India’s BJP and its Hindu-right allies scapegoat Muslims for spread of pandemic

Wasantha Rupasinghe & Keith Jones

As if he had suddenly woken from a weeks-long sleep, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi interjected via an April 19 tweet, “COVID-19 does not see race, religion, color, caste, creed, language or border before striking. Our response and conduct thereafter should attach primacy to unity and brotherhood. We are in this together.”

Modi is a notorious Hindu supremacist, whose Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government and Hindu-right allies have relentlessly whipped up animosity against India’s Muslim minority. This has included a blatant attempt to scapegoat Muslims for the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In recent weeks, senior BJP leaders have vilified members of a Muslim religious group, the Tablighi Jamaat, many of whom became infected with COVID-19 while staying at the group’s hostel in Delhi, as “human bombs” in “the guise of coronavirus patients.” Fellow Hindu communalists have used social media, including under the hashtags #CoronaJihad and #CoronaTerrorism, to accuse Muslims of deliberately infecting Hindus with the virus. This has included circulating fake and doctored videos that purport to show Muslim hawkers licking vegetables before selling them.

As a result of this vile campaign, poor Muslims enduring a weeks-long coronavirus shutdown without work or income have been denied food, while others engaged in distributing food to the poor have been physically assaulted.

A hospital in Uttar Pradesh recently placed an ad in a local newspapers that said Muslims would only be admitted if they, unlike all other prospective patients, had first been screened for COVID-19. Meanwhile, in Gujarat another hospital reportedly divided Hindu and Muslim patients into separate wards.

An April 22 article on The Wire news site observes, “Among the economically deprived sections of Muslims, those who are either daily wage workers, or petty traders, the impact of religious profiling has been the worst. There are innumerable stories of Muslim vegetable sellers being disallowed entry into gated colonies after instructions to security staff who now check identity papers to ascertain if the seller is Muslim or not.”

Modi’s tweet was a transparent attempt to cover his political tracks. The attempt of the BJP and the Hindu communalist right to deflect mass anger over the government’s criminally negligent response to the coronavirus onto the Muslim minority has provoked widespread opprobrium across India and internationally.

None of this, however, stopped India’s corporate media from greeting Modi’s deeply cynical appeal for “unity and brotherhood” as the wise counsel of a great statesman. Needless to say, the media didn’t recall Modi’s role as Gujarat’s chief minister in instigating and presiding over an anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002 in which more than 1,800 people died. Nor did they mention how in 2013 he had responded to those who had criticized him for never expressing any remorse over the 2002 events by comparing his feelings to those of a passenger in a vehicle that had run over a puppy dog. If “someone else is driving a car,” Modi told Reuters, “and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is.”

The BJP’s anti-Muslim offensive

After winning re-election last May, Modi and his BJP intensified their drive to transform India into a Hindu rashtra or Hindu state in which Muslims will be tolerated only insofar as they accept Hindu supremacy. In August, the BJP illegally abrogated the semiautonomous constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, then placed it under effective central government trusteeship in perpetuity by transforming it into two Union territories.

With the Supreme Court’s acquiescence, the BJP government is rushing to build a Hindu temple on the site of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, which in 1992 was razed by Hindu fundamentalist fanatics, at the instigation of the BJP leadership and in direct defiance of an order from India’s highest court.

These steps were a calculated attempt to incite the BJP’s fascist activist base and whip up communalism so as to split the working class, under conditions where India’s economy is unraveling and there is mounting social opposition to the BJP’s austerity measures, privatizations, promotion of precarious contract-labour jobs and other pro-investor polices.

But the BJP government was forced onto its back feet when mass protests erupted against the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) which it rushed through Parliament in mid-December.

Facing a tenacious India-wide protest movement against the CAA and the prospect of it intersecting with the mounting working class challenge to its rule, the BJP doubled down on its communalist offensive. In January and February, BJP leaders publicly called for violence against the anti-CAA protests.

This hate campaign culminated in the violence unleashed against the Muslim minority in northeast Delhi in late February. For three days starting Feb. 23, Hindu fascist thugs, incited by local BJP leaders and with the complicity of the police and security forces, went on a rampage, attacking Muslims, their homes and businesses. More than fifty people, most of them Muslim, died in the Feb. 2020 Delhi riots.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the scapegoating of Muslims

India reported its first coronavirus case on January 30. Although Indian and international medical experts have long warned that the country is especially vulnerable to a pandemic because of its poverty, dilapidated health care system and high-density population, the BJP government did next to nothing to counteract the spread of COVID-19 over the next seven weeks. It performed minimal testing and failed to mobilize state resources or the wealth of India’s 120-strong cohort of billionaires to obtain Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and otherwise prepare the medical system. Its “fight” against COVID-19 was entirely reliant on travel bans and the cursory screening of arriving passengers.

Then on the evening of March 24 the government dramatically shifted gear. Without any serious preparation or forethought, it imposed a draconian three-week nationwide lockdown starting at midnight. It callously failed to provide India’s hundreds of millions of impoverished day labourers who were suddenly rendered jobless with any means of procuring food or money. The lockdown has proven calamitous for India’s workers and toilers. Moreover, due to the lockdown’s improvised character and the continued rationing of testing, the pandemic has continued to spread, forcing the government to extend the lockdown for a further 19 days to May 3.

The visible failure of the Modi government and the Indian ruling class to protect the population from the ravages of the pandemic and its economic fallout and the consequent growing mass anger and anxiety have led the BJP to once again ratchet up its communal slurs against Muslims, with the aim of scapegoating them for the health and socioeconomic catastrophe.

Front and center in their campaign has been the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ), an Islamic missionary group. Aided and abetted by the corporate media, the government have pushed the narrative that Muslims who traveled to Delhi in March to attend an annual TJ convention, and/or receive missionary training, and stayed at its hostel, have played a major role in the spread of the pandemic across India. While the press designated TJ members as “super spreaders” of the virus, the Health Ministry in its daily briefings went out of its way to highlight new COVID-19 cases related to the TJ.

One reason that proportionately TJ members have constituted such a large percentage of India’s COVID-19 cases is, as the Indian Scientists’ Response to COVID-19 group notes, because the government has ordered that all those who visited its Delhi headquarters be tested, while otherwise severely rationing testing.

