DM Monitoring
New Delhi: As Delhi’s hospitals were making desperate calls for oxygen and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal handling of the COVID-19 crisis came under sharp scrutiny, the ruling party’s spokespersons and government-aligned media found new scapegoats this week.
On Tuesday evening, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted that some hospitals were left with “just a few hours of oxygen”. Deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia posted a list of hospitals with the number of hours left for their oxygen supply to run out.
In his letter to commerce minister Piyush Goyal, Kejriwal alleged that the output of a major oxygen supplier to Delhi hospitals, Inox Air Products, has been “diverted” to other states. “At this critical juncture, it will not be possible for hospitals to enter into the contractual arrangements with the new suppliers who have now been assigned to Delhi. The disruption is already starting to cause critical shortage across major hospitals,” he wrote on April 19.
The fact that Delhi’s private hospitals themselves took to social media and also approached the high court for help on the oxygen front made it clear that this was not some political battle between the Aam Aadmi Party, which rules Delhi, and the BJP, which controls the Centre.
The oxygen shortage was a sharp pointer to ordinary Indians that something was seriously amiss in the Centre’s handling of the fast-spiralling crisis. If they had missed the earlier warnings signs, the failure to cancel the Kumbh Mela and the enormous election rallies in West Bengal and elsewhere, the fact that hospitals in the national capital were literally gasping for breath triggered widespread anger against Narendra Modi and his government. Its primetime show had the hashtag “KisanCovidAndHypocrisy”, claiming that the opposition was hypocritical for not objecting to the farmers’ protest, as the former had slammed the BJP for not just allowing but also encouraging the Kumbh Mela.
A senior News18 journalist, citing “government sources”, posted a tweet that “an Oxygen firm” had mentioned delays at the border due to “order blockade by farmers”. By Tuesday night, pro-establishment website OpIndia had published an article claiming that it had accessed a letter from Inox Air products to the Central government. The letter from Inox Air products reportedly stated that vehicles carrying oxygen were having to “travel an additional distance of 100 kms from their unit in Modinagar, Uttar Pradesh to reach hospitals in Delhi due to the farmer protests” at Singhu and Ghazipur border.
