The Dark Hour: India Under Lockdowns

At a mere four hours? notice, on March 24th 2020, Prime Minister Modi announced a lockdown to contain the most devastating pandemics soon to envelop India by jumpstarting an already-crumbling healthcare system. People stormed out to panic-buy ration stocks; India?s migrant working classes started walking back to the villages, left hungry and desolate without homes, work and wages – a scene not very short of an apocalypse.

Over two summers, India woke up to similar headlines: a broken healthcare system; a languishing economy; cases rising and falling; governments greenlighting religious, superspreader events that compounded the second wave; misled unlocking of life; underreporting of cases and deaths; lakhs dead to the virus and crores infected, and still counting.

Over a year of tracking how the novel Coronavirus ravaged India?s society, economy, politics and culture, nine of India?s finest writers make sense of this difficult reality. The Dark Hour is a publisher?s anthology of specially commissioned long-form essays that unpack two ghastly summers of the Covid-19 pandemic that wreaked havoc on the many Indias within India.