Sitting inside a mounted canopy, mike in hand, on a dead elephant. This was an illustration by cartoonist David Rowe for the Australian Financial Review describing Prime Minister Modi’s handling of India’s second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. A powerful and disturbing image but one among many pieces of coverage in the foreign media on what they describe as mismanagement by the Indian government in dealing with the crisis.
Even the 200-year-old science and medical journal Lancet wrote a damning editorial just a few days ago which said: “At times, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Government has seemed more intent on removing criticism on Twitter than trying to control the pandemic.” The Twitter reference itself was to the Indian government’s “request” to the social media platform to remove more than 50 tweets that criticised its handling of the second wave.
In the last few weeks, we have seen New Delhi often respond directly to some of these international media reports. The Indian High Commission in Australia wrote an official response to a piece first published in The Times and reproduced in The Australian titled ‘Modi leads India out of lockdown… and into a viral apocalypse’. The High Commission labelled the piece “baseless and slanderous.” The Indian government has attributed the negative reports on India to “western bias” or “lack of understanding of India.”