![]() “Television news stations rarely cover India’s crumbling health infrastructure in the face of the fast spreading pandemic,” Ali said. Political observers also pointed to the lack of critical coverage from India’s media. Due to a weak, fragmented opposition, Modi hasn’t faced concerted criticism, analysts said. The BJP’s landslide victory in the national elections last year left the biggest opposition party, the Indian National Congress, dispirited and gripped by an unending leadership crisis, as well as rebellions from within. “It has been estimated that this decision prevented approximately … 37,000 to 78,000 deaths,” the minister said. India’s Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said Monday the lockdown was a “bold” decision that had prevented as many as 78,000 deaths. “Had we not announced the lockdown when we did, the numbers would have been very different today,” said BJP’s national spokesperson, Syed Zafar Islam. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has insisted the lockdown was effective and necessary. India’s Labour Ministry says there is no state-wide data available on deaths of migrant workers during the lockdown. ![]() “What’s the point of surviving Covid-19 only to die of starvation or to be stranded without work?” he said.Īccording to the World Bank, a large proportion of India’s 40 million internal migrants were affected by the lockdown. ![]() “A few days of advance notice would not have hurt the lockdown, but would’ve helped small traders plan their stocks, helped people get to places where they could be prepared to stay for a longer period of time, and big companies to shift to alternative ways of working,” said Laxminarayan. Many had no choice but to return to their home villages, but with trains and public transport suspended, some walked for hundreds of miles. In the cities, poor day laborers were suddenly jobless. Coming into effect less than four hours after it was announced, the measures brought the country to a virtual standstill and triggered a migrant crisis. What most experts agree on is that India’s lockdown – the largest and one of the strictest in the world – was imposed with not enough notice or planning. Because we didn’t stop the pandemic,” said economist and Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee. “Now, looking back it was clearly a mistake. The unsustainable nature of the nationwide lockdown merely delayed the spread of the outbreak. Consequently, more people were impacted by the resultant economic slowdown than needed to be, and not enough resources were available to support slum areas, for example, where lockdown measures including social distancing were impossible. Jacob John, argue the lockdown was imposed too early and too widely, when cases were still low and concentrated in specific regions. Ramanan Laxminarayan, a senior research scholar at Princeton University, said it was essential because infections were increasing rapidly at the time, and that it helped decrease disease transmission. Indian public health experts, however, have differed on their support for the timing and effectiveness of the lockdown. He is seen as a “saintly figure who means well and always acts in the larger national interest,” said Ali. XAVIER GALIANA/AFP/Getty Imagesīy taking drastic action early, Modi reaffirmed his image as a decisive leader who is able to take strict, politically tough measures for the sake of the country, said Ali, the researcher at the Center Policy Research. As it continues to batter the Indian economy, analysts say it’s unclear if the populist leader can emerge politically unscathed.Ī man crosses a deserted Rajpath in New Delhi on March 22, 2020. Over the past year, Modi has made steady headway on Hindu nationalist policies, from revoking the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, to backing a controversial citizenship law that critics say discriminates against Muslims.īut his second-term aspirations to revitalize the economy now seem more distant than ever due to the pandemic. ![]() “Modi has staked out for himself the role of not just the political leader of India, but also its social, moral and spiritual leader, in the mold of Mahatma Gandhi,” Ali said. Asim Ali, a researcher at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research think-tank, said the Indian leader is seen as a “national messiah” who is working on a grander agenda to reshape the Indian nation and is not accountable for day-to-day government failures. Modi’s landslide re-election for a second five-year term last year gave him a sweeping mandate to push his Hindu nationalist agenda, in a country where 80% of the population is Hindu.
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