Many Indians are underestimating Prime Minister Narendra Modi over his response to a narrow boom in cases of coronavirus as he falls ill by addressing tens of thousands of people at state elections and has Hindu devotees rally for a festival.
Tags like #ResignModi and #SuperSpreaderModi have been trending on Twitter for the past two days, with corpses piling up in morgues and crematoria, and desperate cries for hospital beds, medical oxygen and coronavirus tests flooding social media.
After Modi came to power in 2014 with the largest single party majority in decades, he was not used to such public braai work.
He had previously tried to lose support by bringing about unpopular reforms, especially after he dissolved high-denomination banknotes overnight in 2016, and last year, when his agrarian reforms provoked months of mass protests by angry farmers.
But it’s different. The economy struggled to recover after a months-long shutdown last year, but for all the hardships suffered at the time, the second wave of the coronavirus epidemic is more deadly than the first.
India is currently taking on more new cases of coronavirus than any other country, and this week it is expected to rise above the high tide of the epidemic seen in the United States, with daily new cases peaking in early January at almost 300 000. read more
Deaths in India have risen to nearly 179,000. read more
Yet Modi and his ministers fought fiercely ahead of the West Bengal state election, where opinion polls showed the prime minister’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) was in a tough race with a state-run regional party.
“You hold meetings when people go to funerals,” Akhilesh Jha, the head of the Federal Department of Science and Technology’s data chief, wrote on LinkedIn in Hindi in a rare public outburst by a government official.
“People will hold you accountable, you keep holding rallies.”
Several other government officials shared similar sentiments with Reuters.
The eight-phase vote in West Bengal ends on 29 April.
Whatever happens there, Modi does not have to worry about a national vote until 2024, but at present it is difficult to say when the coronavirus epidemic will disappear in India.
A government spokesman did not respond to questions about criticism of Modi. But Piyush Goyal, the Minister of Railways, Trade and Industry, told television partner ANI to Reuters that Modi worked many hours a day to manage the crisis.
On Saturday, Modi urged religious leaders to symbolically celebrate only a festival known as Kumbh Mela, after tens of thousands of Hindu devotees gathered daily to immerse themselves in the Ganges.
But it was on the seventeenth day of the festival that was to take place until the end of April, and it has yet to be officially stopped, despite the authorities discovering hundreds of infections among participants who poured in from all over the country. read more
Although it is not a power in the state, the largest national opposition party of Congress on Sunday halted election rallies in Bengal. But the BJP insisted that the candidates have a ‘constitutional right’ to fight for at least 14 days.
COVID-19 cases in Bengal have meanwhile quadrupled since the beginning of April and at least three contestants have been killed.
“How many deaths does it take until he knows too many people have died?” Nirupama Menon Rao, a former foreign minister, asked on Twitter.
Our standards: the principles of the Thomson Reuters Trust.