Unplanned lockdown, mishandled return: Why governments are responsible for Punjab’s Nanded COVID cases
In the past week, the active cases of the novel coronavirus in Punjab have increased nearly six times—up from 219 on 28 April to 1,364 on 6 May, according to government figures—as close to seven thousand people returned to the state from places in Maharasthra, Rajasthan and Gujarat. Primary among these were over four thousand pilgrims who were stuck for over a month at gurudwaras in Maharashtra’s Nanded district, many of whom are now lodged in state quarantine facilities and are being blamed for furthering the virus’s spread in Punjab. As of 6 May, 969 of these returnee pilgrims had tested positive. Some media houses and others on social-media have characterised the Nanded pilgrims as irresponsible and compared them to the members of the Tablighi Jamaat cluster of cases, from Delhi’s Nizammudin area, who were vilified as well.
But retracing the timeline of events that transpired since Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed the janata curfew—or people’s curfew—on 22 March makes it clear that the Nanded pilgrims were victims of unresponsive central and state administrations that denied their repeated requests for evacuation, and did not ensure their health and safety. The Punjab government only arranged for buses to bring the devotees back in late April, over a month after the lockdown began, and then did not enforce proper screening before re-entry—in fact, many pilgrims appear to have been tested and quarantined only after positive cases began to emerge. Owing to the haphazard manner in which these pilgrims and other state residents were finally allowed re-entry, the source from which they contracted the virus remains unclear and hard to trace. Meanwhile, the politicians in Maharashtra and Punjab are only lobbying blame.
Nanded is home to several historical gurudwaras, including the Hazur Sahib gurudwara, which is among the Panj Takht, the five temporal seats of Sikhism. Many pilgrims were staying at the serais, or inns, of the Nanded gurudwaras. In addition to the pilgrims, about three thousand daily-wage labourers and 153 students from Kota, Rajasthan, were also brought back to Punjab in recent days, according to government figures.
It is common practice for pilgrims and devotees from Punjab to visit the historical gurudwaras between February and March, when the festival of Holi is celebrated—for many farming families in rural areas, this is the only time before the harvest that they can leave their villages. Harbinder Singh was among nearly fifty people who left the border village of Sur Singh on 5 March. “After visiting various Gurudwaras, we reached Nanded on 14 March and intended to come back by 25 March or so. We were staying at Gurudwara Langar Sahib”—another gurudwara in Nanded, located close to the Hazur Sahib.
But on 22 March, Modi imposed a janata curfew. Three days later, he announced a nationwide lockdown, until 14 April. The pilgrims were stuck, unable to go back home. “Meanwhile, the harvesting season started in Punjab,” Gurmeet Singh Mahajan, a member of the gurudwara board for the Hazur Sahib, said. It was already March end, and rumours were rife that the lockdown would last for several months. The devotees were scared, Mahajan said. Many were worried that they would be unable to harvest their crops in time.
Harbinder said that gurudwara authorities made sure that the devotees were well fed. The district authorities also screened the pilgrims for fever a few times. But maintaining social distancing norms was not possible, he said, nor did the authorities do anything to ensure these were followed. Desperate to get home, some with family back home depending on them to harvest the crop, “some of the pilgrims hired cabs for huge amounts of money like Rs 70,000 or so,” Harbinder said. He returned to Punjab in late April, in the same truck that he had left in. He is currently under quarantine at the Tarn Taran Civil Hospital.
Karamjit Singh, from the village Thatha in the Chabhal area, said that his wife, his daughter and he had set off from the gurudwara Patna Sahib—another of the five temporal seats, located in Bihar—for Nanded, on 18 March. After visiting the Nanded gurudwaras, they were headed back to Punjab, also in a truck. “We were held up at the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh border,” he said, referring to government authorities. “We were asked to go back to Nanded on 24 March.”
Karamjit and his family eventually left a month later. “We started on 24 April and reached here”—Punjab—“on the evening of 27 April. The next morning, the authorities came to take us for the government quarantine. My wife and daughter tested negative while I tested positive,” he said. He, too, is in quarantine at a government facility in Tarn Taran.
