Both may have been waiting for an opportunity to hit back at their rival. The Congress was first off the mark, quickly exploiting the official bungling over the exodus of migrant labourers from Delhi and other cities for their home villages. Since, as Congress president Sonia Gandhi said, the chaotic conditions were inevitable in the absence of timely warnings about the lockdown, the country not only witnessed surging crowds at bus stations, there were also heart-rending scenes of hundreds of people walking for miles to reach their destinations along with their children.

As Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel pointed out, these hapless people could have been spared their plight if the centre had consulted the state governments before taking the decision. But the inadequacy of preparations came in the way of softening the blow for the migrant labourers who were fearful about losing their means of livelihood as well as shelter. The consultations will now take place with the prime minister deciding to get in touch with former presidents, former prime ministers and opposition leaders.

After the fiasco over the fleeing migrants, came the prime minister’s “lights off and diya jalao” diktat, which gave the Congress an opportunity to make fun of the government, along with a section of the Twitterati. While Shashi Tharoor and several other Congressmen accused Narendra Modi of forever looking for photo-ops, irrespective of the seriousness of the occasion, Rahul Gandhi said that the infection could not be tackled by lighting lamps and Trinamool Congress’s Mahua Moitra spoke of the government’s various sound-and-light shows, obviously referring to the diya jalao enterprise having been preceded by the thhali bajao, taali bajao exhortation.

There is little doubt, however, that the government will watch with a hawk’s eye the response to the prime minister’s “9 minutes at 9 p.m.” call in order to assess whether the stay-at-home directive has increased or decreased Narendra Modi’s popularity. Reports suggest that the response was huge which should make the government heave a sigh of relief. It will also be relieved that the sudden 32,000 MW drop in demand during those nine minutes was competently handled by the power stations.

Of all the difficulties which the government has faced, the covid-19 crisis is without question the worst. Compared to dealing with this menace, the demonetization exercise was a cakewalk. If the government can tide over the present crisis, it will be ready for any challenge. But there is still some distance to go before any claim can be made that the worst is over.

But it is not only the government which is on test. So is the opposition. It is worth noting, however, that of all the parties, it is the Congress, which was supposed to be down and out, which is currently more in the limelight in the matter of taking on the government than any other party, indicating – yet again – that the BJP and the Congress remain the two poles of Indian politics. The others are not of much consequence presumably because of their localized regional influence. While Congressmen like Shashi Tharoor, P. Chidambaram and Abhishek Manu Singhvi have been quite vocal, most of the leaders of other political parties have kept quiet, including Sharad Pawar who played a stellar role in turfing out the BJP from Maharashtra.

The next phase of the BJP-Congress confrontation is expected after the lockdown is lifted, either in a staggered manner as the prime minister has hinted, or fully. For the present, if the government was on the back foot on the migrants issue, it may have been able to recover some of the lost ground – to judge from the reactions of the pro-BJP television channels - after the egregious violation of the lockdown rules by a group of Muslims led by a fundamentalist cleric who said that the scare about the deadly virus was an excuse (“baahana”) to harass the Muslims.

Although he later recanted, he succeeded in confirming the stereotype of the Muslims as a backward and bigoted community which is how they are portrayed by the BJP’s core Hindu base of supporters. The cleric, Ameer Maulana Saad, can be said to have joined the list of Muslim zealots like the Jawaharlal Nehru University student, Sharjeel Imam, and the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen’s Waris Pathan, who have played into the BJP’s hands by their provocative communal rants.

However, while lambasting the Muslims, the pro-government television anchors could also pointed out that these fanatical religious elements are not the only extremists. They are also others like the pastor in Florida in the US who described coronavirus as a “phantom plague” and said that the church was the safest place to be in. Similarly, the orthodox Jews in Israel have been reluctant to follow the stay-at-home rules. There is little difference between the fundamentalists of the various religions. (IPA Service)