[From an approval rating of 80% earlier in the year,
now tough questions are being asked of PM’s leadership]
Nagesh Kariyappa, the general
secretary of the Indian national students’ union who filed
the report to police on Friday, said he wanted the absence of
political leadership when India had been brought to its knees by Covid-19 to be
a matter of official record. “Where are the so-called leaders who had promised
to make India a global leader but have instead made people suffer like this?”
said Kariyappa.
As a devastating second wave of
coronavirus has engulfed
India in recent weeks, taking India’s tally of cases above 20m and the
official death toll to more than a quarter of a million – a figure most experts
consider to be a vast undercount – the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government
led by Modi has faced an unprecedented and visceral wave of public anger.
Modi came to power in 2014 on
promises of growth and prosperity, and won another sweeping majority in 2019.
He has deflected civil unrest, economic decline and some backlash against
his Hindu
nationalist agenda to remain India’s most popular prime minister in
years, his approval rating hitting 80% earlier this year.
But with so many people losing
loved ones due to a lack of hospital beds, oxygen, ventilators and vital
medicines across the country, and with a chronically underfunded,
under-resourced healthcare system pushed to the brink of collapse, tough
questions are being asked for the first time about Modi’s competence and
leadership.
“Modi’s image will depend on how
the mass suffering is interpreted, and whether he can successfully deploy his
skills at narrative shifting, but I think he will have to pay a price,” said
Ashutosh Varshney, director of the Centre for Contemporary South Asia at Brown
University in the US.
“This is too immense a period of
suffering and it will be too hard to convince people that this was just down to
‘divine will’ or individual failures to wear a mask etc.”
In the city of Panchkula, in the
BJP-ruled state of Haryana, Chetan Tikoo stood cremating his 75-year-old father
who had died from Covid. Gesturing to the many burning pyres of other Covid
victims at the crematorium, Tikoo said the consequences of the government’s
handling of the pandemic were “here for you to see”.
“Everybody is angry,” said Tikoo.
“It is a collective failure. This is how I look at it. Whether it is the state
government or the central government, everybody has failed. The planning was
bad and the government should have definitely not held state elections.”
Outside Mankian village in Haryana,
a village that previously voted for the BJP, anti-Modi sentiment is now so high
that a sign was recently erected prohibiting any BJP politicians from entering
the village.
Karamchand Singh, an autorickshaw
driver from Ramgarh village who has been struggling to make ends meet during
the pandemic, said he had voted for Modi in 2019 but had now lost all faith in
him. “ Look at the number of people who have died,” he said.
The prime minister stands accused
of turning a blind eye to warning signs of the second wave, ignoring the advice
of scientists and fuelling a culture of complacency at the top levels of
government by allowing state elections, political rallies and religious
festivals to go ahead and “victory” to be declared over the pandemic. The
vaccination programme, meanwhile, has been crippled by severe shortages blamed
on an earlier lack of orders from the government, and state governments have
been pitted against each other for supplies.
“There is barely anyone in India that hasn’t been
touched by this pandemic, and the level of anger and outrage that’s being
directed towards Modi, particularly from the urban middle classes where he
traditionally has a strong base of support, is the highest it’s been since he
was elected prime minister,” said Milan Vaishnav, director of the south Asia
programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“It’s palpable, you see it on
social media, you see when talking to friends and family, you even see it in
the fact that Modi has become the butt of jokes on WhatsApp.”
This week anti-government posters
appeared in neighbourhoods across Delhi emblazoned with the question “Modi, why
did you send our children’s vaccines abroad?”. More than 20 people have been
arrested for displaying the posters.
Modi’s home state of Gujarat has
been accused of some of the most egregious misreporting of the toll of the
pandemic. Death certificate records gathered by the state newspaper suggest up
to 17 times more deaths than official records show.
As the crisis has unfolded, Modi,
who has built his reputation as a strongman politician who leads from the
front, has become conspicuous by his absence from the public eye. It has led to
accusations of abandonment and abdication of responsibility.
“Alongside vaccines, oxygen and
medicines, the PM has also vanished,” tweeted the opposition leader Rahul
Gandhi this week, while India’s Outlook magazine ran a cover this week with the
words “Missing. Name: Government of India. Age: 7 years.”
The government’s decision to push
ahead during the pandemic with the controversial £2bn
renovation of the parliament building and surrounding Central Vista
area in Delhi, a project that has been described as Modi’s “vanity project” and
includes the construction of a palatial new residence for the prime minister,
has also drawn criticism.
The BJP has begun a concerted
campaign to try to seize back the initiative, pushing a strong narrative of
“positivity” as the way forward. The government has instructed diplomats to
counter the coverage in international media that Modi’s government is failing.
While the government was quick to
centralise the credit for defeating the pandemic in February, it is now
decentralising blame, shifting responsibility for the spread of the second wave
on to state governments, in particular Delhi and Maharashtra.
The BJP vice-president, Baijayant
Panda, said that “by no stretch of imagination can it be stated that the prime
minister or his cabinet had taken the virus lightly”. He maintained the
government had been “fully aware” that a second wave might come about and
accused states such as Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Punjab and Kerala – all ruled
by opposition parties – of ignoring “multiple warnings” and turning down
central government offers of help.
“Healthcare is a state subject
under the constitution of India. However, whenever there has been oxygen shortage
or a shortage of hospital beds anywhere in the country, the centre and its
agencies have tried to rise to the occasion,” he said. “Had those warnings been
heeded by the government of Maharashtra and the caseload been brought under
control then there would have been no chance for the emergence of the new
variant that is roiling the state and the rest of the country now.”
While Modi’s well-cultivated image
of competence and strength may have taken a battering, Vaishnav, like many
political observers, remains sceptical that he will pay any long-term political
price. The main opposition Congress party is riddled with disunity, has
performed dismally at recent state elections, and its de facto leader remains
Gandhi, who lost crushingly to Modi in the 2019 general election.
“At the national level, in terms of
party organisation, in terms of messaging and in terms of leadership, we don’t
have a single opposition, and that is a huge gift to Modi,” said Vaishnav.
Nonetheless many have pointed to
the BJP’s recent defeat
in the West Bengal state elections as an indicator that is at state
level where dissatisfaction with Modi could play out damagingly for his party,
and even pave the way for the possibility of an opposition alliance between
powerful regional parties to challenge the BJP on a national level.
The state elections in Uttar
Pradesh in March next year, where the BJP-controlled government is led by one
of Modi’s closest and most hardline allies, will be the first test of the
political toll of the pandemic on Modi and the BJP.
“There will be some fall for Modi
out of this,” said Varshney. “The big question that remains to be seen is, how
big will the fall be?”
Additional reporting by Tripti Nath
