More Than Physical Space
Social distancing reveals wide wealth gaps in Pakistan
BY SHAJIA SARFRAZ
Photo by Logan Weaver/Unsplash.
Do you really think these maids are staying inside and not meeting anyone when you give them a paid leave during lockdown?” asked Mahnaz, a woman on an online Facebook group where women in urban Karachi share reviews on domestic workers and post openings for household help. “I have started calling mine back — I think it’s fine as long as we take all the necessary precautions,” she added.
Someone inquired what was meant by “necessary precautions” and she clarified, “When [my maid] enters, I just spray her with an antiseptic and ask her to shower and change clothes before she begins work.”
On March 2, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 was reported in Pakistan. While, the government had yet to impose an official lockdown, social distancing was being recommended to curb the spread of the virus. However, within hours, photos of a dinner party in the city of Lahore went viral. Waiters and caterers were photographed wearing masks and gloves, while the host and guests mingled maskfree. Even with the looming threat of a deadly virus, the latter-day aristocracy maintained its “let them eat cake” attitude.
A few days later, a famous fashion designer sparked countrywide outrage for releasing a video asking the Prime Minister for help as her husband had been arrested. The charges were that the couple had sent their cook packing to his village on a public bus, despite knowing that he had tested positive for COVID-19. The police arrested the husband for criminal negligence and risking public health. While the designer’s tone-deaf video recorded in her opulent home was derided all over the country, she was quickly able to get her husband released on bail with the help of some “friends from the army.”
This virus has exposed the fractures present in Pakistani society and the double standards by which people and businesses choose to govern themselves: calling in a minimum-wage-earning housekeeper under the guise of supporting the economy; making a chauffeur redundant, while spending half his monthly salary on ordering restaurant deliveries at home; businesses donating large sums of money to televised fundraisers around the country, while laying off employees only a month into the lockdown. This global pandemic is shining a bright light on how hypocrisy, bred through class difference, has contaminated nearly every aspect of our citizenry.
The coronavirus has exposed the fractures in society and the double standards by which people choose to govern themselves.
Pakistani upper-middle class have always been fairly immune to the hardships of the ordinary citizen. Water scarcity is resolved by water tankers making weekly household deliveries, electricity shortages are fixed by installing personal generators, unreliable policing is compensated by private guards, broken healthcare and education systems are supplanted by sophisticated foreign operations run by trained professionals.
Over the years, the belief that the rich are untouchable has been cemented in the minds of Pakistan’s bourgeois. Hence, when COVID-19, the supposed great equalizer, threatened liberties that were always taken for granted, the idea of a complete lockdown quickly transitioned into a joke.
Initial instructions to stay more than six feet apart have morphed into a loose etiquette of sitting “far enough” and having “smaller” gatherings. Flights have been cancelled, but cross-country road trips can still be taken in private SUVs, as long as the numbers are low enough. Large gatherings have been banned, but people continue to host parties at home — there have even been reports of discreet, corona-themed tea-parties, complete with face masks and hand sanitizers.
Should anyone contract the virus, the well-to-do need only pick up the phone to order a COVID-19 test, which they can administer from the comfort of their home. While these tests remain in short supply at the government-run hospitals, a private test can be ordered for a mere hundred dollars.
Meanwhile, for more than a third of the country’s population, the prescribed strategies of social distancing, working from home, and self-isolation are impractical, almost risible in the face of stark realities.
When COVID-19, the supposed great equalizer, threatened liberties that were always taken for granted, the idea of a complete lockdown quickly transitioned into a joke.
More than 45 percent of Pakistan’s population lives in slums where there is no running water. Often, people line up for hours to fill water from a community tap. Hand sanitizers are an expensive joke and regular hand washing an unthinkable luxury.
Hassan, a domestic worker, does his best to keep his family safe during the pandemic. To avoid taking a bus, he bikes for forty minutes every day in the sweltering heat to work. Social distancing is impossible in the slum where he lives. Wedged between upscale Karachi suburbs, he lives in a house on an unplanned street that has dozens of houses piled on top of each other. A canal chocked with plastic bags runs through the slum, reeking of sewage.
His wife and two children live in one room of a two-bedroom apartment, which he shares with his brother’s family of another six. Their children have been off from school for over two months. “The police would hit us with batons if they saw us outside during the lockdown. Thankfully, with the lockdown easing off, the children can at least play in the streets.”
Although public transportation is closed, the economy has started to open up. To get about, more than a dozen men cram into the back of a pickup truck. A wealthier passerby looks on in horror from their chauffeured car, raising the phone to take a picture of the scene.
As if the contrast between the wealthy and the working class in Pakistan was not stark enough, the coronavirus has made it impossible to overlook. Poor investment in infrastructure and the lack of a social safety net are being paid for with the lives of the poorest among us. One question we are left to face, among the many that will come after the first wave of COVID-19 subsides, is how can we let one segment of society bend the rules and leave another to face a humanitarian and economic disaster?
SHAJIA SARFRAZ is an international development professional who uses evidence and data to improve the quality of education and learning for children in developing countries. She currently works as a consultant in Pakistan with various international aid organizations and non-profits.