Pratap Bhanu Mehta: The ruthless politics of the Centre’s vaccine strategy
In the face of India’s catastrophic pandemic, the tongue goes silent and the pens fall dry. What can one say that is meaningful? There is seldom any consoling story to be told about grief or mass suffering. There are brave journalists bearing witness. But what does bearing witness do in a culture of official nationalism where the images of death offend more than death itself? There is an urgent need to fix several policies. But what do policy proposals mean, when all policy is about managing headlines, not achieving an objective? There is a need to fix accountability. But how does accountability get fixed when so many institutional sinews from federalism to bureaucracy have snapped?
There is justifiable anger at the Prime Minister, whose self-obsessive callousness and abdication of leadership has contributed immeasurably to the current crisis. But in the case of this government, anger seems misplaced. Anger presumes a leader who is standing within the space of reason, where the point of anger is to restore a certain reciprocity between citizen and leader. Anger is completely beside the point, when you have an imperious leader, who has come to mistake the hologram of his own mendacity for reality. In any case, the scenes of suffering make even anger a luxury; there are more urgent tasks to be attended to….
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Public Health-The Nordic Model
