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Showing posts with label Incredible India. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Incredible India. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 5, 2021

How Narendra Modi Conquered Coronavirus

(Image: Twitter/ANI)

"No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit for doing it." -Andrew Carnegie


Much like George W. Bush once prematurely declared victory in Iraq, our Prime Minister started taking victory laps in mid-February this year when he proclaimed that …the whole world was worried about India's situation. But today India's fight against corona (coronavirus) is inspiring the entire world…


No matter that the World Health Organization, our medical fraternity, immunologists and scientists the world over warned that complacency could have devastating consequences for India. And that no country would be safe until at least 85% of the population is vaccinated.


On 7th March 2021, the Indian Health Minister boldly declared at a Delhi Medical Association gathering that “We are in the end game of the COVID-19 pandemic in India.” Adding that India was now the ‘world’s pharmacy’, boasting that we had shipped “5.5 crore vaccines to 62 different countries.”


What he failed to mention was that claiming the moniker of world’s pharmacy meant Indians would get fewer vaccines. India’s current vaccination rate is 9.4%, which lags Brazil (12.8%) and Turkey (15.6%). At this pace, it will take another 600 days to vaccinate enough Indians to achieve herd immunity. Shortages have now become so acute that 94 vaccination sites were recently closed for three days in Bombay, even as India was reporting nearly 400,000 Covid cases daily. 


It would seem that the BJP government decided having Mr. Modi strut on the world stage claiming to be the world’s pharmacy was more important than prioritising vaccinating our own citizens, as every other nation did.


Then, as if to prove that he is not just a man of words, Mr. Modi started holding massive election rallies across West Bengal. These rallies had thousands of people in attendance without masks or social distancing because naturally Mr. Modi’s aura was enough to strike fear into the heart of coronavirus.


Just over a week ago Mr. Modi tweeted from a rally sayingHave never ever seen such huge crowds at a rally” and added “wherever I look, I see people, only people”. It would seem that his aura has faded because in the past week West Bengal reported the highest spike in a single day, and instituted lockdowns due to an alarming rise in cases.


The next coronavirus showdown occurred in late March. By now the second wave was well under way and the double mutant variant had been identified, but Mr. Modi refused to cower. Instead, he appeared in full-page ads in national newspapers welcoming devotees to Kumbh Mela, an annual pilgrimage for Hindus.


A courageous leader might have cancelled a gathering of hundreds of thousands of people traveling from all over the country to wash their sins in the Ganges, but not our Prime Minister, destroyer of corona. He made sure the masses got their opium, even if it meant risking their lives.


The ads not only encouraged the young, old and infirm to attend but claimed that the festival was “clean” and “safe”. On being asked, the Chief Minister of the state told the media that the festival would not be cancelled because “Maa Ganga’s blessings are there in the flow. So, there should be no corona…” Incidentally, this man once compared Mr. Modi to Lord Ram. No word yet on whether India plans to export water from the Ganga, along with vaccines.


In Assam the Health Minister, also BJP, declared in April, “There is no Covid in Assam... there is no need to wear a face mask..." When his comments were mocked by the opposition and the media, he took to twitter inviting them to visit Assam, boasting that his state had eliminated Covid, unlike states run by opposition parties.


They must have accepted his invite, because as of this week Assam is witnessing an alarming rise in positive cases across the state. The situation is so bad that they have not only had to impose a nightly curfew but are having to source oxygen from Bhutan.


In Gujarat, Mr. Modi’s home state, an MLA was asked if the spike in cases there might be a result of local elections held in late February. He responded saying thatWorkers of the BJP have done work, have done labour work and none of them has been infected.” We hear this former Science and Technology minister, along with the Chief Minister, state BJP chief and several other MLAs all tested positive for Covid-19. Clearly, they must have been shirking their work.


Yet another BJP luminary, a minister from Madhya Pradesh, recently explained to the media why Modi’s administration should be absolved of all responsibility for this crisis. He said that “Nobody can stop these deaths….People get old and they have to die.” Let’s hope he shares this wisdom with the WHO.


Over the last year, instead of building hospital capacity, oxygen plants and stockpiling life-saving medicines, as WHO and various health experts recommended, it seems Mr. Modi had his finest yoga mind work on developing a drug to fight Covid-19.


Coronil, the Ayurvedic wonder drug was launched with great fanfare in February, with the Indian Health and Union ministers proudly sharing the stage and endorsing it. Baba Ramdev stated that his “research-based medicine” showed 100% recovery for Covid positive patients, in an astounding 3-7 days. Turns out his research was conducted on only 100 people, unlike dumb Western studies that waste time recruiting thousands of participants for research trials. Indian ingenuity at its finest!


