While states were kept in the dark, the Centre drew on its legal powers to monopolise decision-making on key aspects like testing strategy, kits and emergency supplies

The pandemic has not been kind to Delhi. The state government, no stranger to pugilist moves in politics, is locked in a grim battle. Even since the lockdown was eased, horror stories have been escaping out of city hospitals like ghouls out to torment the populace. The city’s Covid graph is soaring; overloaded hospitals are turning away patients, letting them die without proper medical care. But what’s a crisis if not an opportunity for some extra lashings of mayhem?

We were not disappointed: two contentious decisions came along from chief minister Arvind Kejriwal to set off a right royal row. One was on barring admission to patients from outside Delhi to state-run hospitals. The order was sent back to the pavilion by the lieutenant-governor, Anil Baijal, before you could pronounce N95. The other was a revised testing strategy—that asymptomatic people will be restricted from testing. Again, the L-G scalped it, directing the state to adhere to guidelines set by ICMR. The soundness of the decisions—or the lack of it—in terms of ethics or effective epidemic policy is one thing. But the episode framed a central conflict at the heart of India’s Covid-19 battle—central being an accidental word there. The key question is: who owns an epidemic?

Kejriwal’s U-turn—from being a votary of aggressive testing to a subdued line—baffled all, and gave enough ammunition to the Centre to train its guns on the state. Not only because this was flip-flop—a pandemic is a dynamic flux, and policy needs to be alive rather than rigid. The real issue was whether a state could adopt its own strategy, in tune with its needs, but at variance with the broad national template. There are competing formal frameworks at play here. Health is a state subject under the Constitution. At the same time, a pandemic is a national event—indeed, global. Rich mig­rants courier in infection from abroad, poor migrants connect it to the last mile. It calls for national collaboration to solve it, a measure of uniformity in policy. But how much uniformity? And who examines the content of that policy for its soundness? Whose perspectives would feed it? Does it reflect India’s multiple experiential realities? Is it consultative enough? A restriction on autonomy at state level, essentially, creates the spectre of a monopoly in policymaking. In short, it seems to have fallen upon a tiny virus you cannot see to invoke another thing you cannot see much in India these days: a federal spirit.