Raw deal to States

When cooperation and trust are the keywords for governments in the fight against COVID, the ruling dispensation at the Centre has, against the principles of federalism, undermined even the State governments’ spaces for negotiation.

- VENKITESH RAMAKRISHNAN

ONE OF THE KEY POINTS THAT THE HISTORIAN Yuval Noah Harari stressed in his seminal essay “The World After Coronavirus” (published in March 2020) was the need to build “a spirit of global co-operation and trust” in order to make a concerted effort to overcome the unprecedented human crisis caused by COVID-19. “Countries should be willing to share information openly and humbly seek advice, and should be able to trust the data and the insights they receive,” he said. Later, talking to Indian audiovisual media, Harari pointed out that the attacks on the Muslim minority in the country on the basis of unfounded perceptions would only weaken the initiatives to overcome the crisis. In a larger sense, he was highlighting the distrust that prevailed in the Indian society, and this observation, inarguably, was an indirect message to the political dispensations of India to build societal trust. It was also a sort of reiteration of his message to “share information openly and humbly seek advice”. Seen from a national perspective, Harari’s message should function primarily at the level of the interactions between the Central and State governments and between various State governments.