What only some feared in the initial days of the pandemic is now increasingly getting registered. Earlier it could have been set aside as just another scholarly rant, but now, as the crisis turn endless, the problem is rearing its head for all to see. In fact it is a multi-headed demon that the world now encounters. The talk on who would now lead the world, and how the power would shift, is for the realists to see, primarily. For a vast majority of academics, public intellectuals, civil society formations, and genuine humanitarian groups, the time ahead is not difficult in the ordinary sense of the word. The scale of humanitarian crisis that one can see unfolding is scary, to put it mildly. When the chief of the World Health Organization (WHO) says that Covid-19 threatens to exacerbate many issues the world is facing, such as years of conflict and other humanitarian crises, it’s call for serious reflection, and meaningful action. Right now the world is busy in finding some treatment to this infection.
It’s a genuine human endeavour and one can only wish to see some vaccine come up before long. But that is to treat pandemic in biological sense. The bigger problem, and the one this pandemic has further put in a bold relief, is how the political and economic systems are working at international and national levels. Just a look at the conflicted spots in the world would expose the state of our systems; it’s a plagued politics. All these conflicts- political, economic, ethnic, resource based – would deepen in the new scheme of things, if efforts are not specifically directed at resolving them. Swathes of population around the globe will suffer unimaginably if the systemic injustices are not ended. The world that shaped up after the two great wars has seen some of the brilliant things happening to humans. The opening up of democratic spaces, and an end to conquest based territorial control was a huge relief to mankind. But the emergence of military-industrial complex, and some supremacist and xenophobic ideas, are bound to cause havoc. Unless local and global mind targets these evil formations directly, covid 19 would result is miseries that we might not have imagined yet.