Modi pays at the polls for Covid
Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, suffered a major blow yesterday after his Right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost a key regional election amid mounting criticism of his response to the country’s catastrophic outbreak of the coronavirus.
As the votes were counted for the state elections in West Bengal, a new daily record of 3689 deaths from Covid was recorded on the day, along with 390,000 new infections.
Britain announced yesterday that it was sending 1000 ventilators to India.
It comes on top of 200 ventilators, 495 oxygen concentrators and three oxygen generation units dispatched last week to Indian hospitals.
Modi and his cabinet ministers had hoped to gain a majority in the oppositioncontrolled state of West Bengal, holding massive rallies attended by millions, many of them not wearing face masks.
The opposition party, Trinamool Congress, won 216 seats while BJP secured only 75 seats in the 294-seat assembly, a clear indication that Modi’s response to the pandemic is hurting him at the ballot box.
It means that Mamata Banerjee, a powerful Trinamool Congress politician and prominent critic of Modi, will serve a third term as chief minister of West Bengal. Modi conceded the election in a Twitter post, though official results have not yet been announced.
In a victory speech, 66-year-old Banerjee said West Bengal’s ‘‘immediate challenge is to combat the Covid and we are confident that we will win’’.
‘‘This victory has saved the humanity, the people of India. It
is the victory of India’’, she added.
Shashi Tharoor, an MP from the opposition party Indian National Congress, told the Telegraph: ‘‘The Bengal win . . . showed the BJP’s electoral juggernaut
is not invincible. And it reasserts the value of a federal India where the states resist the overweening power of the centre,’’ Tharoor said.
Elections were also held in four states and an Indian union territory in late March and April, coinciding with the emergence of India’s vicious second wave, which has overwhelmed the country’s weak healthcare system.
Both Modi and his home affairs minister, Amit Shah, have been accused of prioritising politics over their response to the humanitarian crisis created by the pandemic.
There have been chaotic, harrowing scenes in India, where sufferers of Covid have died on trolleys outside hospitals due to a lack of oxygen supplies. On Sunday alone, 28 patients – including 12 in Delhi – died as a result of oxygen shortages.
As the infection rate continues to climb, several states in India are grappling with a shortage of vaccines while many hospitals have run out of beds and ventilators, as well as various medicines.