Since late March, “the Gurudwara board was continuously writing to the authorities to provide a safe passage to these travellers,” Mahajan said. Documents that I perused showed this trail of attempts, by the board and local politicians. On 30 March, the local member of parliament, Prataprao Patil Chikhalikar, of the Bharatiya Janata Party, wrote to the union home minister Amit Shah and the union transport minister Nitin Gadkari, seeking permission to send back the nearly one thousand eight hundred devotees stuck in Hazur Sahib. Chikhalikar appended a letter by Baba Balwinder Singh, who serves on the Kar Sewa—or social-work—committee of the Langar Sahib gurudwara. Baba Balwinder, too, requested Shah and Gadkari to help the devotees find a way home. “Post the lockdown, we contacted and requested the government officials multiple number of time to arrange for the return of these devotees,” Baba Balwinder told me. On 12 April, Gurwinder Singh Wadhwa, the superintendent of the gurudwara board, wrote a letter to the railways minister Piyush Goel, which was also copied to the Prime Minister’s Office, requesting the evacuation of the devotees stuck in Hazur Sahib.
Though various politicians seemed to have taken note of the matter, no help materialised. Mahajan told me that Prakash Javadekar, the union minister for information and broadcasting, told the gurudwara authorities that “nearly fifteen crore people in India were stuck in similar situations and that the government was formulating a policy for everybody.” Mahajan added, “In fact, two special trains were announced for 17 April or so and these devotees even got their tickets booked, but these were cancelled due to COVID spread. We were also planning to send them by air but that also did not materialise,” he said. Echoing Harbinder, Mahajan said that eventually, some devotees spent large amounts of money from their personal funds and managed to arrange private vehicles to take them home, in violation of the lockdown.
On 22 April, Bhupinder Singh Manhas, the president of the Gurudwara Board Takhat Sachkhand Sri Hazur Abchalnagar Sahib—the board of the Hazur Sahib—sent a letter addressed the home minister Amit Shah, which was copied to the Prime Minister’s Office; to Harsimrat Kaur Badal, the union food-processing industries minister, who is from Punjab’s opposition party, the Shiromani Akali Dal; and Amarinder Singh and Uddhav Thackeray, the chief ministers of Punjab and Maharashtra. In his letter, Manhas wrote, “Those that had come for the Holi festival to Takth Sachkhand Shri Hazur Sahib, Nanded, their numbers include 332 at Hazur Sahib and 3708 at Gurudwara Langar Sahib, and among them are old people, children and women … They’ve been stuck here for a period of nearly one month, since 20 March.”
Manhas said that those who were staying at the Hazur Sahib had been quarantined at the inns of the gurudwara. “At regular intervals, on the orders of the district officials, Nanded, via the district personnel, they have been checked thoroughly. They are completely healthy, they have no signs of cough, throat pain, fever or such symptoms of Corona,” he wrote. Baba Balwinder told me, “There used to be regular check-ups and not even a single patient was found to be positive. The pilgrims had three different check-ups including two from government doctors … There was no case in Nanded during those days.”
In his letter, Manhas said that these pilgrims were all residing in or associated with north India or Punjab. “Right now, in all of northern India and in Punjab, it is time to harvest the wheat crop. These people all depend on this harvest for their income. Their income for the whole year comes from this crop.” As the pilgrims remained stranded in Nanded, their crop was waiting for them in the fields. “In this situation it is really urgent for them to return home,” Manhas wrote.
In the month that they were stuck in Nanded, some among the devotees made videos on their phones, pleading with the government to take them back home, where many of them had kids waiting. They posted these to social-media websites. In one video, a Sikh man in a yellow turban can be seen saying, “The thought of the devotees stuck here hasn’t crossed anybody’s minds. I want to request all the MPs of Punjab, all the Rajya Sabha members, to bring back the devotees stuck at various gurudwaras.” Another woman says, “Naa ithe koi Badal aay te na Captain”—Neither the Badals came here, nor the Captain. (The latter refers to Amarinder Singh, who is popularly called Captain.)
