[News] Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe: ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/28/crime-against-humanity-arundhati-roy-india-covid-catastrophe#top
Arundhati
Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe: ‘We are witnessing a crime against
humanity’
Arundhati Roy - April 28, 2021
------------------------------

During a particularly polarising election campaign in the state of Uttar
Pradesh in 2017, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, waded into the fray
to stir things up even further. From a public podium, he accused the state
government – which was led by an opposition party – of pandering to the
Muslim community by spending more on Muslim graveyards (*kabristans*) than
on Hindu cremation grounds (*shamshans*). With his customary braying sneer,
in which every taunt and barb rises to a high note mid-sentence before it
falls away in a menacing echo, he stirred up the crowd. “If a kabristan is
built in a village, a shamshan should also be constructed there,” he said
<https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/covid-narendra-modi-pits-smashan-against-kabristan-in-polarising-elections-speech-in-uttar-pradesh/cid/1813065>
.

“Shamshan! Shamshan!” the mesmerised, adoring crowd echoed back.

Perhaps he is happy now that the haunting image of the flames rising from
the mass funerals in India’s cremation grounds is making the front page of
international newspapers. And that all the kabristans and shamshans in his
country are working properly, in direct proportion to the populations they
cater for, and far beyond their capacities.

“Can India, population 1.3 billion, be isolated?” the Washington Post asked
rhetorically in a recent editorial
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/indias-sudden-coronavirus-wave-is-not-a-far-away-problem/2021/04/23/f363bda2-a3a3-11eb-85fc-06664ff4489d_story.html>
about India’s unfolding catastrophe and the difficulty of containing new,
fast-spreading Covid variants within national borders. “Not easily,” it
replied. It’s unlikely this question was posed in quite the same way when
the coronavirus was raging through the UK and Europe just a few months ago.
But we in India have little right to take offence, given our prime
minister’s words <https://pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetail.aspx?PRID=1693019>
at the World Economic Forum in January this year.

Modi spoke at a time when people in Europe and the US were suffering
through the peak of the second wave of the pandemic. He had not one word of
sympathy to offer, only a long, gloating boast about India’s infrastructure
and Covid-preparedness. I 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 2 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.”

Modi the magician takes a bow for saving humanity by containing the
coronavirus effectively. Now that it turns out that he has not contained
it, can we complain about being viewed as though we are radioactive? That
other countries’ borders are being closed to us and flights are being
cancelled? That we’re being sealed in with our virus and our prime
minister, along with all the sickness, the anti-science, the hatred and the
idiocy that he, his party and its brand of politics represent?
------------------------------

When the first wave of Covid came to India and then subsided last year, the
government and its supportive commentariat were triumphant. “India isn’t
having a picnic,” tweeted
<https://twitter.com/shekhargupta/status/1251381206827950081> 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
crematoriums & graveyards out of wood or space. Too good to be true? Bring
data if you disagree. Unless you think you’re god.” Leave aside the
callous, disrespectful imagery – did we need a god to tell us that most
pandemics have a second wave?

This one was predicted, although its virulence has taken even scientists
and virologists by surprise. So where is the Covid-specific infrastructure
and the “people’s movement” against the virus that Modi boasted about in
his speech? Hospital beds are unavailable. Doctors and medical staff are at
breaking point. Friends call with stories about wards with no staff and
more dead patients than live ones. People are dying in hospital corridors,
on roads and in their homes. Crematoriums in Delhi have run out of
firewood. The forest department has had to give special permission for
the felling
of city trees
<https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/forest-dept-allows-felling-of-200-dead-trees-for-wood/articleshow/82235990.cms#:~:text=NEW%20DELHI%3A%20With%20the%20spike,utilising%20the%20wood%20for%20cremati>.
Desperate people are using whatever kindling they can find. Parks and car
parks are being turned into
<https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/parks-and-parking-lots-turn-into-cremation-grounds/articleshow/82247852.cms>
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.

02:10
India Covid crisis: families' plea for help amid oxygen shortages and mass
cremations – video report

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.

