India's Covid Crisis: Narendra Modi Seems to Have No Plan

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India's Covid Crisis: Narendra Modi Seems to Have No Plan


Rana Ayyub
April 23, 2021 8:06 AM EDT
Dr. Jalil Parkar, one of India’s leading pulmonologists, wears his exhaustion on his face.

In between treating patients at the COVID-19 intensive care unit of Mumbai’s prestigious Lilavati Hospital, Parkar appears regularly on TV to give updates on the current, devastating second wave of the pandemic that is killing thousands of Indians. He himself spent time in the ICU last year and almost died after suffering multiple COVID-complications. Now, he confesses to losing his calm over what he is seeing unfold every day.

“Our healthcare system has collapsed. We have let down our own people in the country,” he says. “What can doctors do when our infrastructure is unable to take the patients, when there are no hospital beds or oxygen cylinders?”

Narendra Modi's Party Takes an Electoral Hit Amid India's Virus Surge



On Friday, April 23, India recorded 332,730 coronavirus cases, the highest single-day total of cases recorded globally so far. It had broken that record the day before, too. Since the pandemic began, India has confirmed more than 16 million cases and more than 186,000 deaths. India’s total confirmed COVID-19 cases to date are second to the United States overall, and its daily case and death rates are rapidly catching up with the U.S.—which means, given India’s much larger population, its raw case and death numbers will surpass the U.S. soon if the trends continue. Every day, more than 2,000 people in India aredying with COVID-19, according to official numbers—and experts believe that number is a dramatic underestimate. Three health officials who asked to remain anonymous told me they believe that the daily number of COVID-19 deaths in India has already crossed the 10,000 figure. There is no escape from it; in the past week alone, I have lost four people to COVID-19—a distant relative, my next-door neighbor, and two of my closest friends, both in their mid-30s.

Read More: Officially, India Has the World’s Second-Worst COVID-19 Outbreak. Unofficially, It’s Almost Certainly the Worst

Increasingly, people are dying in plain sight. On Friday, Delhi’s leading Gangaram Hospital issued an SOS that it only had enough oxygen left for two hours and that 25 patients had already lost their lives in the hospital due to oxygen shortages. Videos show people stealing oxygen cylinders for their relatives. One devastating video from the BBC shows a woman trying to help her dying brother regain consciousness. “Bajali, why don’t you wake up?” she cries. As I was writing this, the news broke that 22 critically ill patients lost their lives at a hospital in Maharashtra after a leak from the main hospital oxygen tank stopped the flow to their ventilators. Multiple hospitals in India are petitioning the High Courts to seek immediate oxygen supply. If the apocalypse had an image, it would be the hospitals of India.

Despite these inescapable horrors, much of India remains in a sort of parallel reality where COVID-19 is not a threat. Tens of thousands of Hindu devotees continue to show up each day for a dip in the Ganges as part of the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage in Haridwar, Uttarakhand. Millions of worshippers have participated in the weeks-long festival since the first day of bathing on March 11, despite clear evidence that thousands are testing positive for the virus after attending. In the space of just a few days in mid-April, more than 1,600 cases were confirmed among devotees. In March, when the second wave was already underway, state leaders from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) published full-page ads in national newspapers telling worshippers it was “clean” and “safe” to attend. The Uttarakhand chief minister declared on March 20, “nobody will be stopped in the name of COVID-19 as we are sure the faith in God will overcome the fear of the virus.” It wasn’t until mid-April that Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted that participation in the pilgrimage should be kept “symbolic” to combat the pandemic. Is it any wonder that the festival has become a super-spreader event?

A mass cremation of bodies of COVID-19 victims in New Delhi on April 22, 2021.
Danish Siddiqui—Reuters
A more deadly second wave
I’ve been reporting on COVID-19 in India since March 2020, and it’s been bad before, but what I’m witnessing in this second wave is like nothing I’ve seen.

Healthcare workers are stretched beyond all comprehension. When I visited the state-run Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation hospital on Sunday, I saw a nurse sitting on the staircase with her head in her hands. She told me she’d been struggling with nausea. The bathrooms had not been cleaned; the workers had given up because there is only one toilet for every 20 COVID-19 patients. The nurse, who did not wish to be named, said she herself was recovering from the virus. Her request for leave had been denied three times and she wished she could resign, but her family of six depends on her. “This is hell, you tell me, is this not?” she said. “They talk of worshipping the medical fraternity but they have left us to die.”

The second wave of cases has been made more deadly by oxygen shortages in hospitals. An investigation by Indian news website Scroll.in revealed that the country’s government waited until October 2020, eight months after the pandemic began, to invite bids for a $27 million contract to place oxygen generation systems inside more than 150 district hospitals. Six months later, most still aren’t up and running. Hospitals in the states of Haryana, Maharashtra and Gujarat have been issuing distress calls for urgent supplies of oxygen. Two patients in a Gujarat hospital died because of oxygen shortages on Wednesday.

States are now feuding with each other to obtain supplies. In a recent tweet, Anil Vij, a minister from the state of Haryana accused the neighboring Delhi government of stealing oxygen canisters from a truck en route to Haryana. Vijlater told the Economic Times that he had ordered police protection for oxygen trucks so that they are not stolen by other states.

We might also ask how many deaths the government is attempting to hide. In the state of Uttar Pradesh workers were pictured covering the crematorium with tin sheets. Priyanka Gandhi, of the opposition Congress party, accused local authorities of hiding the truth.” In Gujarat, the Prime Minister’s home state, crematoriums are burning day and night, while the state refuses to acknowledge the high number of deaths. The Gujarat high court has demandedthe state government reveal the accurate count of COVID-19 patients and deaths.

In other states, the data for COVID-19 deaths are unreliable at best, and at worst fabricated to cover up the devastation. To give just one example, in a crematorium in the state of Madhya Pradesh, 94 bodies were cremated in a day but government data reported only three, according to Times Now. But the more overwhelmed morgues and crematoriums become, the less able state governments are to conceal the truth or to bolster the false narrative that all is well in India.