After a month of waiting, the pilgrims finally received help to return to Punjab. The day that Manhas wrote his letter, Amarinder posted to Twitter that the home ministry had granted the Maharashtra government to allow the devotees to leave. The chief minister said that he would arrange for the devotees’ transport. The next day, the Punjab government told the media that it had requested the government of Maharashtra to allow the devotees to leave. “On 27 April, the Punjab Government sent nearly 78 buses and we also sent a fleet of 10 buses of our own on 26 April,” Baba Balwinder told me.
But the government’s effort did not appear to be properly planned, and appeared to have put the pilgrims, as well as other returning residents, at risk of exposure to the virus. For one, upon hearing that the pilgrims of Nanded were receiving a passage home, thousands of labourers who were stranded in other states, trying to go to Punjab, set out for Maharashtra instead. “A lot of harvester-combine operators”—largely daily-wage workers—“from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and so on, had come to Nanded when they heard of the permission to return,” Baba Balwinder said. A senior Punjab government official, who asked not to be named, told me that the government decided to bring back the labourers along with the pilgrims, as well as students from Punjab who were studying in Rajasthan. Social distancing during travel would have been near impossible.
According to Mahajan, the cavalcade of buses took two routes, “one from Gujarat-Rajasthan and other one from Madhya Pradesh.” He added, “They would have obviously stopped en route for some time.” Ram Singh, a priest at the Hazur Sahib gurudwara told me that “the buses also picked up farm labourers on the way, in Indore and in Haryana.” The first fleet, of 10 buses, carrying more than two hundred passengers, reached Bathinda in Punjab on the morning of 26 April.
The government of Punjab did not appear to have prepared in advance to screen the returning residents. According to Mahajan, “The first lot of devotees was just allowed to go to their homes without any screening.”
The senior Punjab government official said, “The response was slow due to the lack of time since everybody was first allowed to come back without any screening on the borders and the panic rose when a few were found to be positive after information from the locals. So much for the preparedness and the claims.” He added that “a string of letters had been issued to the district authorities in the previous few days leading to confusion and chaos.”
The letters show the gaps in the government’s planning, which resulted in many returnees having reached their homes before being screened or tested for COVID-19. One communication issued by Anurag Agarwal, the principal secretary for health and family welfare in the Punjab government, on 27 April, to all district commissioners and civil surgeons. “Persons coming in group of four or more from Rajasthan or Delhi are to be put in quarantine in facilities identified by District Administration,” it said, without mentioning Nanded or Maharashtra. Agarwal issued another communication the same day, which said that since five asymptomatic persons returning from Nanded had tested positive in Tarn Taran, “it has been decided that all returnees from Shri Hazur Saheb are to be put in quarantine facilities identified by District Administration.” He directed that samples of all the returning people be collected and tested for COVID-19. By this time, hundreds had already reached the state and returned to their homes.
The letter still did not include any mention of the migrant labourers or students, who had returned as well. On 28 April, Agarwal issued another letter, finally directing that “Persons coming into Punjab from outside are to be put in quarantine facilities,” and asked for them to be tested.
That day, the positive cases in Punjab began spiking. On 28 April, Punjab recorded 12 new cases of the novel coronavirus. The next day, the number rose to 33. On 30 April, it recorded 105 new cases. According the media bulletin issued by the state’s national health mission, at least eighty two of these were cases where the source of infection was “likely outside Punjab.”
The same day, Agarwal issued another letter, admitting that “a considerable number of migrants/returnees have arrived in the state in the past few days and when tested for COVID, turned out to be COVID positive.” The letter asked the commissioners to furnish information regarding the state these returnees were coming from and the location-wise details of these migrants within each district on 30 April itself. The same day, Agarwal issued yet another guideline, for quarantine facilities. The order instructed district authorities to quarantine all “returnees/migrants” in government facilities and not at home, even if they had tested negative.
