Amid Omicron, other fears, restraint on polls advisable

In the world’s largest electoral democracy each year is a poll year. The catch in the last couple of years has been that 2020 and 2021 were also the years of the coronavirus pandemic. The Omicron and the hybrid Delmicron variants are posing new threats but that will change nothing in another election — 2022. With Uttar Pradesh being the most significant poll state whose verdict may have a direct bearing on who gets to rule from New Delhi after the next general elections, all pandemic protocols will be taking a back seat again.

There is rum irony in the fact that while there is, in theory, a cap on guests at weddings and mourners at funerals, it is a free-for-all in poll-bound states as there is no such bar on attendance at rallies. When a chief justice of a high court railed against the Election Commission for compounding the coronavirus situation by holding elections and allowing rallies in Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, he ended up paying the price, which was a punishment transfer to the Northeast. He may have gone overboard in accusing the ECI of murder but he made a point about public health and its correlation with the polls.

The Allahabad high court has made bold to suggest that the 2022 polls be postponed by a month or two while India deals with an Omicron wave that epidemiologists say is certain to strike early in the New Year. The health ministry, in its advisories, is calling for pollbound states to up vaccination rates to prepare to at least try and take the sting out of the attack by the new strain as vaccines are shown to be holding up well enough at least to the extent of minimising hospitalisations and deaths. Put together, the advisories point to a Catch-22 — more the merrier it may be at poll rallies, but that translates to more suffering in the high numbers that pandemic diseases tend to produce in India.

It is paradoxical that the Prime Minister, who advises caution to all states and UTs on the march of the Omicron, is also the ruling party’s star campaigner whose ubiquitous presence in UP in the last couple of weeks points to the poll trail having been well and truly established already even as we prepare to step into 2022. But then he is only bowing to the compulsions of political power through the ballot, which is the ultimate definer of Indian democracy, more than the need for equal primacy of the branches and institutions of governance that are supposed to be its guardians.

The poor may believe wrongly that Covid-19 is a rich man’s disease; they are the ones who suffer the most in their life and livelihood at a pandemic time. The means of reaching out to urban voters may have changed with the advent of the social media but the rural voter is still a moth to the poll fire, more so in UP where the Covid numbers are up long before the heat is expected to peak at the hustings. Beware of the Omicron wave the epidemiologists are saying but their voices are diffused, year after year, by the notes of the poll bugles that are blowing in the wind.

The Allahabad high court has made bold to suggest that the 2022 polls be postponed by a month or two while India deals with an Omicron wave that epidemiologists say will strike early in the New Year