Health crisis in India: the great collapse?
India, Jammu, April 25, 2021, cremation of a person who died of Covid-19: the pain of a loved one.
Crematoriums in India are in full swing with three to four times more dead than normal.
AP - Channi Anand
Text by: Heike Schmidt Follow
5 mins
India believed it had weathered the worst of the pandemic when a second wave hit the country.
Hospitals lack everything.
However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has only one priority in mind, that of winning the elections, believes Jean-Joseph Boillot, economist and specialist in India who has just published "Utopias made in the World, the Wise and the 'economist' published by Editions Odile Jacob.
The globetrotter researcher denounces a mismanagement.
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RFI: The Indian hospital system is on the verge of collapse. Lack of beds, drugs and a thriving black market for oxygen. Desperation, but also anger among Indians are igniting social networks - does this health catastrophe illustrate, and I quote one of your Tweets, "
a drifting Hindu regime
"?
Jean-Joseph Boillot
: adrift, I do not know, but in any case, it is indeed surprising that we continue to use official figures, which we know must be multiplied by 30 for the number of cases, it is that is to say that several million Indians, every day, are reached by this new wave. Yes, there is mismanagement. Since the return to "normalcy", Narendra Modi thinks of only one thing: elections, elections, elections. So there was no preparation. Even in terms of vaccination, I am very surprised to find that roughly less than 5% of the Indian population received both doses. For someone who, since last June, played vaccine diplomacy, it is quite revolting in the eyes of the Indians. Many of my friends are dying. There is a panic, there is a catastrophe whose primary responsibility,just like in Brazil with Jaïr Bolsonaro, is linked, in India, to Narendra Modi and to the fundamentalist Hindu nationalists.
West Bengal has been hit hard by the Covid - yet Prime Minister Narendra Modi persists in organizing monster electoral rallies there to achieve victory, crucial for his BJP party. Does he not take the risk that this negligence will turn against him and that he will come out weakened and discredited?
It is not because you have, on social networks, a phenomenon of revolt and indignation that you necessarily have a sanction on the electoral level.
Two conditions are needed for this.
The first is that there is an alternative, a succession.
However, the probable victory of the Hindu BJP party in West Bengal can be explained, historically for the first time, by the division of the opposition parties.
This is also true on the scale of the whole of India: there is no real succession and capacity of union of the opposition parties.
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So you don't expect any sanction at the ballot box?
It could work, this idea of sanction in the ballot box, if there was really an energy, a force especially among Indian youth.
However, you have rather a phenomenon of despair.
So we finally see another phenomenon, known in the seizures of power by neo-fascist regimes, that is to say that you have a charismatic leader who makes believe that he is going to save you from the shipwreck.
I fear, alas, that with Narendra Modi we are in this configuration.
India touted itself as 'the world's factory' for vaccines, even today India's vaccination centers close due to shortages - isn't that a huge loss of face for this country which nevertheless presents itself as a great modern regional power?
Listen, a loss of face, I don't know, but you are, of course, going to have a more realistic view of what this 'vaccine diplomacy' discourse has been, and of India's ability to cope. to China.
Precisely, does China intend to take advantage of the Indian failure?
For Beijing, this is probably the strengthening of its credibility.
China delivers vaccines to all developing countries.
The virus is immediately checked, tested and isolated there.
There is therefore no resumption of the epidemic in China.
So there you go, it just goes to show what I've been saying for years, that India is a great country demographically, but still a secondary power.
So much the better, because if India were a superpower, then it could present dangers, and the rise of Hindu neofascist fundamentalists confirms me in this idea.
So let's take India as it is, as it is.
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Read also
: in India, faced with the alarming situation, the EU and the United States will send aid
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