On March 31, police filed a criminal case against TJ leaders for “defying a series of government directives.” Subsequently, according to press reports, police added charges of “culpable homicide” (manslaughter) against TJ leader Maulana Saad.

The BJP and their allies have used the TJ COVID-19 victims as a convenient means to blame the Muslim population as a whole for the pandemic. BJP leaders like Kapil Mishra, who played the lead role in inciting the February Delhi riots, have accused the TJ of carrying out a “Talibani crime.” M.P. Renukacharya, the political secretary to Karantaka’s BJP chief minister, has declared TJ members who fail to report to authorities for COVID-19 testing should be shot dead. “All those who are spreading the virus are traitors,” said Renukacharya. “… [I]t is not wrong to shoot them with a bullet.”

There have been claims that the TJ violated lockdown orders issued by the Delhi government by holding a religious gathering, but this is at best selective reporting. It also ignores the fact that the TJ convention was held with government approval before the March 16 Delhi lockdown order. The Wire has noted that the Yogi Adityanath, the BJP Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, attended a large religious gathering at which social distancing was not practiced, and unlike the TJ’s this occurred after Modi had ordered the nationwide shutdown and admonished the population that their very survival was at stake.

Adityanath has responded to this exposure by getting charges of disseminating “fake news” laid against The Wire’s editor, Siddharth Varadarajan.

As the BJP whips up communalism and presides over a ruinous response to the COVID-19 pandemic dictated by its insistence that working people’s lives must be subordinated to the needs of big business and investor profit, the opposition parties, led by the Stalinist CPM and CPI-supported Congress Party, are blowing hot and cold. One day the opposition criticizes Modi and the next day it urges unity with his government in the name of fighting the pandemic.

This is because their own implacable defence of Indian capitalism is causing them to perform a high-wire act. The opposition parties dare not identify with the BJP too closely for fear of losing any remaining shred of political credibility in the eyes of the masses; but they fear still more that their criticisms of the government could inadvertently act as a stimulant to an eruption of the working class that could quickly escape their control.

US elderly care devastated by the profit system

Isaac Finn

The COVID-19 pandemic has further exposed the failure of the American health care system, and the inability of the wealthiest country on Earth to take care of its elderly and infirm. Over the past month numerous incidents have shocked the public from the admission that 800 patients and staff at the Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness Center in Pennsylvania have likely been infected with the virus to the gruesome discovery of 17 corpses piled up in a New Jersey nursing home.

It is now estimated that over 10,000 individuals in long-term care facilities, including nursing homes, have died from complications due to a coronavirus infection. The Washington Post has recently compiled a list—which is admittedly incomplete—of 1,300 nursing homes that have experienced a coronavirus related death. Nearly 1 in 10 nursing homes in the US have a publicly reported case of the virus. All these numbers are expected to rise as cases continue to be reported to officials, and new cases are expected to increase as the US begins to “reopen” the economy.

While the COVID-19 pandemic is the most recent and deadly disaster impacting residents at long-term care facilities, it is far from the first. Over the past few years virtually no natural disaster has hit without directly impacting, and often killing some section of the roughly 1.5 million residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities. Incidents of senior citizens dying in sweltering heat, left to sit in filthy water, or abandoned by staff as wildfires approach have been widely reported over the past few years.

History of regulation and deregulation

The development of nursing homes in the US by some accounts date back to the early 17th century with settlers from England establishing almshouses—care facilities that would provide basic food and shelter for the elderly individuals, orphans and the mentally ill. The federal government first became involved in nursing homes as a result of the Social Security Act of 1935, which also established the Old Age Assistance (OAA) program. The legislation in its initial form specified that funds would not be given to residents of public institutions, a stipulation that encouraged the rapid growth of a private nursing homes. An amendment to the act was added in 1950 to allow payment to individuals in public institutions.

Unlike hospitals, most state governments did not provide licenses to nursing homes until after 1950. A study in 1955 by the Council of State Governments also reported that the majority of these facilities provided a poor quality of care and relied on relatively untrained personnel.

In 1965 federal funding was greatly expanded for long-term care services as part of the newly established Medicare and Medicaid programs. The programs, even in their initial proposal, were widely attacked by Republican legislators.

While the legislation did pass and provide the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare with an authority to implement certain regulations, demands for certain standards in long-term care facilities continued to be fought over into the 1970s. Almost immediately the Medicaid program—which was used to pay for skilled nursing services—abandoned using Medicare’s standards for an “extended care facility.”

Under Republican President Ronald Reagan a number of reforms that had been implemented in the last year of the Carter administration were overturned. In 1987 the Nursing Home Reform Act was passed providing some bare minimum standards for nursing homes. This included a requirement for each nursing home to have a registered professional nurse on site for at least eight consecutive hours a day every day of the week, and “sufficient” nursing staff to meet the resident’s needs.

Conditions have been impacted by continued cuts to Medicaid, which is used to cover care for most nursing home residents. Early proposals for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, to include a buy-in option for Medicaid was ultimately rejected, while the Obama administration proposed cuts to the program.

The Trump administration has since implemented a restructuring of Medicaid, including a proposal to cap payments to poor adults without children. Trump has also cut fines for nursing homes that injure or endanger residents, resulting in the average fine dropping from $41,260 under Obama’s last year in office to $28,405.

Quality and cost

In the US, access to health care is widely understood to be split along class lines. While certain luxurious nursing homes and assisted living facilities exist, the situation facing most patients resembles either direct abuse or criminal negligence as a handful of nurses and certified nursing assistants (CNA) are tasked with caring for over a dozen elderly individuals, each with multiple health complications.

While some states have specific laws requiring lower patient-to-nurse ratios and patient-to-CNA ratios, many states allow management to overwhelm staff with patients. According to Nurse.org, in Ohio there was a ratio of 32 residents per nurse and 16 per CNA, and in Georgia 50 residents per nurse and 30 per CNA.

In 2018, Kaiser Health News released a report on staffing levels based on payroll records provided by Medicare. The publication determined that seven out of 10 of the 14,000 nursing homes had lower staffing ratios than previously admitted. At that time, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services replied by threatening to lower the rankings of facilities that had violated the rules.