People bury the bodies of COVID-19 victims at a graveyard in New Delhi on April 16, 2021.
Danish Siddiqui—Reuters
Responsibility lies at the top
This week, as India reported the highest number of daily cases of anywhere in the world, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party tweeted a video of one of Modi’s political rallies. (Five states are holding elections in May.) Alongside Modi was his close confidante and home minister, Amit Shah. In theory, Shah should have been in the capital, coordinating with various state governments on how to to deal with the devastating spike in COVID-19 cases over the past few weeks. Instead, Shah has been holding roadshows with thousands of joyous crowds on the streets of eastern India. He broadcasts these rallies live on his Twitter and Facebook accounts at the same time as many Indians’ social media feeds are inundated with people begging for medical help. As thousands are dying, our home minister and our Prime Minister have looked the other way to continue campaigning. (It was only after significant criticism this week that Modi finally announced on Thursday night that he would be canceling his Friday rallies in West Bengal to instead hold COVID-19 management meetings with state ministers.)

Why was India caught unprepared as the second wave ravaged a cross-section of Indian society? The responsibility lies with a strongman regime that has ignored all caution.

It lies with the sycophantic cabinet ministers who praised Modi for successfully dealing with COVID- 19 in India even as testing slowed down and allowed people to become more complacent about the virus.

It lies with the upper-middle-class Indians who were last year banging platesfrom their high-rise windows and lighting candles to praise Modi and celebrate the success of an unplanned lockdown—while poor migrant workers lost their jobs and had to leave the cities. While the rich booked themselves in hospitals using their contacts, they rarely offered monetary help to their employees.

Read More: How the Pandemic Is Reshaping India

Accountability also lies with the state ministers who prefer playing power games to actually governing, and who were caught napping as the virus made a comeback. In the state of Maharashtra, as numbers surged, the BJP and the ruling party, the Shiv Sena, were occupied with a face-off over control of the state government.

But above all it lies with Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, who calls himself the servant of 1.3 billion Indians, yet who has criminally abdicated his responsibility.

Since January, Modi has organized mass political rallies in various states and has allowed religious events like the Kumbh Mela to go ahead, while his party continued with its dog-whistle campaigns against Indian minorities. In West Bengal, the Modi election campaign warned Hindus of being under threat from Muslim immigrants from neighboring states, with Amit Shah accusing West Bengal’s Chief Minister of appeasing Muslim interests.

The vaccine rollout became a global PR campaign for Modi’s leadership—in March, an Indo-Canadian group sponsored billboards erected in Canadathanking Modi for exporting Indian-made vaccines abroad—even while many Indians were apprehensive about their efficacy and side effects.

The great orator has made little effort to send out a message to the country to get the vaccine, or to dispel the myths surrounding it. In rural India, where more than 65% of Indians live, many are skeptical of the vaccine, with misinformation circulating on social media. The Prime Minister has done little to reinforce public health messaging. In West Bengal, where Modi himself has been campaigning. the BJP Chief has advocated drinking cow urine to treat COVID-19. Vijay Chauthaiwale, in charge of the BJP’s foreign affairs department, wrote a column calling economists and experts part of the “anti-Modi lobby” and encouraging Indians not to reject traditional medicine, including cow urine and turmeric to boost the immune system.

When the vaccine rollout slowed, there was no effort or coordination with the states as Modi’s cabinet indulged in a blame game with ministers from opposition parties. When states like Maharashtra, with the highest number of COVID-19 cases, shut down a majority of its vaccination centers because of a lack of vaccines, the government was not quick to step in. While epidemiologists, specialists and opposition leaders have long urged Modi to give approvals for foreign vaccines, the decision to give emergency use license to the Russian manufactured Sputnik V vaccine was only taken in the second week of April.

This is a moment when the country needs answers. Yet on April 20, when Modi finally addressed the nation about the growing crisis, he warned states that a lockdown should be considered a last resort, and called on young people to form committees to ensure COVID-19 protocols are being followed. On the festival of Ram Navami, he tweeted that people should follow the message ofLord Ram, the Hindu deity for protection, and follow “appropriate behavior.”

The address to the nation received a lukewarm response as the Prime Minister offered no immediate relief to the country. Many Indians called out the prime minister’s failure to take accountability. The hashtag #WeCannotBreathe is trending on Indian twitter.

At this critical juncture in its history, Indians have been left to fend for ourselves.

 

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Narendra Modi's COVID catastrophe brings India to its knees
Failure raises questions about nation's future role on the world stage

Rupa Subramanya is a researcher and commentator.

In 2018, when the southern Indian state of Kerala was devastated by floods, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declined foreign assistance, following a precedent set during the Asian tsunami of 2004, when then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had similarly declined.

The previous year, then Finance Minister Jaswant Singh, in his budget speech, had announced that India no longer needed foreign aid, a doctrine endorsed by every subsequent government, and widely seen as a marker of India's imminent arrival on the world stage.

While India was in the midst of fighting the first wave of COVID-19 under one of the harshest lockdowns in the world, Modi, in June 2020, had proclaimed a new doctrine of self-reliance, known as Atmanirbhar Bharat, which purported that India's future would lie in looking after itself and not being dependent on other countries.

This marked a reversal of three decades of globalization in India. The country had opened up to international trade and investment in 1991, the year of India's economic reforms, which marked a change from a post-independence period characterized by isolation and central planning.

In January, Modi's optimism seemed to know no bounds. He said: "In times of crisis, India is able to serve the world because India, today, is capable of medicines and vaccines, is self-sufficient. This is also the idea of a self-reliant India. The more capable India is, the more it will serve humanity and the more the world will benefit."

Taking a leaf from his boss, in early February, when there were incipient signs of a likely second wave, India's External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar, proudly proclaimed that the country's recovery from the pandemic was evidence that India's self-reliance drive was working.

Today, India is in the midst of a deadly second wave of the pandemic with no relief in sight. The Modi government initially downplayed this threat and asserted India's exceptionalism, ignored credible warnings by its own experts and even a parliamentary committee that a second wave was building, and declared premature victory, both to their own citizens and to world leaders.

One mark of this complacency is that, as late as the end of February, the Indian government had ordered only 21 million vaccine doses for a population of 1.3 billion people while at the same time proclaiming to be the pharmacy of the world and engaging in vaccine diplomacy.

