Covid Crisis: From Bad to Worse; Political Cost
Amulya Ganguli
Even as India reels under the impact of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is talk of a third wave hitting the nation. It has even made the Supreme Court take note and call upon the government to be ready with a pan-India buffer stock of oxygen, the first line of defence in fighting the virus.
The shortfall in oxygen supplies has been one of the reasons for the widespread distress as the relatives of the patients have had to run from pillar to post to secure cylinders, sometimes at exorbitant rates. This is the reason why the Delhi high court had once urged the government to beg, borrow or steal to get oxygen to the sufferers. It also said that the government can bury its head in the sand like an ostrich, but “we will not”.
Rarely has the judiciary been so harsh and unsparing in its criticism of the authorities. The palpable reason is that the second wave has exposed the almost criminal lack of preparedness by the government with the result that there is a shortage of everything from oxygen to hospital beds to medicines to even vaccines. Hence, well-known American Covid expert Anthony Fauci’s advice to India to ask the military to set up field hospitals as during a war.
Even if no one expected the virus to return with such venom after a slight respite at the end of the first wave, there can be no excuses why the country’s medical infrastructure should have been so fragile, especially when there is no dearth of specialists to show the right way. Clearly, someone in authority took his eyes off the ball.
Now, there is an impending shortage of medical personnel as well with the result that final-year students in the medical colleges are being asked to leave their studies and join the doctors and nurses in the fight against the disease. Evidently, the interns are being thrown into the deep end of the pool even before they have learnt properly to swim.
The only good news is that the rest of the world has been extremely generous in their attitude to help India in its hour of distress. Medical supplies are pouring in and even the intellectual property rights are being waived to enable India manufacture some of the patented vaccines which had up to now been the monopoly of the advanced countries.
Behind this kind gesture is the realization that vaccines provide the only way to tame the virus. Much more than medicines, including steroids, it is only the jabs in the upper arm which can keep the virus at bay even if it continues to mutate and assume more and more virulent forms.
But, as of now, India is woefully short of the locally made vaccines and the imports are not yet in adequate numbers to make up for the shortfall. There is little doubt that the country is in for a long haul before it can breathe a sigh of relief.
It is not surprising that in such a situation of distress and despair, the government has started paying a political price for its seeming mismanagement of the preparations for the pandemic. According to a survey, 61 per cent of Indians are angry over the crumbling health care system. It goes without saying that much of the blame will have to be borne by the BJP government at the centre for its supposed ineptitude.
The BJP has already lost the state assembly elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala while its success in Assam can be ascribed to the fact that the polling took place before the full magnitude of the second wave had become apparent. It has been said that if the polling took place a few weeks later, the BJP would not have fared as well in either Assam or Puducherry.
Instead, its fate might have been something like what the outcome in the BJP’s stronghold of U.P. has been where the party’s foremost rival in the state, the Samajwadi Party, has gained ground in the panchayat elections along with other opposition parties like the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal.
Considering that the U.P. chief minister, the saffron hardliner, Yogi Adityanath, has been one of the BJP’s poster boys who has been much in demand for campaigning for the party in the other states, the setbacks which the BJP has suffered in his bastion must be a cause of worry for the party.
The BJP, and especially prime minister Narendra Modi, have built their reputation for efficiency based on a quick decision-making ability which has been attested to by several in the government and outside. But the virtual collapse of the medical system has been a blow to their image. What is worse for the party, it is the middle class, its main support base, which is bearing the brunt of the shortages of facilities which people take for granted when they are ill, such as hospital beds and oxygen.
While some of the rich and the famous have fled the country in their private jets to Dubai or London at costs ranging up to $ 100,000, the less privileged have had to stay put and watch the infection rate climb past the 400,000 mark with no immediate respite in sight. Their only hope is that the third wave will either not arrive or at least not make the casualty figures go further up.