None of this conveys the full depth and range of the trauma, the chaos and,
above all, the indignity that people are being subjected to. What happened
to my young friend T is just one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of similar
stories in Delhi alone. T, who is in his 20s, lives in his parents’ tiny
flat in Ghaziabad on the outskirts of Delhi. All three of them tested
positive for Covid. His mother was critically ill. Since it was in the
early days, he was lucky enough to find a hospital bed for her. His father,
diagnosed with severe bipolar depression, turned violent and began to harm
himself. He stopped sleeping. He soiled himself. His psychiatrist was
online trying to help, although she also broke down from time to time
because her husband had just died from Covid. She said T’s father needed
hospitalisation, but since he was Covid positive there was no chance of
that. So T stayed awake, night after night, holding his father down,
sponging him, cleaning him up. Each time I spoke to him I felt my own
breath falter. Finally, the message came: “Father’s dead.” He did not die
of Covid, but of a massive spike in blood pressure induced by a psychiatric
meltdown induced by utter helplessness.

What to do with the body? I desperately called everybody I knew. Among
those who responded was Anirban Bhattacharya, who works with the well-known
social activist Harsh Mander. Bhattacharya is about to stand trial on a
charge of sedition for a protest he helped organise on his university
campus in 2016. Mander, who has not fully recovered from a savage case of
Covid last year, is being threatened with arrest and the closure of the
orphanages he runs after he mobilised people against the National Register
of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed in
December 2019, both of which blatantly discriminate against Muslims. Mander
and Bhattacharya are among the many citizens who, in the absence of all
forms of governance, have set up helplines and emergency responses, and are
running themselves ragged organising ambulances and coordinating funerals
and the transport of dead bodies. It’s not safe for these volunteers to do
what they’re doing. In this wave of the pandemic, it’s the young who are
falling
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/mystery-shrouds-growth-covid-cases-young-people/>,
who are filling the intensive care units. When young people die, the older
among us lose a little of our will to live.

T’s father was cremated. T and his mother are recovering.
------------------------------

Things will settle down eventually. Of course, they will. But we don’t know
who among us will survive to see that day. The rich will breathe easier.
The poor will not. For now, among the sick and dying, there is a vestige of
democracy. The rich have been felled, too. Hospitals are begging for
oxygen. Some have started bring-your-own-oxygen schemes. The oxygen crisis
has led to intense, unseemly battles between states, with political parties
trying to deflect blame from themselves.

On the night of 22 April, 25 critically ill coronavirus patients on
high-flow oxygen died in one of Delhi’s biggest private hospitals, Sir
Ganga Ram. The hospital issued several desperate SOS messages for the
replenishment of its oxygen supply. A day later, the chair of the hospital
board rushed to clarify matters
<https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/delhi-ganga-ram-hospital-deaths-oxygen-shortage-7285598/>:
“We cannot say that they have died due to lack of oxygen support.” On 24
April, 20 more patients died
<https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/delhi-jaipur-golden-hospital-covid-patients-oxygen-supply-shortage-7286997/>
when oxygen supplies were depleted in another big Delhi hospital, Jaipur
Golden. That same day, in the Delhi high court, Tushar Mehta, India’s
solicitor general, speaking for the government of India, said
<https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/coronavirus-lets-try-and-not-be-a-cry-baby-centre-to-delhi-on-oxygen-crisis-amid-covid-19-2421034>:
“Let’s try and not be a cry baby … so far we have ensured that no one in
the country was left without oxygen.”

Ajay Mohan Bisht, the saffron-robed chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, who
goes by the name Yogi Adityanath, has declared
<https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/seize-property-of-those-spreading-rumours-up-cm/article34404518.ece>
that there is no shortage of oxygen in any hospital in his state and that
rumourmongers will be arrested without bail under the National Security Act
and have their property seized.