Many nursing homes and other long-term care facilities have faced difficulties finding enough CNA’s as the job is both demanding and offers relatively low pay. According to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in May 2019, the average wage for a nursing assistant was $14.77 per hour or just $2.63 more than a retail salesperson. Nineteen states require only 75 hours of CNA training for certification, and no state requires more than 180 hours of training.

Toby Edelman, a senior policy attorney for the Centers for Medicare in Washington D.C., in a 2018 interview, stated, “Most of the bad outcomes [at nursing homes] are the result of insufficient staffing, and insufficiently trained staff. It’s pretty much a universal problem.”

Staffing issues in nursing homes can cause serious problems as it can put certain patients in jeopardy of malnutrition and dehydration. Some patients can also develop pressure ulcers, also known as bedsores, if they are not regularly moved. If gone untreated bedsores can result in fatal complications.

The cost for nursing homes and assisted living is exorbitant. According to Genworth, a life insurance company, a nursing home in the US costs on average $8,365 per month, or $275 a day, for a private room and $7,441 per month for a semi-private room. This cost is growing by 3 to 6 percent per year on average. Fidelity Investment estimates that a couple retiring at age 65 will spend $280,000 on health care.

Roughly 7 million seniors rely on Medicaid for essential care to help cover long-term costs of medical treatment, since payouts of Medicare stop after a hundred days. While over 80 percent of nursing homes accept Medicaid, it is also known that many strongly prefer private payers since they are able to pay more out of pocket for care.

At least 130 US health care workers dead from COVID-19

Clara Weiss

A count of deceased health care workers complied by the World Socialist Web Site based on a variety of sources found that at least 130 workers have died from COVID-19 in the US. Public sources include a list from the medical journal Medscape which counts 607 health care workers who have died internationally from COVID-19, as well as memorial pages set up by unions and EMS agencies. Names were also found based on media reports about health care workers and first responders that died from COVID-19 in recent days.

Despite the growing death toll, and amid the Trump administration-led “back to work” campaign, there has been a noticeable decline in mainstream media coverage of the situation facing health care workers on the frontlines of the struggle against the still raging COVID-19 pandemic. Camera crews in front of hotspots like Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, New York City are gone and fewer and fewer exposures of the situation in the hospitals are appearing in the bourgeois press.

Unrefrigerated bodies lying outside an overwhelmed funeral home in Brooklyn, New York City

This is under conditions where the pandemic has now claimed the lives of over 50,000 Americans. In New York, where the death toll has passed 15,000, bodies are shipped to other states because the state’s four crematoria are overwhelmed; 180 refrigerated trucks for the bodies of recent COVID-19 victims have been set up throughout the city.

To this day, no reliable statistics about infections or deaths among health care workers have been released. This is despite the fact that they have been among those most severely affected by the virus. An estimated 10 percent of the 192,992 confirmed cases in Italy are health care professionals; at least 125 Italian physicians have died from the disease. Over 100 health care workers in Britain have died. In the US, where 923,612 COVID-19 cases have been confirmed, there is a total of 2.86 million registered nurses, almost one million physicians and 826,000 EMS workers.

Even three months into the pandemic, there is no adequate supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) for most of these workers. A nurse at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio told the WSWS that her hospital had a policy of encouraging nurses to only wear cloth masks, “but they don’t protect against droplet or airborne [infections]”, she noted. “If you want a surgical mask you have to track them down. It takes me 5-10 min [at the beginning of a shift] every day to get a mask.”

Given the WSWS independent tally based on public information, there is no question that the official numbers released by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), which recorded over 9,300 infections and 27 deceased health care workers as of April 15, are a vast underestimate. It is still exceedingly difficult for health care workers, as for all workers, to get tested for the virus. There have been reports of health care workers in New York and other states being forced work even after they tested positive, contribution to the spread among hospital staffers, patients and their families.

At the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan alone, over 700 workers were tested positive weeks ago. The number of confirmed infections and deaths in that state has since skyrocketed. On Long Island, New York, nearly 1,200 hospital staffers had tested positive as of April 15. Nine hundred workers of the New York City public hospital system have tested positive, and 3,000 have called in sick. At hospitals in Illinois more than 2,500 health care workers have been confirmed positive. In a special broadcast by PBS, the emergency room director for one Brooklyn hospital indicated that 30 percent of the staff had been infected, and five had died.

The first known health care worker fatality in New York City, Kious Kelly, a nurse at Mount Sinai West, died on March 24. By now, based on the WSWS count, at least 50 New York health care workers have died, including 26 workers of the NYC Health + Hospitals public hospital system, and at least 8 at EMS. In New Jersey, at least 25 health care workers have died. Thirteen of them worked for EMS and died since March 31. In Michigan, at least 15 health care workers have died, most of them in Detroit and Flint, cities that have been decimated by decades of austerity, de-industrialization, bankruptcy and, in the case of Flint, the poisoning the water system with lead. At least seven health care workers have died in Georgia, which is already reopening its economy, and at least eight have died in Illinois.

Ted Levine, a healthcare worker at Mount Sinai Hospital, holds a photo of Feda Ocran, a nurse who died of coronavirus disease [Credit: Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters]

These numbers are but a pale reflection of the situation. A paramedic in New York City told the WSWS that he knew at least three other EMS workers who died in New York state, which would bring the total at FDNY to 11. In Detroit, an EMT [Emergency Medical Technician] told the WSWS that he knew of fifteen EMT colleagues who had died. The WSWS list only includes one Detroit EMS worker. It also does not include workers at nursing homes, which have been completely ravaged by COVID-19, although reports have surfaced of workers having died there in facilities that continue to block the release of numbers.

Many of these workers died after having been denied proper PPE, testing and medical care. Deborah Gatewood, a nurse at Beaumont Hospital in Farmington Hill, Detroit suburb, was denied admission to the hospital where she worked four times before she passed away from COVID-19. A 33-year-old Miami-area ICU nurse, Danielle Dicenso, also died after having been denied face masks while treating COVID-19 patients.

Every single one of these deaths and the vast majority of infections were preventable. They are the result of a policy of criminal negligence by the government in response to the pandemic, and a decade-long social counterrevolution in which social infrastructure was destroyed and plundered to enrich a tiny oligarchy.

