How India became the world’s COVID-19 capital
Day and night, the ambulance sirens sound on Indian streets thousands of kilometers apart. Over the last month, the coronavirus pandemic has turned into a tidal wave. The scenes are horrifying and have captured the attention of the entire world. It is the worst public health crisis in the history of independent India. No one who has lived through it will ever forget it — or entirely recover from it.
And every Indian is asking: How did we get here? For, although a pandemic is a biological entity and to some extent inescapable, the way it spreads has a very significant social component. So significant that sometimes economic well-being is sacrificed in order to contain it. In fact, that was precisely the message conveyed by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in March last year, when, with just a few hours’ notice, he enforced the world’s strictest pandemic lockdown.
This March, though, as cases began to rise again, Modi and his government showed a laissez-faire attitude as blithe as last year’s shutdown was draconian. There were three major reasons for this.
The first was complacency brought about by a combination of low case numbers through the winter, the inauguration of a large-scale vaccination drive, and a growing sense that Indians had somehow “beaten” the virus. Secondly, a government ideologically committed to Hindu nationalism and the strategic use of religion to generate political majorities found it unable to muster the strength to cancel mass religious events, such as the Kumbh Mela of Haridwar in north India. Millions congregated there in April to take a holy dip in the river Ganga in defiance of all social distancing guidelines, thereafter to return home to far-flung parts of the country. Lastly, Modi, who has never let his thumping majority in parliament deter him from trying to add a state government to his kitty, was distracted and even disoriented by the prospect of a big new electoral prize. This was the election in West Bengal — with about 100 million people, India’s fourth most populous state, and one where his party had never before come to power.
State policy has also not been responsive to the need to urgently ramp up the pace of vaccination, except again in a self-regarding kind of way. Effective May 1, the Modi government has made vaccination open to all Indians aged 18 to 45 (hitherto, only those above 45 were eligible). That would be wonderful, except that it has also changed the way vaccines are procured; now placing the onus on states to compete in the open market to buy vaccines (at a much higher price than that paid by the central government) to service the citizens newly eligible for a dose. This means that, although India has the largest vaccine production capacity in the world and the good luck to have two indigenously developed vaccines, its vaccine policy has overnight become fragmented, expensive, incoherent and utterly impractical.
So it is a perfect storm. But if doom and desperation have not yet prevailed, it is because of the resilience and selflessness of millions of ordinary Indians.
India may be on the rack, abandoned by a callous and narcissistic regime more interested in image than reality. But, over the past month, civil society has shown itself worthy of the land that has produced Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha, Kabir and Guru Nanak, Mirabai and Mother Teresa.
As the nightmare continues, these bonds of compassion and spontaneous connection are our last line of defense against COVID-19.