Yogi Adityanath doesn’t play around. Siddique Kappan, a Muslim journalist
from Kerala, jailed for months in Uttar Pradesh when he and two others
travelled there to report on the gang-rape and murder of a Dalit girl in
Hathras district, is critically ill and has tested positive for Covid. His
wife, in a desperate petition to the chief justice of the supreme court of
India, says her husband is lying chained “like an animal” to a hospital bed
in the Medical College hospital in Mathura. (The supreme court has now
ordered
<https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/supreme-court-to-up-shift-arrested-journalist-siddique-kappan-to-delhi-govt-hospital/articleshow/82289115.cms>
the Uttar Pradesh government to move him to a hospital in Delhi.) So, if
you live in Uttar Pradesh, the message seems to be, please do yourself a
favour and die without complaining.
[image: Funeral pyres in Delhi april 2021.]
Funeral pyres in Delhi last week. Photograph: Anindito Mukherjee/Getty
Images

The threat to those who complain is not restricted to Uttar Pradesh. A
spokesperson for the fascist Hindu nationalist organisation the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/20/hindu-supremacists-nationalism-tearing-india-apart-modi-bjp-rss-jnu-attacks>
(RSS) – of which Modi and several of his ministers are members, and which
runs its own armed militia – has warned
<https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/rss-warns-against-anti-bharat-forces-amid-pandemic/article34401183.ece>
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
<https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/24/22400976/twitter-removed-tweets-critical-india-censor-coronavirus>
critical of the government.

Where shall we look for solace? For science? Shall we cling to numbers? How
many dead? How many recovered? How many infected? When will the peak come?
On 27 April, the report was
<https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-posts-323144-new-covid-19-cases-2021-04-27/>
323,144 new cases, 2,771 deaths. The precision is somewhat reassuring.
Except – how do we know? Tests are hard to come by, even in Delhi. The
number of Covid-protocol funerals from graveyards and crematoriums in small
towns and cities suggest a death toll up to 30 times higher than the
official count. Doctors who are working outside the metropolitan areas can
tell you how it is.

If Delhi is breaking down, what should we imagine is happening in villages
in Bihar, in Uttar Pradesh, in Madhya Pradesh? Where tens of millions of
workers from the cities, carrying the virus with them, are fleeing home to
their families, traumatised by their memory of Modi’s national lockdown in
2020. It was the strictest
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/world/asia/india-coronavirus-lockdown.html>
lockdown in the world, announced with only four hours’ notice. It left
migrant workers stranded in cities with no work, no money to pay their
rent, no food and no transport. Many had to walk hundreds of miles to their
homes in far-flung villages. Hundreds died on the way.

This time around, although there is no national lockdown, the workers have
left while transport is still available, while trains and buses are still
running. They’ve left because they know that even though they make up the
engine of the economy in this huge country, when a crisis comes, in the
eyes of this administration, they simply don’t exist. This year’s exodus
has resulted in a different kind of chaos: there are no quarantine centres
for them to stay in before they enter their village homes. There’s not even
the meagre pretence of trying to protect the countryside from the city
virus.

These are villages where people die of easily treatable diseases like
diarrhoea and tuberculosis. How are they to cope with Covid? Are Covid
tests available to them? Are there hospitals? Is there oxygen? More than
that, is there love? Forget love, is there even concern? There isn’t.
Because there is only a heart-shaped hole filled with cold indifference
where India’s public heart should be.
------------------------------

Early this morning, on 28 April, news came that our friend Prabhubhai has
died. Before he died, he showed classic Covid symptoms. But his death will
not register in the official Covid count because he died at home without a
test or treatment. Prabhubhai was a stalwart of the anti-dam movement in
the Narmada valley. I stayed several times at his home in Kevadia, where
decades ago the first group of indigenous tribespeople were thrown off
their lands to make room for the dam-builders and officers’ colony.
Displaced families like Prabhubhai’s still remain on the edges of that
colony, impoverished and unsettled, transgressors on land that was once
theirs.

