HC rap to TRS govt wise, welcome
The strong admonishing given by the Telangana high court to the state government led by chief minister K. Chandrashekar on the issue of scale of testing to combat coronavirus is majestic, wise and welcome. This comes after the TRS government has recalcitrantly and comprehensively ignored all criticism, advice and voices from all other quarters, including the general public, medical experts, the World Health Organisation, and even the Central government on the extent of testing.
The politically motivated approach to view the battle against Covid-19, including large-scale testing, taking precautions, providing medical and other frontline working staff with protection gear, reporting and sharing information, managing contacts of those infected by the disease as a race towards the bottom, and to hope to emerge politically unscathed by showing least numbers singularly is a reflection of the worst possible mindset during a global pandemic.
Having wrongly placed the brand of Hyderabad and Telangana over the health and life of people, who expectantly looked up to the state to protect it, was most unfair and terribly disappointing of a popularly elected government.
It was, therefore, obvious that the judiciary was the last resort of hope for the over four crore people of Telangana, which did not even react positively to the Central government advisory on the matter.
Rising to the momentous occasion, the bench of Chief Justice Raghavendra Singh Chouhan and Justice B. Vijaysen Reddy rightly directed the K. Chandrashekar Rao government to start testing the dead, increase testing numbers, and make quarantine rules of those who are returning from different parts of the country more stringent.
The court also took the moral onus to call out the bureaucratic chicanery of changing red zones into orange and orange into green and sought reports in particular from the district collectors of Suryapet and Nirmal. The HC has exposed the Trojan horse. It is not for the government to choose for truth over one-upmanship and sincerely fight the pandemic.