Remember the astrological prediction that all planets will re-allign by 6th of April 2021. The astrologers prediction on Covid was way of the mark but in India it marked the beginning of a new era.
Emergence of Morality and the Need to Love Thy Neighbour irrespective of Caste Creed or Religion.
People of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal have given their verdict, which says quoting Mahatma Gandhi "In matters of conscience, the Law of Majority makes no Sense".
It is time for Indian Parliamentarians with huge BJP Majority, to put aside their party affiliation and serve the very people who elected them and hold the govt responsible for its actions and inactions.
At the end of the day the King and the Pauper both end up in a Wooden Box called Coffin. So will the elected Indian Parliamentarians.
Time to break all political shackles and serve the people of the nation. Time is of essence.
A true Democracy is : "Of the People, By the People, For the People".
India is not another Gujerat either..
Jai Hind
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The Tide has Turned. Media cannot be silenced. Journalists are not going to live in fear any longer. Truth has to be told. Truth Shall prevail
Now read the following article which is Mark's the beginning journalistic FREEDOM.
LONG LIVE INDIA.
👇👇👇👇👇👇👇
Here is a Gripping article, a must read for every Indian:
Failed: Government of India
At the best of times, India is a difficult country to govern, given its size, diversity and the argumentative Indian. Yet, it has successfully weathered many a crises. Never has it been so badly let down by its leadership that seems obsessed with scoring political gains, oblivious to the fact that the country faces its biggest challenge since the partition in 1947.
Smugness sets in
In January-February this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had good reason to feel satisfied. In India, COVID-19 numbers had declined steadily to one-tenth from the peak of 96,000 daily infections last September and the death rate was down from 1200 to 80. In contrast, January saw the US undergoing its third wave with an unprecedented 500,000 new cases daily and a daily death toll of well over 4000; European countries were in their third lockdown; and UK numbers had exploded with a new variant that was one-and-a-half times more infectious.
Not only had India defied the dire predictions that many Western epidemiologists had made but India seemed to have also escaped a possible second wave or a new variant that was ravaging Brazil. The economy had opened up. After an 8.5 percent contraction in 2020-21, the 2021-22 projection was an encouraging double-digit growth.
On 16 January, India rolled out a three-stage vaccination programme covering the 30 million health workers and frontline essential public services in the first phase followed by those who are above 60 along with those with co-morbidities and then the above 45 age groups. This accounted for 22 percent of the population, about 300 million people and the vaccination was supposed to be completed in six months, by July-August. An acceptable time frame only if the current decline in case load held.
Also read: India needs time for penance and prayer. Naysayers are baying for blood
Triumphalism takes over
A sense of triumphalism began to emerge, buttressed by a faith in Indian exceptionalism. Leading the pack were the cheerleaders, as the BJP prepared to launch election campaigns in five states going to polls in March-April. These included Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, the last two seen as critical by the BJP. On 21 February, the senior leaders of the BJP and all the state unit chiefs met to adopt a resolution thanking Modi for his visionary leadership for effectively handling the pandemic and getting the country back to growth.
Under a newly appointed chief minister, Uttarakhand was getting ready for the Kumbh Mela where millions of devotees were expected to congregate to pray and bathe in the Ganga. To top it all off, even the requirement of a negative RT-PCR test report was done away with a conviction that faith would protect the devotees. According to one school, the Kumbh was brought forward by a year, presumably because the BJP election strategists calculated that pulling off a huge exercise like the Kumbh in the middle of a pandemic would be an unparalleled electoral boost among the majority Hindu community.
Addressing the annual conference of the Delhi Medical Association on 7 March, Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan proudly declared that we are in the “end game of the COVID-19 pandemic in India.” He went on to detail how India had emerged as “the world’s pharmacy” having supplied 55.1 million doses of the vaccine to 62 countries, in keeping with international obligations as a responsible global citizen. Praising Modi’s leadership at the time of a global crisis, he added that “India has emerged as an example to the world in international cooperation.”