The yoga baba claimed that this marvel of science was approved by the WHO. We are still trying to confirm who exactly approved it because the World Health Organisation was quick to issue a tweet saying they have “not reviewed or certified the effectiveness of any traditional medicine for the treatment of #COVID19.”


Even before this wonder drug was created, BJP leaders were not shy to offer Indians various remedies to boost immunity and protect against coronavirus. In July last year, the West Bengal BJP chief told people to drink cow urine. “This is India, the land of Lord Krishna, and here we worship cows. We will have cow urine to stay healthy.” We are reliably informed that those who took his advice are now, indeed, closer to God.


While Mr. Modi has no fear of coronavirus, he does tremble at the sight of a free press and lacks the courage to hold himself accountable to the people who elected him. By the time he finally appeared on national TV India’s healthcare systems had collapsed, crematoriums were overwhelmed and we had widespread shortages of oxygen, plasma, Remdesivir and other life-saving medicines, all across the country.


Mr. Modi is convinced that his long white beard and flowing designer garbs are enough to calm the nation and stop people from complaining about losing loved ones, because he was still unable to offer a plan of action to steer the country out of the worst crisis we have faced since our Independence.


He did acknowledge that the challenge before us is big and that “we have to overcome it with our resolve, courage and preparation” but was not able to explain why, more than a year into the pandemic, his administration was so woefully unprepared.


As infections and deaths continue to break new records each day, states have mandated strict lock downs and banned all non-essential activities. However, Mr. Modi has made an exception for his Rs 20,000 crore pet project to redevelop a 3.2 km stretch of Delhi built by the British. The Central Vista project will needlessly tear down and rebuild several iconic landmarks and construct a new Parliament building.


Since the Central Vista is a vanity project, tied to his legacy, bids were fast-tracked and the entire process was conducted far from the prying eyes of the media, and awarded without a public consultation. Coincidentally, the winning bid went to a firm from Gujarat known to have close ties to Mr. Modi.


Yet, for some reason sanctioning oxygen plants took his government eight full months into the pandemic, just to start inviting bids. Only 11 of 162 plants have been built, and only 5 are operational. The budget for oxygen plants was a meagre 201 crore, while 917 crore was allocated to rebuild a Parliament building that everybody agrees does not need to be rebuilt.


As if mocking the plight of Indians desperately gasping for air, Mr. Modi’s Union Minister recently told the media that the blame lay with state governments who were not “controlling demand” for oxygen. It seems that in a country of 1.4 billion people our government believes that it is resources and not lives that are most precious and must be preserved.


One could forgive Mr. Modi if this crisis had transpired at the beginning of the pandemic when every leader was caught flat footed. Also, we know that unlike Western countries, it is harder in India to institute endless lockdowns, as the overwhelming majority of Indians are unable to zoom to work. For millions of Indians a lockdown can mean starving to death.


However, what cannot be excused, one year into this pandemic, is the fact that the Modi government did nothing to build capacity in the healthcare system, stockpile oxygen and other lifesaving treatments, knowing that it was just a matter of time before the virus would mutate and become more deadly.

Mr. Modi surrounded himself with loyalists and instead of experts. He never assembled a Covid Task Force to monitor the situation or to develop plans to deal with outbreaks and surges, and transfer medical supplies and other things to areas most in need. Instead, he stood on the
stage at Davos this year and boasted, “We worked on strengthening the Covid specific health infrastructure, trained our human resources to tackle the pandemic and used technology massively for testing and tracking of the cases.”


Mr. Modi has gone out of his way to behave like the pandemic is over and his administration has instead encouraged people to stop taking even basic precautions, refused to limit public gatherings, lifted restrictions on massive Indian weddings, religious festivals and election rallies and they have severely botched India’s vaccination rollout plan, choosing instead to ship desperately needed vaccines to far flung corners of the globe.


In less than two terms Mr. Modi has succeeded in taking a proud seventy-four-year-old nation from shining example of democracy and powerhouse of economic growth, to laughing stock of the world. The incompetence, complacency and ineptitude Mr. Modi and his administration have demonstrated during this pandemic rival that of banana republics and failed states like Venezuela.


We know Mr. Modi, cares deeply about his public image and legacy. He now assuredly holds a special place in the heart of every Indian who has lost a grandparent, parent, spouse, sibling, aunt, uncle or child due to his government's apathy and ineptitude.


Mahatma Gandhi, the father of our nation, was responsible for giving birth to India. 

