Prioritising image management over planning has led to India's Covid catastrophe
Prime minister Narendra Modi prefers to sow conflict and division than take proper control of what is now an international crisis
Mohamed Zeeshan27 May 2021 • 8:00am
Family members of a man who died of the coronavirus mourn before his cremation near Bengaluru, India Credit: Samuel Rajkumar/Reuters
As more than 3,000 Indians were dying from Covid-19 each day at the end of April, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made an appeal on Twitter: “Last phase of the 2021 West Bengal elections takes place today. In line with the Covid-19 protocols, I call upon people to cast their vote and enrich the festival of democracy.”
It was a sobering reflection of what India’s fabled democracy has been reduced to: an empty electoral charade, devoid of governance. Despite cases rising rapidly in West Bengal, the Election Commission refused to cut short the drawn-out, eight-phase polling schedule in the state.
While the refusal to postpone the election was unforgivable, perhaps even worse was the government's inaction in the face of the collapse of India’s public health system, particularly when it had been given ample warning of the impending disaster.
A parliamentary committee report warned of a second Covid-19 wave as far back as November 2020 and highlighted shortages in oxygen and hospital beds. But ministers publicly declared that India had won its war against the virus, as they turned to electioneering in multiple states.
A triumphalist media bought the narrative and ran jingoistic stories on how India had handled the pandemic far better than the West. Data on low mortality rates was blindly cited, even though it was clear that there had been huge undercounting of deaths.
But the lack of accountability did not begin there: at the start of the pandemic Mr Modi set up a crowdsourced fund called PM-CARES, which was meant to pay for health facilities and Covid-19 research, but it was deliberately kept beyond the control of state auditors.
Several months later, there is still no public database on the money the fund contains or how it has been used. It certainly does not seem to have gone towards vaccination, which has now been opened to all citizens over the age of 18, as several states have said that they have insufficient supply. Yet, the government has made no public plan for how and when it will meet this need.
In place of planning and preparation, Mr Modi’s ministers continue to prioritise image management.
When foreign diplomats in New Delhi - most notably from New Zealand and the Philippines - posted appeals on social media for oxygen cylinders for their sick staff, S. Jaishankar, Minister of External Affairs, alleged on Twitter that the demands were fake.
He said the opposition Congress party had staged the appeals for “cheap publicity”. Days earlier, he had used a meeting with top Indian diplomats to urge them to prioritise the management of headlines in the world press, which he called a “one-sided” narrative.
India’s Covid-19 catastrophe has been many years in the making. In the midst of a pandemic, a country requires the full strength of its state institutions and civil society to function. But Mr Modi’s style of politics and governance has weakened both.
Mr Modi has followed a politics of identity polarisation that has encouraged conflict between communities rather than cooperation. In his home state of Gujarat, leaders from his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) objected to the presence of Muslim volunteers in Hindu crematoria.
Such deeply suspicious politics has sowed a beggar-thy-neighbour attitude – groups fighting each other for the reservation of more government jobs or seats in parliament for their own community; a temple being built in place of a mosque; communities raising the alarm over slight decreases in their share of the population.
By contrast, investment in public health infrastructure – which would have benefited everyone – was not seen as important. While Mr Modi has mobilised billions of dollars for grand statues, opulent temples and communally-inspired citizenship registries, India spends a little more than one per cent of GDP on healthcare each year.
The Hindu nationalist inferiority complex has also affected India’s scientific community. Hindu nationalists have long believed that India’s ancient civilization does not get its fair share of praise in global discourse. To remedy this, Mr Modi and others have advanced several unfounded claims, including that ancient Indians flew guided missiles and performed plastic surgery.
During the pandemic, this phenomenon has become far worse, with several quack cures being promoted for the virus. Earlier this year, Mr Modi’s health minister, Dr Harsh Vardhan, was lambasted by the Indian Medical Association after he publicly endorsed an unproven indigenous cure for Covid-19, promoted by the Hindu religious leader, Baba Ramdev.
India’s apocalyptic second wave is now an international crisis. The virus is mutating and new variants can threaten to prolong the pandemic worldwide by potentially making vaccination less effective. India has to urgently find ways to stem the transmission of the virus and stop the slide. But that requires a change in its politics.
