Who is CoronaVirus?

Who is CoronaVirus?

Strange question, you say? Not at all, I say.

The “what?” of CoronaVirus, now commonly referred to as COVID-19, is important and of interest to this blogger as much as it is to everybody else, but so is its “who?”, or in other words the increasing number of  identities that are now getting assigned to this new plague the origins of which remain hotly contested. The president of the USA, Trumpola the Racist Buffoon, continues to insist that it is a “Chinese Virus”. Many others of his ilk, the noisy demagogues, the populist charlatans in his own country and around the world, have called it the “Wuhan virus”, the “foreign virus”, the “Asian virus’ and even the “Yellow virus” (read “Yellow peril”).  Many Chinese----and Chinese-looking people-----have become victims of xenophobic abuse, some even physically attacked.  The plagues of fear and loathing follow them everywhere more viciously than the actual pathogen itself.

In our own part of the world, Pakistan, the discussions and debates, both in the corridors of power and especially in the country’s cacophonous electronic-digital media that is infested with an army of obscenely partisan talk show hosts, maskhara (comic) experts and script-reading, hired-gun  “anal-ysts” are not lagging behind in giving the new virus regional, ethnic and sectarian identities. It seems the blame game is in full swing in order to ascertain the irresponsible (the criminal and “sinful”) agents for importing and spreading the disease in the country. While the top authorities in the government (including the president of the republic) of the vindictive ego-man, PM Kaptaan Insaaf Khan, and the discarded, corrupt rabble-rousers in the dysfunctional opposition, tout, almost on a daily basis, that the Pakistanis infected with COVID-19 have no Chinese links, have no history of travel to that friendly country (CPEC, billions of dollars in aid, soft-loans and investments----all understandable), they don’t waste a second to target and blame other communities, peoples and even particular countries for the spread of the new influenza virus in Pakistan. They, these people in positions of power, may or may not have any chauvinistic intentions but in a country ridden with all sorts of inequities, where the nature of power relations between the dominant and the dominated, between the center and the peripheries is what Roger Garaudy once called "a relation of the sick and the deceived", the identities of these blamed people who are often from the minority and historically maligned and marginalized communities are bound to become nastily entangled with any such pathogen and the blame discourse bound to quickly morph into that of biological racism. Recent history is full of such cases, whether in the modern West or elsewhere in modern-(ising) Asia and Africa.

In one such toxic strain of this ugly discourse, the contestants are battling it out in public, one side arguing that the virus came to Pakistan from the Wahabi kingdom---the Saudi kingdom of clown prince MbS---and the other side arguing, equally if not more ferociously, that it was brought to the country from Shia Iran and spread by the returning zaireen, the Shia pilgrims, that frequent that country all year round. Khwaja Asif, a gaffe prone opposition stalwart from PML-N, has actually openly accused the special assistant to the PM for overseas Pakistanis (SAPM), the shady Zulfi Bokahri, for allowing these zaireen to return to their homes in different parts of the country without proper screening and testing for the virus at the Pak-Iran border town of Taftan in Balochistan province.  Bokhari has now sued the loud-mouthed khwaja for defamation and for endangering his life.  Like most other things in the country, ethno-sectarian bigotry has now been injected into this discourse, too. In Quetta, for example, the minority community of Hazaras, targets of decades long indiscriminate killing, victims of terrorism at the hands of both non-state and state-sponsored agents and who are already ghettoized in two neglected wards of the city, have strongly objected to the officially sanctioned policy that was announced by the rather gauche chief secretary of the province in a press conference a few days ago, a policy of quarantine and “social isolation” that the Hazaras see more as another act that will only exacerbate their economic, political and cultural marginalization and ghettoization than a reasonable precautionary measure in the fight against the new virus. As I write these lines, new groups are being identified and blamed as the super-spreaders of COVID-19, such as the Deowbandi Tableeghi Jamaat in Sindh and Punjab.

The CoronaVirus, or COVID-19, has no nationality or ethnicity. It is neither religious nor secular. It is not a Sunni, Shia, Deowbandi or Barelvi pandemic; nor is it Chinese, Iranian, Indian, American or Arab. Although some of my leftist-Marxist friends, with whom I have always disagreed on many things and this is one more of those things, have said to me that this virus does have a “class” in the sense that it will kill mostly poor people (the proletariat) than rich (the bourgeoisie), I think the facts so far are not completely supportive of their arguments, either. This virus is not a friend of some and an enemy of others. It is not some foreign enemy----the different, the strange and unfamiliar, the alien, fearful “other”----that has declared war on me, on my family, my sect, tribe, nation and people, or on “us” only. If we must use such militant or war-like terminology, then let’s try to understand that this essentially modern plague is a threat to, and the enemy of, the entire species, of all of US: us human beings. We are now increasingly using terms such as “social distance” and “social isolation”. The unfortunate thing is that the “distance” in these terms often gets filled with fear, hatred and prejudice----especially on what is called, ironically, social media. The real challenge for all of us, but especially for us Muslims, is to learn to fill it with understanding, love, care and wisdom. We can do it. We should be able to do it relatively easily because we are heirs to (and we never tire of  bragging about this!) a long and illustrious tradition of love, patience, perseverance and, above all, of hikmah (wisdom). 

Wallahu Alam.   

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