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Why India crashed in the second Coronavirus wave
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- The early days: In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, people worldwide were worried. Dispatches out of Italy and New York depicted grim scenarios of flooded hospitals and dying patients. The poor responses of most of the Western world, meant that nations like India would be hit beyond imagination.
- Perfect for Covid: India seemed like the perfect place for COVID-19 to run wild — health infrastructure is underdeveloped, population density is high in urban areas, and the country already suffers from high rates of other diseases like tuberculosis and malaria. Everyone was preparing for a disaster but it never arrived in 2020.
- That was because of early swift action by the authorities. The central government quickly clamped a lockdown across the country and nearly everyone, from Prime Minister Narendra Modi down, got serious about masking up. Other factors also seemed to be working to the country’s advantage; India has a younger population than most other countries, and there was discussion of preexisting immunity among the population.
- Till December 2020, things were improving — case counts kept falling, and the government and its allies made sure to point that out.
- Political games began. In September 2020, during the lead-up to assembly elections in Bihar, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claimed the state would soon be COVID-free. Likewise in October, the BJP’s national spokesperson went on the BBC and argued that India was almost back to normal.
- Small aid package: A complicating factor was the relatively small size ($300 billion) of the coronavirus aid package passed by the government. The United States, with a population of less than one-third of India’s, spent a few trillion dollars so far. India had to be more fiscally cautious than the United States as it doesn’t have U.S. spending capacity and was worried about a possible downgrade in debt. With less relief, people needed to get back to work sooner, and the lockdown was unsustainable.
- Relaxed public: Beyond the financial aspect, people in India stopped taking the pandemic seriously. This isn’t new when it comes to health issues. Firecracker bans are usually ignored because the air quality is already incredibly poor without the firecrackers and, in light of that, the requests seem unreasonable.
- Leading from the front: Early on, both the government and opposition made a show of how important it was to abide by all the rules. However, as time went on and India seemed to have dodged the worse, elites became less concerned about setting a good example. At first, that might be forgivable given that India’s numbers seemed relatively low. But in February and March 2021, as the virus numbers swung upward, the government and its allies got even more irresponsible.
- In mid-February, while the uptick was in progress, Health Minister Harsh Vardhan appeared at an event supporting an ayurvedic medication that the World Health Organization clarified was ineffective in fighting COVID-19.
- Shortly after this, the BJP’s national committee passed a resolution arguing that India was victorious in the fight against COVID-19, echoing claims made by Modi in his January speech to the World Economic Forum.
- While all this was happening, campaigning for the five 2021 assembly elections was in full swing. West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, and Assam were all heading to the polls. Kerala, Puducherry, and Tamil Nadu all had one day of polling, but West Bengal and Assam had multiple phases. This meant that different assembly constituencies were voting at different times rather than the whole state heading to the polls at once.
- West Bengal and Farmers' protests: Top ministers of the govt. spent a lot of time campaigning in West Bengal, and the farmers’ protests that started in 2020 against the new agriculture laws continued. When questioned, the farmers have argued that when the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act shut down due to COVID-19, they lost momentum and this was not a mistake they wanted to make.
- The Kumbh Mela: This is a sacred Hindu tradition, on a 12-year cycle, four separate regions celebrate this festival. Initially, the Haridwar Kumbh Mela was scheduled to happen in 2022, but it was moved up due to astrological concerns. Past versions of these events have seen up to 30 million people gather in one day, and despite the rising case counts and concerns about it being a superspreader event, the festival went on as planned. It is only today that politicians are realising the gravity of the mistake, as thousands are dying each day.
- Summary: All of this has produced a compound disaster. States are running out of oxygen and people are begging for it on Twitter. People are sharing hospital beds, and crematoriums’ furnace grills in some regions have melted because of overuse. The peak may arrive in mid-May 2021. The people who made the decisions that got the country here may get the virus, but they will have access to the oxygen and medicine they need. The people who will suffer most are those who have traditionally suffered—the poor and working class who followed the examples set by politicians across the country.
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