Such hubris has now brought India to its knees. The belated about-face and the grudging acceptance of foreign assistance marks a reversal of the long-standing policy of declining foreign assistance and makes a mockery of Modi's proclamation that India is ready for self-reliance.

Narendra Modi, pictured on Jan. 25: the Prime Minister's optimism seemed to know no bounds. (Handout Photo from Prime Minister's Office of India)
In recent days, foreign countries have begun coming to India's assistance after receiving a tacit signal that such offers are now welcome. Countries are stepping in simply because India is too big to fail. Among major donors, the U.S., France and the U.K. have already begun to deliver emergency supplies such as oxygen plants, ventilators and essential medications used to treat COVID-19.

Even India's tiny neighbor, Bhutan, has offered the services of its two oxygen generators. Oxygen is in such short supply that some recent deaths are due to the lack of oxygen and could have been prevented were supplies more plentiful.

As the world watches and foreign leaders who had embraced and built up Modi take note, they are all witness to the absence of a coordinated response by the government and the complete failure of leadership combatting the crisis. People have been left to their own devices, with much of the heavy lifting being done by volunteers on the ground trying to pick up the slack. Some state governments are trying to fill the vacuum left by the central government's inaction, but the absence of coordination means a national response has gone begging.

The Indian government's climbdown reflects the severity of the current crisis, with the health system having all but collapsed and even mortuaries unable to process all of the dead.

Modi's spectacular failure to manage the crisis raises important questions about India's future role in the world. Far from being a reliable partner, and a possible counterweight to a rising China, India has shown that it is barely even able to look after itself.

So mismanaged has been the response that, at the time of writing, many of the aid supplies that have been flown in from abroad have yet to be distributed to where they are needed. What is more, given the scale of its domestic crisis, the Indian government has diverted vaccine doses meant for export to domestic use, raising serious questions about India's reliability as a source of vaccines going forward.

An important country has been brought to an abject state by multiple failures of its leadership. Indeed, the magnitude of the current debacle is matched only by the boastfulness of Modi's previous rhetoric: that under his visionary leadership, the 21st century would belong to India.

With COVID19, reality has finally caught up with the rhetoric. Modi's shining India has now been shown up to be little more than a facade, built upon image management and marketing, which has now collapsed like a house of cards. Not only has India's image in the world taken a beating, but its credibility as a reliable partner under Modi's wayward leadership is also seriously in doubt.

 

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Modi Says Virus Is Rapidly Spreading in India’s Rural Areas
Bibhudatta PradhanMay 14, 2021, 5:38 AM EDT
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Covid-19 was spreading rapidly in rural areas and asked villagers in the world’s second-most populous nation to take precautions.

“You should take required steps at the family and community level to save yourself from the virus,” Modi said to a gathering of farmers virtually on Friday, adding state governments are making efforts to stop the spread of infections.

Villagers should not ignore symptoms such as cough, fever, vomiting and must isolate themselves, undergo testing and consult doctors, Modi said.

The latest Covid updatesMake sense of the headlines and the outbreak's global response with the Coronavirus Daily.
The second wave of Covid-19 has been acute in towns and cities, including New Delhi and Mumbai, where the infections have strained India’s health system and overwhelmed crematoriums and hospitals, forcing people onto social media in a desperate search for oxygen and life-saving medicines. The spread of infections to rural areas, where about 70% of country’s 1.3 billion population live, poses even more of a challenge because remote areas lack health care infrastructure.

Read: Modi Ally Tries to Quash Reports on India’s Deadly Covid Crisis

India has reported more than 300,000 daily infections for 22 consecutive days, highlighting the country’s slide into the world’s worst health crisis. One research model is predicting deaths could almost quadruple to more than a million by end-July from the current official count of less than 300,000.

The situation is worse in states where massive voter rallies were held during recent multi-phase elections, said Alok Mukhopadhyay, chairman of the Voluntary Health Association of India, a non-profit organization that has links with more than 4,500 health and development institutions in India.

“It’s a quite alarming situation in rural areas,” Mukhopadhyay said, based on the information he has been receiving throughout the country. “The spread is more fierce than the first wave.”

(Updates with analyst comment in six paraghaph)

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Modi's Gamble, and How Many Lives It Will Cost
Modi did not want only to prevent a second wave; he wanted all the credit for stopping COVID-19 in its tracks to go to him and him alone.
In her heart-rending description of her desperate search for oxygen to save her father’s life, the celebrated TV news anchor Barkha Dutt ascribed his death to three features of governance that have defined Modi’s India: complacency, callousness and incompetence. She could have added a fourth – an insatiable, almost suicidal appetite for risk born of a compulsion to keep reinforcing an already swollen image of himself.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has displayed this penchant half a dozen times in the last seven years: his personal announcement of demonetisation before the new currency notes had even been printed; his imposition of the Goods and Services Tax with immediate effect, denying India’s 71 million small manufacturers time to set up the required accounting systems; his sudden confrontation of the Chinese at Doklam in Bhutan without consulting Thimpu, and his equally sudden removal of price and marketing protection from farmers without even a rudimentary examination of how it would affect them.

His appetite for risk surfaced yet again, within days of being told that the first wave of India’s COVID-19 epidemic had peaked in September last year. Of the 50 lakh Indians who had been infected until then, 81% had recovered. Some 10 lakh patients remained under medical care, most of them at home. A little over 84,000 people had died. The mortality rate of 1.68 % was about the lowest in the world and the envy of other nations (notwithstanding fatality undercounting and underreporting).

But everyone involved in the actual fight until then knew that it was too good to last. Scientists always knew of the danger that the ‘original’ virus could mutate into more dangerous forms. Second ‘waves’ of COVID-19 had already developed in the summer and autumn of 2020, spreading through parts of Belgium, Iran, South Korea, Germany, the Czech Republic, Spain and the US.

When researchers in the UK reported the B.1.1.7 variant in December 2020, the country’s government immediately extended its existing lockdown. The variant was found to be more infectious but no more dangerous than the original. Within weeks, scientists reported two more ‘variants of concern’, from Brazil (P.1) and South Africa (B.1.351), in addition to numerous other strains and mutations. P.1 and B.1.351 have been found to be able to partially evade the human immune system, endangering prospects of vaccines being developed at the time.

