‘The system has not collapsed; it barely existed’

According to the World Health Organisation, the second year of the pandemic is going to be worse than the first. It sees the Indian Covid 19 variant as a global concern. 
So far, the UK, the US, Singapore, Germany, Australia and Denmark are countries which have recorded cases of the Indian variant. The UK has recorded over 7000 such cases, the highest number outside India. So far, the US, Singapore and Germany are the only other countries to have recorded more than 100 cases of the B.1.617+ variant.

But these are only the recorded sequenced cases. Most global cases are not sequenced. Therefore, the actual numbers could be much higher. The UK sequences a large proportion of its Covid 19 cases.
In the meantime, as the new Covid 19 variant sweeps across India, author Arundhati Roy   has made a scathing criticism of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his handling of the crisis.

In a recent editorial, the Washington Post asked if India’s huge population can be isolated if the pandemic went from bad to worse there. “Not easily,” it went on to say condescendingly. But Roy says Indians have ‘little right to take offence, given our prime minister’s words at the World Economic Forum in January this year.”

She says Modi did not have a word of sympathy to offer at a time when the West was facing the peak of the pandemic’s second wave. Instead, he began boasting about India’s infrastructure and Covid-preparedness. She says she downloaded the speech “because I fear that when history is rewritten by the Modi regime, as it soon will be, it might disappear, or become hard to find. Here are some priceless snippets:

“Friends, I have brought the message of confidence, positivity and hope from 1.3 billion Indians amid these times of apprehension … It was predicted that India would be the most affected country from corona all over the world. It was said that there would be a tsunami of corona infections in India, somebody said 700-800 million Indians would get infected while others said two million Indians would die.”
“Friends, it would not be advisable to judge India’s success with that of another country. In a country which is home to 18% of the world population, that country has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.”

"The system hasn’t collapsed. The government has failed. Perhaps ‘failed’ is an inaccurate word, because what we are witnessing is not criminal negligence, but an outright crime against humanity. Virologists predict that the number of cases in India will grow exponentially to more than 500,000 a day. They predict the death of many hundreds of thousands in the coming months, perhaps more"

Roy points out how pro-Modi media heavyweights followed “Modi the magician’s” example, building up a dangerous sense of complacency in the general public.  “India isn’t having a picnic,” wrote Shekhar Gupta, the editor-in-chief of the online news site the Print. “But our drains aren’t choked with bodies; hospitals aren’t out of beds, nor crematoria and graveyards out of wood or space. Too good to be true? Bring data if you disagree. Unless you think you’re god.” 

Now, the virulence of the second wave has taken even scientists and virologists by surprise. Roy asks: “So where is the Covid-specific infrastructure and the ‘people’s movement’ against the virus that Modi boasted about in his speech? The seemingly unending tsunami of infections and deaths – in some cities, the infection rate is as high as 50% – has exposed the inadequacies of India’s woefully underfunded health care system. As Roy puts it:
“Crematoria in Delhi have run out of firewood. The forest department has had to give special permission to cut down city trees for firewood. Desperate people are using whatever kindling they can find. Parks and car parks have become cremation grounds. It’s as if there’s an invisible UFO parked in our skies, sucking the air out of our lungs. An air raid of a kind we’ve never known.

“Oxygen is the new currency on India’s morbid new stock exchange. Senior politicians, journalists, lawyers – India’s elite – are on Twitter pleading for hospital beds and oxygen cylinders. The hidden market for cylinders is booming. Oxygen saturation machines and drugs are hard to come by.

“There are markets for other things, too. At the bottom end of the free market, a bribe to sneak a last look at your loved one, bagged and stacked in a hospital mortuary. A surcharge for a priest who agrees to say the final prayers. Online medical consultancies, in which desperate families are fleeced by ruthless doctors. At the top end, you might need to sell your land and home and use up every last rupee for treatment at a private hospital. Just the deposit alone, before they even agree to admit you, could set your family back a couple of generations.”
She says that  a spokesperson for the fascist Hindu nationalist organisation the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – of which Modi and several of his ministers are members, and which runs its own armed militia – has issued warnings that “anti-India forces” would use the crisis to fuel “negativity” and “mistrust” and asked the media to help foster a “positive atmosphere”. Twitter has helped them out by deactivating accounts critical of the government.