These paeans of praise harmonised well with the idea of India re-emerging under Modi’s leadership to reclaim its glory as a vishwaguru and he, with his newly cultivated flowing white beard persona, as the Pradhan Acharya of this Vishwa Gurukul.
Also read: Oxygen tankers ‘held hostage’ at Haryana plant, taking 6x longer to fill, Delhi claims
Wilful neglect and data denial
Even as the BJP was adopting its resolution, a new outbreak of COVID-19 was emerging in Maharashtra. While doctors in the Indian Council for Medical Research blamed it on Covid-inappropriate behaviour, local doctors were voicing concerns about the possibility of a new variant. The Health Minister was declaring the “endgame” in the second week of March when daily deaths were up by 50 percent to 120 and daily cases had doubled to 18,000.
But none of this registered. Cricket matches were played in stadiums packed to capacity. Goa saw a revival of domestic tourism. Domestic flights were running to over two-thirds capacity, amid complaints by some that often passengers were not even wearing masks. Hubris demanded that India was invincible. Home Minister Amit Shah, chief election strategist for the BJP was spending five days in a week on campaign rallies in the five states.
By the third week of March, the National Institute of Virology was pointing to the existence of a new double variant strain in Maharashtra. By 4 April, India had exceeded the daily new case load peak of last September. It was registering over a hundred thousand cases with a daily death toll of 700. Active cases went up from 1,45,000 in early February to 800,000 in sixty days, a pace far more rapid than that seen in 2020.
TV channels kept the focus on election rallies where neither the political leaders nor the crowds numbering hundreds of thousands wore masks. The Election Commission issued proforma communications to the state administrations to take steps to ensure COVID-appropriate behaviour. No political leader was ever reprimanded for not wearing a mask.
Since the Election Commission had allowed political rallies, religious congregations could hardly be curbed. Three million pilgrims a day thronged the Kumbh sites on auspicious days, without masks or any social distancing.
No meeting of the National Executive Council, the apex decision making body under the National Disaster Management Act that had been invoked in 2020, was convened between November and March, either to track the behaviour of the virus or to follow-up on implementation of decisions taken in 2020 to augment health infrastructure. There was a wilful neglect of the approaching tsunami because the leadership caught up with politics, turned its back towards it.
Temporary COVID facilities set up by central organisations that were lying largely empty since December began to be dismantled earlier this year. Genome sequencing proceeded at a leisurely pace. In 2020, over 9000 sequences had been carried out; beginning January, the numbers dropped to a few hundred a month, making it difficult to identify new strains in a timely fashion. One hundred and sixty six oxygen generating plants had been sanctioned after the 2020 peak but there was little follow up and only 32 had been set up by mid-April.
Other than banning exports of vaccines in end-March, no attempt was made to have a re-look at either ramping up vaccine production or accelerating the pace of vaccinations. Foreign vaccine developers that applied for authorisation were told to carry out bridging trials that would take a few months before emergency use authorisation could be given. By mid-April, the reality could no longer be denied.
Also read: Second Covid wave is causing guilt, anxiety, distress, NIMHANS helpline sees 40% spike in calls
The tsunami breaks
On 15 April, India crossed 200,000 new cases daily, doubling to 400,000 cases on 30 April, with a total of 3.2 million active cases, and was suffering over 3500 deaths every day. Numbers have exploded in the last fortnight. Health infrastructure has collapsed with oxygen shortages leading to deaths in hospitals. The vaccination rates have dropped from above 3.5 million jabs a day to below 2.5 million, reflecting a looming vaccine supply crunch in the near term.
Since 17 April, Modi has been taking nearly daily meetings with his core group of advisers, with the three national task forces that had been set up last year to monitor disease spread, vaccine R&D and production, and medical infrastructure, state chief ministers and has addressed the nation twice. Emergency funding is being provided to ramp up vaccine production. Pending approvals of vaccines already approved for use in US, EU and Russia are being fast tracked. More than 500 new oxygen generating plants have been announced. Import duties of key drugs and vaccines have been slashed to zero.
