India

Modi government responsible for a ‘self-inflicted catastrophe’, if India sees 1 million deaths by August 1: Lancet

“Modi's actions in attempting to stifle criticism and open discussion during the crisis are inexcusable,” said the highly critical article, published in The Lancet on Saturday.

The Modi government, which nearly succeeded to curb the first catastrophic wave of the corona virus, has been facing a lot of criticism for their ignorance and mismanagement of the second wave.

According to many reports and incidents, the Modi government has focussed more on removing criticism rather than controlling the spread of the deadly virus.

A similar editorial released by a UK-based leading medical journal, The Lancet on Saturday, squandered the central government’s early successes and called the Modi government’s attempts to stifle criticism and open discussion during Covid pandemic as ‘inexcusable’.

Many incidents of deletion of critical tweets questioning the handling of the pandemic by the central government were reported on social media giants like Twitter and Facebook this month. Recently, around 50 tweets that were highly critical of the central government were taken down. Just within a week of this, posts with the hashtag-#ResignModi were hidden to the Indian crowd for about 3 hours, but the same were accessible outside India.

The government has, in fact, been criticised for it’s callous attitude of conducting super-spreader mass gathering events like the Kumbh Mela and state election rallies, which eventually slowed the start of India’s vaccination campaign, covering less than 2% of the population till date.

India must now restructure its response while the crises age and the success of this effort will depend on the government owning up to its mistakes, providing responsible leadership and transparency, and implementing a public health response that has science at its heart, the noted UK-based medical journal said.

Concluding the editorial, it quoted The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation which estimated that India will see a staggering 1 million deaths from COVID-19 by August 1. The medical journal grimly added, if that were to happen, the government would be responsible for presiding over a “self-inflicted national catastrophe.”

Interestingly, The Lancet in 2018, lauded the Modi government’s efforts of prioritising universal health coverage under the ‘Ayushman Bharat’ programme. While there is no doubt of pre-existing biases and political motivation of media houses, organisations and many reports, the Indian government cannot slide every criticism by labelling it as an attempt to defame India, just like last month when the Indian government issued a rebuttal letter to an Australian paper for criticising Modi, according to which, Modi lead India into a “viral apocalypse”.

On Sunday, India recorded 4,03,738 fresh cases and 4,072 deaths, but the numbers have declined marginally over the past three days after hitting a peak of 4,14,554 on Thursday.

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