Narendra Modi will forever be remembered as the man who brought death to India.


AUTHOR'S NOTE: 
My heart goes out to everyone, as I spend every moment worrying about my mother, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, friends and their kids - all one symptom away from a life-threatening emergency, or worse.

What makes me livid is the fact this situation was avoidable and unnecessary. More than a year into the global pandemic, the Modi administration’s lack of preparedness is beyond inexcusable. It is criminally negligent.

WE WILL NEVER FORGET.


Thursday, November 10, 2016

Hindutva or Development; That is the Question

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.” 
Henry David Thoreau

Capitalism and democratic freedom go hand in hand. In order for India’s economy to succeed, people need to stop fearing backlash for religious or political beliefs, and have no fear in publicly criticising the government, the PM, elected officials and even the army.

Silence is no longer an option; it will be deemed as acquiescence at worst, cowardice at best, at a time when moral policing, anti-Muslim bigotry, religious intolerance, frivolous accusations of anti-nationalism and vigilantism continue to grow.

In order for Mr. Modi’s vision of India to succeed, he needs to go well beyond cutting a few layers of our bureaucracy and corruption, and also start championing free society where diversity of thinking is encouraged, where there is respect for rule or law (and consequences for breaking it) and where there is a very clear separation between religion and state.

These are the fundamental underpinnings of every successful free market economy. India cannot progress economically with one-hand tied behind its back. If Mr. Modi continues to allow apolitical institutions like the army to be used by his political cronies as instruments of faux nationalism, he will pay a very heavy price and so will India.

The bottom-line is that every month between 2011 and 2030, nearly 1 million Indians will turn 18 and if India is unable to create well-paying jobs, no matter what else Mr. Modi achieves, his tenure will be viewed as a failure.

In my estimation, there are couple of things Mr. Modi must do to change the tenor of the current discourse in our nation and lay the foundations for a more cohesive and inclusive India.

One. As one of the few politicians who understand the power of social media, Mr. Modi must make an appeal to all digital lynch mobs to make clear that this behaviour will not be tolerated and most certainly should not be done in his name. He needs to be unequivocal in his condemnation of social media misogyny, bullying and hooliganism, but stop short of passing new laws. 

His needs to be a plea for civility without limiting free speech. It is about appealing to people’s good sense and getting them to take the higher ground, just like Mr. Modi did when he met with Nawaz Sharif and invited Pakistan’s SIT team (against the wishes of his own advisors).

Two For a man who took office promising to attract foreign companies and investment by changing the backward, corrupt, bumbling and bureaucratic image of India, his government’s own PR has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster.

In a world where perception is reality, the BJP is increasingly being seen as a government of overreach. One that regularly tramples on civil liberties and constitutional rights. Granted, some of this is overreaction, media bias and orchestration by opposition parties, but truth is that beef bans have been enforced in BJP-led states, independent documentary films have been banned, funding has been blocked for NGO’s, college students have been charged with sedition and there was an attempt to blacklist an independent TV channel without judicial oversight. All of this has transpired under Mr. Modi’s watch.

The point is that the world is watching and taking note. Ultimately, nobody wants to invest in a country where rule of law is regularly trampled and sound economic policy decisions are overtaken by religious fanaticism and medieval ideology.

Three. It is easy to forget that at sixty-nine years we are still a young and nascent democracy. Witnessing the machinations of the last two Congress governments, the Aam Aadmi party’s complete ineptitude and the BJP’s Hindutva antics, it tells me that to begin our evolution into a mature democracy we need to start creating non-partisan institutions, independent think tanks, civilian ombudsman bodies and numerous other apolitical and non-partisan groups that have the ability to monitor our government’s activities and prevent overreaches. 

Such institutions are the bedrock of every mature democracy. We have seen how these independent organisations ultimately held the US government to task over recent overreaches like the illegal Iraq invasion and the torture of enemy combatants, and put a stop to intelligence agencies' infringing on citizens’ rights through opaque domestic spying programs.

India needs this type of independent oversight to hold government and elected officials accountable when they stray, as they all inevitably do. Modi can become the PM who championed the creation of these public institutions.

If he does not start to address these underlying civil and social issues, all the good he continues to do – his recent bold move to combat black money, removing foreign equity caps (from defense to railroads), launching Jan Dhan Yojana (bank accounts for the poor), smart city initiatives, fast track projects, divestment of PSU’S, women's empowerment programs – will all seem inconsequential as they are overshadowed by beef bans and the use of antiquated British laws.

I believe it comes down to a very simple question that Modi needs to ask himself: What does he want his legacy to be?