The crisis is also taking a tremendous emotional and psychological toll on health care workers who are not infected. Left to fight under war-like conditions without proper equipment on shifts that can last up to 16 hours, they are undergoing traumatizing experiences, including taking responsibility for decisions about life and death, and seeing countless patients die alone and their families suffer. Most health care workers are experiencing serious anxiety, fearing not only for the health of their patients, but also their own health and that of their loved ones. In New York City, EMS workers, who often earn poverty wages, have been reportedly forced to sleep in their cars or at their workstation for lack of alternative housing opportunities.

Under these conditions, there have been growing warnings by medical health experts that the COVID-19 pandemic will be followed by a second pandemic of mental health issues, which will hit health care workers especially hard. Many health care workers already experienced acute stress and are at increased danger of suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) once the pandemic ends.

Even before the crisis, there was an epidemic of nurse suicides in the US. EMS workers were contemplating suicide at a rate 10 times higher than the average adult in the US. This situation is being dramatically exacerbated by the pandemic. A study on the mental health conditions of Chinese health care workers who treated COVID-19 patients in Wuhan found that half of them were now struggling with depression, 44.6 percent experienced anxiety and a third insomnia.

A paramedic in New York City told the WSWS that he had to call the FDNY counseling service after every shift “because it’s becoming so much. I’ve been knocking out once I get comfortable due to sleep deprivation adding to my insomnia. I’ve been in low depressed moods recently. Too much death than should be observed in a lifetime.”

Asked what he thought about the reopening of the economy under these conditions, he said: “I think it’s premature, to say the least. The very first people that are going to be affected by that is us: hospital workers, first responders. I don’t think any sane person would do that, especially if we don’t have any regularly available care for something as massive as this.”

Women’s Peace & Humanitarian Fund (WPHF) COVID-19 Emergency Response Window 2020

Application Deadline: 28th April 2020

About the Award: Apply for new funding opportunities that support your local civil-society organization in its efforts to respond to the COVID-19 global pandemic. We seek to fund qualifying projects of local women’s organizations that contribute to responding to COVID-19 in crises settings.

Type: Grants

Eligibility: The WPHF COVID-19 Emergency Response Window is divided into 2 funding streams:

Funding Stream 1: Institutional funding: from 2,500 USD to 30,000 USD
This funding stream will provide institutional funding to local civil society organizations working on women, peace and security and humanitarian issues to ensure they are able to sustain themselves through the crisis. Prospective applicants will need to demonstrate how the current crisis affects their institutional and financial capacities and how the funding would support them through the pandemic.

Funding Stream 2: Programmatic funding: from 30,000 USD to 200,000 USD
This funding stream will finance projects which aim specifically to provide gender-responsive response to the COVID19 crisis. Interventions could include, but are not limited to:

• Strengthening the leadership and meaningful participation of women and girls in all decision-making processes in addressing the COVID-19 outbreak.
• Mobilizing of women’s organizations at community level to ensure that public health education messages on risk and prevention strategies are reaching all women (including through community radio, the use of technology, etc.).
• Supporting women who will be most economically affected by the crisis, namely daily wage earners, small business owners and those working in informal sectors. This could be done through cash transfers, community funds and support to women-led small businesses.
• Restoring and strengthening access to sexual and reproductive health services, including pre-and post-natal care.
• Supporting prevention and response to GBV, including through safe shelters but also campaigns on social norms targeting male engagement in domestic work and combatting domestic violence.

Eligible Countries: Civil-society organizations in all 25 WPHF eligible countries are qualified to apply.
AFGHANISTAN, BURUNDI, BANGLADESH (ROHINGYA CRISIS), C.A.R., COLOMBIA, D.R.C. (KINSHASA, KWILU, NORTH KIVU, ITURI AND SOUTH KIVU), HAITI, IRAQ, JORDAN (SYRIA CRISIS), LIBERIA, MALAWI, MALI, MYANMAR, NIGERIA (BORNO, ADAMAWA AND YOBE STATES), PALESTINE, PAPUA NEW GUINEA, THE PACIFIC (FIJI, PALAU, TONGA, SAMOA, SOLOMON ISLANDS, VANUATU), THE PHILIPPINES, SOMALIA, SOUTH SUDAN, SUDAN, SRI LANKA, UGANDA, UKRAINE, AND YEMEN

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award:

• Funding Stream 1: Institutional funding: from 2,500 USD to 30,000 USD
• Funding Stream 2: Programmatic funding: from 30,000 USD to 200,000 USD

How to Apply: To apply, download the attached application forms (available in English, Spanish, French and Arabic) and email your submission directly to WPHFCOVID19Response@UNWOMEN.ORG

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Commonwealth Youth Council (CYC) Covid 19 Rapid Response Mini-Grants 2020

Application Deadline: 28th April 2020, 11:59pm GMT.

About the Award: The WHO declared COVID-19 to be a global pandemic, and recommended communities take social distancing measures to prevent the spread of the virus. Globally, COVID 19 is more than a public health challenge-it has laid bare the consequences of persistent systemic inequalities and is threatening our social fabric , trust in our institutions and the economic security of billions of people.
More than two million confirmed cases have been reported worldwide with more than 150,000 people having died from the virus. Most of the Commonwealth countries have also been affected by the pandemic, which is expected to have dire social and economic consequences as well.
The Commonwealth Youth Council believes it the role of young people in addressing this pandemic and its consequences and is launching a rapid response grant process to help young people within the Commonwealth lead projects that address community impacts of COVID-19. Mini-grants of 250$ shall be given to two organisations from each of the Commonwealth regions namely, Africa, Europe, Asia, Pacific and the Caribbean. The small grants will target grass root youth-led organisations.

Field(s):  The project should focus on (but is not limited to) the following areas:
1) Digital mental health campaigns to support persons feeling isolated
2) Addressing stigma and reinforcing the sharing of accurate, youth friendly information.
3) Awareness raising and information targeting persons living with disabilities.
4) Community focused sanitation and prevention campaigns
5) Projects addressing SRHR and sexual and gender based violence

Type:  Grants

Eligibility: To be considered for the small grant, the organisation must be:
1) Be a youth group,a team or a grassroot organisation situated in one of the 54 Commonwealth states.
2) Youth-led ( The Commonwealth defines youth as any person between the ages of 15 and 30)
3) Be a team, a youth group or a grass-root/community based organisation. Special focus will also be paid to youth-led organisations working in low-income communities, persons living with disabilities, rural populations and other vulnerable groups.

