There is no doubt now what complacency and sycophancy have done to India. The country is breaking its previous record to count over 3.46 lakh infections a day on April 24, the highest recorded anywhere in the world since the pandemic began.
The daily casualties and the callousness of the government lowering its guards to dish out a false narrative that its leadership is the best in the world in beating the virus have attracted global media attention and sounded alarm bells across the world. The appalling situation in India is featuring on the front pages of newspapers across the globe. The Washington Post has described it as “avoidable and tragic”.
The Guardian has been brutally honest in its assessment that the Indian Prime Minister’s overconfidence lies behind the country’s disastrous Covid-19 response. The PM, according to the paper, “suffers from overconfidence in his own instincts and pooh-poohs expert advice. The buck stops with him”.
However, it is not the immense increase in figures of Covid infected that should worry citizens. What should be of great concern is the total unpreparedness of the Central and state governments’ machineries that has resulted in creating today’s scenario. It is interesting to note how people have been cleverly burdened with various responsibilities under direct command of the Prime Minister. Starting from Swacch Bharat, Demonetisation, giving up of LPG subsidies to banging of thalis, clapping and lighting of lamps ‘at 9 pm for 9 minutes’, the citizen has been misled to believe that s/he is actively participating in the reconstruction of the nation. This smart idea of asking the citizen to run around in circles has also given rise to the feeling that any fault finding in the government’s response is akin to attacking that citizen.
While the pains of Demonetisation were supposed to be over in 50 days, the crisis in Kashmir, after the abrogation of Article 370, was to die out in 30 days. The nation’s economy has not been able to revive after Demonetisation nor has the situation in Kashmir normalised.
Kashmir now has a much larger concentration of Indian armed forces which is bleeding the nation’s finances even more. Covid-19 played out soft on India in 2020. Instead of the childish dramatics of taali and thaali, the government could have focussed on building emergency healthcare facilities and asking states to ramp up tests and vaccinations. All that got ignored. Initially, the Prime Minister started what was termed as international vaccine diplomacy. India exported vaccines to a few countries. It also agreed in the last Quad Summit to supply vaccines to Asian countries that would not side with China. In the meantime, a regional leader piped in a brilliant idea of making vaccines available in the free market. This one statement completely changed the narrative. PM Modi, all along, had been tom tomming India’s vaccine production capabilities and claiming that Indians will get access to free vaccines. Now suddenly, both Bharat Biotech and Serum Institute of India are putting up the MRP of their vaccines. When people are talking of the cost of vaccines, most are forgetting that an amount of Rs 35,000 crores was earmarked in the last Union budget 2021 for vaccines. Now it is entirely up to the individual’s imagination as to where this large amount of money could have been invested.