When Gandhi battled an epidemic

I’ve written in these columns about Gandhi’s response to the plague epidemic in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1905.

When after an abatement, the contagion was threatening to reappear, he wrote an article in his journal Indian Opinion on January 16, 1905, which bears substantial copy. “Once again the dark clouds are gathering. It will be to the great benefit of our people if they bear in mind the following rules; otherwise there would be immense harm. What is more, it might be used as an argument for enacting more severe laws against us: (1) No one should think that the government will harass the patient after removing him to the hospital. (2) The government should be immediately informed in case of a sudden attack of fever or asthma. (3) A doctor should be immediately consulted. (4) Everyone should stay where he is without becoming panicky. (5) Those who might have come in contact with a plague patient should not try to conceal the fact but should come forward to have their clothes etc, disinfected. (6) One should not, under any circumstances, have one’s bedroom attached to the shop to save money. (7) One should not stock any goods for sale in one’s house. (8) One should keep one’s house scrupulously clean. (9) Every house or room should be well-lighted and well-ventilated. (10) One should sleep with the windows open. (11) The clothes worn by day as well as those used during the night should be kept clean. (12) The food taken should be light and simple. (13) Lavish dinners and feasts should be stopped. (14) Dry earth or ashes should be provided in latrines where buckets are used; and everyone should after easing himself cover the night soil thoroughly with these so that no flies sit thereon. (15) Lavatories and urinals should be kept clean. (16) The floors and other parts of the house should be washed clean with disinfecting fluid mixed in hot water. (17) No article from an infected place should be used elsewhere. (18) More than two persons should not sleep in a room of normal proportions. (19) One should not sleep in the kitchen, dining room or the larder. (20) Walls should be plastered with cement in order to keep out rats. Care should, most of all, should be taken to see that foodstuffs are kept beyond their reach. (21) Those who always work indoors should go out into the open air and walk a couple of miles daily for exercise.”

One can see behind every of the objects he has listed the presence of the rat. It is a plague-resisting checklist. Yet, the notes of warning, in factors 4, 5, 11, 12, 13 , 14 , 15, 16 , 17 and 18, learn like they’ve been written for our current Covid-19 pandemic.

If Gandhi spelt out in no unsure phrases the obligations of people and of society, he didn’t spare the municipality its share of the blame. The municipality’s all-white officers believed and led others to consider that the unfold of plague among the many Indians was as a consequence of their insanitary methods — an impression that Gandhi sought strenuously to dispel by writing within the South African press and lobbying with members of the House of Commons and political leaders equivalent to Dadabhai Naoroji in Britain and Gopal Krishna Gokhale in India.

The city council, at the moment, had begun to take insensitive, callous and medically-uncalled-for steps equivalent to shifting sufferers to canvas sheds in an open subject about 13 miles from town. Gandhi pilloried the council for its preliminary sluggish response to the epidemic and — most vital— its therapy of the unfold (till Gandhi made it realise the error of its methods) as one thing to do with the color of the sick man’s pores and skin.

He was combating plague and prejudice.

I have to remind readers that Gandhi had, somewhat earlier, labored with chosen volunteers, to minister to 23 victims of the plague outbreak in that metropolis. All the victims had been of Indian origin, working in a gold mine simply exterior town. Twenty one of many victims died, as did the only real nurse the municipality had supplied. Rigorous hygiene and luck helped Gandhi and his colleagues, together with a courageous physician, William Godfrey, to outlive.

So, is that this narrative merely a historic recall?

No historic allusion needs to be considered “merely” that, for historical past, when precisely and pretty recalled, with out exaggeration or embroidering will not be a narrative, however the residing fact of the current previously and the residing previous sooner or later.

But that truism aside, this narrative is significant for we will make certain that the world goes to stay with this pandemic for a protracted whereas, as will the necessity to struggle each the virus and, the place they happen, our errors in dealing with it.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a former administrator, diplomat and governor

The views expressed are private