Eligible Countries: In Commonwealth regions namely, Africa, Europe, Asia, Pacific and the Caribbean.

Number of Awards:  2 from each of the regions

Value of Award: Mini-grants of $250.

How to Apply: Apply in link below
The applications will be reviewed and successful applicants shall be notified in the week following the deadline. Successful applicants shall be required to implement the projects before 30th May 2020, and share their final reports by 15th June 2020.

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Undocumented Workers Need a Bailout, Too

Josue De Luna Navarro

I was a child when I understood my immigrant family was wanted for labor — and for labor only.

Every day before dawn, I would hear my father pray on his knees. He would pray for our health, our safety, and — most importantly — for nothing out of the ordinary to happen that would threaten my parents’ jobs.

As you can imagine, our lives and economic stability depended on those jobs. If anything happened that would prevent my parents from working, it would be devastating to our family.

Our story is not unique — it is the same story 11 million undocumented people live every single day in the United States. However, something extremely “out of the ordinary” is now leaving many of these families without their livelihood: the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 has devoured the country’s health care system and led to what’s been called the “deepest global recession in history.” As an attempt to provide some relief to struggling Americans and businesses, Congress recently passed a $2 trillion stimulus and bailout package.

But the deal they negotiated gave a cold shoulder to the backbone of our economy: 11 million people and their families currently living in desperation. The stimulus bill, in short, simply left out undocumented people.

In 2018, a typical year, undocumented immigrants contributed around $20 billion in federal taxes, plus nearly $12 billion in state and local taxes. But because people need a valid Social Security Number to benefit from federal financial assistance, they’re getting completely left out of the stimulus their own tax dollars paid for.

Undocumented immigrants can forget about, for example, collecting the $1,200 stimulus checks promised to every U.S. household. Even worse, as more undocumented construction, housekeeping, and service workers find themselves unemployed, they won’t be able to file for unemployment benefits, which were expanded and extended under the stimulus.

Making matters worse, immigrant workers often work the front line jobs most exposed to the virus — while lacking health care or any meaningful social safety net.

Take farm workers. Right now, most of the food Americans eat is farmed, cooked, processed, and/or packaged by undocumented workers. In fact, an estimated 70 percent of the essential workforce in farms is undocumented.

Should they go to work, risking their health as well as the health of people who eat the food they farm? Or should they stay home and watch their own families go hungry? With no health insurance or unemployment benefits, that’s the choice they’re stuck with. Yet Congress seems not to care.

All this takes a toll.

I used to work at a community health clinic where I directly assisted many undocumented patients. After seeing sick people day after day for three years, I learned a horrendous lesson: The root cause of their illnesses was often connected to stress. Their bodies were simply deteriorating from labor exploitation.

I’d end each day furious. These people paid their taxes and spent their lives working jobs no one else wanted, but there was little to no help for them. I remembered hearing my dad’s prayers each morning, crushed by the reminder our bodies were just being used for cheap labor.

Congress must finally come to its senses — and morals. Immigration status, and the nine-digit number that confirms it, shouldn’t be used to determine who’s worthy of aid in a pandemic that can infect or impoverish anyone. To protect everyone, we need to bail out the most vulnerable first.

Wherever they go, immigrant workers perform essential labor. Beyond that, we are humans — and, in a pandemic, that should be enough to deserve help.

Kashmir and Press Freedom

Sajad Rasool

Kashmir’s story, ravaged from misreporting and state-sponsored journalism in the past more than three decades has been pushed to an extreme, with hardly any representation in media to the local populace to speak for themselves and question the narratives crafted in the studios, thousands of miles away. The traditional mass media usually tends to less inclusion of community voices, as the control, ownership, and authorship are in hands of a few only. Editors decide what is read and who is heard and who is not. The free press is already struggling in Kashmir due to slow internet connectivity and further intimidation and harassment are adding to hamper the smooth functioning of media. Journalists have been targeted more frequently in the past 8 months. With this ongoing crisis, media too evolved, what didn’t change is the regular harassment, from summoning journalists to police stations and booking them under different draconian laws.

The advent of social media and digital means of communication revolutionized the way people in the world communicate and share information. It became part of 21st-century society, everything in the society is affected virtually by digital media. This invention and its spread changed the way we interact and communicate with fellow human beings. The storytelling in the media industry evolved and became easy for the people who otherwise would remain unheard of. A few years back we were so much accustomed to traditional media studios and print media coverage, that only a handful of people, usually privileged ones will have the access to become journalists and tell stories, set agendas and prioritize the content and decide what people shall read in the morning or watch during the prime time TV shows. The previous decade changed just that, the internet and mobile phone technology revolutionized the very concept of storytelling. It flipped the profile of storytellers and media makers; we saw hundreds of online news outlets coming to the fore.

Internet and social media had the potential to flip the coin, it allowed a wide range of people to produce news and tell stories. In 2014, after the Kashmir floods, a few like-minded activists, media students and I started Kashmir’s first community news platform ‘Kashmir Unheard’. Instead of joining any other media outlet after our studies, we established a platform that would open doors for the communities to tell the stories which never became a headline or were buried under hundreds of narratives. The media landscape lead by communities, with basic training of film making on their smartphones, we trained more than a dozen men and women from every district of Kashmir in a year. An alternative landscape like many across the globe with the potential to bring out real narratives from ‘media dark’ areas of the valley was all set. We at Kashmir Unheard managed the gender balance and trained 10 women in storytelling. These community correspondents not only reported on the issues which they and their communities have been suffering from a long time but also with a deep understanding of issues involved local authorities for action. In the past some years Kashmir saw an increase in more and more people joining media organizations and starting their initiatives – this filled the information vacuum and offered a possibility to do journalism and storytelling in different formats. Journalism can only be improved only when local journalists are allowed to improve and work freely.

I believe, if the world must understand a conflict, its people have to be empowered to speak, only then we will understand conflict better and resolve.