Also read: Narmada, Modi’s Showpiece Tourist Centre, Is Reeling Under a Terrifying Second Wave of COVID

Therefore, every government took the risk of a second outbreak seriously from the start. By early January 2021, the B.1.1.7 strain had been detected in samples in Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia, Italy, Sweden, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Japan, Lebanon and Singapore. All of these countries took quick precautions, imposed lockdowns and/or stepped up their vaccination schedules.

There were only three exceptions – all in large democracies with insecure but ruthless leaders in power: Brazil, the US and India.

India’s scientific and medical establishment, and its health minister Harsh Vardhan in particular, were fully aware of the threat that later strains of the virus could pose. Vardhan had overseen the last phase of the polio eradication campaign during Prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s tenure, so he had an experience of disease control that no one else in the government did.

But from the very first days of the pandemic, the Modi government developed two conflicting aims. While the administration wanted to chart a course of action that would minimise the risk of a second wave, the political establishment – headed by Modi himself – was concerned only with extracting every ounce of political advantage from the crisis.

The conflict emerged in the very first week of the March 2020 lockdown. In speech after televised speech, Modi reminded his audiences that just as the Pandava had won the battle of Kurukshetra in 18 days, he would win the battle against COVID-19 in 21 days. He thus turned the lockdown into a personal battle between him and the virus.

As the days passed, and the number of new cases increased instead of declining, Modi began to look for something, or someone, to blame. Conveniently for him, the Tablighi Jamaat conference in New Delhi gave him just the scapegoats he needed – foreign religious clerics belonging to a religion he detested and had targeted to attain power. The strictest possible lockdown was therefore imposed on the entire Nizamuddin area of New Delhi and criminal cases filed against the organisers – despite the fact that the conference had ended two days before the government imposed the first travel restrictions on foreigners, on March 14.

But new cases continued to mount long after the event’s conclusion, so Modi sought help from the occult. To invoke the gods to come to his aid, he asked people to turn off their lights and beat thalis at preordained times and used the Air Force to shower flowers over Delhi.

While he was monopolising TV time, his administration was setting up 11 empowered groups under the National Disaster Management Act, to deal with the material aspects of the forthcoming challenge. One of them, within days of being set up, warned the government in unambiguous terms that a second wave was likely and provided detailed recommendations on how to prepare for it, should it happen.

Among its most important recommendations was that India immediately import 60,000 tonnes of oxygen and upgrade 150 district hospitals – mainly by supplying them with 162 pressure swing adsorption plants to isolate oxygen.

The 162 plants were expected to cost Rs 200 crore. At the time the empowered group made these recommendations, the PM Cares fund, which Modi had set up to fight the pandemic, had already received Rs 3,076 crore, mostly from public sector companies. So Modi had the money he needed, in abundance.

A COVID-19 patient on oxygen support waits to be admitted at Patna Medical College and Hospital, during the second wave of coronavirus in Patna, Friday, May 14, 2021. Photo: PTI

But Modi did not want only to prevent a second wave; he wanted all the credit for stopping COVID-19 in its tracks to go to him and him alone. So when the first wave peaked in September 2020, his propagandists immediately proclaimed that Modi’s harsh lockdown had defeated the outbreak and saved India. From then on, it was business as usual for Modi, and business as usual had only one goal: to wrest West Bengal from Mamata Bannerjee and the Trinamool Congress, no matter the cost.

In Modi’s highly centralised, PMO-centred decision-making process, this shift of attention sowed the seeds of today’s disaster. The government’s first act was to wind up five of the 11 empowered groups and discontinued the meetings of the group tracking the virus’s spread. The programme to upgrade district hospitals went into limbo – as did the plan to create an oxygen reserve by importing 50,000 tonnes of oxygen.

Genome sequencing, which is essential to determine which mutations are spreading in which population, took the back seat. It was not till December 25, 2020, after B.1.1.7 had already arrived in India, that the health ministry created the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Consortium on Genomics (INSACOG) – a chain of 10 laboratories to sequence and analyse virus samples.

By March 24 INSACOG had tested 10,787 samples and found 771 instances involving three of the eight ‘variants of concern’ the US Centres of Disease Control had identified. Of them, 94% were of B.1.1.7.

This should have set the alarm bells ringing in every office in the PMO – but four state elections were imminent and Modi could think of nothing else but the stentorian speeches he was preparing to give in the 23 election rallies he intended to address in West Bengal and Assam.

In fact, the absence of any sense of urgency in the government after September was so complete that it took eight months, until November 2020, just to invite tenders for the oxygen plants. As a result, on April 18, 2021, only 11 of the 162 oxygen plants had been installed.

Also, none of these had been funded by the PM Cares fund. In fact, it was not till April 15 that the PMO coughed up a measly Rs 100 crores from its corpus to complete the construction of 59 more plants and bring the number up to 80 by the end of May.

There was a similar departure from responsibility in the vaccination programme. From January 16, the government concentrated on vaccinating frontline and healthcare workers. Vaccination for those above 50 years began on March 1, but with that private interests and preferences came roaring back into play.

Pfizer was refused permission to sell their vaccines in India. The Centre also failed to strike advance purchase agreements with vaccine-makers and grossly underestimated Indian manufacturers to satisfy the domestic demand for doses.

Also read: A Report Card on the End Times Brought Upon Us by Hindutva

The government also forced Covaxin, an ‘indigenously developed’ vaccine, on government hospitals before the latter had completed its crucial phase 3 trials. As a result, vast numbers of eligible persons refused to take the vaccine, slowing immunisation still further.

Despite this rampant irresponsibility, Modi’s luck held for five months after September. Through these winter months, the number of active cases continued to ebb. When it reached a minimum in the week of February 11, 2021, there were fewer than 138,000 patients under treatment and a hundred or so deaths a day. The country heaved a sigh of relief. Markets, restaurants and malls began to function again and life was returning to a semblance of normal. But by then, the seeds of the second wave that is now ravaging the country had been sown.

The second wave

The first warning came, almost unnoticed, in late-February when the number of new cases daily began once again to exceed recoveries, causing the number of active cases to start rising. This was slow at the beginning: the first doubling of active cases, from 137,000 on February 14 to 273,000 cases on March 18, took 32 days. But after that, and within six days of INSACOG’s warning, the speed tripled and each doubling took only 11 days or so.

