Dear Editor,
The COVID–19 situation in India is grim. Hospitals are running out of beds and oxygen, vaccines are in short supply, the death count is rising, and public spaces turned into crematoria. Except for the rich, most of the country’s 1.3 billion people are left to fend for themselves – to look for vaccinations, oxygen, a hospital and even a place to be cremated. As if this were not enough, 18 of the ones lucky to have been admitted into a hospital, were killed when it was struck by a fire. Even Dante would have found it hard to foresee such a hellish condition.
While the world has responded to the developments in India with a strange mix of shock and sympathy, the international media, led mainly by Indian journalists and commentators based outside of India, are now openly placing the blame where it belongs: at the feet of Narendra Modi, India’s power-hungry, despotic and xenophobic Prime Minister, bent on turning India from a secular state (part of the basic structure of the Indian Constitution) to a Hindu State, recklessly oblivious to the fact that India has the world’s third largest Muslim population (10.9%), just behind Pakistan with 11%.
Modi, whose free market policies were applauded by the West, does not even attempt to conceal his autocratic instincts as he subverts all institutions in India, including that country’s highly acclaimed Supreme Court, its media and even the Elections Commission. Using the Indian Parliament, Modi in 2019 successfully brought into law the Citizenship Amendment Act, widely seen as a ploy by the Hindu political class to strip Indian Muslims of their citizenship rights.
In the tradition of Baghdad Bob, the country’s Health Minister, seeks to assure Indians that the fatality rate from the disease is one of the lowest in the world. In doing so, he was only following his Prime Minister’s boast to the World Economic Forum earlier this year that India has saved humanity from a big disaster by the effective containment of the corona virus. In the ultimate contempt of and insult to the dead and their families, the Modi Government is massively rigging the COVID statistics while television reports and the wailing of loved ones unable to find a hospital with a bed or oxygen, tell the true story.
What makes the situation so tragic is that India can rightfully claim to have some of the best medical institutes found anywhere, with advanced facilities for genomic sequencing and world class doctors. But like his side-kick Donald Trump and Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Modi and his Government chose to ignore science, sideline the scientists in favour of political cronies and disregard the lessons from around the world – that there are second and more waves and that new strains of the virus are more likely than not. Equally shocking and ironic is that even as India boasts of being the world’s pharmacy, Modi seemed more concerned with exporting vaccines rather than vaccinating his own people. His BJP, in the dastardliest act of politicising the right to life, promised the electorate of West Bengal, one of the states not controlled by him and his Party, that vaccines would come their way if they vote for his Party. Well, earlier yesterday, poetic justice forced him to concede defeat, his aura of invincibility cracked by a party led by a woman.
Modi hopes to control every state in India in order to impose his agenda and pursue market policies which destroy the last vestige of the public health system in favour of policies designed to put millions of lakhs into private hands. As famous Indian writer Arundhati Roy pointed out in a recent article in the London Guardian, the private sector does not cater for the “starving, sick, dying people who don’t have money.”
Guyana’s long and friendly relationship with India predates Modi, going far back to the anticolonial struggle and the Non-Aligned Movement era. That relationship subsists up to this day, potentially strengthened by our sale of crude oil to that country. Despite Modi’s excesses, the bonds between our two countries remain but our historical ties and common heritage should not blind us as citizens from speaking up in the face of such criminal neglect by the Government of the country.
There is also a lesson from India which we should not ignore. From all appearances, Guyana’s health care system is heading in a direction where private medical care and huge profits dominate the health sector, public facilities are for the less fortunate, and public health of little or no consequence. Two recent examples might suffice: in the midst of the greatest public health challenge ever to face Guyana, the Government chose to make the income of the private hospitals tax free! And in seeking to apply COVID– 19 measures, the Government has had to go back to the Public Health Ordinance of 1934 because in the 87 years since, we never thought public health legislation deserved attention.
Yours faithfully,
Christopher Ram