Prime minister Narendra Modi prefers to sow conflict and division than take proper control of what is now an international crisis
Mohamed Zeeshan27 May 2021 • 8:00am
Family members of a man who died of the coronavirus mourn before his cremation near Bengaluru, India Credit: Samuel Rajkumar/Reuters
As more than 3,000 Indians were dying from Covid-19 each day at the end of April, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made an appeal on Twitter: “Last phase of the 2021 West Bengal elections takes place today. In line with the Covid-19 protocols, I call upon people to cast their vote and enrich the festival of democracy.”
It was a sobering reflection of what India’s fabled democracy has been reduced to: an empty electoral charade, devoid of governance. Despite cases rising rapidly in West Bengal, the Election Commission refused to cut short the drawn-out, eight-phase polling schedule in the state.
While the refusal to postpone the election was unforgivable, perhaps even worse was the government's inaction in the face of the collapse of India’s public health system, particularly when it had been given ample warning of the impending disaster.
A parliamentary committee report warned of a second Covid-19 wave as far back as November 2020 and highlighted shortages in oxygen and hospital beds. But ministers publicly declared that India had won its war against the virus, as they turned to electioneering in multiple states.
A triumphalist media bought the narrative and ran jingoistic stories on how India had handled the pandemic far better than the West. Data on low mortality rates was blindly cited, even though it was clear that there had been huge undercounting of deaths.
But the lack of accountability did not begin there: at the start of the pandemic Mr Modi set up a crowdsourced fund called PM-CARES, which was meant to pay for health facilities and Covid-19 research, but it was deliberately kept beyond the control of state auditors.
Several months later, there is still no public database on the money the fund contains or how it has been used. It certainly does not seem to have gone towards vaccination, which has now been opened to all citizens over the age of 18, as several states have said that they have insufficient supply. Yet, the government has made no public plan for how and when it will meet this need.
In place of planning and preparation, Mr Modi’s ministers continue to prioritise image management.
When foreign diplomats in New Delhi - most notably from New Zealand and the Philippines - posted appeals on social media for oxygen cylinders for their sick staff, S. Jaishankar, Minister of External Affairs, alleged on Twitter that the demands were fake.
He said the opposition Congress party had staged the appeals for “cheap publicity”. Days earlier, he had used a meeting with top Indian diplomats to urge them to prioritise the management of headlines in the world press, which he called a “one-sided” narrative.
India’s Covid-19 catastrophe has been many years in the making. In the midst of a pandemic, a country requires the full strength of its state institutions and civil society to function. But Mr Modi’s style of politics and governance has weakened both.
Mr Modi has followed a politics of identity polarisation that has encouraged conflict between communities rather than cooperation. In his home state of Gujarat, leaders from his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) objected to the presence of Muslim volunteers in Hindu crematoria.
Such deeply suspicious politics has sowed a beggar-thy-neighbour attitude – groups fighting each other for the reservation of more government jobs or seats in parliament for their own community; a temple being built in place of a mosque; communities raising the alarm over slight decreases in their share of the population.
By contrast, investment in public health infrastructure – which would have benefited everyone – was not seen as important. While Mr Modi has mobilised billions of dollars for grand statues, opulent temples and communally-inspired citizenship registries, India spends a little more than one per cent of GDP on healthcare each year.
The Hindu nationalist inferiority complex has also affected India’s scientific community. Hindu nationalists have long believed that India’s ancient civilization does not get its fair share of praise in global discourse. To remedy this, Mr Modi and others have advanced several unfounded claims, including that ancient Indians flew guided missiles and performed plastic surgery.
During the pandemic, this phenomenon has become far worse, with several quack cures being promoted for the virus. Earlier this year, Mr Modi’s health minister, Dr Harsh Vardhan, was lambasted by the Indian Medical Association after he publicly endorsed an unproven indigenous cure for Covid-19, promoted by the Hindu religious leader, Baba Ramdev.
India’s apocalyptic second wave is now an international crisis. The virus is mutating and new variants can threaten to prolong the pandemic worldwide by potentially making vaccination less effective. India has to urgently find ways to stem the transmission of the virus and stop the slide. But that requires a change in its politics.
- Mohamed Zeeshan is the author of Flying Blind: India’s Quest for Global Leadership (Penguin) and editor-in-chief of Freedom Gazette