The number of active cases breached the 1 million mark on April 10 and the 2 million mark on April 21. Not until then did it register on Modi that there was something more important happening in the country than the West Bengal and Assam elections. But by then he had already addressed 10 million persons in 23 rallies, where neither he nor anyone in his audiences wore a mask.

Modi’s utter disregard for the consequences of his actions emboldened lesser leaders in his party to follow his lead. The chief minister of Uttarakhand not only refused to cancel the Kumbh Mela but put out advertisements to draw more devotees from around India.

When a special leave petition to the Supreme Court pointed out on April 16 that “there is no protocol in place to ensure that devotees who get infected do not go on to spread the virus when they return”, he retorted that “nobody will be stopped (from attending the mela). We are sure that faith in God will overcome fear of the virus”. As a result, an estimated 28 lakh persons attended the mela, took holy dips in the Ganga, jostled with each other in the crowded, polluted waters of the river, and then dispersed to all parts of India to spread the virus.

Devotees gather to offer prayers during the third Shahi Snan of the Kumbh Mela 2021, at Har ki Pauri Ghat in Haridwar, Wednesday, April 14, 2021. Photo: PTI

Therefore, to Modi’s surprise – and perhaps only his – there were three and a half million active cases on May 4. Hospitals were full to bursting, doctors couldn’t even reply to anxious calls from infected patients, helplines were overloaded and distress calls received no answer. An acute shortage of oxygen killed patients by the scores every hour.

Although the data has not been released, and may never be, I speculate from personal experience that more people have probably died because of the lack of oxygen than from any other single cause. In fact, the shortage of oxygen is therefore the one issue on which the world needs to hold the Modi government, and Modi in particular, criminally responsible. For there is not a shadow of an excuse for the shortage that has developed.

In a report a report submitted to the Lok Sabha in 2020, a committee headed by MP Ram Gopal Yadav pointed out that the country’s oxygen production capacity was 6,900 tonnes a day; that at the peak of the first wave the demand for medical oxygen had reached 3,000 tonnes a day, but as the wave subsided it had fallen to 1,000 tonnes a day. This allowed the remainder to be diverted for industrial use.

So in March, when INSACOG identified the B.1.1.7 strain as the main threat to the country’s population at the time, the government could have diverted at least 2,000 tonnes a day of oxygen back from industrial centres with a single stroke of the pen. But at the end of March, Modi’s fixation on winning the West Bengal and Assam elections was so complete that he ‘forgot’ to make that stroke of the pen. And by the time he ‘remembered’, it was April 19, and people were dying in their cars and as their relatives took them desperately to one hospital after the next in search of oxygen.

Modi has been a gambler all his life. His entire career has been built on forcing his way through one organisational or moral barrier after the other, and brazening his way forward until he could turn it into a success. This time his gamble has failed and, if an estimate by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation is to be believed, India could see a staggering one–million deaths from COVID-19 by August this year.

 

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Modi blaming everyone but himself. Voters aren’t buying it.
Salil Tripathi
May 12, 2021, 9:01 AM

