Every day, 350,000 new infections and more than 2,000 deaths are recorded in the country. A situation due to the unpredictability of the virus but also to the lack of anticipation, arrogance and demagoguery of the Indian Prime Minister.
Editorial of the “World”. It was at the beginning of February. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi prided himself on having defeated the Covid and saved his country. The subcontinent and its 1.4 billion people had only 9,000 daily cases. Presented as the “pharmacy of the world”, the country exported and offered millions of doses of vaccine, ensuring that enough was produced for its population to be protected.
Three months later, the Indian “example” gave way to a nightmare. Every day, 350,000 new contaminations and more than 2,000 deaths are recorded; India is approaching 200,000 dead, according to statistics that are probably far below the real mark.
The sight of lines of ambulances at the gates of saturated hospitals, relatives of patients begging in vain for oxygen, chain cremations is not mistaken. From towns to the countryside, from the privileged to the poor, the massacre spares no one. Descending until February, the curve of the epidemic is now rising almost vertically. This tragedy shakes a great country full of promise, exposing its weaknesses.
Such a backlash cannot be explained solely by the unpredictability of a virus and its variants. The lack of foresight, the arrogance and demagoguery of Narendra Modi are obviously among the causes of a situation which today seems out of control and requires international mobilization. The Prime Minister, after having paralyzed and traumatized his country in 2020 by decreeing brutal confinement, abandoning millions of migrant workers, completely lowered his guard at the beginning of 2021.
Collective immunity in 2023
Preferring nationalist harangues to health councils, more inclined to self-celebration than to the protection of the populations, Mr. Modi only worsened the situation. In the electoral campaign for the reconquest of states which escape him, he has multiplied the meetings in front of gigantic crowds without masks. He allowed the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage to take place , during which millions of Hindus immersed themselves, one against the other, in the waters of the Ganges, turning the place into a giant source of contagion.
Mr. Modi’s vaccine strategy stems from the same imperit: lavishness of vaccine diplomacy at the service of his ambitions, but ignorant of the reality of the country’s production capacities, priority given to politically favorable regions of India, rejection of its responsibility over the federated states. The result is that barely 10% of India’s population has received a dose of the vaccine, and at the current rate, herd immunity will not be achieved until 2023.
Faced with this disaster, the time has come for solidarity. Everything must be done to alleviate and shorten the suffering of the populations of India, whom the pandemic has already brought down, by the millions, below the poverty line. The United States, the European Union, France, Germany and the United Kingdom have rightly announced the dispatch of aid in the form of ventilators or components for the production of vaccines.
Never has the vanity of beggar-thy-neighbor been more blatant than in these times of Covid-19. Never has the dependence of each human being on the whole of humanity been clearer. The Indian drama, like that experienced by Brazilians, also illustrates the ravages of populism, wherever illusionists thriving on inequality manage to sell voters their promises of salvation based in reality on nationalism and ‘ignoring.
Source: Editorial from Le Monde