Roy also fearlessly exposes the vaccine racket in India. This is what she has to say:

“Anyway, what about the vaccines?  Surely they’ll save us? Isn’t India a vaccine powerhouse? In fact, the Indian government is entirely dependent on two manufacturers, the Serum Institute of India (SII) and Bharat Biotech. Both are being allowed to roll out two of the most expensive vaccines in the world, to the poorest people in the world. This week it was announced that they will sell to private hospitals at a slightly elevated price, and to state governments at a somewhat lower price. Back-of-the-envelope calculations show the vaccine companies are likely to make obscene profits.

"At the bottom end of the free market, a bribe to sneak a last look at your loved one, bagged and stacked in a hospital mortuary. A surcharge for a priest who agrees to say the final prayers. Online medical consultancies, in which desperate families are fleeced by ruthless doctors. At the top end, you might need to sell your land and home and use up every last rupee for treatment at a private hospital. Just the deposit alone, before they even agree to admit you, could set your family back a couple of generations"

“Under Modi, India’s economy has been hollowed out, and hundreds of millions of people who were already living precarious lives have been pushed into abject poverty. A huge number now depend for survival on paltry earnings from the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which was instituted in 2005 when the Congress party was in power. It is impossible to expect that families on the verge of starvation will pay most of a month’s income to have them vaccinated. In the UK, vaccines are free and a fundamental right. Those trying to get vaccinated out of turn can be prosecuted. In India, the main underlying impetus of the vaccination campaign seems to be corporate profit.”

The current byword is that the pandemic has overwhelming pressure on India’s health care system, making it collapse. Roy has something very interesting to say about that:

“The system has not collapsed. The ‘system’ barely existed. The government – this one, as well as the Congress government that preceded it – deliberately dismantled what little medical infrastructure there was. This is what happens when a pandemic hits a country with an almost nonexistent public healthcare system. India spends about 1.25% of its gross domestic product on health, far lower than most countries in the world, even the poorest ones. Even that figure is thought to be inflated, because things that are important but do not strictly qualify as healthcare has been slipped into it. So the real figure is estimated to be about 0.34%. The tragedy is that in this devastatingly poor country, as a 2016 Lancet study shows, 78% of the healthcare in urban areas and 71% in rural areas is now handled by the private sector. The resources that remain in the public sector are systematically siphoned into the private sector by a nexus of corrupt administrators and medical practitioners, corrupt referrals and insurance rackets.

“Healthcare is a fundamental right. The private sector will not cater to starving, sick, dying people who don’t have money. This massive privatisation of India’s healthcare is a crime.

“The system hasn’t collapsed. The government has failed. Perhaps ‘failed’ is an inaccurate word, because what we are witnessing is not criminal negligence, but an outright crime against humanity. Virologists predict that the number of cases in India will grow exponentially to more than 500,000 a day. They predict the death of many hundreds of thousands in the coming months, perhaps more. My friends and I have agreed to call each other every day just to mark ourselves present, like roll call in our school classrooms. We speak to those we love in tears, and with trepidation, not knowing if we will ever see each other again. We write, we work, not knowing if we will live to finish what we started. Not knowing what horror and humiliation awaits us. The indignity of it all that is what breaks us.

“Despite knowing all this, many of India’s so-called public intellectuals, the CEOs of its major corporations and the media houses they own, worked hard to pave the way for Modi to become the Prime Minister. They humiliated and shouted down those of us who persisted in our criticism. “Move on”, was their mantra. Even today, they mitigate their harsh words for Modi with praise for his oratory skills and his “hard work”. Their denunciation and bullying contempt for politicians in opposition parties is far more strident. They reserve their special scorn for Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party, the only politician who has consistently warned of the coming Covid crisis and repeatedly asked the government to prepare itself as best as it could. To assist the ruling party in its campaign to destroy all opposition parties amounts to colluding with the destruction of democracy.
“No, India cannot be isolated. We need help.”