August 5, 2019 – with the abrogation of article 370 everything changed for all Kashmiris politically, we witnessed thousands of arrests, internet, and communication lines were shut and media was paralyzed. Kashmir unheard and many other online news outlets were silenced the same day – with the main idea of giving voice to the muzzled voices of Kashmiri communities. In the past 5 years besides trying to explain what causes the conflict, we tried to give voice to all perspectives – including nongovernmental organizations and people from all parts of civil society. We reported on different efforts made to resolve the issues, looked closely at all sides. To make people from our communities and elsewhere aware of the real stories of Kashmir. The main aim was to report from all diverse communities of Kashmir, not just a few. As journalists shall report about the whole society, not it’s half. August 2019 brought a very difficult phase for journalism in Kashmir, hundreds of people lost their jobs after many online outlets had to shut down, journalists are being harassed regularly. While the media remains under threat in Kashmir and strategic attacks against them continue the number of journalists is being made less. As free journalism disappears from Kashmir, its stories are expected to remain buried. If a journalist who is living in conflict and experiencing it writes something that’s much more in-depth, we not only can see a greater chance of getting people to engage with the story but it increases the authenticity as well. In the times of this pandemic, we need more press freedom, the journalist’s movement if curbed will keep us unaware of the ground realities. Free flow of information in desperate times is a must, which is only possible when the people associated with this fraternity do not feel intimidated.

The Kashmir conflict has affected not only Kashmiris in particular but the people across south Asia as well. I believe conflicts do not end by themselves unless all parties are involved, ground reporting from Kashmir by Kashmiris is a must for all the parties to understand different perspectives but also learn what this community is looking forward to. By putting real people in the story, all the parties can understand how this conflict affects them. We know that news reporting will still not only mean to resolve anything but who reports and what is reported has the potential to change how we all look at things. The real stories are to be heard, and they neither can be told by the mainstream TV studios of India, with a jingoistic attitude and demonizing Kashmiris nor can they be told by the print journalists coming from outside of Kashmir. Instead, it is such platforms, alternative media platforms that can-do justice in real sense. An indirect ban on online media by restricting the internet speed is a punishment to the whole society and is adding to the wounds of Kashmiris amid these crises, the muzzling of freedom of the press is a question mark on the face of democracy.

Child Soldiers in War

Naveed Qazi

Hearing about the trend of recruiting child soldiers for war, in and around us, is not unusual. Scholars such as Vera Achvarina and Simon Reich ascertain that since 1975, Africa has had largest concentration of conflicts and child soldiers. Mark Drumbl further states that about forty percent of child soldiers in the world are present in Africa.

Child soldiers mostly thrive in low intensity conflicts, where wars do not end through victory or negotiated settlement, according to research pursued by Paul Collier. The other reason was that the cold war left some armed forces or groups without financial support – before they had been supported by either the United States or the Soviet Union in fighting proxy wars. The end result was the rebel groups started abducting cheap child soldiers.

Romeo Dallaire, who encountered child soldiers in the Rwandan genocide, believes that most population in the conflict zones, in Africa, is less than eighteen years old. That’s has been one of the reasons to employ child soldiers, since they are ‘cheap to maintain, expendable, and replaceable’. According to him, since younger children lack a sense of fear, they can easily be preferred over adults in performing dangerous tasks. Furthermore, child soldiers can be easily controlled and influenced, since they are dependent on guidance and protection.

Child soldiers are also able to take part in combat, due to widespread and global proliferation of small arms, mainly AK-47 assault rifles. Technological advancements in small arms now make them as dangerous as adult soldiers. Approximately more than seventy million AK-47 rifles have been produced globally since 1947, and this weapon can be easily carried and used to deadly effect by children as young as ten. Although, research has it that child soldiers can also participate in conflicts without technologically advanced weapons. Such was the case in Rwanda, where child soldiers often used panga, which is a machete, or a masu, a club studded with nails.

Abduction is the most common method through which the recruitment takes place. They become child soldiers either being born into forces or groups, or they are abducted, or conscripted through coercion or severe threats. Uganda’s Lord Resistance Army (LRA) is commonly known for abducting children from their homes. According to the 2008 Global Report on Child Soldiers by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, the LRA has abducted about twenty five thousand children since the 1980s.

The practice of abducting children also holds true for Sierra Leone, where real life witnesses have provided testimonies. In Sierra Leone, it must not be forgotten that all sides had recruited children, including Civil Defense Forces (CDF), the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), Sierra Leone army, besides the rebel group RUF.

There are also instances when children are not forcibly recruited. Therefore, the factors that make them motivate to join war in a conflict zone include past grievances, repression and discrimination, as well as lack of education, poverty, lack of employment, abuse at home, or having no community or home. They suddenly see a security in fighting forces, where there is provision of food, a sense of belonging, ideology or group identity, as well as economic reasons for gaining profits. A study on the recruitment of child soldiers in Colombia into Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) cited the above reasons as main push factors.

Furthermore, children are often promised some payoff when joining armed forces and groups. They can be divided into pecuniary and non-pecuniary rewards, with pecuniary rewards mostly consisting of “wages, one-shot monetary rewards (often associated with loot), and other tangible rewards such as drugs and alcohol”. Non-pecuniary rewards could include the achievement of rank, bonding with comrades and commanders, and forming a group identity.

In Afghanistan, insurgent groups, including the Taliban and other armed groups, use children as fighters, including in suicide attacks. The UN has also reported recruitment of children by the Afghan National Police. In Burma, thousands of boys serve in Burma’s national army, with children as young as eleven forcibly recruited off the streets and sent into combat operations. In Central Asian Republic, around six thousand to ten thousand children, some as young as twelve, serve with several rebel groups. The Lord’s Resistance Army has abducted children in the southeast of the country. In Chad, thousands of children have served in both government and rebel forces. In 2011, the government signed an action plan to end its use of child soldiers and recruitment has decreased sharply. In Colombia, thousands of children – both boys and girls – served in the FARC guerrillas, with smaller numbers in UC-ELN guerrillas. Children are also recruited into successor groups to paramilitaries. In DRC, children serve in the government forces as well as various rebel forces. At the height of DRC’s war, more than thirty thousand boys and girls were fighting with various parties in the conflict. Most have now been released or mobilised. The Lord’s Resistance Army also abducts children in northeastern Congo. It uses both boys and girls as fighters, and girls as sex slaves. In India, Maoist ‘Naxalite’ rebels in Chhattisgarh use children as soldiers. The Maosists induct children as young as six into children’s associations, and use children as young as twelve in armed squads that receive weapons training, and may participate in armed encounters.

