Exactly three years ago, towards the end of April and early May 2021, all of India faced the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic’s deadly second wave. Every day, 5000 fellow citizens succumbed to the pandemic. Every one of us lost someone close or dear to us or knew someone who did.
Images of dead bodies lined up for cremation and burial, of shamshan ghats overwhelmed, of shallow graves on the banks of the Ganga, viral videos of patients and their family members desperately seeking life-saving oxygen, that was simply not available – it is all burnt into our collective memories.
Three years later, as we watch the 2024 Lok Sabha election campaign unfold, there is a deafening silence about the one single, most important, and traumatic event that took place during the second tenure of the Modi government.
Should we not be asking why the BJP is almost silent about how it handled the pandemic - which killed over 5.3 lakh Indians? Why is there no mention of COVID-19 in the BJP’s manifesto, and why is the subject almost completely missing from the election speeches of its top leaders?
BJP Government's Errors Cost India Thousands of Lives
To a neutral observer, and one among the 140 crore Indians who endured the pandemic, it is a quiet, and damning admission of one of the Modi government’s biggest failures.
If there was anything the government could claim credit for during the pandemic, surely this would be the time to make a noise about it. Instead, what unfolded during most of 2020 and 2021, was a string of errors that cost India thousands of lives.
Let’s rewind and go over them, even if it means replaying terrible memories. Let’s also wonder why this government’s poor response to, and performance during the Coronavirus pandemic, has failed to become an election issue in less than three years since it happened.
In late March 2020, came an insensitive, knee-jerk lockdown, which scrapped all bus and train services overnight. This unplanned act alone had vast consequences. It forced crores of India’s internal migrant workers, mostly based in the country’s big metros, to walk hundreds of kilometres back to their villages as they could not possibly stay in the cities without work. Lakhs of families saw their livelihoods getting destroyed overnight.
It was an inhumane ordeal. Many did not make it. The most disturbing was the tragedy of 16 migrant workers being run over by a goods train as they slept on a railway track near Jalna in Maharashtra while trying to walk back to Madhya Pradesh. Shockingly, in Parliament, when asked how many migrant workers died while trying to return home during the pandemic, the Central Government simply said that they had no record.
As the pandemic progressed, we also saw Covid-jingoism prevailing over science. And I am not talking about thaali bajaana as that exercise may still have helped the morale of a few.
Recall the Second Wave and Modi Sarkar's Response
We are talking about things that made you worry about who was leading the fight against COVID-19. For instance, in July 2020, Dr. Balram Bhargava, head of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), claimed that an ‘Indian’ vaccine would be on sale by 15th August 2020. It was an irresponsible and unscientific claim. There was no way clinical trials could have been completed that soon. Even after working at breakneck speed, the world got its vaccines only in early 2021.
In February 2021, the then Union Health Minister, Dr Harshvardhan, was seen publicly endorsing Baba Ramdev’s ‘Coronil’, a concoction that claimed to be a treatment for COVID-19. Patanjali also claimed that Coronil was ‘WHO-approved’. The claim was denied almost immediately by WHO, following which the Indian Medical Association (IMA) issued a statement calling on the Health Ministry to clarify what it called a ‘blatant lie’.
By this time, India was at the doorstep of COVID-19’s second wave. Red flags about a new deadly coronavirus variant were raised in early March 2021 by the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genetics Consortium or INSACOG, a group of scientific advisers assembled by the government in December 2020, to track and advise on new virus variants. INSACOG detected B.1.617, later known as the ‘Indian’ variant of COVID-19, in early February. They shared their findings with the Union Health Ministry’s National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) by 10 March.
But the Modi ‘sarkar’ seems to have done little in response. The Centre’s task force, comprising India’s leading scientists, meant to advise the government on the pandemic, did not meet during February and March 2021. After January, they met again only on 15 and 21 April, by which time the scourge of the second wave was well upon us.
In the weeks ahead of the second wave, the government embraced and encouraged ‘super-spreader’ events. The big one was, of course, the Kumbh Mela. On 21 March full-page newspaper ads were featured with PM Modi assuring the devotees that attending the Kumbh would be ‘safe’. Through April, even as the second wave numbers rose, millions attended the festival at Haridwar. Social distancing, masking, and testing were all but absent. On 17 April, Modi called for the Kumbh to be ‘symbolic’, but it was too late.
Caught unaware, the country even went ahead with state elections in Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal, with politicians of every hue taking part in political rallies, each a ‘super-spreader’ event. Some of the biggest rallies were part of Modi’s campaign in Bengal, which continued through most of April 2021.
Before the second wave, the government had a year to build on the learnings from the 1st wave. One life-saving need was oxygen. A central agency, under the Health Ministry, was to coordinate with multiple vendors to set up 162 oxygen plants at district hospitals across India. The budget was not an issue, as each plant cost just Rs two crore. Yet, instead of 162, only 33 plants were running when the second wave struck.
India Chose to Be in Complete Denial
Clearly, those at the helm did not show a sense of urgency and had begun to believe their rhetoric that India had fought COVID-19 well and that the worst was behind us. The learning that politicians cannot browbeat science came at a huge cost. Thousands of precious lives were lost due to the shortage of oxygen. Little wonder that the BJP leadership is reluctant to talk about COVID-19 – it would rake up images and wounds of loss among the voters that would be hard to explain.
The embarrassment for the government was not complete though.
In late April as the caseload and death toll spiralled, and it was clear that the Modi government was struggling to cope, the Supreme Court took Suo Motu note of the dismal situation and decided to monitor issues related to oxygen supply, drug supply, and vaccine policy. The 3-judge bench that took this call included the then Chief Justice of India, SA Bobde. Some days later, India’s top court formed a 12-member expert team to help it manage these issues directly.
It was a massive thumbs down for the government’s performance during the second wave.
Today, India’s death toll ‘officially’ stands at just over 5.3 lakh people, the highest in the world. Understandable, as we are the most populous country. What is less discussed, is how India under-reported and under-recorded COVID-19 deaths. This too is understandable, because it was a medical disaster of catastrophic proportions, and no country had systems in place to cope. And under-developed countries have challenges in reporting and recording deaths even in normal circumstances.
While the rest of the world accepted the fact that there was an understandable gap between ‘official’ death tolls and scientifically calculated ‘estimates’, India chose complete denial. A WHO report put India’s death toll from the second wave at a whopping 47 lakh people, over 10 times more than the Indian government's official toll of 4.8 lakh deaths. It was a staggering, even embarrassing ‘gap’.
But rather than embracing science, and carefully examining what led the WHO to make its estimates, the Indian government seemed to have prioritized its own, and imagined ‘national ego’, as it outrightly rejected the WHO report. Could the WHO have been wrong? One indication is the correlation between the deaths recorded by India’s own Civil Registration System (CRS) and WHO’s estimates for the first wave, which almost matched, according to a report in The Wire. So, the WHO’s ‘10x’ estimate about the second wave may also not have been far away from reality.
Interestingly, the Indian government has simply not allowed the CRS estimates of deaths for 2021 to be made public. It is part of a pattern of denying or ‘invisibilizing’ inconvenient data that has characterized this government frequently in the last 10 years.
Yeh Jo India Hai Na, here the BJP’s failures during COVID-19 should be a key election issue. Sadly, that has not happened.
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