Barely two months ago in February the Government and the Bharatiya Janata Party declared victory over Covid. BJP adopted a resolution hailing Prime Minister Modi’s dynamic leadership as an example to the world. The Union Health Minister exulted that the endgame was close. Overconfidence was such that the Election Commission announced an expansive poll schedule; the Government gave the go ahead to the richest cricket tournament to go ahead on schedule.
The overconfident government permitted the once-in-12-years Kumbh Mela to be advance from 2022 to this year. Precious resources, manpower and energy were diverted to manage elections, the religious festival and cricket matches. The Government which had failed to arrange trains for migrant workers last year went ahead to arrange for 25 special trains to ferry the pilgrims.
While the Prime Minister continued to solemnly ask people to stay indoors, put on masks and maintain social distance, he himself and his ministers sent out mixed messages by claiming that India had overcome the pandemic and holding road shows in poll-bound states without masks. New facts are tumbling out daily over the past few weeks, which call the government’s bluff on good governance and its gross mismanagement of the pandemic. It encouraged irrational and unscientific cures with the health minister himself promoting Baba Ram Dev’s magic cure branded as Coronil.
The Government encouraged research on the efficacy of Gayatri Mantra and Yoga on Covid-19 patients while withholding funds for genome sequencing of samples. Despite being aware of the country’s vaccine manufacturing capacity pegged at seven Crore doses against the requirement of 180 Crore doses, it did nothing to secure vaccines from manufacturing companies abroad unlike other countries. License to manufacture vaccines were denied till this month to public sector companies with past experience.
While it boasted of having ramped up hospital beds, the second surge of Covid has exposed its complete unpreparedness with two to three Covid patients forced to share beds in Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Hospital in Delhi. It had the time to set up oxygen plants in hospitals and increase the storage capacity but once again it was complacent and took its eyes off the ball.
The government, one suspects, has used emergency provisions to spend enormous sums of money on advertisement and communication. That is why its failure to disseminate credible information about the pandemic and the failure to contain panic are so glaring. While police in the national capital and in several states went berserk, beating the daylights of people found without a mask, the uniformed force turned their eyes from ruling party workers taking out rallies, organizing roadshows and seeking donations for the Ram temple without masks.
The WHO dropped Remdesivir last year from its approved list of medicines to cope with Covid. But the government created an artificial shortage of the medicine and allowed its hoarding and sale at exorbitant prices. It failed to communicate to the people that 99% of the Covid patients can get well at home. It failed to convey that only around one percent of Covid patients ran the risk of death.
It is a different matter that it botched up the treatment of even these one percent of the cases, just as it botched up the vaccine rollout. Even more amusingly, a government which calls for ‘one country-one tax-one election’ and so on has now allowed private vaccine manufacturers to charge multiple prices from different users. An all-party meeting and a short session of Parliament need to be convened urgently to lay the road map ahead.
Global press turns guns on India, blames Modi for failure to tackle second wave
For image-conscious Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the foreign press’s reviews of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic must make devastating reading. Modi has gone from hero to minnow in fighting Covid-19 in the eyes of the world press as daily infections have soared to successive new records. After appearing to have skilfully ridden the first Covid wave with one of the world’s strictest national lockdowns, Modi has been engulfed by the second, according to the verdict of the foreign media.
Headlines like: “Modi flounders in India’s gigantic second wave,” in The Times, London, have been typical of the coverage that the Prime Minister has been receiving as the daily count of new Covid cases has barrelled past 300,000. The Times has blasted the government’s response to the latest coronavirus wave, saying it has “underscored the air of complacency and denial that have dogged his government’s response to the crisis.”
“The system has collapsed: India’s descent into Covid hell,” said an equally blistering headline in The Guardian, which led its main story with a photo of flames soaring high in a crematorium. The newspaper added: “Many falsely believed that the country had defeated Covid. Now, hospitals are running out of oxygen and bodies are stacking up in morgues.”
International coverage which had focused on Brazil as the global Covid disaster zone has now zeroed in on India as the place where the pandemic is raging out of control.
The global press has turned its guns especially on the Central government for having been complacent and not being prepared for the second wave. Also, the government has been castigated for holding mass election rallies in West Bengal that may have worsened the situation. The decision to allow the mega Kumbh Mela to go ahead has also been roundly denounced as reckless. International newspapers have splashed their front pages with pictures of huge crowds of mask-less devotees pressed against each other and accused the Indian government of lacking the courage to call the gathering off for fear of alienating their Hindu supporters.
The Times which makes a ferocious attack on the Central government says: “The speed and ferocity of the second wave have exposed a string of missteps at the start of the year, repeating the mistakes of 2020 and making new ones, to leave Indians facing a tsunami of infection that has pushed the country to the brink of collapse.”
It also talks about Modi, mask-less, at a West Bengal election rally attended by hundreds of thousands of voters, also not wearing masks, declaring that, “In all directions, I see huge crowds of people….I have never seen such crowds at a rally.”
The Financial Times departed from its usual sober style to describe devastating sights of people dying while waiting for hospital beds, the disastrous oxygen shortage and apocalyptic scenes of funeral pyres on the banks of the Ganges. It said the latest wave was “sparking a health crisis and human tragedy in India that is far surpassing anything seen last year.” FT also carried detailed charts about the wave of infections, including ones from each state showing rising positivity rates, which indicate the infections are likely to get worse.
FT, too, blamed the government for the devastating second wave, saying: “The devastation has sparked outrage at the lack of preparation among officials who believed the worst of the pandemic was over.”
The Washington Post led one of its stories with an aerial shot of a Muslim graveyard in Uttar Pradesh showing a large number of freshly filled graves. It said: “In India, this surge is not a wave but a wall.” It added: “In some cities, crematoriums are running their furnaces round the clock.”
The Washington Post divided the blame between, “more contagious variants of the virus, as well as an early relaxation of restrictions and a slow-moving vaccination campaign.” In another story, it also described damaging vaccine shortages in various states.