There is no hospital in Kevadia. There’s only the Statue of Unity, built in
the likeness of the freedom fighter and first deputy prime minister of
India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who the dam is named after. At 182 metres
high, it’s the tallest statue in the world and cost US$422m. High-speed
elevators inside take tourists up to view the Narmada dam from the level of
Sardar Patel’s chest. Of course, you cannot see the river valley
civilisation that lies destroyed, submerged in the depths of the vast
reservoir, or hear the stories of the people who waged one of the most
beautiful, profound struggles the world has ever known – not just against
that one dam, but against the accepted ideas of what constitutes
civilisation, happiness and progress. The statue was Modi’s pet project. He
inaugurated it in October 2018.
[image: Narendra Modi at the inauguration of the Statue of Unity, the
world’s tallest statue, in India’s western Gujarat state in 2018.]
Narendra Modi at the inauguration of the Statue of Unity, the world’s
tallest statue, in India’s western Gujarat state in 2018. Photograph:
HANDOUT/AFP/Getty Images

The friend who messaged about Prabhubhai had spent years as an anti-dam
activist in the Narmada valley. She wrote: “My hands shiver as I write
this. Covid situation in and around Kevadia Colony grim.”

The precise numbers that make up India’s Covid graph are like the wall that
was built in Ahmedabad to hide the slums Donald Trump would drive past on
his way to the “Namaste Trump” event
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/24/namaste-donald-trump-india-welcomes-us-president-narendra-modi-rally>
that Modi hosted for him in February 2020. Grim as those numbers are, they
give you a picture of the India-that-matters, but certainly not the India
that is. In the India that is, people are expected to vote as Hindus, but
die as disposables.

*“Let’s try **and** not be a cry baby.”*

Try not to pay attention to the fact that the possibility of a dire
shortage of oxygen had been flagged as far back as April 2020, and then
again in November by a committee set up by the government itself
<https://indianexpress.com/article/india/covid-19-oxygen-supply-warning-7285340/>.
Try not to wonder why even Delhi’s biggest hospitals don’t have their own
oxygen-generating plants. Try not to wonder why the PM Cares Fund – the opaque
organisation <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-53151308> that
has recently replaced the more public Prime Minister’s National Relief
Fund, and which uses public money and government infrastructure but
functions like a private trust
<https://scroll.in/latest/982310/pm-cares-controlled-by-government-but-doesnt-come-under-rti-act-says-centre-in-new-response>
with zero public accountability – has suddenly moved in to address the
oxygen crisis. Will Modi own shares in our air-supply now?

*“Let’s try **and** not be a cry baby.” *
------------------------------

Understand that there were and are so many far more pressing issues for the
Modi government to attend to. Destroying the last vestiges of democracy,
persecuting non-Hindu minorities and consolidating the foundations of the
Hindu Nation makes for a relentless schedule. There are massive prison
complexes
<https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/nov/20/race-to-stop-2-million-becoming-stateless-as-the-clock-starts-ticking-in-assam>,
for example, that must be urgently constructed in Assam for the 2 million
people who have lived there for generations and have suddenly been stripped
of their citizenship. (On this matter, our independent supreme court came
down hard on the side
<https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2020/07/how-covid-19-0>
of the government and leniently on the side of the vandals.)

There are hundreds of students and activists and young Muslim citizens to
be tried and imprisoned as the primary accused in the anti-Muslim pogrom
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/01/violence-in-delhi-is-not-a-riot-it-is-targeted-anti-muslim-brutality>
that took place against their own community in north-east Delhi last March.
If you are Muslim in India, it’s a crime to be murdered. Your folks will
pay for it. There was the inauguration of the new Ram Temple in Ayodhya,
which is being built in place of the mosque that was hammered to dust by
Hindu vandals watched over by senior BJP politicians. (On this matter, our
independent supreme court came down hard
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/30/india-bjp-leaders-acquitted-babri-mosque-demolition-case>
on the side of the government and the vandals.) There were the
controversial new Farm Bills
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-54233080> to be passed,
corporatising agriculture. There were hundreds of thousands of farmers to
be beaten and teargassed when they came out on to the streets to protest.