After the spectacular failure of the U.S.-sponsored invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, then-President John F. Kennedy did the honorable thing: He took full responsibility for the fiasco. “Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” he told the nation. Americans appreciated Kennedy’s candor, rewarding him with an unexpected rise in his approval ratings.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken the opposite path and is getting punished at the polls. Faced with an even bigger disaster—a devastating COVID-19 outbreak with a projected 1 million deaths by the end of July amid shortages of ambulances, oxygen, and vaccines—Modi is blaming anyone but himself. His lack of leadership likely played a major role in recent elections in West Bengal, India’s fourth-most populous state, where voters handed Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a resounding defeat. It was the state he coveted most, and where he’d campaigned relentlessly, holding irresponsible public rallies even as the virus was multiplying across the country.
Modi has been immensely popular among Indians, but public criticism is now at its sharpest across the country. He has been absent from the public eye in recent weeks. He has continued to operate as if nothing has changed, including pressing forward with his personal prestige project of rebuilding the Indian capital with such monuments as a palatial new prime minister’s residence at a time when the country has clearly different priorities. And he hopes that the next national elections in 2024 are sufficiently far away that Indian voters will have put the trauma of the pandemic aside and returned to supporting his Hindu nationalist party. While the political opposition is still divided and not yet ready to mount a national challenge, the pandemic has opened a floodgate of public criticism unlike anything Modi has faced since he took office in 2014.
It wasn’t supposed to be like that. At the virtual World Economic Forum in January, Modi patted himself on the back and ridiculed those who had feared India would be swallowed by the COVID-19 tsunami. India was handling the crisis so well, Modi said, that it could afford to help other countries by donating vaccines, even as scientists warned about shortages in India. India’s national COVID-19 task force didn’t even meet in February or March. Lacking urgency, the government ordered vaccines several months after the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Brazil had already secured supplies. Hospitals in India had begun winding down the extra capacity they had preemptively put in place. As a result, the country was disastrously unprepared when the current crisis hit.
Modi took no blame, but now the public mood has turned from despair and sadness to anger.
But in Modi’s India, the buck keeps rolling, settling conveniently wherever the prime minister believes the blame should lie. This is hardly unusual. Modi has never failed to take credit for achievements belonging to others, nor has he accepted blame for the various disasters during his seven-year rule. Now, with the worst public health crisis for India in nearly a century, Modi’s luck may have finally run out.
Modi’s determination to win West Bengal was real. The elections were spread over a month in eight phases, and Modi addressed many rallies without any social distancing measures during the campaign. He eventually canceled only the last few. When the votes were counted, of the 292 seats at stake, the BJP won 77, a significant improvement over the three seats it held in 2016. The resounding victor, however, was All India Trinamool Congress, the party of incumbent West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, which won 213 seats—two more than in the last election. (Two seats remain contested, with the final polls to be held on May 16, but they won’t change the outcome.) The BJP’s gains were impressive, but they came at the cost of a decimated left.
The election rallies were not the Modi government’s only reckless moves that worsened the pandemic. Every 12 years, millions of devout Hindus congregate at the Kumbh Mela festival in Haridwar, a town in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand. In dense crowds, they take a ritual dip in the Ganges, which they consider a holy river. Hosting such a festival during a pandemic is callous—the more so because it was brought forward from its regular date next year based on an astrological prediction. Uttarakhand’s chief minister pooh-poohed concerns, saying people would be safe—before he later got infected.
Modi has been silent about why massive rallies were allowed to take place for the elections. He meekly asked devotees not to go to Haridwar, a halfhearted plea most of them ignored. Modi took no blame. But now the public mood has turned from despair and sadness to anger. Magazines are publishing images of dead bodies waiting at crematoriums. The Indian Medical Association has taken the unusual step of criticizing the prime minister. The Indian Supreme Court has condemned the government for threatening to prosecute anyone using social media to seek medical help, ostensibly to prevent the spread of misinformation. A prominent, normally pro-government publisher approvingly retweeted a columnist from a rival newspaper who wrote critically of the government. Modi’s most virulent and vehement public supporters have either been silent or halfheartedly blamed opposition-ruled states for the disarray.
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When the pandemic did not hit India ferociously last year, Indians thought they had immunity because of the warmer climate, some presumed genetic protection, or specific dietary habits. Key opinion-makers ridiculed experts who had predicted a worse pandemic outcome for India. The government did impose a severe lockdown, causing significant difficulties for India’s armies of migrant workers. But then the country relaxed, and the government was found asleep at the wheel.
The Indian crisis was anticipated. While it could not have been averted, the effects could have been minimized. Every worst-case scenario is coming true: The country’s health infrastructure has collapsed. Hospitals are turning awaypatients. Ventilators are in short supply. Hospitals are desperately posting appeals on social media for oxygen. Ambulances are unavailable when needed. One doctor, who had been working at an intensive care unit treating COVID-19 patients, hanged himself. Crematoriums are pleading with the bereaved to have patience as they cannot cope. At some crematoriums, the number of bodies cremated daily has risen tenfold. Makeshift funeral pyres are being built in parking lots, poignantly close to one another, where grieving relatives get only limited time to say farewell to their loved ones. There is a shortage of wood, furnaces are red-hot and melting, and fights have broken out over suspicions that some people are jumping the line at crematoriums. There is no sign when this apocalyptic scenario might end.
The unstoppable march of Modi and the BJP has finally slowed—but only at a tragic cost in human lives.
Yet instead of accepting blame and firmly taking charge, the government is at the receiving end of criticism from the courts. In addition to various accusations, the Supreme Court has begun to mandate the amount of oxygen that must be supplied to hospitals in different states. Government supporters are now complaining of judicial interference. Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar has been urging diplomats to counter the adverse publicity stemming from the pandemic, asking them to write denials and accusing foreign media of propaganda in screeds that follow Maoist or Stalinist templates.
But the buck keeps rolling. BJP leaders have alternatively blamed China, an Indian Muslim congregation, and states controlled by the opposition. Modi’s health minister, who has promoted dubious esoteric cures, claims there are no shortages. New Delhi has left it to the states to arrange for vaccine imports on their own. Modi’s supporters callously discount the number of deaths by saying that relative to India’s population, it is a low percentage. But it doesn’t take a genius to recognize that in a large country like India, even a fraction of a percent can mean millions of people.
The apocalyptic scenes now playing out in India have not only deflated Modi’s reputation abroad but also severely dented his image at home. West Bengal wasn’t the only state to bring Modi bad news. In other state elections that concluded in early May, the BJP failed to win a single seat in Kerala, where the Left Democratic Front, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), was reelected. In Tamil Nadu, another southern state, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, a conservative party allied with the BJP at the national level, lost power to the Secular Progressive Alliance.
After seven years, voters in some Indian states, at least, have had enough and are responding in the only way Modi seems to understand: by driving his party and allies from power. As a result of the pandemic, the unstoppable march of Modi and the BJP has finally slowed—but only at a tragic cost in human lives. India continues to undercount the dead, and government supporters still downplay the crisis. But the overworked crematoriums and pyres in the streets present a far more harrowing image that no deflection of blame can erase.
Salil Tripathi is a writer based in New York.

 

[d00od00o]

How India’s Covid-19 crisis diminished Narendra Modi
Many Indians feel abandoned by a leader who ignored signs of a second wave and appears indifferent to their plight
May 13 2021

© Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg
Anarya is haunted by her father’s last request as he lay dying in an Indiangovernment Covid hospital, where doctors struggle with a deluge of critical patients. “The last clear words I heard from him were, ‘Get me some help. Get someone to attend to me’,” the 30-year-old art educator, who uses only one name, recalls.

She and her brother had hunted desperately for a hospital for their 67-year-old father, who was struggling to breathe at home despite having an oxygen cylinder. Delhi’s private hospitals were full, so they rushed by ambulance to a public hospital only to find it barricaded shut. “The hospital staff told us to leave because there was no bed available,” Anarya says.

They wound up at a makeshift government Covid isolation facility, with four junior doctors monitoring more than 100 patients. Her father got oxygen but no medication. Admitted to hospital two days later, he was left without oxygen or care for an entire night. When he finally got an oxygen bed, it was too late. “The harm was already done,” Anarya says.

Today, the young woman is overwhelmed with grief — as well as rage at her family’s ordeal. It is a fury pervasive in urban India, as citizens struggle to obtain medical care for ailing loved ones — and scarce vaccinations — amid an enormous wave of deadly Covid-19 infections.

This anger has exposed the first cracks in the armour of a charismatic strongman who had until weeks ago seemed all but politically invincible: Narendra Modi, India’s most powerful and popular prime minister in decades.

Modi — propelled to power in 2014 by promises to bring acche din or “good days” to aspirational Indians — now appears a diminished figure, presiding over what many see as the biggest disaster to befall the country since its independence from British colonial rule in 1947. His pledges to increase job-generating economic growth, deliver administrative efficiency — or “minimum government, maximum governance” as he called it — and boost India’s stature on the global stage remain unfulfilled.

Instead, many Indians struggling to keep Covid-stricken relatives alive in the face of daunting obstacles feel abandoned by a leader who appears strangely indifferent — if not paralysed — amid their suffering.