Having used the brahmastra of a draconian lockdown once with damaging political fallout, this option is no longer available. Instead, the states are being urged to create local containment zones. From 1 May, those in the 18-44 age group will also be eligible for vaccination but this part has been delegated to the state governments, except that vaccine stocks are woefully short leading to states refusing to expand the vaccination coverage.
At a national level, India registered a total of 11 million cases over one year and added 7.5 million in last two months. Out of a total death toll of 208,000, one-fourth of the deaths have been added in March and April. From one million active cases during the last peak, India already has 3.2 million active cases and the peak lies somewhere in the future. The tsunami has crashed our shores and it is difficult to escape the waves now.
Also read: It’s not just India, fierce new Covid waves have hit many developing countries
The collapse of vishwaguru
How did India go from being a vishwaguru and the world’s pharmacy to this when 60 days earlier, the ‘bhakts’ were caught up in a self-congratulatory frenzy of having defeated the pandemic? How did we sleepwalk into a disaster of such magnitude, the worst India has faced since the partition in 1947?
The answer can be given in one word – hubris, the fatal flaw in leaders, consumed by arrogance and over confidence.
For millennia, whether in the Mahabharat or in Greek mythology, we humans have been warned about the dangers of hubris, of the enormous ability of the human mind to delude itself out of its best interests by the mistaken certainties driven by false pride and over-confidence. If mythology is full of tales about heroes who sought to challenge the gods and then paid for their hubris, history is littered with tragic stories of leaders who ignored the warning signs and wilfully led their people into disaster.
Hubris made our leaders blind to what was happening in February in Maharashtra, and later in March and April. The sad part is that denials and lies continue. Inaugurating a number of blood donation camps on 27 April, Dr Harsh Vardhan said that India “is better prepared in 2021 to beat the pandemic compared to 2020.” Such statements fly in the face of the daily reality faced by hundreds of thousands of Indians struggling for even the most basic medical care or even a dignified death.
An unnecessary controversy has erupted about the differential pricing of vaccines. A back of the envelope calculation would indicate that if India were to vaccinate 75 percent of its 900 million strong population that is above 18 years, the total number of vaccine doses needed is 1.35 billion. If the government were to procure at INR 200 a dose, it works out to INR 270 billion or INR 27,000 crores. If the large corporates take charge of their employees and families, the amount will go down further. While a large sum, it is less than 0.5 percent of India’s GDP. The PM Cares Fund can be effectively employed for this, ending the controversy surrounding it.
Running a state and governing India
Modi became chief minister of Gujarat in 2001 and from there was catapulted into the position of prime minister in 2014. It was a bitterly fought election, particularly within the BJP about who their candidate ought to be and whether this decision was even necessary a year before the elections in a parliamentary democracy but Modi supporters carried the day. The campaign in 2014 was fought in presidential mode, and Modi came to Delhi with his Gujarat experience and a closed mind.
The problem is that he never realised the difference between running a state and being prime minister of a large, diverse federal structure, and consequently, failed to make the transition from being the chief minister of a state to being the prime minister of India. As chief minister, he had ignored the opposition; from 2001 to 2014, on average, he went to the state assembly less than once a year. Second, he ruled Gujarat like an executive governor, not with his cabinet colleagues but through a group of loyal and committed civil servants. Third, he ignored the national media blaming them of bias but effectively controlled the Gujarati press, radio and TV that was dependent on the state for advertisement revenue and access. Finally, when his schemes did not take off, he had a convenient bogeyman; the Centre could always be blamed for misguided fiscal and monetary policies or for damaging India’s FDI opportunities because of unwarranted restrictions driven by crony capitalism.
When Modi took over in Delhi in 2014, he often forgot that that the buck stopped with him. He continued to ignore Parliament, confident of his majority till the rude realisation struck him that national parliament proceedings are telecast live and his absence aroused unfavourable comment. He retained an arrogant approach towards the opposition, justified, perhaps, given its diminished presence but contrary to the fundamental precepts of parliamentary democracy. Given his difficult relationship with the Delhi-based national media, he cut himself off from it, adopting the direct communication radio chat Mann ki Baat (straight from the heart) medium. He surrounded himself with a bunch of loyal and committed civil servants to carry out his programs, forgetting that India is a federal country and the Gujarat governance model cannot not be scaled up for such a diverse nation.