In Iraq, Al-Qaeda recruits’ children to spy, scout, transport military supplies, plant explosive devices, and actively participate in attacks against security forces. In Philippines, children are recruited by rebel forces, including the New People’s Army, Abu Sayyaf Group, and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). In Somalia, the Islamist armed group al-Shabaab forcibly recruits children as young as ten, often abducting them from their homes or schools. Some are coerced into becoming suicide bombers. Children also serve in Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG) forces. In South Sudan, the national government has enacted a law and pledged to end its use of child soldiers, but continues to recruit children and has not yet demobilised all children from its forces. The number of child soldiers in South Sudan has been steadily increasing since war began in 2013, to around sixteen thousand, according to UNICEF, which seeks $4.2 million to support ex-child soldiers in South Sudan. In Sudan, over a dozen armed forces and groups use child soldiers, including the Sudanese Armed Forces, pro-government militias, and factions of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army. In Thailand, separatist insurgents called Pejuang Kemerdekaan Patani (Patani Freedom Fighters) have recruited hundreds of ethnic Malay Muslim children as messengers, couriers, scouts, and in some cases, combatants, in the insurgency in Thailand’s southern border provinces. The National Revolutionary Front-Coordinate (BRN-C) has systematically recruited children, and used them to support armed attacks. And in Yemen, government forces have recruited children as young as fourteen. Prior to the Arab Spring, the government used children in its armed forces to fight Houthi rebels in the north, who also used children. In 2011, rebel forces in Taiz deployed children to patrol roads, and operate checkpoints. Some had previously served with government forces before defecting. Saudi Arabia has been accused of paying upto $10,000 to Sudanese militiamen including child soldiers, to fight the war in Yemen.

New Zealand teachers and nurses oppose easing of lockdown

Tom Peters

There is unease and opposition among teachers and health workers to the Labour Party-led government’s decision to ease New Zealand’s pandemic-related restrictions, allowing schools and many businesses to reopen next week.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Monday that the strict alert level 4 lockdown that began a month ago will drop to level 3 on April 28, five days later than originally planned, but earlier than some experts recommended. Scientist Shaun Hendy called for a two-week extension of level 4, while Rod Jackson, an epidemiologist at the University of Auckland, supported keeping schools closed under level 3. Stuff reported on April 18 that a poll of more than 72,000 people found over 60 percent in favour of remaining in level 4 for an extra two weeks. An online petition for schools and early childhood centres to remain closed under level 3 now has more than 38,000 signatures.

The government is gambling with the lives and health of the population. New cases of COVID-19 are still being reported each day. The country has had a total of 1,451 cases and 16 deaths. Jackson has estimated there could be up to 500 undetected cases.

Ardern stated that the health benefits of a longer lockdown had to be “traded against” the harm to the economy. In every country the ruling elites are demanding the resumption of work to prop up businesses and the financial system, which have received trillions in government bailouts even as ordinary people have suffered job losses and wage cuts.

The government says families should keep children at home during level 3 if possible. Writing in the New Zealand Herald, however, Kaye Brunton, principal of Ngāti Toa School, said while wealthier parents could often work from home, “many of our parents’ financial situations will mean they won’t have any choice but to send their kids to us.”

The decision to reopen schools has been justified with questionable claims by Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield, echoed by Education Minister Chris Hipkins, that children “don’t tend to” catch the virus or spread it to adults.

Across New Zealand, 10.2 percent of confirmed and probable cases are in people aged under 19, with about half of those aged under 15.

The US Centres for Disease Control states that children are likely playing a role in transmission and spread of COVID-19. In New York City, more than 60 school staff have been killed by the virus. In New Zealand, the second-largest cluster of COVID-19 cases is centred around Marist College in Auckland, with 93 people infected, including children and adults.

The government’s present claims also contradict its previous statements.

A review of evidence published by the Ministry of Health on April 13, which outlined the reasons for keeping schools closed under level 4 restrictions, had taken note of only a single “non-peer reviewed” Japanese study which claimed that school closures “did not reduce cases.” By contrast, it stated that modelling from Singapore, China and the UK indicated school closures were an effective means in controlling the spread of the virus.

In the Facebook group “I back the teachers!” one person said she “almost literally fainted” hearing Bloomfield’s justification for reopening schools. “I just wish he could look at examples from other countries like Taiwan, where PPE [personal protective equipment] is recommended to all at school, and Hong Kong, where schools have been closed since January.”

A teacher said social distancing would be impossible to implement: “Try telling a 5-year-old they cannot touch each other and must be 2 meters away... not humanly possible. Does this mean teachers are a disposable commodity[?]” She added that “many of our teaching staff are over 60,” meaning that they are at greater risk from coronavirus.

A video on the Ministry of Education Facebook page, in which Bloomfield insisted there was a “very, very low” chance of COVID-19 cases emerging in schools, attracted hundreds of angry comments.

Cheryl asked: “Why was the Marist [College] cluster so large if children don’t pass on Covid-19?” No explanation was given.

Angela wrote: “You are still not providing the evidence that children don’t ‘tend’ to pass it on. Would you pick up an infected child (as we will need to) and comfort them and assure us that we won’t catch it?”

The New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) and Post-Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA), which both opposed calls for the closure of schools before it was announced by the government, are now seeking to suppress opposition to the reopening. An April 20 statement by the NZEI said the union was “eagerly anticipating further detailed guidance from the Ministry of Education to help schools and centres prepare for some children to return on 29 April.”

The World Socialist Web Site spoke with a nurse in Christchurch, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid negative repercussions. Newshub reported on April 22 that health workers have been “warned they could face disciplinary action for going public” about conditions in hospitals.

The nurse said the government “chose business concerns over expert advice. I’m sure another two weeks at level 4 and we could have eliminated [the virus], but we have thrown that chance away. My work has been pretty much told it’s business as usual next week. Hospitals opening is just ridiculous. There’s been a hundred and something nurses who have caught [the virus].”

Hospitals deferred non-urgent operations and barred visitors under level 4, but these restrictions will be loosened under level 3. Hospitals could become much more crowded, raising the risk of transmission. At least 128 health workers have reportedly been infected with COVID-19.

Despite government claims that there is plenty of PPE available, District Health Boards (DHBs) are restricting its use, placing staff and patients in danger. “The government’s completely out of touch with the way these DHBs run, they’ve got no idea… it’s being rationed,” the nurse said.

