How govt’s spin is losing us the war against Covid
AFrench queen had said, “If the people can’t have bread, let them eat cakes!” This characteristically heartless remark had made Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France, who was sent to the guillotine, an object of hate as the revolution advanced. However, she was just being a lousy member of the decaying order that was dispatched to the dustbin of history. There was no self-serving propaganda about the remark attributed to her.
As the queen assessed the spreading chaos and stood in surly denial, she was just being a member of her vanishing class. But this cannot be said of the ruling establishment in India elected on a popular vote.
They appear to think that only by mounting a massive propaganda counter-offensive against the people can they save themselves since there is a widening gulf between the reality of people’s misery on account of the pandemic and the words of self-praise and retribution against opponents they hear from the government’s representatives.
The government appears to be engaged in the subversive exercise of bending people’s perception of their own painful reality being experienced on a daily basis — no oxygen, no cremation or burial space as dead bodies pile up, no hospital beds, and no one to turn to.
In a matter it took up suo motu, the Madras high court pointedly asked this week what the Centre was doing for the past 14 months. The government should have acted in a “planned and informed” manner with the help of “expert advice”. The additional solicitor-general weakly responded that Covid’s second wave was “unexpected”.
And why exactly was that? Empowered committees that recommended enhancing oxygen production in April last year were ignored. A committee of Parliament was similarly ignored through inaction on its proposals. Indeed, newly created facilities to fight Covid last year were wound up. Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed at the World Economic Forum this January that India had “defeated” Covid. On February 21 this year, the BJP passed a resolution, which noted “with pride” that India had “defeated” Covid “under the able, sensitive, committed and visionary leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi”. In March this year, Union health minister Harsh Vardhan claimed before the Delhi Medical Association that “we are in the end-game of the Covid-19 pandemic in India”.
Within weeks of that remark, India has officially acknowledged crossing four lakh new cases a day and three thousand daily deaths, though the data could be many times higher. And yet, the health minister could summon the fool’s courage earlier this week to say that the country was “better prepared” now than a year ago to fight Covid.
Meanwhile, the Indian High Commission in Canberra sent a stinker to the Australian which had carried a critical report highlighting the crippling drawbacks, including political hubris and religious promiscuity allowed to the majority community, of India’s anti-Covid programme. Threateningly, it complained about the “completely baseless, malicious slanderous” report.
This trajectory of self-defence through sheer propaganda was confirmed when, last Thursday, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar, in a virtual meeting with our ambassadors and high commissioners around the world, instructed them that the “onesided” message in the international media showing the “incompetent” handling of Covid must be “countered”.
There is some irony here. The winning of the war through propaganda — instead of action on the ground — has coincided with the reversing of a 16-year old policy of not accepting foreign aid in coping with calamities.
The government appears to be engaged in the subversive exercise of bending people’s perception of their own painful reality being experienced on a daily basis