All of us would remember this day one year ago. The nation was pushed into a so called ‘Janata Curfew’ and Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked citizens to bang gongs and ring bells, we were told, to scare away the coronavirus by creating a vibration in the atmosphere. A movie star of great repute told the nation, through a video message, that the timing was appropriate keeping in mind the conjunction of planets and the results would be miraculous. Unfortunately, that very aged actor along with his son and other family members later fell prey to Covid-19 and needed hospitalization. Two days later after the Janata Curfew and ringing of bells, at 8 pm on 24 March 2020, the Prime Minister of India announced a complete lockdown that paralysed normal life across the length and breadth of the country. Come midnight of 24 March 2020, all air and rail services came to a halt. From 25 March last year, even private cars and motorbike riders were stopped by police and the drivers heavily penalized. This kicked off the long march of migrant labourers from one end of the country to another. Children, women and men started out on foot from their places of employment and headed back home. The factories or fields they were working at were suddenly and forcibly shut. Owners refused to take care of their labour force which resulted in one of the greatest humanitarian crisis of modern times. International media termed Modi’s lockdown as one of the most inhumane and stringent compared to actions of other governments which too were facing the same predicament.
While all this was being done, a very crucial action was consciously ignored. International flights were not stopped which resulted in infected people from other countries pouring into India. In the usual political style of current times, efforts were made to blame the Tablighi Jamaat, a congregation of international Moslem preachers, for spread of the virus in India. No one bothered to question how the Indian embassies in highly infected countries of that time, such as Malaysia and Indonesia, sanctioned visas to the preachers who sought to visit New Delhi. The idea that coronavirus is a rich man’s disease seems applicable to India. Instead of dramatizing and creating a farce, the Central government could have easily cancelled the US President’s Namaste Trump trip and stopped Indians stuck abroad from returning back home. Interestingly, Prime Minister Modi not only offered doctors and medical assistance in the early days in late 2019 but also sent Air India aircrafts to Wuhan and brought back Indians living in that city. This morbid joke continued with the Vande Bharat inward flights which ferried stranded Indians from highly infected countries like Italy, Spain and England. Such poor judgement pushed the country into a stage where everything seemed to collapse inwards. The past saga should have taught us Indians a great big lesson.
Times gradually changed. The rate of infection seemed to dissipate. Indians took pride in the new knowledge that their country was one of the largest vaccine manufacturers of the world. Companies like Serum Institute of India suddenly became household names and the Central government did not hesitate to politically cash in on the situation. First, it used the vaccine manufacturing infrastructure to gain international acceptance by sending huge batches of vaccines overseas. That, supposedly, gained credibility for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. On the other hand, domestic vaccination drive has not, even till date, been properly organized and it has resulted in barely 3 per cent of the population getting the jab till now. According to reliable estimates, a complete vaccination of all Indians would take slightly over a decade. Nobody seems to notice this grand failure. On the other hand, extremely valuable time has been wasted by the government by inciting people with crazy new farm laws being enacted and wild efforts of curbing social media by issuing new regulations. These were times which should have been used positively to build awareness and create an atmosphere of cooperation and understanding. Resultantly, the Indian society has not learnt much from the sufferings of 2020. Now we are faced with a second wave leering at our faces. We have people like the Chief Minister of Uttarakhand who claimed that India was enslaved by America for 200 years and while America has failed to control the spread of Covid-19, India has done remarkably well in that field because of Modi’s leadership. Unfortunately, the CM himself has been infected by the coronavirus pretty much soon after his utterances. The government of India claims that more than 280 companies went bankrupt in the past year. Reality, however, may be very different. It is not only the sky rocketing fuel prices that have hit the citizens of India but more the overall mismanagement of the entire economy, the results of which will be even more cruel in the months to come.
Today, all of us Indians need to take a step back and re-assess what we learnt from the last year and prepare for a long drawn struggle ahead.