“It’s not our job to find medicine, to find oxygen, to find an ICU bed,” says Anarya. “Going from hospital to hospital — that is not what should happen. Our job is to pay taxes. It is the government’s job to provide basic facilities. They are failing the people. It’s criminal negligence.”

Tough questions are being asked of Modi’s pandemic management, including public health messages that suggested the virus threat had passed; the failure to heed repeated expert warnings of an imminent second wave; and a botched procurement strategy that has led to an acute shortage of vaccines.

BJP supporters in Modi masks at a March rally addressed by the prime minister in Kolkata. Modi’s party lost the West Bengal state election © Bikas Das/AP
Meanwhile, the planeloads of emergency medical relief supplies pouring in from around the world — including from countries such as Uzbekistan and Romania — have punctured many Indians’ proud perception of their country as an emerging global power.

“This is the first time in seven years that we are seeing a sense of public anger against Modi,” says Asim Ali, an associate at New Delhi’s Centre for Policy Research. “It is coming from the urban middle class, which is his most loyal base. These are people who shape opinion.”

Modi’s popularity is still at elevated levels that would make most other global leaders green with envy. According to data analytics agency Morning Consult, more than 65 per cent of Indians still approve of Modi’s performance, while just 29 per cent disapprove. But Modi’s standing has eroded significantly since late March, when his approval rating was 74 per cent and disapproval rating just 20 per cent.

The question now is whether the prime minister — who during his seven years in power has consolidated most decision-making authority in his own office — can divert public attention and deflect blame for the crisis, or whether disillusionment with his performance will deepen, gradually sapping his authority.

Ali says the premier’s carefully cultivated image as a self-sacrificing leader working tirelessly to serve the public has been badly hit by his intensive campaigning in state elections in West Bengal. He addressed more than 20 rallies, gloating about the huge crowds gathered to see him — even as India’s Covid cases surged and Delhi hospitals ran out of oxygen.

“The core of Modi’s image was of a selfless person, who wasn’t after power or money,” Ali adds. “This image has suffered. He was hankering after electoral power in West Bengal while people in other parts of the country suffered. He just seems like another politician to people now.”

Ronojoy Sen, a senior research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies in Singapore, says Modi appeared caught off-guard as the second wave hit last month, creating the impression of a leadership vacuum.

“The certitude, the leadership qualities that the prime minister is famed for, and that he had shown last year — that seems to be missing,” says Sen. “They [ruling party officials] seriously believed India had really vanquished Covid. You had the health minister say in March, ‘We’re in the endgame’. Now, when things are probably at their worst, the central government seems to be either overwhelmed or missing in action.”

Health workers tend to coronavirus patients inside a temporarily converted centre of the Commonwealth Games village in New Delhi this month © Tauseef Mustafa/AFP via Getty Images
Interpreting suffering
India’s next general election isn’t until 2024. But India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, now run by the controversial Hindu cleric Yogi Yogi Adityanath from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party, will elect a new state government next year. The poll will provide an early test of voters’ opinions on the BJP’s management of the crisis.

Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist at Brown University in the US, says the outcome will depend partly on whether Indians interpret the destruction and losses of the pandemic as the result of governance failures, or a force beyond any administration’s control.

“The question is, ‘How is suffering interpreted?’” Varshney says. “Some will say, ‘This is God’s punishment for your deeds’. [Others] will say this is excessive suffering and this is because of government mistakes and bureaucratic brutality. I can’t believe more and more people will not think this was inflicted by the government.”

Most analysts still believe Modi will be able to overcome his current woes, given his consummate political skills, the weakness of India’s opposition parties and his proven ability to maintain his standing in voters’ eyes despite inflicting disruptive shocks since he became leader.

His unorthodox plan to demonetise much of the country’s currency in 2016, and poorly executed adoption of a new tax system a year later, brought much public misery and severely damaged the economy. But voters kept faith, seeing Modi’s actions as well-intentioned efforts to shake up a rotten system.

At the start of the pandemic last year, Modi imposed one of the world’s most draconian lockdowns on just four hours’ notice. This created a humanitarian crisis for millions of vulnerable migrant workers, who were trapped in cities without earnings or forced to take arduous journeys hundreds of kilometres back home on foot.

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Yet the urban middle classes — and even many migrants themselves — still thought Modi had taken a tough but necessary decision to protect public health.

Gilles Verniers, a political scientist at Ashoka University, says Modi’s resilient popularity has so far reflected his perceived personal qualities as a strong decisive leader, rather than on “accountability or an evaluation of the consequences of his action or inaction.”

But he believes Modi, and the BJP, will face a tough battle to regain control of the narrative about their handling of the crisis.

“The contrast between the projected image, and the actual capacities, has never been so stark,” Vernier says. “There is a sentiment of powerlessness that the government exudes that we haven’t been accustomed to before . . . There is simply no way that this situation can be spun into anything that is remotely positive.”

Harsh Vardhan, health minister, receives a vaccine, developed by Indian company Bharat Biotech, at a private hospital in New Delhi in March © Altaf Qadri/AP
The true magnitude of India’s current Covid wave — and the human toll — may never be known or officially acknowledged. India’s testing capacity remains limited especially in small towns and rural areas, where the virus is spreading rapidly. According to official figures, India has recorded just over 250,000 Covid deaths since the pandemic began, still behind the US and Brazil.

Harsh Vardhan, India’s health minister, has repeatedly cited these official figures to argue the country has handled Covid far better than richer countries — a key mantra in the BJP’s rhetorical arsenal in the debate over its pandemic management.

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India has recorded 23.3m cases, with the most recent seven-day rolling average of daily infections put at more than 380,000. But independent experts believe the true number of new daily infections is running at between 1.5 and 2m a day, with daily Covid deaths estimated at 25,000 to 50,000. Such a widespread trauma is unlikely to be forgotten easily, given the distressing nature of Covid deaths.

“You can ignore, fail to test for or undercount whatever disease you want,” Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, wrote on Twitter last week. “But you can’t ignore the dead. In India, the dead are telling us that the disease is much worse than the official statistics. And we have to listen.”

