Waving to a cheering crowd of thousands at an election rally in West Bengal, the Indian prime minister lapped up the adulation from supporters as he goaded the opposition. “In all directions I see huge crowds of people . . . I have never seen such crowds at a rally,” Narendra Modi declared.
He cut a more statesmanlike figure later on Saturday evening, photographed alone during a video conference with officials as he discussed the catastrophic second wave of Covid-19 infections that has engulfed the country over the past month. Attempting to rally the nation, he declared: “India defeated Covid-19 last year. We can do it again with the same principles but with greater speed and co-ordination.”
Modi’s claim to have beaten Covid-19 once already, and the striking contrast between his public appearances at the weekend, however, underscored the air of complacency and denial that have dogged his government’s response to the crisis. The speed and ferocity of the second wave have exposed a string of missteps at the start of the year, repeating the mistakes of 2020 and making new ones, to leave Indians facing a tsunami of infection that has pushed the country to the brink of collapse.
India recorded more than 273,000 new infections and 1,600 coronavirus deaths in the latest 24-hour count. The emergence of highly infectious new variants of the disease, including a “double mutant” Indian strain that has already reached Britain and at least nine more countries worldwide, has catapulted India’s caseload beyond 15 million, second only to the United States. After Boris Johnson bowed to the inevitable and cancelled next week’s planned trip to meet Modi in Delhi, India has been added to the UK red list for travel.
Delhi and Mumbai, India’s two biggest cities, spent the weekend back in lockdown as they try to ease the pressure on frontline health services but social media has been flooded with messages from across the country, begging for help to find a hospital bed or bottled oxygen for those who are sick or dying.
“Brother, please save me. Do whatever you can, but please save me. There is no oxygen,” Maya Iyer begged her brother-in-law when she called him, breathless, from Vinayak Hospital in Palghar on the outskirts of Mumbai last week. Like scores across Maharashtra state, the centre of the second wave, Maya died before oxygen could be found.
In Delhi, a city of more than 20 million people, fewer than 100 intensive care beds remain vacant, Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister for the capital, has admitted. In Mumbai hospitals patients sleep two to a bed or lie in corridors and car parks. India’s vaccination programme, already floundering, risks being sidelined by critical shortages in frontline healthcare, with states begging the Modi government for increased supplies of oxygen.
However, even with bodies piling up in blazing heat outside hospitals and mortuaries and crematoria working around the clock, the Modi government has continued to encourage mass gatherings that have accelerated a disastrous collapse in public safety protocols.
A week ago, Modi urged Indians “not to leave the house when there is no need”, as he launched a “vaccination festival” to reboot India’s faltering inoculation drive. Ignoring its own advice, however, the government allowed two million Hindu worshippers to cram on to the banks of the Ganges for the Kumbh Mela festival this month.
Despite incredulity across India at the sight of thousands of naked sadhus, without masks, plunging into the holy waters as volunteers sprayed the crowds with sanitiser, Modi’s nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) refused to halt the event.
“Coronavirus will not spread among the attendees of Kumbh Mela with Mother Ganges’s blessings,” said Tirath Singh Rawat, the BJP’s chief minister for Uttarakhand. Within days, thousands of devotees had tested positive and one leading Hindu saint had died. Modi belatedly intervened yesterday, calling for the Kumbh Mela to disband. But states across the country are already braced for another wave of infections, as thousands of infected worshippers now return home.
Modi himself has continued to rally huge crowds in West Bengal. Obsessed with seizing the opposition-held state for the BJP in local assembly elections, the prime minister has defied calls to suspend the campaign with more than two weeks of voting to go.
That relentless focus on domestic politics, pandering to the BJP’s Hindu nationalist base, has served Modi well since he swept to power in 2014 but threatens to leave the government ill equipped for a national crisis on this scale. India’s rocketing Covid-19 infections, now striking rich and poor indiscriminately, cannot be massaged out of existence by a dutiful press, and even among BJP loyalists, dissent is rising.
In February the prime minister declared that India’s response to the pandemic was “inspiring the world”. Case numbers had plunged to below 1,000 a day from their peak of 98,000 in the autumn and deaths had dropped below 100 a day. As the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, India was poised to lead the global fightback against Covid-19.
Instead, the government and the country dropped their guard. Experts spoke confidently of Indian cities nearing the threshold for herd immunity. As the economy opened up and the final restrictions from last year’s lockdown fell away, public complacency set in. Masks and social distancing were widely abandoned as restaurants reopened and markets thronged with shoppers. Indian airports filled with holidaymakers.
India launched its vaccination drive in January, aiming to inoculate 300 million essential workers by July. More than 122 million doses have been administered but only 7.8 per cent of the population have received at least one dose, and 1.2 per cent have had both shots.
Spying an opportunity to outflank its rival China, India shipped almost 65 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca and homegrown Covaxin vaccines abroad to friendly nations in a bout of vaccine diplomacy.
Only when Indian case numbers began to accelerate early last month and vaccine stocks began to run dry did the Modi government appear to realise that a second wave was inevitable. Vaccine exports were quietly suspended to rebuild stockpiles, severing critical supply chains to other countries, including Britain, which was expecting a second shipment of five million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine from the Serum Institute of India last month.
Interruptions to India’s contribution to the Covax global vaccine sharing scheme will hit poorer nations even harder. Indonesia confirmed last week it was facing a shortfall of 30 million Oxford-AstraZeneca doses, due to the delay in supplies from India, and said it would turn to China to plug the gap.
The “pharmacy of the world” now faces mounting criticism at home and abroad, accused of blocking desperately needed vaccines from the rest of the world while bungling its own programme as stocks run dry in several states.
Adar Poonawalla, the head of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s biggest vaccine manufacturer, confirmed this month that he could not increase production capacity. Poonawalla said that the institute faced a £300 million funding shortfall that would have come from lucrative vaccine exports overseas because it was forced to sell to the Modi government at a discounted price.
“We’re supplying in India at approximately 150-160 rupees [£1.50 per shot]. The average price is around $20 (£15) . . . [but] because of the Modi government’s request, we are providing at subsidised rates . . . it is not that we’re not making profits . . . but we are not making super profits, which is key to re-investing,” Poonawalla said.
Despite hundreds of vaccination centres closing, the government insisted that reports of vaccine shortages were “utterly baseless”. Harsh Vardhan, the health minister, attacked “deplorable” attempts by opposition parties to “distract attention from their failures and spread panic”.
Nawab Malik, an opposition minister in Maharashtra, hit back that if vaccination certificates continued to carry Modi’s image: “We demand the prime minister’s photo should be put on death certificates too.”
Though still denying blame, the government has moved to address the crisis. Tonight it announced that it would offer jabs to everyone over 18 from the start of May. Several states have pleaded with Modi to lower the age limit from 45 and offer the jab to any adult who wanted it but with stocks in short supply the government had resisted. The change of heart will offer hope that officials are more confident that vaccine supplies will recover from next month.
The Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine was the third approved for use in India last week and other foreign vaccines have been fast-tracked without bridging trials. Modi’s vision of an India “self-reliant” on vaccines, announced to the World Economic Forum in January, has been quietly abandoned.
The prime minister has moved to import medical oxygen and opened emergency corridors on India’s railways for shipments to the hardest-states yesterday. Even now, in another echo of last year’s crisis, there are allegations that Indian states are again manipulating their case numbers and suppressing death rates to save face. With a second peak still nowhere in sight, India’s second wave is likely to be far worse than official figures admit.