Since then, the numbers have only climbed. On 2, 3 and 5 May, Punjab recorded 187, 331 and 219 new cases, respectively. Most of these were suspected to be from outside the state. “These devotees have been wronged, and rather acquired the infection because of a delay in action by the government authorities,” Mahajan said. The senior government official said, “I wish the government had stressed more on screening than on PR videos.”
He was referring to the politicians’ responses to the Nanded pilgrims’ crisis. The confusion over their repatriation obscured the manner in which these pilgrims could have acquired the virus, and set off a blame game between different authorities. Leaders in Punjab have either been attempting to deflect blame for the rising cases, or attempting to take credit for the rescue of these devotees. The union minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal, of the SAD, had been releasing updates on social media and to the press, stating that she had been speaking with the home ministry to seek permission for the evacuation. In mid April, she told the media that she requested Narendra Modi, the prime minister, to run special trains to bring back the stranded. When the home ministry granted permission for the evacuation on 22 April, Badal thanked Shah through a tweet, and said that the SAD had arranged buses to bring the devotees back.
The SAD and the Congress, the ruling party, have been quibbling over the Nanded issue—SAD leaders have criticised the state health minister Balbir Singh Sidhu’s handling of the process and demanded his resignation. SAD leaders claimed that the government’s failures to arrange proper transportation or ensure that social distancing measures were followed during the journey led the victims to be infected and then stigmatised. Sidhu, on the other hand, described the SAD’s criticism as having “unnecessarily hyped the issue.” He instead blamed the Maharasthra government for being “lax” for not testing the pilgrims for Coronavirus while they were in Nanded.
In early May, news emerged that several sewadars, or volunteers, of Gurdwara Langar Sahib Nanded had tested positive after tests were conducted there. In a statement to the media, on 3 May, Sidhu said that in view of this development, “it was evident that pilgrims had contracted the virus before entering Punjab.” Sidhu said that just as the labour and students returning from Kota having tested positive did not involve any controversy, nor did the cases of the stranded pilgrims returning from Nanded.
Meanwhile, Maharastra’s public-works department minister, Ashok Chavan, said on 2 May that the drivers from Punjab, who drove the buses, may have infected the Nanded pilgrims. The Punjab government rubbished this claim. Razia Sultana, Punjab’s transport minister, described Chavan’s statement as “misleading” and “bereft of facts.” Sultana said that a first batch of 31 vehicles, which included 20 buses and 11 tempo travellers, and which ferried 860 pilgrims from Nanded to Punjab, were all Maharashtra vehicles with a Maharashtra crew. She further added that the first three groups of pilgrims came via private vehicles that were arranged locally in Nanded. By 2 May, four bus drivers who were part of the fleet that drove to Punjab tested positive in Nanded, according to a report in the Times of India.
On 1 May, Amarinder, the Punjab chief minister, said that there is no need to panic about the rise in cases, which was only due to those returning to the state. Amarinder claimed that all those who were returning were being screened, and would get the required treatment if they were found to be positive. “We have a war at our hands, and it is time not to score brownie points but to show unity,” Amarinder said. But referring to the fact that several staffers at the Nanded gurudwara had tested positive, Amarinder said that the SAD’s claim—that the pilgrims had been infected on the way back or on reaching Punjab—stood discredited.
In Punjab, social-media users and some media publications compared the Nanded pilgrims who tested positive to the members of the Tablighi Jamaat. In late March, news emerged that an outbreak of the novel coronavirus had been recorded among those who attended a conference by the Islamic revivalist organisation, in Delhi’s Nizamuddin area. Following the discovery of the outbreak, various sections of the media as well as the union government depicted the Jamaatis as irresponsible carriers of the virus, leading to a stigmatisation of Muslims across the nation.