Then there’s the multi-multi-multimillion-dollar plan for a grand new
replacement for the fading grandeur of New Delhi’s imperial centre to be
urgently attended to. After all, how can the government of the new Hindu
India be housed in old buildings? While Delhi is locked down, ravaged by
the pandemic, construction work on the “Central Vista” project, declared as
an essential service
<https://scroll.in/article/993385/as-covid-19-devastates-delhi-central-vista-project-declared-an-essential-service-work-continues>,
has begun. Workers are being transported in. Maybe they can alter the plans
to add a crematorium.
[image: Crowds at the Kumbh Mela festival in Haridwar april 2021]
Crowds at the Kumbh Mela festival in Haridwar earlier this month.
Photograph: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters

There was also the Kumbh Mela to be organised, so that millions of Hindu
pilgrims could crowd together
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-56770460> in a small town to
bathe in the Ganges and spread the virus even-handedly as they returned to
their homes across the country, blessed and purified. This Kumbh rocks on,
although Modi has gently suggested that it might be an idea for the holy
dip to become “symbolic” – whatever that means. (Unlike what happened with
those who attended a conference for the Islamic organisation Tablighi Jamaat
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-52131338> last year, the media
has not run a campaign against them calling them “corona jihadis” or
accusing them of committing crimes against humanity.) There were also those
few thousand Rohingya refugees who had to be urgently deported back to the
genocidal regime in Myanmar from where they had fled – in the middle of a
coup. (Once again, when our independent supreme court was petitioned on
this matter, it concurred with the government’s view
<https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/rohingya-refugees-crisis-india-supreme-court-7288913/>
.)

So, as you can tell, it’s been busy, busy, busy.

Over and above all this urgent activity, there is an election to be won in
the state of West Bengal. This required our home minister, Modi’s man Amit
Shah, to more or less abandon his cabinet duties and focus all his
attention on Bengal for months, to disseminate his party’s murderous
propaganda, to pit human against human in every little town and village.
Geographically, West Bengal is a small state. The election could have taken
place in a single day, and has done so in the past. But since it is new
territory for the BJP, the party needed time to move its cadres, many of
who are not from Bengal, from constituency to constituency to oversee the
voting. The election schedule was divided into eight phases, spread out
over a month, the last on 29 April. As the count of corona infections
ticked up, the other political parties pleaded with the election commission
to rethink the election schedule. The commission refused and came down hard on
the side of the BJP
<https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/election-commission-responsible-for-covid-19-surge-madras-high-court/articleshow/82256082.cms>,
and the campaign continued. Who hasn’t seen the videos
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf9qcgCAJtI> of the BJP’s star campaigner,
the prime minister himself, triumphant and maskless, speaking to the
maskless crowds, thanking people for coming out in unprecedented numbers?
That was on 17 April, when the official number of daily infections was
already rocketing upward of 200,000.

Now, as voting closes, Bengal is poised to become the new corona cauldron,
with a new triple mutant strain known as – guess what – the “Bengal strain
<https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/what-is-triple-mutant-variant-of-covid19-virus-bengal-strain-details-1793991-2021-04-22>”.
Newspapers report
<https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/every-second-person-getting-tested-in-kolkata-is-positive/articleshow/82236519.cms>
that every second person tested in the state capital, Kolkata, is Covid
positive. The BJP has declared that if it wins Bengal, it will ensure
people get free vaccines. And if it doesn’t?

*“Let’s try **and** not be a cry baby.”*
------------------------------

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
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/02/india-in-charge-of-developing-world-covid-vaccine-supply-unsustainable>,
to the poorest people in the world. This week they announced
<https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/centre-tells-serum-institute-bharat-biotech-to-lower-their-covid-vaccine-prices-101619444078473.html>
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.

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 themselves 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.
[image: People with breathing problems caused by Covid-19 wait to receive
oxygen in Ghaziabad, India, April 27, 2021.]
People with breathing problems caused by Covid-19 wait to receive oxygen in
Ghaziabad. Photograph: Adnan Abidi/Reuters

As this epic catastrophe plays out on our Modi-aligned Indian television
channels, you’ll notice how they all speak in one tutored voice. The
“system” has collapsed, they say, again and again. The virus has
overwhelmed India’s health care “system”.