The results soon began to show. The ill-conceived disastrous exercise of demonetisation in November 2016 reflected his penchant for the grand gesture. It smacked of Indira Gandhi’s political move on bank nationalisation that hobbled the economy for decades. Yet, Modi survived it because he played on the psychology that if the poor Indian suffered, the rich fat cat lost more; the reality later emerged that the fat cat had managed to escape fairly unscathed. The same incompetent planning showed up in the roll out of the GST. His election strategy relied on consolidating the majoritarian vote, through a blend of populism and nationalism. The removal of Article 370, the Citizenship Amendment Act, the Balakot air strike a month before the elections in 2019, are pointers to this toxic but heady blend.
Also read: Here’s how Indian private sector must play bigger role in Covid management, writes Deep Kalra
Loyalty above all
Modi is a gifted orator and that gives him both credibility and legitimacy. He used it effectively to win elections, so much so that he is the campaign mascot of the BJP for every state assembly election. For governance, Modi resorted to cleverly coined slogans (sab ka saath sab ka vikas, Make in India, Digital India etc) and slick abbreviations (3 Ds, 5Ts, AMRUT, PRAGATI, SAGAR, UDAN, at last count numbering nearly 50). In 2016, at a BJP national meeting, he received the accolade of MODI – Modifier Of Developing India) coined by his admirers. More appropriate may have been NaMo – National Acronym Manufacturing Organisation.
Modi took pride in presenting himself as an ‘outsider’ in Delhi, dismissing the Delhi insiders with mocking references to the ‘Khan Market gang’ or ‘Lutyen’s Delhi’. ‘Merit’ was conflated with ‘elitism’ and loyalty became the criteria of acceptance in the circles of power. The ‘elite’ always knew it was a minority but it also stood for the middle-class ethos of hard work as the road to ‘merit’ and success; now the ‘elite’ was dismissed as the oppressor, and jettisoned alongside were the notions of expertise and merit. Civil servants, judiciary and media fell in line, keeping their reservations to themselves, but for a handful of exceptions.
No first-time president or prime minister comes into position with prior experience. Effective and successful leaders grow into their roles but only if they have the tool kit to do so and the humility to accept that they need to grow. Modi has had some policy achievements to his credit but on balance, his reluctance to engage in a consultative process has led him astray more often. He has demonstrated, time and time again, that his skill lies in demagoguery and winning elections, not in translating that skill into effective governance.
Modi has made no secret of his visceral dislike for the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Yet, his secret ambition is to be remembered as the architect of 21st century India just as Nehru is remembered as the institution building, architect of 20th century India. However, unless he changes his ways, he is more likely to be remembered as the institution derailing, insecure, autocratic “Indira Gandhi on steroids”.
Just as the prime minister gets the credit for a successful policy initiative even though many work to make it happen, and Modi has deservedly received praise for his initiatives like Swach Bharat, open-defecation free India or Jan Dhan Yojana, it is at the prime minister’s door that the blame comes to rest for political judgement failures. And it is on Modi’s watch that the current tragedy is unfolding.
Rakesh Sood @rakeshnms is a former diplomat and Distinguished Fellow at ORF. He has over 38 years of experience in the field of foreign affairs, economic diplomacy and international security issues. Views are personal.
The article first appeared on the Observer Research Foundation website.
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Another hard hitting article very difficult for Modi Supporters to Digest:-
Modi is Singularly Responsible for India’s Pandemic Disaster
BY SONALI KOLHATKAR
Photograph Source: Americans during the Battle of Long Island, 1776 – GODL-India
India has become the new global epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with daily infections surpassing 300,000 per day and the official death toll—likely a massive underestimate—nearing a quarter of a million people. Hospitals are being overrun with patients, and the crisis is exacerbated by a devastating shortage of oxygen. The Indian judiciary has gone as far as threatening capital punishment for anyone caught trying to divert shipments of oxygen from around the country to affected areas. There have been dozens of deaths documented directly tied to a lack of oxygen.
