COMMENTS
No one knows the true extent of the disaster in India. But corpses in rivers and a lack of wood to cremate the dead tell a dramatic story, writes Morten Strand.
PICTURE OF A DISASTER: It is burning in India, also politically. Here the dead are cremated in Bengaluru Photo: REUTERS / NTB
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Internal comments: This is a comment. The commentary expresses the writer’s attitude.
Published
Friday 14 May 2021 – 17:01
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Something completely new has appeared in the pandemic-stricken India. Lots of corpses fill the sacred river Gagnes and other rivers, and are caught by nets in strategic places so as not to pollute the river water even more. In some places, pictures have been taken of people dumping these bodies from bridges, because those who dump the bodies do not know where else to make them. This is because many more people die from the corona epidemic than the official figures say. And because in many places there are reports of a shortage of wood to cremate the bodies in the outdoor crematoria that in recent weeks have marked the news images from the country with 1.4 billion inhabitants. And it may be that this is sacrilege. For both the corpses in the rivers, and the lack of firewood to give the dead a dignified farewell, are images of a disaster.
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These pictures are so horrible that they make delicate souls shrink. But not Prime Minister Narendra Modi, one must believe Indian political analysts. Modes, which are usually everywhere and everywhere, are suddenly gone during the pandemic. The Prime Minister, who has created a career of, above all, being responsive and active in the face of the little man’s problems and disorders, suddenly seems to have become deaf. If during the pandemic he were to put his ear to the ground to listen to the voices of the people, he would be accused of hearing. Nothing.
While the infection and the death toll is about to flatten out in the big cities, so the plague is now spreading in the countryside, where two thirds of India’s population lives. Officially, just under 25 million are infected, and just over 250,000 have died from the pandemic. And around 4,000 people die every day. But systematic underreporting of hospitalized and dead in hospitals in the big cities means that there is reason to believe that it is much worse in the province, where there are often neither doctors nor hospitals to determine what people die of. Not to mention counting the dead. There is therefore reason to believe – also because of the bodies in the rivers, and the lack of firewood – that the real numbers of victims of the pandemic are many times as high as the official ones.
And therefore, because Modi is rarely silent, and because India had control of the pandemic this winter, until the prime minister opened the country in March and April, including for religious ceremonies and election campaigns in several states, criticism is now hailed. The BBC refers to one newspaper which describes the condition as follows:
– Arrogance, hyper-nationalism and bureaucratic incompetence have together created a crisis of epic dimensions.
One of the cases with bureaucratic incompetence were customs officers who stopped crisis aid from abroad for several days because they demanded customs for the aid. Waves of criticism are now hitting the prime minister, who is otherwise a Hindu nationalist with confrontation as a political method. Despite this, support for him last weekend was as high as 67 percent, only seven percent down from the previous poll.
Yet not everything is as it should, even if we disregard the pandemic. One of the contagion bombs in April was the state election in West Bengal, with nearly 100 million inhabitants. Modis and his party had set out to conquer the majority in the state, to demonstrate national strength for his aggressive Hindu nationalism. The prime minister’s closest man, Interior Minister Amit Shah, ran a hyperactive election campaign, and Modi publicly boasted about the number of people he attended at his election campaign meetings, who were also contagious. Shah boasted that Modi’s party, the BJP, would get more than 200 of the state’s 294 representatives, and ran an election campaign with the promise that everyone in the state would get a free vaccine if the BJP won the election.
It went wrong, and the opposition, the Congress Party – the party of the Gandhi dynasty – retained the majority. The BJP received only 77 representatives. The party lost because instead of mobilizing for the BJP, Modi and Shah mobilized against themselves. The state’s 30 million Muslims voted tactically, among other things, by voting for the party that was best placed to beat the BJP, whether it was the Congress Party or the Communists. And the pandemic is obviously part of the explanation for this.
This does not mean that Modi’s time is up. The next national election is in 2024, and a lot of water will flow into the sea before that time. But it is crucial for Modi that the water flowing in the sea is not full of corpses from the pandemic.
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