NEW DELHI: As he surveyed the thousands of people gathered at an election rally in eastern India on April 17, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared jubilant. “Everywhere I look, as far as I can see, there are crowds,” he said, his arms spread wide. “You have done an extraordinary thing.”
At the time, India was recording more than 200,000 coronavirus cases a day. In the western state of Maharashtra, oxygen was running short, and people were dying at home because of a shortage of hospital beds. In Modi’s home state of Gujarat, crematoriums were being overwhelmed by the dead.
Those scenes were just a prelude to the devastation now unfolding in India. It is recording more infections daily — at last count 379,000 — than any other country since the start of the pandemic. Hospitals are turning away severely ill patients, and their relatives are frantically searching for medical oxygen.
For Modi, it is a moment of reckoning. He is facing what appears to be the country’s biggest crisis since independence, a calamity that is challenging his vision of a proud, self-reliant nation. Modi’s own lapses and missteps are an increasing source of anger, according to international media reports.
As coronavirus cases skyrocketed, Modi continued to hold huge election rallies and declined to cancel a Hindu religious festival that drew millions to the banks of the Ganges River, despite pleas from health experts. Rather than making urgent preparations for a second wave of cases in an already weak health-care system, the government put much of its focus on vaccinations — a campaign too limited to blunt the oncoming disaster. The government repeatedly chose self-congratulation over caution, publicly stating that the pandemic was in its “end game” in India as recently as last month.
Modi swept to a landslide re-election victory in 2019, offering Indians a muscular brand of nationalism that views India as a fundamentally Hindu country rather than the secular republic envisioned by its founders. He has cultivated an image as a singular leader capable of bold decisions to protect and transform the country.
Now that image is “in tatters,” said Vinay Sitapati, a political scientist at Ashoka University in the northern Indian state of Haryana. Modi and his governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) built a formidable machine for winning elections, Sitapati said, but their mind-set of continuous campaigning has come “at the cost of governance.”
Critics have called for Modi’s resignation, and the author Arundhati Roy described the current situation in India as a “crime against humanity.” The governing party rejects such criticisms. Modi’s government has been working “round the clock” to fight the pandemic since the start of 2020, said Baijayant Panda, the national vice president of the BJP.
Modi has acknowledged that the country is fighting “a colossal battle” against the coronavirus. India was successful in confronting the first wave of cases, he said in a radio address this week, but “this storm has shaken the country.”
Modi’s approach to India’s current surge stands in contrast to his actions last spring. Last March, he ordered a strict nationwide lockdown, the world’s largest, with four hours’ notice at a time when the country had recorded about 500 coronavirus cases. The lockdown caused extreme economic hardship: More than 100 million people lost their jobs. Among them were millions of migrant workers who began leaving cities on foot to return to their home villages. The lockdown slowed transmission of the virus and gave India time to scale up testing and other capacities to fight the pandemic. Infections surged in the fall as restrictions were loosened across the country but receded early this year for reasons that remain unclear.
A national task force of experts and scientists set up to advice the government on its response to the pandemic did not meet at all in February and March. In March, the government allowed an enormous month-long Hindu religious festival, the Kumbh Mela, to proceed in the northern state of Uttarakhand. Earlier this month, the state’s chief minister, a member of Modi’s party, said that because the gathering was held on the banks of the Ganges River, which Hindus consider holy, “there should be no corona.”
Meanwhile, Modi threw himself into several state election campaigns, including a crucial one for his party in the state of West Bengal. The current desperate struggle for oxygen across much of India has revealed a lack of preparation by the government for a new surge. Now anger is growing, even among Modi voters. For BJP supporters whose relatives died trying to find treatment for covid-19, the sense of betrayal is acute.