Only a few months ago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was basking in the glow of success at beating the virus and scientific experts were confounded as to why COVID-19 infections and related deaths were falling. India had access to two vaccines, a homegrown one developed by Bharat Biotech, and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine that was being mass-produced at Indian facilities. Mask wearing was reportedly nearly universal, and the Wall Street Journal hailed India’s “proven pandemic strategy.”
So, what happened?
Amandeep Sandhu, a journalist and novelist based in Bangalore, author of Bravado to Fear to Abandonment: Mental Health and the COVID-19 Lockdown, had a one-word explanation for me: “complacency.” In an interview, he issued a scathing critique of the Modi government, saying it suffered from “arrogance, policy paralysis, and no efforts to learn from the past year.” A government with a religious fundamentalist ideology that has taken aim at minority groups and elevated a form of fascist Hindu supremacy has failed its people spectacularly.
Sandhu cited how Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has retained a majority stranglehold on Indian politics for decades, sponsored massive in-person rallies this spring to shore up votes for state elections. Modi’s Twitter feed is replete with videos of his speeches in early April (here, here, and here for example) where he boasted of “euphoric” crowds packed together like sardines with nary a mask in sight cheering him on. The phenomenon was not unlike Donald Trump’s political rallies in the United States last year, which were often marked by increased rates of infection in the weeks following.
Modi also encouraged millions of Hindus to attend the Kumbh Mela festival that takes place every 12 years. This largest religious pilgrimage on earth involves masses of devotees submerging themselves in the Ganges River. A whopping 3.5 million people attended this year, even as rates of infection had begun to rise and public health experts warned of the potentially dire consequences.
A year ago, government leaders denounced a far smaller gathering by a Muslim organization called Tablighi Jamaat which was linked to the spread of the virus. A BPJ member of the legislative assembly from the state of Karnataka went as far as encouraging the lynching of Muslims over the gathering and said, “Spreading COVID-19 is also like terrorism, and all those who are spreading the virus are traitors.” This year, no such pronouncements were aimed at the Hindu gathering that was many orders of magnitude larger.
Modi has also refused to negotiate with tens of thousands of poor farmers who began a mass occupation on the outskirts of the capital New Delhi last year in protest of new harsh privatization farm laws. While the number of farmers protesting declined during the annual spring harvest as they returned to pick crops on their farms, an estimated 15,000 still remain, and according to Sandhu, many more are ready to return if needed.
“What choice do the farmers have at this point?” asked Sandhu. “The farm laws will kill them in the next few years, and, heaven forbid, if the virus comes, it will kill them quickly. So, death is on both sides. What do they do?” And so, the farmers continue to protest, although, according to Sandhu, their outdoor occupation has not been linked to the spread of COVID-19 yet. Instead, farmers fear that the Modi government will use the pandemic as a tool to force them to end their protests.
Like Trump, Modi has gone out of his way to ensure he receives credit for combating the virus, launching a relief fund last year called PM Cares that has collected massive amounts of donations. And just like Trump, he has been opaque about disseminating and managing the fund. One activist called the PM Cares fund “a blatant scam.”
In spite of being the world’s largest manufacturer of COVID-19 vaccines, India has exported far more doses to other nations than were deployed internally. Modi has been accused of engaging in “vaccine diplomacy,” giving away millions of vaccines to other nations to shore up his international support. Sandhu said that although he didn’t hold India’s vaccine exports against the Modi government given that the pandemic is a global disaster, what he does object to is how the privatization of Indian health care has kept vaccines out of the reach of the poorest Indians.
According to Sandhu, the “vaccine has been put on the open market with limited provision from the government to inoculate citizens.” In other words, poor Indians have to wait far longer to obtain the vaccine compared to wealthier Indians who can walk into a private clinic and purchase a dose. Sandhu asked, “how will India’s poor afford the vaccine? If they can’t, we as a society, and the world at large, remain vulnerable. The vaccine must be free for all.”