False narrative
As crematoriums work overtime to dispose of the dead, the BJP is shifting into aggressive damage control mode, with party leaders likening the second wave to an unforeseeable natural disaster.

Jay Panda, national vice-president of the BJP, says senior government figures are “working close to 24/7 to tackle the problem” of oxygen shortages and boost vaccine supplies.

“The prime minister repeatedly appealed to people not to let their guard down,” says Panda. “The number of cases has surged far more than was anticipated by anybody. Nobody — not even the critics today — predicted this either.”

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Scientists and public health experts counter that they warned in early March of the risks posed to India by more infectious new variants in circulation — and of the dangerous consequences of New Delhi giving the nod to mass political and religious gatherings, like the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival that drew at least 9m devotees to the banks of the Ganges up to the end of April.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand there would be a second wave,” says virologist Shahid Jameel of Ashoka University. “Look at every country in the world that peaked before India, they all had a second wave — why would India not have one? This really false narrative was built that Indians are somehow special — and everyone participated in that.”

However, the BJP is also using its extensive network of WhatsApp groups to discourage expressions of “negativity” that it warns could undermine public morale. Facebook and Twitter have been ordered to remove content critical of Modi’s government, while Uttar Pradesh police authorities have filed criminal complaints against hospitals and individuals publicly complaining about the acute shortage of life-saving medical supplies.

A Covid-19 patient is treated with free oxygen at a makeshift clinic outside the Gurdwara Damdama Sahib in New Delhi © Getty Images
New Delhi is also trying to deflect blame for the crisis to state governments, even adopting a new decentralised vaccine procurement policy which could leave states taking the flak for the acute shortage of jabs.

It has also identified another culprit for the Covid calamity: the Indian people themselves. Officials have criticised people who failed to wear masks and started socialising intensively after Covid case numbers fell earlier this year.

“Instead of just blaming the government and instead of blaming institutions, I would tend to blame the people of India also,” Amitabh Kant, chief executive of Niti Aayog, the government’s main policy think-tank, told a recent FT Global Boardroom online event. “All of us need to be far more responsible. It’s very important that the people of India become disciplined.”

Workers at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv load medical aid on to an Air India aeroplane © Menahem Kahana/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
Yet the increasingly critical tone of India’s once deferential media reflects the furious popular mood. On the cover of its latest issue, the weekly news magazine India Today used a photo of a queue of corpses awaiting cremation, with the words “The Failed State”.

Gujarat Samachar, the most read daily newspaper in Modi’s home state Gujarat, compared Modi to Nero, fulminating that construction on his pet project of a new parliament building — and a palatial new prime ministerial residence — was continuing after being declared an “essential service” exempted from Delhi’s lockdown.

“PM is busy with his $2.9bn Central Vista Project,” the newspaper said in a recent front page headline. “While Indians swing between life and Covid death, our ‘public servant’ has turned dictator.”

Criticism of Modi’s pandemic management extends beyond India. In a withering editorial last week, The Lancet, the medical journal, said Modi’s government had “squandered its early successes” and warned the premier was at risk of “presiding over a self-inflicted national catastrophe”.

‘If not Modi, who else?’
India’s struggling opposition parties — long overshadowed by Modi’s towering political persona — sense opportunity. Rahul Gandhi, de facto leader of the enfeebled Congress, last week wrote a scathing letter accusing the premier of “hubris” that has not just cost Indians their lives but imperilled global health.

Regional parties have been buoyed by the victory of West Bengal’s incumbent chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, who withstood the full force of the BJP’s electoral machinery in just concluded state elections.

Modi, even if he has been weakened by the crisis, still appears well-entrenched. A 31-year-old sweet shop owner in an Uttar Pradesh temple town acknowledges the widespread public anger at the prime minister, but says India had no viable alternative as a national leader.

“Almost everyone has lost a loved one in this second wave,” says the man, a self-proclaimed Modi supporter who asked not to be identified. “But whenever people ask me about Modi’s leadership, I wonder, ‘If not Modi, who else?’ There’s no other eligible leader around.”

 

[d00od00o]

Very bad news for India. There are so few clinics and doctors in rural India, many millions of Indians will die. People will never get tested, much less receive medical care. The second wave is just getting started.

 

[d00od00o]

At least 10 million Indians will die, maybe even up to 40-50 million.

 

[FuturePAF]

At least 10 million Indians will die, maybe even up to 40-50 million.

The article states a Mortality rate of 1.68% of those infected, if not contained and it does actual spread to most of the population, which it seems like it is in the process of doing over these coming weeks and months... deaths could be in the millions

The mutations coming out of India could break through the protection provided by the vaccines. Hence why even here in New York, medical workers are still wearing masks.

 

[Jobless Jack]

ultimately BJp's gambles will destroy the Indian Union .

BJp/ Modi is yet to play their greatest gamble.

Stay tuned. Their best performance will start from 2023 on wards...

 

[Ali_Baba]

The first wave had only hit the major cities and they were lucky it didnot get into the Rural areas - but this wave has resulted in the virus getting into those areas.

This will not be good for the people in the rural area - they wont know what hit them unfortunately.

 

[d00od00o]

The article states a Mortality rate of 1.68% of those infected, if not contained and it does actual spread to most of the population, which it seems like it is in the process of doing over these coming weeks and months... deaths could be in the millions

The mutations coming out of India could break through the protection provided by the vaccines. Hence why even here in New York, medical workers are still wearing masks.

The mortality rate of 1.68% is likely for the cities and those hospitalized. Those dying at home are not counted. Rural India is not equipped to deal with this, so the mortality rate will be much higher. 40 million will die in silence, and nobody will care. That's India.

 

[d00od00o]

The first wave had only hit the major cities and they were lucky it didnot get into the Rural areas - but this wave has resulted in the virus getting into those areas.

This will not be good for the people in the rural area - they wont know what hit them unfortunately.

Easily 20 million deaths.

 

[PradoTLC]

This is Fake news......

india is a superpower...

 

[BATMAN]

COVID rising in India and Iran shall be matter of concern for Pakistanis as well... because as per NCOC Pakistan website India & Iran are classified as category B country, which means same as most of the world.
This sounds conspiracy against Pakistan, where regime is complicit.