In Srinagar, the city where I live in Indian administered Kashmir, the streets are deserted under a lockdown. But through Twitter, I hear cries of desperation across India: a son who asks for an oxygen cylinder to save his mother; a girl pumping a parent’s breast outside a hospital; an elderly man transporting his deceased wife on a bicycle to find a place to cremate her; all of India turns into a pyre because of mass cremations.
As the number of new Covid-19 cases increases by the hundreds of thousands a day, Indian Twitter, with its 18.9 million users, is now a collection of desperation. Yet it has also turned into something else: a sort of emergency line for citizens where neighbors cry out for help from their neighbors. Using hashtags like #CovidSOS and #SOSIndia makes an article successful. Other users respond with resources or tag other people, hoping that someone …nobody—May be able to help you. Volunteers in the field working with NGOs or relief groups sometimes respond directly or advise on local sources of resources. Groups have also formed on Telegram and WhatsApp to find oxygen tanks, empty beds and other essentials. Activity on these platforms is both encouraging evidence of people coming together and a rebuke of the government’s inability to prevent, contain and combat this second wave of Covid-19.
Somya Lakhani, a journalist with 12,000 Twitter followers, had Covid-19. She suffered from severe headaches and sore throat and was out of breath. Even lifting a single finger hurts. Unable to sleep, she took to Twitter at 4 a.m. and retweeted calls from people who were in even more critical condition, trying to amplify and spread those SOS messages. We asked help for a 37-year-old nurse who worked at a Covid-19 center in New Delhi. “She needs help, an intensive care bed… (please) help.” #CovidSOS #COVIDEmergency. Lakhani scrolled through her feed and frantically called or DM’ed the numbers of the resources she found listed there. An hour later, she tweeted once again: “She is no more.”
“I was going to Twitter as a last resort after nothing worked offline for me,” Lakhani said, adding that his MDs are now inundated with requests from Covid-19 patients and the phone keeps ringing . But with growing demand and chaos across the country, the tracks are drying up. “We are losing eight out of ten people that we raise SOS for,” she said. “Where is the government? I have no one to ask for help. How long can Twitter run the country for them? “
In January, at the World Economic Forum, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who heads the Hindu nationalist government, boasted of India’s success in containing the novel coronavirus. “The country where 18% of the world’s population lives saved the world – all of humanity – from a major tragedy by effectively controlling the crown,” he said. But then the guardrails came down. The government allowed masses of people to attend Hindu festivals, and ruling party members spoke at political rallies with tens of thousands of attendees.
All hell broke loose: the big hospitals in metropolitan cities lacked oxygen; patients have died while awaiting medical assistance; and the crematoriums lacked firewood. People have been left to fend for themselves. Official counts cause more deaths than 3000 every day, but experts say that real number is much higher.
In a sense, just by exposing the shortcomings of official aid, India’s Twitter is full of implicit criticism of the Modi government. But the platform itself has complied with a government crackdown on explicit criticism. Twitter deleted at least 53 tweets challenging the government’s handling of the pandemic. New regulations in India require social media platforms to erase content that authorities deem illegal; Twitter said The Washington Post that it has blocked tweets in accordance with local law.
