Mask Off

COVID-19 denial spreads to India

- RAJNI GEORGE

“I have never worn a mask,” Jagdish Chandra told me, in November. The 51-year-old businessman from Kolkata said that he had taken six flights since September and that he carries documents that supported his right to not wear a mask while travelling. “The security person may try to say, ‘I won’t scan you,’” he added. “But, more than following the rules, I need to protect myself.” Chandra, who claimed to have filed around twenty right-to-information requests regarding the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has taken part in several recent anti-mask protests in India, which he described as part of an awareness initiative.

“There is nothing like virus,” Ashok Patel told me, a month earlier. “How can something so small harm us?” The 65-year-old former sweet-monger from Rajkot said that he is unafraid of death. “I believe in a soul, not the body. It is the government whose health is failing.” Patel has performed a sort of satyagraha over the past fifteen years, courting arrest ten times for the goal of a “party-less India.” He was part of a group of 27 people who wrote to government authorities for permission to mingle with COVID-19 patients, without any protection, to show up what they see as a hoax. (They have not received a response to date.) As part of a nationwide protest on 1 November, he wanted to present the entire Bhagavad Gita on placards displayed on the bodies of protesters; when we spoke again in late November, he told me he had been detained by the police for around four hours that day.