Does he want to be remembered as the Prime Minister who put India on the path to achieving its full potential - by promoting free thought, gender equality and rule of law, or the PM who allowed India to be reshaped by wildly misguided notions of Hinduism and pseudo-nationalism? 

History will certainly judge how Mr. Modi chooses to answer, but long before that we will decide at the ballot box.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Open Letter to Anupam Kher: I Come in Peace


Anupam Kher at the Tata Literature Fest (Image: Huffington Post)



“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” 
George Orwell 

Dear Mr. Kher,

Like many of my peers I grew up seeing you grace our screens, playing everyone from a closed-minded father to an incorruptible cop and a lovable scoundrel. So I write to you as someone who genuinely admired your on screen characters and also looked up to your generation of actors.

Incidentally, I also agree with you that India needs Modi at this moment, to champion development, cut through red tape and reduce corruption in order to usher in phase two of the liberalization that the brilliant Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh birthed, championed and shepherded. I too want Modi to succeed so that India can succeed; it is in this context that I would like to better understand the motivations behind your recent off-screen antics.

Granted India is a free country and nothing stops a person from speaking his mind, however mindlessly he may choose to do it. But there is good reason why we are not aware of the political or religious beliefs of most public figures. Unless you are an activist, self-proclaimed Godman or a politician, sharing these views has no bearing on your profession; one could argue that public figures who use their fame, beyond raising social issues, are taking advantage of the goodwill we have given them.

To be clear I have no problem with your speaking out, even though I find your interpretation of free speech nauseatingly narrow and your defense of the current government glaringly one-sided.

What offends me is the fact that you are making the world believe India is a weak and cowardly nation. A nation filled with wimps who are offended at the drop of a hat, and led by such a weak Prime Minster that he needs an actor to defend him. Beyond this, I confess I am also truly confounded by your goals for the following reasons. 

First, I am sure we can agree that the level of national pride China (or North Korea) touts its citizens have for their country is unquestioned. But we all know that it is forced nationalism, driven by brainwashing and fear. Here is the startling proof of China’s nationalist lie: by one estimate more than $1 trillion in capital left China in 2015 – a foreign education for a child can serve as a first step towards capital flight, foreign investment, and even eventual emigration.” (Source: Economist article). Similarly, if we continue down this path, the pseudo-nationalism you are now touting in India will cause the brightest and best to flee. We see the same in Pakistan, Iran, Russia and every other ‘deeply’ nationalistic nation.

Don’t you think that India has suffered enough over the last few decades of brain drain? Now under Modi we have a real chance to make progress by bringing back the brightest and best minds – do you really want to become the catalyst and poster child for another exodus?

Second, I have no doubt that you were offended by the words of a few students at JNU, as you claim. For me here is the bottom line - it does not matter what the purpose of the student gathering was or what slogans were chanted; even if it was convened to question the death penalty of a terrorist or if they called him a martyr, I am willing to allow it and here is why.

I agree that it is heinous to glorify a convicted terrorist, but mere words cannot shake my belief in the strength of India. More importantly, it is only through debate and dialogue that we can challenge and change views we disagree with. I prefer to know what people think and feel, rather than forcibly stifle their voices, only to have them bottle it up and then vent it in more dangerous ways. 

Granted, my line of thinking requires having the courage to hear what we find most offensive, and also requires a deep belief in the fundamentals of our democracy, the power of our nation and our current leadership’s ability. So I can only surmise that you do not share the same faith in the power or fabric of our nation, the deep roots of our democracy or in our current Prime Minister’s 56 inch chest (Source: NDTV article).

The point is that irrespective of how you or I felt about what transpired at JNU, do you honestly believe the solution is to jail our young minds, misguided as they might be, using a law our British rulers created to silence our dissent?

All I ask is that you show some faith in our nation, and our Prime Minster. Give him time to do his job, and stop making it harder for him by causing unnecessary division and strife. Most of all please stop making us Indians look like wimps who are offended at the drop of a hat.

Because if we continue to choose to take offense to words, if we choose to stifle anger and forcibly suppress dissent – we will fuel the anger and find we are responsible for turning once harmless words into much more dangerous actions. 

Sincerely,

A Fellow Indian

p.s. On a more personal note, you seem to be a rather sensitive chap. One who gets offended quite easily and regularly. Instead of wasting taxpayer money on public defenders, lengthy trials and diverting precious few police resources from fighting crime, you might want to consider hiring a psychologist. I am sure you can afford the best shrink in India and if these sessions help you grow a slightly thicker skin, you will also have the gratitude of the small minority of citizens who pay all the taxes in India.