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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Modi's Gamble, and How Many Lives It Will Cost -Prem Shankar Jha

Modi's Gamble, and How Many Lives It Will Cost -Prem Shankar Jha

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published Published on May 14, 2021   modified Modified on May 15, 2021

-TheWire.in

Modi did not want only to prevent a second wave; he wanted all the credit for stopping COVID-19 in its tracks to go to him and him alone.

In her heart-rending description of her desperate search for oxygen to save her father’s life, the celebrated TV news anchor Barkha Dutt ascribed his death to three features of governance that have defined Modi’s India: complacency, callousness and incompetence. She could have added a fourth – an insatiable, almost suicidal appetite for risk born of a compulsion to keep reinforcing an already swollen image of himself.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has displayed this penchant half a dozen times in the last seven years: his personal announcement of  demonetisation before the new currency notes had even been printed; his imposition of the Goods and Services Tax with immediate effect, denying India’s 71 million small manufacturers time to set up the required accounting systems; his sudden  confrontation of the Chinese at Doklam in Bhutan without consulting Thimpu, and his equally sudden removal of price and marketing protection from farmers without even a rudimentary examination of how it would affect them.

His appetite for risk surfaced yet again, within days of being told that the first wave of India’s COVID-19 epidemic had peaked in September last year. Of the 50 lakh Indians who had been infected until then, 81% had recovered. Some 10 lakh patients remained under medical care, most of them at home. A little over 84,000 people had died. The mortality rate of 1.68 % was about the lowest in the world and the envy of other nations (notwithstanding fatality undercounting and underreporting).

But everyone involved in the actual fight until then knew that it was too good to last. Scientists always knew of the danger that the ‘original’ virus could mutate into more dangerous forms. Second ‘waves’ of COVID-19 had already developed in the summer and autumn of 2020, spreading through parts of Belgium, Iran, South Korea, Germany, the Czech Republic, Spain and the US.

When researchers in the UK reported the B.1.1.7 variant in December 2020, the country’s government immediately extended its existing lockdown. The variant was found to be more infectious but no more dangerous than the original. Within weeks, scientists reported two more ‘variants of concern’, from Brazil (P.1) and South Africa (B.1.351), in addition to numerous other strains and mutations. P.1 and B.1.351 have been found to be able to partially evade the human immune system, endangering prospects of vaccines being developed at the time.

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TheWire.in, 14 May, 2021, https://thewire.in/government/narendra-modi-covid-19-gamble


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