COVID-19: Modi Is Worsening the Suffering from India’s Pandemic

An authoritarian apparatus is being turned on wider society with lethal consequences

A volunteer prepares an oxygen cylinder for COVID patients at a Gurdwara (a Sikh religious center). Credit: Sumit Dayal Getty Images

On May 8, 2021, as a deadly second wave of the COVID pandemic was ripping through India, an imprisoned doctoral student made an urgent appeal to the Delhi High Court. Incarcerated by the Indian government since May 2020 on dubious terror charges, Natasha Narwal asked for interim bail to see her father, agricultural scientist Mahavir Narwal, who was in an intensive care unit with the virus. The court procrastinated. She would never see her father again: he died the following evening, one among the 4,000 daily COVID fatalities India is currently reporting—undoubtedly an undercount.

Days earlier, a member of parliament, Manoj Jha, had amplified an SOS plea for an oxygen cylinder or hospital bed for the elder Narwal. Jha’s tweet was one among thousands of anguished requests for oxygen, hospital beds, medicines and relief that have consumed India’s social networks from early April. 

As the nation reported caseloads nearly equivalent to those of the rest of the world put together, the massive scale of the distress has exposed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s multiple failures. These include prematurely declaring victory in the war against the virus despite scientists’ warnings of an imminent “second wave”; helping instead to spread the infection by addressing packed election rallies and featuring in front-page newspaper advertisements that invited devotees to a religious festival, ultimately attended by millions; and neglecting to provision for medical resources and relief needed in a second wave or to put in place a vaccination plan for a billion people.

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