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 have been
slipped into it. So the real figure is estimated to be more like 0.34%
<https://science.thewire.in/health/union-health-budget-nirmala-sitharaman-covid-19-pmasby-allocation-gdp-expert-analysis/>.
The tragedy is that in this devastatingly poor country, as a 2016 Lancet
study <https://www.thelancet.com/gbd> 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
<https://www.channel4.com/news/500000-to-900000-covid-cases-a-day-in-india-virologist-shahid-jameel>
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.
------------------------------

The hashtag #ModiMustResign is trending on social media. Some of the memes
and illustrations show Modi with a heap of skulls peeping out from behind
the curtain of his beard. Modi the Messiah speaking at a public rally of
corpses. Modi and Amit Shah as vultures, scanning the horizon for corpses
to harvest votes from. But that is only one part of the story. The other
part is that the man with no feelings, the man with empty eyes and a
mirthless smile, can, like so many tyrants in the past, arouse passionate
feelings in others. His pathology is infectious. And that is what sets him
apart. In north India, which is home to his largest voting base, and which,
by dint of sheer numbers, tends to decide the political fate of the
country, the pain he inflicts seems to turn into a peculiar pleasure.

Fredrick Douglass said it right: “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by
the endurance of those whom they oppress.” How we in India pride ourselves
on our capacity to endure. How beautifully we have trained ourselves to
meditate, to turn inward, to exorcise our fury as well as justify our
inability to be egalitarian. How meekly we embrace our humiliation.

When he made his political debut as Gujarat’s new chief minister in 2001,
Modi ensured his place in posterity after what has come to be known as the
2002 Gujarat pogrom. Over a period of a few days, Hindu vigilante mobs,
watched over and sometimes actively assisted by the Gujarat police, murdered,
raped and burned alive
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/mar/14/new-india-gujarat-massacre>
thousands of Muslims as “revenge” for a gruesome arson attack on a train in
which more than 50 Hindu pilgrims had been burned alive. Once the violence
subsided, Modi, who had until then only been appointed as chief minister by
his party, called for early elections. The campaign in which he was
portrayed as Hindu Hriday Samrat (“The Emperor of Hindu Hearts”) won him a
landslide victory. Modi hasn’t lost an election since.

Several of the killers in the Gujrat pogrom were subsequently captured on
camera by the journalist Ashish Khetan, boasting of how they hacked people
to death, slashed pregnant women’s stomachs open and smashed infants’ heads
against rocks. They said they could only have done what they did because
Modi was their chief minister. Those tapes were broadcast on national TV.
While Modi remained in the seat of power, Khetan, whose tapes were
submitted to the courts and forensically examined, appeared as a witness on
several occasions. Over time, some of the killers were arrested and
imprisoned, but many were let off. In his recent book, Undercover: My
Journey Into the Darkness of Hindutva, Khetan describes in detail how,
during Modi’s tenure as chief minister, the Gujarat police, judges,
lawyers, prosecutors and inquiry committees all colluded to tamper with
evidence, intimidate witnesses and transfer judges.

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 it
could. To assist the ruling party in its campaign to destroy all opposition
parties amounts to colluding with the destruction of democracy.

So here we are now, in the hell of their collective making, with every
independent institution essential to the functioning of a democracy
compromised and hollowed out, and a virus that is out of control.

The crisis-generating machine that we call our government is incapable of
leading us out of this disaster. Not least because one man makes all the
decisions in this government, and that man is dangerous – and not very
bright. This virus is an international problem. To deal with it,
decision-making, at least on the control and administration of the
pandemic, will need to pass into the hands of some sort of non-partisan
body consisting of members of the ruling party, members of the opposition,
and health and public policy experts.

As for Modi, is resigning from your crimes a feasible proposition? Perhaps
he could just take a break from them – a break from all his hard work.
There’s that $564m Boeing 777, Air India One, customised for VVIP travel –
for him, actually – that’s been sitting idle on the runway for a while now.
He and his men could just leave. The rest of us will do all we can to clean
up their mess.

No, India cannot be isolated. We need help.
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