In the nurses’ Facebook group “New Zealand, please hear our voice,” several comments have denounced Canterbury DHB’s attempt to blame nurses at Burwood Hospital, who tested positive for the virus, for misusing PPE.

An anonymous post said 20 patients transferred to Burwood for isolation “had all been exposed to other patients or staff who had tested positive to the virus… Those nurses should have had access to full PPE during transfer, and from the moment the patients arrived in Burwood, and until at least two weeks had passed with no symptoms. They did not… How dare the DHB suggest that staff are to blame for not using PPE properly.”

The severe under-resourcing and under-staffing in hospitals by successive Labour and National Party governments, enforced by the trade unions, has left them completely unprepared to deal with significant outbreaks of the virus.

Tens of thousands of Nepali workers stranded abroad by COVID-19 disaster

Rohantha De Silva

Tens of thousands of Nepali migrant workers remain trapped in several foreign countries by the coronavirus pandemic because the Stalinist Communist Party of Nepal-led government is barring them from reentering the poverty-stricken country.

Over four million migrant Nepalis are currently working in India, the Gulf States and South Korea. Many have lost their jobs and have no income because of the lockdowns imposed in those countries.

The Kathmandu Post reported on April 17 that at least 20,000 Nepali people want to return home and that hundreds of workers employed in India are joining those already stuck at border crossing between the two countries.

Indian and Nepali security forces at border posts are preventing the migrant workers from entering Nepal. Rather than allow these workers to return home, Kathmandu claims that their entry will further spread the virus.

On April 17, the Nepal Supreme Court ruled that the government should take immediate steps to bring the country’s migrant worker citizens back home. The court’s decision was in response to a petition filed by a human rights group amid rising popular opposition to the government’s callous indifference towards the plight of the stranded workers.

Foreign Minister Pradeep Kumar Gyawali cynically told the court that the government was “assessing” the conditions of the migrant workers and would “fulfil our responsibility to ensure their welfare.” While the stranded workers face rapidly worsening hardships, the minister requested that he be given 15 days to report back to the court.

Late last month Gyawali asked Kantipur Television: “What’s the use of lockdown if the borders are open?”

When Kathmandu abruptly imposed its March 24 lockdown, which is still continuing, it made no serious efforts to ensure that the country’s overwhelmingly poor population were provided with daily essentials, medicine and health safety equipment. The government has not provided substantial funds to assist Nepal’s rundown and inadequate health infrastructure to cope with the pandemic.

Attempting to escape endemic poverty, over a million Nepalis live and work in India, most of them as low-wage day laborers. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sudden national lockdown on March 24 drastically impacted on these low-paid workers.

An April 10 report in the Wire showed hundreds of migrant workers at the border town of Dhachula demanding to be allowed home. The article revealed that three workers were arrested by Nepali police and put into quarantine after they attempted to swim across the Mahakali River, which forms part of Nepal’s western border with India.

Forty-five-year-old Indra Singh Khatri, who has worked as a mule handler for the past 20 years, told the Wire: “We are disappointed with our own government… I wanted to be with my family of five once the lockdown was imposed. [But] we could not even talk with our local representatives and government serviceman.”

Another migrant worker Ramesh Bista, a bus driver for eight years, said: “Why do I have a citizenship card if my government won’t make arrangements for me? [Is it] only for voting? I feel as if I’m not a Nepalese citizen.”

The stranded migrant workers are fully aware of the coronavirus dangers and have not called for an unconditional opening of the borders.

“I also have a wife and children at home,” Maha, another worker, told the media. “I don’t want to give them a disease—I will quarantine—but please let us come back to Nepal.”

Nepali migrant workers face appalling social conditions in India, toiling long hours and with harsh workloads, little free time, overcrowded accommodation—up to five people in a single room—and only limited access to the country’s rundown health facilities.

In emergencies, they have to use private healthcare providers and pay for it with loans from their employers or through charity. Their situation has worsened under the Modi government’s Hindu-chauvinist anti-immigrant campaign.

When the Indian government suddenly imposed its coronavirus lockdown measures, many Nepali workers attempted to walk to the crossing points on country’s 1,700-kilometre border with India.

On April 10, Nepali Prime Minister Sharma Oli, after discussions with Prime Minister Modi, said that both countries had agreed to take care of each other’s citizens stranded in the border areas. This so-called agreement, however, has not changed the situation.

Amnesty International has accused the Qatari government of rounding-up Nepali migrant workers last month. Police authorities declared that they would be tested for COVID-19 and returned to their usual accommodation. The workers, however, were imprisoned in detention centres in overcrowded cells without beds or bedding and not given enough food and water. The migrant workers, who were not paid their outstanding salaries, were then deported to Nepal before the lockdown began.

The Oli government, which speaks for the country’s tiny capitalist elite, has also abandoned the poor masses in Nepal. Like their counterparts throughout the Indian subcontinent, the most affected are the daily-wage earners who do not have any savings or any viable means of economic support.

On April 17, the Kathmandu Post reported that hundreds of daily-wage workers have returned to their home villages during the ongoing coronavirus lockdown.

“There have been numerous reports of people leaving the Kathmandu valley in droves to get back to their homes,” the newspaper stated. “Without public transportation, many are making journeys that are hundreds of kilometres long on foot. Images have appeared on social media of people carrying babies, clad only in slippers, and laden with possessions, all walking home.”

On April 21, Nepal’s ministry for health and population reported that 42 people had tested positive for COVID-19. These figures are low because the country is not conducting systematic and widespread systematic testing throughout the country. Nepal has a population of 28 million but so far only 8,763 people have been tested for the virus. Nor is the government providing enough Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for health workers.

As one doctor at a Kathmandu medical college told the media: “By the time we confirm whether [patients] have been infected, the virus could infect many others in the hospital treating them, like myself.” He added: “If you don’t go to work, the medical college won’t give you a certificate.”

Another report said: “The PPE gown is improvised from thin plastic, and the goggles have been made from transparent stationery, while the helmet is fashioned out of elastic apparel material.”

To provide workers and the poor with the desperately-required testing equipment, PPEs, additional hospitals and other improved medical facilities in poverty-stricken countries like Nepal requires an international response. The global mobilisation of these necessary health and scientific must be advanced as part of the struggle by the working class for international socialism.