Now, as the Indian government flounders under international scrutiny with hundreds of thousands of new infections emerging each day, Modi, who is as prolific on Twitter as Trump had been before he was banished from the platform, appears more concerned about his image than about his country. His administration found time amid the crisis to demand that Twitter remove tweets critical of his handling of the pandemic—and the social media company complied.
It’s not just Twitter that is validating Modi. Right-wing supporters of Indian origin in the U.S. routinely donate millions of dollars to float the Modi government’s fascist educational programs and nationalist groups. Indeed, some groups like the Houston-based Sewa International are considered the U.S. arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is the parent organization of the BJP. Sewa International, taking advantage of international concern over India’s coronavirus crisis, is seeking to raise $10 million for oxygen concentrators and other medical supplies. But, in 2004, the organization was implicated in a scam where it diverted funding from the British public intended for earthquake relief toward the building of ideological Hindu supremacist schools. More recently, the group was caught restricting funding for flood victims in Kerala to Hindus only.
President Joe Biden’s administration has also faced criticism for embracing the BJP and its authoritarianism, continuing a trend from the previous administration. Biden appointed Sri Preston Kulkarni, an Indian American with ties to the RSS, to a key position in AmeriCorps. Kulkarni ran a failed campaign for a congressional seat representing Texas with funding help from Ramesh Bhutada, who is now the director of Sewa International.
The Biden administration has been under pressure for months to waive intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines, weighing the need for pharmaceutical corporations to reap profits against the lives of millions. Now, with India’s devastating crisis, Biden once again considered the option ahead of a World Trade Organization meeting on April 30. But by the time the waived patents are put to use, hundreds of thousands more will have died.
In the meantime, Indians continue dying in numbers so large that the capital New Delhi glows at night from the fires of mass cremations. As the hashtag #ResignModi began trending to new heights, Sandhu summarized succinctly that “the government has failed on all accounts.”
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates.
New from
CounterPunch
Photograph Source: Americans during the Battle of Long Island, 1776 – GODL-India
India has become the new global epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with daily infections surpassing 300,000 per day and the official death toll—likely a massive underestimate—nearing a quarter of a million people. Hospitals are being overrun with patients, and the crisis is exacerbated by a devastating shortage of oxygen. The Indian judiciary has gone as far as threatening capital punishment for anyone caught trying to divert shipments of oxygen from around the country to affected areas. There have been dozens of deaths documented directly tied to a lack of oxygen.
Only a few months ago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was basking in the glow of success at beating the virus and scientific experts were confounded as to why COVID-19 infections and related deaths were falling. India had access to two vaccines, a homegrown one developed by Bharat Biotech, and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine that was being mass-produced at Indian facilities. Mask wearing was reportedly nearly universal, and the Wall Street Journal hailed India’s “proven pandemic strategy.”
So, what happened?
Amandeep Sandhu, a journalist and novelist based in Bangalore, author of Bravado to Fear to Abandonment: Mental Health and the COVID-19 Lockdown, had a one-word explanation for me: “complacency.” In an interview, he issued a scathing critique of the Modi government, saying it suffered from “arrogance, policy paralysis, and no efforts to learn from the past year.” A government with a religious fundamentalist ideology that has taken aim at minority groups and elevated a form of fascist Hindu supremacy has failed its people spectacularly.
Sandhu cited how Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has retained a majority stranglehold on Indian politics for decades, sponsored massive in-person rallies this spring to shore up votes for state elections. Modi’s Twitter feed is replete with videos of his speeches in early April (here, here, and here for example) where he boasted of “euphoric” crowds packed together like sardines with nary a mask in sight cheering him on. The phenomenon was not unlike Donald Trump’s political rallies in the United States last year, which were often marked by increased rates of infection in the weeks following.
Modi also encouraged millions of Hindus to attend the Kumbh Mela festival that takes place every 12 years. This largest religious pilgrimage on earth involves masses of devotees submerging themselves in the Ganges River. A whopping 3.5 million people attended this year, even as rates of infection had begun to rise and public health experts warned of the potentially dire consequences.
