People throughout this planet are trying to cope with a near apocalyptic pandemic, whose scale and magnitude have never been experienced, so far as recorded history is concerned. We are quite totally bewildered by the tragedies in the First World countries that have reached the pinnacle of material progress complete with highly evolved and competent healthcare system and other luxuries of modern life.

We in India, one of the most populous countries in the world with teeming millions devoid of access to proper health care, hygienic living conditions and a semblance of social security are braving a three-week lockdown and social isolation.This has been directed by the government as a desperate measure to avert a catastrophic spread of the deadly disease. Given the fear, anxiety, helplessness and all-pervading sense of gloom and despondency, life will never be the same either in India or in any other part of the world, after this Corona recedes.

Though the impact on our political, economic and social lives is likely to be far-reaching and considerably unexpected, certain trends indicate a revival of Statism and a propensity to dispense with the neo-liberal political economy as countries like India move inwards, lock borders, suspend international flights and appeal to the nationalist sentiments of the people for motivating them to follow directives regarding quarantine rules and social distancing so that millions can be saved from falling prey to the virus, a way suggested by medics and enforced by state.

People of different strata and with political views ranging from the Left to the Right have more or less unanimously felt the need for a nationwide lockdown imposed both by Central government and most state governments. They have worked in tandem to contain the disease, and have demanded more effective measures from the government, such as better testing to trace and check the sources of infection, personal protective kits for doctors, nurses and health workers at the frontline of the battle, proper management of the supply chain so that people have access to essential commodities, relief package for the huge number of daily wage earners who are facing the brunt of the lockdown most severely.

There is also a new-found realisation that in times of a crisis like this, only the State can and is expected to provide security of citizens’ lives, and can legitimately demand compliance and obedience. This is almost a throwback to the concept of Social Contract Theory about the Origin of State, postulated by political theorists, pre-eminently Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau.

They advocated that people living together in a society within a definite territory are bound by an agreement to be governed by certain rules, regulations, moral, social and political obligations and code of behaviour to be framed, executed and adjudicated by a political authority, the State. This is in lieu of the security of life, liberty and property to be provided by the State and that the authority of the State is the embodiment of the General Will of the people postulated by Rousseau.

It indicates the actual, genuine will of the people to lead a life of virtue and collective wellbeing instead of being guided by perverse selfinterest . People in the advanced Western countries, riding high on the opportunities of lives and livelihoods created by the forces of capitalism and the technology driven system of production were increasingly viewing the State as a sunset structure made redundant by the market.

In countries like India, where benefits of globalisation have accrued unevenly to different sections of society, pushing the poor more towards the periphery while the affluent has prospered, the situation has been ripe for the emergence of majoritarian governments in the garb of a nationalist dispensation. But the pandemic has led to a paradigmc shift in this politico- economic matrix, as there is a surge of demand for the State to be more proactive in containing this dreadful disease.

For the moment, the primordial survival instinct is getting precedence over the penchant for laissez faire, and personal liberties, as testified by recent developments in some countries already harbouring authoritarian regimes. Hungarian legislators are considering a new bill which will allow Viktor Orban’s government to extend the state of emergency indefinitely, creating fears that it will give a carte blanche to Orban. This will have serious implications for freedom of the press, scope for judicial scrutiny and might weaken further an already shattered democracy.

Similar developments are happening in other countries as well. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has instructed the country’s internal security agency to tap into a vast and previously undisclosed trove of cellphone data, gathered by the secret service to combat terrorism. The objective is to retrace the movements of people who have contracted coronavirus and identify others who should be quarantined because their paths crossed.

Fears have been expressed that nations across the world will witness the emergence of the Leviathan, the all-powerful state, a concept floated by Hobbes in a book of the same name, written partly as a response to the fear he had experienced during the political turmoil of the English Civil Wars in 1651. Hobbes strongly advocated the creation of an absolute sovereign, the Leviathan, which alone can give men freedom from a state of ‘war of all against al.

In the present day and age, it is a war against a micro-organism holding to ransom the lives of the most advanced species on this planet.This alone can prevent the disintegration and degeneration of the social order and a return to a ‘state of nature’ in which men’s lives would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. This sounds so prophetic in the wake of this dreadful, near apocalyptic pandemic.

The implications of having such an absolute sovereign in the helm of affairs, with the power to decide whom to protect and whom to punish, are indeed grave.

Those who fear that nations will continue to be more inward looking after Corona might find some solace in the fact that in future the prevention of such pandemics and other catastrophic fallouts of climate change, which would not be deterred by barbed wires and armed posts at the national borders, will require more international cooperation, better global institutions with adequate power of implementing corrective measures and a genuine spirit of cooperation among nation states to ensure the continuation of the ‘dominant species’ in this planet, as has been warned by noted scientists.

Life after Corona demands more compassion, better fellow feeling and restrained actions to ensure better harmony with nature.

(The writer is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Women’s Christian College, Kolkata)