Chitrangada Choudhury: Modi Is Worsening the Suffering from India’s Pandemic
On May 8, 2021, as a deadly second wave of the COVID pandemic was ripping through India, an imprisoned doctoral student made an urgent appeal to the Delhi High Court. Incarcerated by the Indian government since May 2020 on dubious terror charges, Natasha Narwal asked for interim bail to see her father, agricultural scientist Mahavir Narwal, who was in an intensive care unit with the virus. The court procrastinated. She would never see her father again: he died the following evening, one among the 4,000 daily COVID fatalities India is currently reporting—undoubtedly an undercount.
ना भूलना तुम : By Dr Raju Sharma, ex IAS
Shav Vahini Ganga Song | शव वाहिनी गंगा | Parul Khakkar (Hindi/Punjabi/English Translation)
Days earlier, a member of parliament, Manoj Jha, had amplified an
SOS plea for an oxygen cylinder or hospital bed for the elder Narwal. Jha’s
tweet was one among thousands of anguished requests for oxygen, hospital beds,
medicines and relief that have consumed India’s social networks from early
April. As the nation repored caseloads nearly equivalent to those of the rest of
the world put together, the massive scale of the distress has exposed Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’s multiple failures. These include prematurely
declaring victory in the war against the virus despite scientists’
warnings of an imminent “second wave”; helping instead to spread the infection
by addressing packed election rallies and
featuring in front-page newspaper
advertisements that invited devotees to a religious festival, ultimately
attended by millions;
and neglecting to provision for medical resources and relief needed in a second
wave or to put in place a vaccination plan for a billion people.
The pandemic is now ravaging vast areas of rural
India, where health infrastructure barely exists, and thousands are falling
ill and dying, beyond the reach of social media SOS calls and far from the
public eye. The Modi government downplays the catastrophe by claiming that
caseloads are stabilizing. It is left to intrepid local journalists
reporting on the hundreds
of corpses on the banks of the sacred Ganga River to expose the lie….
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/modi-is-worsening-the-suffering-from-indias-pandemic/
Society
of the Spectacle / 'इमेज' - 'Image': A Poem on Deaths in the Age of
Covid
Nandini
Sen Mehra: And night has come upon my land
The
Hindu priest struggling to cremate India’s Covid dead – video
Father Stan Swamy: I’d rather
suffer, possibly die if things go on as it is
Gujarati Poet Parul Khakkar Blames
'Naked King' for Corpses Floating in the Ganga
A
Call for National Mourning and a Proposal for a National Government. By Anil
Nauriya
ना भूलना तुम : By Dr Raju Sharma, ex IAS