Many, including the religious leaders of the Sikh community, are unhappy with the comparison to the Jamaat, worried that it would result in Sikhs being stigmatised as well. Some devotees I spoke to, who did not wish to be identified, told me that they felt “harassed” and as if they had been defamed.
Referring to the Nanded pilgrims, the senior government official told me, “They were stranded there. We tried tracing nearly six hundred of Tablighi Jamaat participants from Punjab and till date could not ascertain most of the information in most of these cases.” He added, “Unlike them and those who continued their work during lockdown in places like Jalandhar, we know the start and the end point of these devotees and their quarantine would be easier.”
Harpreet Singh, the Akal Takht Jathedar—the head of the Sikh clergy—described the comparison to the Tablighi Jamaat as a conspiracy to defame Sikhs, as the Jamaatis had been. In a video message posted to his on his Facebook, he said, “The way there was a competition to defame the Muslims on the name of Tablighi Jamat, now the propaganda is pointing at Takht Hazoor Saheb being the ‘Corona da ghar’”—the home of corona—“and these devotees being the carriers of this disease for spreading it in Punjab.”
The jathedar criticised the government facilities at which the returning pilgrims are being quarantined. While those who have tested positive are admitted to civil hospitals, others, who are under observation or quarantine, are lodged at buildings that belong to the Radha Soami Satsang Deras—a religious sect. This has offended the Sikh clergy, as the Sikh faith is opposed to such sects. “Religious feelings of others are being hurt by keeping them in deras,” the jathedar said. “This is irresponsible on the part of the government.” He suggested that the government coordinate with the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbhandhak Committee, an organisation responsible for the management of certain gurudwaras. Baba Balwinder, too, suggested a similar solution. “If the government wants to quarantine them, then they should be kept in Gurudwaras,” he said. “Please don’t look at them with suspicion. Rather, support them.
But both Harbinder and Karamjit, who returned from Nanded, want to be quarantined at home. Though they tested positive, they are otherwise asymptomatic. Karamjit said he was worried that many children might end up getting the infection in the quarantine facility. Malkiat Singh, a 20-year-old resident of Mughal Chak village shared similar fears. He had arrived on 30 April in the government fleet, and was now in a quarantine facility, with his family. “My cousin Lovepreet tested positive and we all not only tested negative but are feeling absolutely normal too, and have still been quarantined,” he said. “I feel the chances of getting infected this way are far higher.”
Summarising the situation that these pilgrims have found themselves in, the senior government official said, “These victims are the ones who got stranded and stayed at one place as per the orders. They deserve an apology from all those who failed them.”
Other pilgrims I spoke to relayed more details of government neglect, even in quarantine. Shivraj Singh, a resident of village Uppal in the Khadoor Sahib constituency, said that four members of his family had been put in the state quarantine facilities. The local authorities incorrectly told them that they had tested negative for COVID-19. “My six-year-old son, Harkirat, my mother Harbhajan Kaur, my sister-in-law and her three year old son, Gurfateh Singh, all left for Nanded by train on 16 March and were supposed to return on 29 March,” Shivraj told me.
After being stranded for nearly a month, the family travelled on tempos arranged by the Nanded gurudwaras, reaching Amritsar on 26 April. “After the screening, they were told to go home. I went and fetched them in my personal car. On 27 April, they were told to quarantine themselves at a Khadoor Saheb Gurudwara,” Shivraj continued. On 3 May, the family was told that they had tested negative. “The kids were playing together, and everyone interacted socially. However, yesterday at about 2.30 pm, I got a call from the sub-divisional magistrate’s office, informing me that my mother, the three-year-old nephew, and my sister-in-law have tested positive.” Meanwhile, Shivraj said, a local reporter published a news item maligning him and his family, painting them as irresponsible carriers of the coronavirus.
According to the members of the Nanded gurudwara boards that I spoke to, 33 persons have tested positive for COVID-19 in Nanded so far, of which 27 are the sewadars of various Sikh shrines. Many such volunteers were involved in feeding not only those stranded here and those who joined from the other states, but even the local population in need.