Covid created another loss — of trust between people and with organisations like WHO, UN

China’s pernicious surveillance practices now inform the national containment strategy of many democratic nations in Covid-19 fight. It is destroying public trust.

Representational image | Ludhiana Police has created an emergency response team, called Covid Commandos, to fight the pandemic, 16 April 2020 | ANI

Covid-19 has caused tangible losses to the world in terms of human and material resources. However, the intangible loss that is incalculable is the loss of trust in institutions of global governance, national and state governments and most importantly, among people.

The social contract between the state and the people is premised upon the doctrine of trust. People willingly part with a measure of their sovereignty and entrust it to the state premised upon the anticipation that the state would defend, protect and safeguard them when the need arises. Similarly, states also invest a part of their autonomy in inter-governmental organisations hoping that when a global problem erupts, international solutions can be found. Finally, people expect fellow human beings and neighbours to follow certain rules of engagement in human interaction and respect the privacy imperatives of each other. This is civility as opposed to civic sense.

Let me deal with this conundrum in reverse. Today, almost 8 billion people are not only fearful of the coronavirus, but they are also petrified of each other. For there are two concurrent phenomena playing out.

One, there is a virus floating in the ether against which modern science is yet to find a cure, and two, the virus alone is sterile but when it discovers a human host it transforms into a life-choking predator. So, if the virus is dangerous, its human host is equally lethal. That host could be the person right next to you in a bus, Metro, grocer’s shop or in the office. Since you could be a coronavirus carrier and yet be asymptomatic. It then institutionalises a mindset that may not be verbalised but is omnipresent — the presence of another human being around creates a sense of queasiness.

Don’t follow Chinese and Korean models

Co-terminus with it is the spectre of neighbours spying on each other and the state tracking citizens through various physical and electronic means. In China, during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-77, people were encouraged to inform on their neighbours if they displayed imperialist, bourgeoisie and elitist characteristics. They were then humiliated or killed by the ‘Red Guards’. Such was the widespread use of this pernicious form of surveillance that even children were reporting on parents and spouses on each other. It destroyed the traditional and well-knit ethos of the Chinese society, turning neighbour against neighbour.

This method of mass surveillance of people on each other is the cornerstone of the draconian North Korean regime now being run by the grandson of Kim Il-Sung who created this paradigm.

Such was the terror in North Korea when we had gone to Pyongyang 21 years back to participate in the Thirteenth World Festival of Youth and Students in 1989 that if you gave a packet of imported cigarettes to your driver or interpreter, they would smoke all of them in the car and not take the pack home out of fear that their spouse or a neighbour may report them to the authorities. If there were some left, they would return it to you with the plea to give it to them the next day. For it was a crime to possess a packet of imported cigarettes and could get you labeled as an imperialist collaborator and attendant punishment could be torture, rigorous imprisonment and even death — not necessarily in that order.

This spectre of people snooping on each other forms the basis of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s national Intelligence Law of 2017. Article 7 of the law states that “any organization or citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law,” adding that the state “protects” any individual and organisation that aids it.

Article 14 further grants intelligence agencies authority to insist on this support: “State intelligence work organs, when legally carrying forth intelligence work, may demand that concerned organs, organizations, or citizens provide needed support, assistance, and cooperation.”

Available accounts suggest that these practices were rigorously applied in Wuhan both to keep people indoors in the lockdown and also to suppress the evidence of infection fatalities from the public discourse.

Rebuilding trust globally

These pernicious practices now inform the national containment strategy of many democratic nations in the fight against Covid-19. Not only did the Chinese export the virus but they also disseminated the worst practices of mass societal control across the world. For democracies, this destruction of people’s trust in each other is going to have portentous implications in the days and months ahead.

People’s faith in local state and national institutions of governance is a contract that societies at large will revisit. If people globally are cooperating with lockdowns, it is not out of respect for governments or that a lockdown is the smartest strategy. It is sheer survival — for nothing is concentrating the mind more sharply than the possibility of dying at the hands of an invisible organism. People look up to governments for solutions in times of peril. If the solution on offer is what was practised 700 years ago during the plague called Black Death in Europe between 1346-1351, it does not inspire great confidence. During that plague also, those who had luxury to isolate themselves survived. How can people trust governments when the response globally has been so sub-optimal?

Similarly, Westphalian nation states would also be compelled to reconsider the dynamic of the global order especially the role of inter-government organisations like the United Nations, the Security Council and of course, the much-blemished World Health Organization (WHO). Except for dishing out palliatives and homilies, these organisations have done precious little since the outbreak of COVID-19. All responses have been national or local, at best.

So, in the post-Covid world, one of the biggest challenges will be to build trust horizontally among people and vertically between people and institutions of governance.

The author is a lawyer, MP and former Union information and broadcasting minister. Views are personal.