DELHI – TWO SHORT months ago Narendra Modi’s government was one of the most popular and confident in India’s history. Now, judging by fresh election results, by the eruption of criticism even in the largely docile mainstream media, by sharp reprimands issued by top courts, by thumbs-down judgments by seasoned analysts and by a level of rage on social media unusual even for India’s hothouse online forums, the prime minister and his government are in trouble.
It is not simply that evidence has mounted of repeated failures to heed warnings of an impending second wave of covid-19, including from the government’s own health experts. Nor is it just that Mr Modi and his team have struggled to respond to a calamity greater than India has experienced in generations. Indians are accustomed to ineptitude and meagre support. Rather it is a sense of utter abandonment, especially among the politically noisy middle class, that is driving the anger.
The epidemic continues to worsen. On May 5th the country reported over 412,000 new infections, its highest number yet. Half of all cases of covid-19 recorded around the world are in India, up from one in 25 at the start of March. The number of covid deaths tripled in March, and then in April leapt by a factor of ten. With a quarter of all tests in the country returning a positive result, up five-fold in the past month, it is clear that India’s monster second wave has yet to reach its peak. Already nearly a quarter of a million Indians have died after being infected by the virus, and that is going by the government’s own numbers.
For any country to suffer such devastation is awful enough. But even as the official death toll has mounted, faith in its accuracy has sunk. Epidemiological and anecdotal evidence point to massive undercounting. Journalists across India have detailed scores of cases where official tallies are much lower than those gathered from hospitals, crematoriums and obituaries. In rural areas, where two-thirds of the population lives, both data and health care are even harder to come by. Partly as a result, a curve that has moved as sharply as the one describing infections is the one tracing the reputation of India’s government, albeit in the opposite direction.
Mr Modi has done himself no favours. During much of March and April he devoted far more energy to campaigning in one state election, in West Bengal, than to increasingly urgent cries of panic. In response to the revelation that his government had hugely miscalculated the availability of vaccines, he turned to showmanship, declaring a national “Tika Utsav” or Inoculation Festival. Since it was launched, the number of people getting vaccinations every day has fallen by half, owing to shortages. Belatedly addressing the public on April 20th, Mr Modi warned against lockdowns and called instead for testing, isolating the infected and tracing their contacts. Recognising that it was too late for such measures to have any effect, most Indian states and big cities locked down anyway.
The crisis has forced Mr Modi’s government into embarrassing policy reversals. Its vaccine campaign, touted in January as the world’s biggest and most generous, has been sharply adjusted. After banning vaccine exports to address the national shortfall, the government abruptly declared that individual states and private actors would have to bear half the burden. Despite proclaiming self-reliance as the hallmark of his new India, Mr Modi broke with a policy begun by the previous government of rejecting foreign aid, and welcomed planeloads of medical supplies donated by more than a dozen foreign governments. The severity of shortages, particularly of oxygen, and the wrenching and very public misery caused by this growing disaster made it impossible not to.
But the misfortunes of Mr Modi’s government have been compounded by haplessness. The public, overwhelmed with anguish at death on so vast a scale, has been flabbergasted by repeated revelations of incompetence. Initial shipments of aid, they discovered, had been held up by officials wanting to impose duties. These were eventually removed and local sales taxes abolished or reduced. (But on oxygen concentrators, a life-saving instrument, this was from a crushing 28% to a merely gouging 12%.) In the state of Gujarat it was revealed that factories making gas-storage tanks, which use oxygen in the manufacturing process, had halted production of the desperately needed containers because the government was allocating all oxygen to hospitals.
The state’s displays of pure callousness have also been shocking. Residents of Delhi, whose hospitals are completely full, have been treated to the spectacle of the solicitor-general arguing that its state government, which needed help with oxygen supplies, was being a “cry baby”. With the capital under strict curfew, Mr Modi’s government has also given special licence for work to continue on a $2.6bn project to overhaul the grand government buildings of the city centre, including a fancy new residence for the prime minister.
Meanwhile the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, tipped by some as a successor to Mr Modi, has not only declared that there is no oxygen shortage in his poor state of 225m people, but that individuals and even hospitals that spread “rumours” of shortages would be vigorously prosecuted. “This government has lost its mind,” shouts a man who has just lost his niece in a hospital in Meerut, a city in north-western Uttar Pradesh, in a scene captured by Newslaundry, an investigative news group. ”They talk of being a superpower, but what kind of superpower can’t even find oxygen for its people?”
Elections, of course, will prove the real test of what this change in fortunes may mean for Mr Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp). He does not face a national one until 2024, so he may have enough time to repair damage and right his ship. But early omens are not good. Results of state elections announced on May 2nd left the bjp and allies with just one out of four prizes.
More tellingly, the party was hammered in West Bengal, the state it had fought hardest to win. This was not a referendum on Mr Modi’s handling of the pandemic: many Bengali voters dislike the bjp’s thinly disguised bigotry and see its Hindi-speaking, ostentatiously religious leaders as culturally alien. The voting was in eight phases, meaning that many ballots were cast before the deadliness of the second wave became clear. Significantly, the margin seems to have widened as the voting went on and deaths mounted. In Uttar Pradesh, meanwhile, village-level elections showed a sharp tilt against bjp-endorsed candidates in parts of the state considered its fiefs. One of them was Varanasi, Mr Modi’s own parliamentary constituency.
By The Economist
