Stranger things: Western media narratives on Covid crisis might suggest something more sinister
“India is the world’s biggest vaccine producer but it’s struggling to get enough Covid-19 vaccines to give to its own population” shrieked Business Insider. NPR chimed in, “India Is The World’s Biggest Vaccine Maker. Yet Only 4% Of Indians Are Vaccinated”. “Why the World Should Worry About India” screamed The Atlantic.
As the western world battles with yet another wave of Covid in their own backyard, their media seems to be busy churning out opinion pieces insisting that India’s Covid response is a failure.
As “analysis” from the western world keeps going from amusing to downright bizarre, India is going through nothing less than an absolute transformation when it comes to its vaccination program.
Numbers paint us a truer picture. Latest research by Datareveals shows that India has built the most robust and scalable response capacity to the pandemic. What India vaccinates in a day, the United States does in 11, Russia in 23, UK in 56 and the much touted New Zealand in 124 days. Federal and state governments work together, across 70,000 vaccination centres, to deliver on-demand vaccinations, that can be tracked digitally across platforms and devices. Most of these are achievements that “developed nations” cannot claim.
Why then is the Covid narrative so anti-india? At a superficial level, there’s a simple explanation—opinions are easy, and facts are tough. At a deeper level though, the issue is more profound, maybe even sinister.
As they say old habits die hard. Western nations, especially former colonizers, are still used to speaking down at people from a pejorative lens, where the former colony are the subjects for social analysis. The saviour complex is internalized so deep that many aren’t even self-aware of its existence. This tends to happen with societies that reach a certain level of financial stability. Balaji Srinivasan calls it “civilizational diabetes”. This is a societal stage where a certain group of people progress to the extent that they run out of problems, causing mental stasis. In such a state the Western world might try to simulate its societal pain via outside agencies, namely agencies beyond their borders. These could be countries or companies outside their borders. Western narratives are replete with assumed failures often trumping real successes. Why? Because opinions are easy, truth takes some steel.
What makes it worse is the “Halo effect”, where audiences relying on the legacy media and personalities for their “facts” and “opinions” are being wildly misled. As recently as the summer of 2021, self-proclaimed experts were predicting doom and gloom for India’s vaccination program. Says a lot about editorial discretion and quality, when media outlets allow “experts” that have been so consistently wrong.
The Saviour Complex is so deeply ingrained when it comes to Covid in the larger western societal discourse that it has now taken the form of a collective Munchausen by proxy. As is the case in this unfortunate mental condition the caregiver (The West) starts to make up or cause illness or injury in a person under their care, which in this situation seems to be ascending nations (a more appropriate phraseology compared to “developing nations” used more commonly).
The ownership patterns of media companies today, don’t help either. Mastheads of longstanding media brands now include corporate behemoths whose financial interests are directly tied to the economic interests of their home countries. It is unsurprising, therefore, that their narratives prop up the, perhaps misplaced, “glory days” notion.
What India vaccinates in a day, the US does in 11, Russia in 23, UK in 56 and New Zealand in 124 days.
“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed,” said Hitler. The 1930s saw inflated self-esteems bordering on mass-delusions, where the Nazis assumed their superiority, forcing the world to pay a price.
Today’s mass-delusion is neither as extreme, nor as overt. This malignant supremacism takes the shape of an innocuous sounding opinion-piece, or fictionalized reporting attributed to an “anonymous source”, or a derogatory jibe in a standup comedy routine. The fact that this collective supremacism is covert, is precisely what makes it dangerous.
Descending nations haven’t internalized a simple reality—that an ascending nation might have scored a touchdown while they couldn’t. With India open-sourcing its Covid response principles, it is surprising other nations refuse to pick on best practices but prefer to focus on building narratives instead.
Sadly, like with most disorders, others often must pay the price.
Anuraag Saxena is based in Singapore, is a board advisor and public affairs expert. He tweets at @anuraag_saxena . Kushal Mehra is the host of Carvaka Podcast and tweets at @kushal_mehra