By SHASHI THAROOR
It is humbling when a columnist has to retract his words soon after penning them. Just two months ago, after India rushed millions of doses of coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines to more than 60 countries, I praised the country’s “vaccine diplomacy.” India’s aspirations to be recognized as a global power had been given a real boost. Now, with more than 300,000 new cases a day and the death toll evidently much higher than reported, India is no one’s idea of a global leader.
In my own defense, I was worried that India had exported three times as many vaccines as it had administered domestically. The country was clearly lagging behind its own target of immunizing 400 million people by August, after vaccinating some 3 million healthcare workers in a campaign that began only on Jan. 16. “Mounting concern about rising case numbers, the emergence of COVID-19 variants that may not respond to existing vaccines and an economy that has not yet fully recovered,” I noted, “will intensify the challenge India confronts in fulfilling its obligations to developing countries while also meeting domestic demand.”
At the time, I did not realize the scale of the challenge. The number of infections surpassed 17 million in recent days, and the official death toll exceeds 200,000. Hospital beds are overflowing, oxygen supplies have dwindled, vaccination centers have run out of doses, and pharmacies are unable to meet the demand for antivirals. India is reeling. How did everything go so wrong so soon after India recovered from the first wave of the pandemic last year, resumed normal life and economic activity and started exporting vaccines? The list of errors is long.
Begin with symbolism over substance. On national television, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged Indians to bang plates together. Two weeks later, he instructed them to light lamps at a specific moment. Superstition replaced science-based policies in confronting the pandemic.
Modi also enlisted Hindu nationalism in the fight against COVID-19. Just as the epic Mahabharata war was won in 18 days, he claimed, India would win the war against the coronavirus in 21 days. At no point was this based on anything more than wishful thinking.
Another error was ignoring the World Health Organization’s advice. From the start of the crisis, the WHO recommended a containment strategy that required testing, contact tracing, isolation, and treatment. While a handful of states, such as Kerala (which recorded India’s first COVID-19 case on Jan. 30, 2020), initially implemented such measures successfully, the Modi government’s ham-handed response resulted in their uneven application in certain states.
Hospital beds are overflowing, oxygen supplies have dwindled, vaccination centers have run out of doses, and pharmacies are unable to meet the demand for antivirals. India is reeling.
Then there was over-centralization. From the first nationwide lockdown, announced by Modi in March 2020 with less than four hours’ notice, the central government managed the pandemic under obscure provisions of the Epidemic Diseases Act and the Disaster Management Act, which allowed it to ride roughshod over India’s federal structure. Instead of delegating India’s 28 state governments the authority to design strategies tailored to local conditions, the central government tried to manage COVID-19 by decree from Delhi, with calamitous results.
And, no surprise, the initial lockdown was mismanaged. State governments, the public and even central government officials were caught unprepared. Chaos resulted, with some 30 million migrant workers stranded without work in cities and forced to walk home, sometimes for days. It is estimated that 198 people died along the way. Some five million micro and small enterprises closed, unable to recover from the shutdown. India’s unemployment reached the highest levels ever recorded.
As the crisis began to slip out of control, the central government passed off more and more responsibilities to state governments without adequate funding. The state governments struggled to mobilize doctors, nurses, health workers, testing kits, personal protective equipment, hospital beds, ventilators, oxygen cylinders and medicines to fight the pandemic. The government mobilized a huge amount of funds for a new relief entity called PM-CARES, but to this day there is no public accounting of how much money is in the opaque PM-CARES Fund and where its resources have been allocated. –AN