A year ago, government leaders denounced a far smaller gathering by a Muslim organization called Tablighi Jamaat which was linked to the spread of the virus. A BPJ member of the legislative assembly from the state of Karnataka went as far as encouraging the lynching of Muslims over the gathering and said, “Spreading COVID-19 is also like terrorism, and all those who are spreading the virus are traitors.” This year, no such pronouncements were aimed at the Hindu gathering that was many orders of magnitude larger.
Modi has also refused to negotiate with tens of thousands of poor farmers who began a mass occupation on the outskirts of the capital New Delhi last year in protest of new harsh privatization farm laws. While the number of farmers protesting declined during the annual spring harvest as they returned to pick crops on their farms, an estimated 15,000 still remain, and according to Sandhu, many more are ready to return if needed.
“What choice do the farmers have at this point?” asked Sandhu. “The farm laws will kill them in the next few years, and, heaven forbid, if the virus comes, it will kill them quickly. So, death is on both sides. What do they do?” And so, the farmers continue to protest, although, according to Sandhu, their outdoor occupation has not been linked to the spread of COVID-19 yet. Instead, farmers fear that the Modi government will use the pandemic as a tool to force them to end their protests.
Like Trump, Modi has gone out of his way to ensure he receives credit for combating the virus, launching a relief fund last year called PM Cares that has collected massive amounts of donations. And just like Trump, he has been opaque about disseminating and managing the fund. One activist called the PM Cares fund “a blatant scam.”
In spite of being the world’s largest manufacturer of COVID-19 vaccines, India has exported far more doses to other nations than were deployed internally. Modi has been accused of engaging in “vaccine diplomacy,” giving away millions of vaccines to other nations to shore up his international support. Sandhu said that although he didn’t hold India’s vaccine exports against the Modi government given that the pandemic is a global disaster, what he does object to is how the privatization of Indian health care has kept vaccines out of the reach of the poorest Indians.
According to Sandhu, the “vaccine has been put on the open market with limited provision from the government to inoculate citizens.” In other words, poor Indians have to wait far longer to obtain the vaccine compared to wealthier Indians who can walk into a private clinic and purchase a dose. Sandhu asked, “how will India’s poor afford the vaccine? If they can’t, we as a society, and the world at large, remain vulnerable. The vaccine must be free for all.”
Now, as the Indian government flounders under international scrutiny with hundreds of thousands of new infections emerging each day, Modi, who is as prolific on Twitter as Trump had been before he was banished from the platform, appears more concerned about his image than about his country. His administration found time amid the crisis to demand that Twitter remove tweets critical of his handling of the pandemic—and the social media company complied.
It’s not just Twitter that is validating Modi. Right-wing supporters of Indian origin in the U.S. routinely donate millions of dollars to float the Modi government’s fascist educational programs and nationalist groups. Indeed, some groups like the Houston-based Sewa International are considered the U.S. arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is the parent organization of the BJP. Sewa International, taking advantage of international concern over India’s coronavirus crisis, is seeking to raise $10 million for oxygen concentrators and other medical supplies. But, in 2004, the organization was implicated in a scam where it diverted funding from the British public intended for earthquake relief toward the building of ideological Hindu supremacist schools. More recently, the group was caught restricting funding for flood victims in Kerala to Hindus only.
President Joe Biden’s administration has also faced criticism for embracing the BJP and its authoritarianism, continuing a trend from the previous administration. Biden appointed Sri Preston Kulkarni, an Indian American with ties to the RSS, to a key position in AmeriCorps. Kulkarni ran a failed campaign for a congressional seat representing Texas with funding help from Ramesh Bhutada, who is now the director of Sewa International.
The Biden administration has been under pressure for months to waive intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines, weighing the need for pharmaceutical corporations to reap profits against the lives of millions. Now, with India’s devastating crisis, Biden once again considered the option ahead of a World Trade Organization meeting on April 30. But by the time the waived patents are put to use, hundreds of thousands more will have died.
In the meantime, Indians continue dying in numbers so large that the capital New Delhi glows at night from the fires of mass cremations. As the hashtag #ResignModi began trending to new heights, Sandhu summarized succinctly that “the government has failed on all accounts.”
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates.
New from
CounterPunch
