New Delhi: Industrialist Rajiv Bajaj (53), managing director of Bajaj Auto, on Thursday said India had implemented a "draconian" but porous lockdown, which ending up decimating its economy and flattening the GDP curve, instead of flattening the curve of the coronavirus infections. He was quite blunt in his chat with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi as a part of the series in which the former Congress president talks to experts on the pandemic's impact on India.
"You flattened the wrong curve. It is not the infection curve, it is the GDP curve. This is what we have ended (up) with—the worst of both worlds," Bajaj said, asserting that reopening the economy will be a herculean task as "we are not seeing a smooth, concerted, rhythmic movement towards unlocking." First, he wants a "very clear, aligned narrative" from none other than the Prime Minister to take the fear of coronavirus out of the people's mind.
"On the one hand, a porous lockdown makes sure that the virus will still exist and, as you said, it is still waiting to hit you when you will unlock. So you have not solved that problem,” Bajaj told Gandhi. Being an Asian country, Bajaj said he expected India to look at eastern nations than at Italy, France or Spain which can't be its right benchmarks. “Unfortunately, India not only looked to the West, it went to the ‘wild West’. I think we stayed more towards the impervious side.” Reacting to the conversation, senior Congress leader and former Union minister Jairam Ramesh tweeted that "Bajaj is right.
The GDP curve had been flattened by the Modi government much before COVID-19. India is now "na ghar ka, na ghat ka," he added. Bajaj said he had not heard about the kind of lockdown in India anywhere else in the world. "All my friends and family from across the world have always been free to step out, to take a walk, to go and buy something they require, to go and visit someone and say hello. So, in terms of the social and emotional aspects of this lockdown, they seem to have been in a much better place."
"Some of us who can afford it are not too unhappy to be home. But when you see what is happening around you with both businesses and with the masses, it is certainly more bitter than sweet. So every day brings a new learning on how to cope with it, whether in terms of business, in terms of one’s own emotions, in medical terms," Bajaj said. Endorsing him, Rahul Gandhi said: "It’s quite surreal. I don’t think anyone imagined that the world would be locked down in this way. I don’t think even during the world war, the world was locked down.
Even then, things were open. It’s a unique and devastating sort of phenomena." Rahul agreed with Bajaj that "well off people can deal with this kind of situation. They have a home, they have an ecosystem which is comfortable, but what it has been for the poor people, for the migrants, has been completely devastating. They have lost confidence. ‘‘Kaafi logon ne bola hai ki bharosa kho gaya hai, bharosa hi nahi bacha and that I think is a very sad and a dangerous thing for the country." ‘‘What should have been done is something more right of the Centre.
Which is the kind of stuff that we are hearing is coming out of Japan and Sweden. And people, when they hear about this in terms of being articulated as herd immunity, tend to think that herd immunity means let the vulnerable die. It doesn’t mean that at all. They are missing the details, whether it is in terms of sanitisation, masks, distancing etc. Sweden, Japan etc. are following all these practices but they are not trying to go further into the unproductive zone and make something that is relatively benign and manageable appear to be fatal and beyond control. I think unfortunately we have a quasi-hard lockdown, which has given us the worst of both worlds," pointed out Bajaj.
The industrialist also talked of some mood elevator to come out of the present morass. "We have to get demand going again, we have to provide something that lifts the mood of the people. We need some mood elevator. And I do not understand why there is no strong initiative, even if it is for a period of six months or one year, to strongly lift the mood of the people and provide a stimulus to demand.’’
RAJIV IS NO HEALTH EXPERT: BJP The central government went for a lockdown to avoid any large-scale fatality due to COVID-19 as its priority was to save people's lives and build health infrastructure during the period to deal with the pandemic, the BJP asserted on Thursday. It played down industrialist Rajiv Bajaj's remarks, saying he "is not an expert" on the health crisis. BJP spokesperson on economic affairs Gopal Krishna Agarwal said Gandhi had used Bajaj as a "bouncing wall" for his ideas during the conversation in which the opposition leader did "most" of the talking.
BJP's Amit Malviya had a dig at the industrialist, noting that he "hailed" Sweden's strategy of not imposing a lockdown to deal with the pandemic, even as the country's chief epidemiologist has admitted that this approach was a mistake, causing a high rate of fatality. Agarwal added that many countries have "failed" in their approach to the pandemic, and there is no one fixed pattern. Lockdown is not a cure to the coronavirus, that everybody knows, he said.
