from diabetes,  and denied food for two consecutive days,  experienced shivering,   instead of being given food,  they were treated as Covid-affected. In Narela,  until Friday they were not in a position to get  food even when they had the money to buy it.   What  those who were brought in from Nizamuddin in buses eventually got for a day's food,  was just two wadas.  Left starving for a second day,  they got in touch with Tamil Nadu's MP Nawas Ghani and through him  with Delhi KMCC General Secretary Haleem asking them to make some arrangement for food on promise that they would bear the cost.   Those from Tamil Nadu and Kerala were until Friday morning consistently keeping touch with different organizations and social workers in Delhi for food.  In the meantime,  a few Tabligh workers in Delhi  police intervened and arranged to satisfy their hunger for the time being.

Avoidable fuss and witch-hunt

It is about three weeks since most of  those who attended the international meet,  called Alami Mashwara,  including 52 from Kerala,  had arrived back in their native places.  There are also several others who stay in the tablighi centre as customary before leaving.  But one lady,  who had gone from Kollam in Kerala to Mewat near Delhi,  and was classified as positive in Kerala,  had not attended the Alami Mashwara.

Those who had attended the international meet and subsequently came for the joint conference of Andhra Pradesh-Telengana workers,  have returned.   The lockdown was announced after the end of the Tamil Nadu conference on 24 March; reason why more from Tamil Nadu got stranded.  The batches who were present in the markaz when Delhi police came to take control of the centre,  were the ones who came there to start for 40 days of tablighi activities and to report at the centre after that.  These, including natives and foreigners, were people who would at any point of time be there at the headquarters in Nizamuddin.   This fact is known - more than any one else -  to,the officers in Nizamuddin police station sharing a wall with the markaz and the ministry of home affairs that regularly collects intelligence from there. 

Many who berate the Tablighi side insist that they should have shown the kind of farsightedness and propriety that were not shown by those who held the country's parliament sessions and official functions involving regular interactions with many foreigners.  That crticism also betrays an ignorance about the basic nature and organisatioal  structure of the tablighi jamaat and their limitations.  The blame also ignores the fact that people reach the Nizamuddin centre on a daily basis from within and outside the country,  not after obtaining permisson from headquarters,  as is the case with many organisations.

In a nutshell,  what transpired in Nizamuddin is a stirring up of a hornet's nest with hunting which could have been avoided if the Centre and Delhi government had willed so.   Those who make capital out of the situation also have a wicked strategy that if a general perception is created about the tablighi jamat as transmitters of Covid,  that can intensify the communal polarisation which they target.   Things became all the easier for such quareters with a new practice setting in by which figures of total Covid  cases are disclosed with a mention of the number of tablighis centre cases in them – a practice  of Modi government emulated by the Delhi government and promptly followed by other chief ministers.