Home » The Indian disaster is the fault of Narendra Modi – Pankaj Mishra

The Indian disaster is the fault of Narendra Modi – Pankaj Mishra

by admin

08 May 2021 2:23 pm

The Indian health system is collapsing under the weight of the pandemic: on 26 April the country recorded more than 2,700 deaths. Videos circulate of overcrowded morgues and grieving family members waiting in front of full hospitals. This tragedy was avoidable and is largely the fault of an incompetent and swashbuckling government. Yet judging by the fate of other far-right politicians – Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro, British Boris Johnson, Hungarian Viktor Orbán, Filipino Rodrigo Duterte – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will likely pay a reduced political price for his steps. fakes.

Like the other leaders cited, Modi spent more time downplaying the gravity of the pandemic than fighting it. In early March, as cases in India rose alarmingly, he boasted that the country would become the “pharmacy of the world“, producing vaccines for more developed countries. According to his health minister, India had entered the “final phase” of the pandemic. In March, at a new cricket stadium renamed Modi, tens of thousands of mostly maskless people flocked to watch matches between India and England. A much higher number of people, always unprotected, attended the prime minister’s recent election rallies in the state of West Bengal. And some 3.5 million people, encouraged by Modi’s Hindu nationalist colleagues, took part in the Kumbh mela religious festival. The result? Faced with an unsustainable burden of infections and a shortage of vaccines, India has stopped exporting doses and is importing them from Russia. Indian states are also struggling to secure supplies of essentials such as oxygen for medical use.

See also  The No vax protest in front of the counters: Trieste central post office forced to close early

Modi built an alternate reality with the help of loyal journalists and social network trolls

The case of Donald Trump, the biggest political victim of the pandemic, would appear to be a warning. Trump, too, has never stopped projecting an image of superhuman power against the virus, melodramatically tearing off his mask after being healed. Like Modi, he refused to suspend the election campaign during the worst weeks of the pandemic, congratulated himself on his response to the crisis, and blamed the opposition and individual state leaders for any missteps. Trump lost to Joe Biden largely due to his careless handling of the pandemic, but by a narrow margin. Other strong men appear to be more likely to survive politically. And to continue to increase the number of deaths that could have been avoided.

For his part, Modi has much higher approval ratings than Trump has ever had. And he has already survived mistakes that would have wrecked any other political career, such as demonetization in 2016 and a botched lockdown in 2020, which caused India’s largest internal migration ever since 1947. The prime minister thrived with the help of something Trump never had and that those like Boris Johnson only enjoy sporadically: news media complacent. Indeed, one of the reasons this complacency about the virus has spread to India is that Modi personally asked editors and editors to focus on the “positive” stories.

The current crisis seems more serious than others that Modi has had to face. So far his claims – such as the one, for example, that the Indian airstrikes in 2019 killed dozens of terrorists in Pakistan, or that the withdrawal of almost all banknotes from circulation punished the corrupt – have never been verified reality, because Modi built an alternate reality with the help of loyal journalists and social network trolls.

See also  After three months of war, Israel claims “military dismantling of Hamas in northern Gaza”

The many deaths in the Indian middle class and the shortage of hospital beds and oxygen cannot be denied so easily: they do not require any external verification. Even for an illusionist like Modi it won’t be easy to use them to his advantage.

advertising

However, it would be imprudent to foresee a rapid decline of similar figures in India. And the same applies, for that matter, to any other place in the world. Boris Johnson’s popularity, for example, has risen after the successful vaccination campaign in the UK. The British example suggests that not enough voters are ready to punish the scandalous incompetence of their leaders.

The last few years have given us a sad warning: the spell cast by the demagogues of our time is still alive. It is based on the fear and contempt of internal and external enemies, and is reinforced by the people’s rigid personal identification with the leader’s charisma and psychological dependence on him. It is a spell that transcends all conventional political calculations, and cannot be broken even by the terrifying death toll.

(Translation by Federico Ferrone)

.

You may also like

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Accept Read More

Privacy & Cookies Policy