I honestly cannot believe we are now 6 months into this year. This pandemic filled nightmare year. How could we have got this so wrong ? 2020 was going to be the fancy year, the fun and happening year. The culmination of two decades into the millennium, the yeas in which millennials turn adults. And , if you subscribed to the political propaganda, and had read the books of Abdul Kalam, this was the year India was going to makes its mark (Remember the book, India 2020 ?)on the world.
Well India has left
and will leave its mark on the world. The world’s largest lockdown has turned
out to be hogwash, and India has accelerated itself into the top 5 of the world’s
COVID affected countries. Long predicted by the world’s non-Indian infectious disease
experts, this statement was ‘fake-news’ed by India’s politicians early on. Even
now, the Govt denies India has community spread, and is getting ready to
organize political rallies for the upcoming state elections.
And here is the bare
truth : we are yet to peak.
It does not inspire
confidence when scientific consensus is thrown out in favour of political propaganda.
To be fair, India is not the only country to do so, almost every country has fudged
their numbers, if rumour is to be believed, to look better than others. But while
some others have genuinely put in the hard work and effort to fight this
invisible enemy, ours is a case of being attacked on multiple fronts.
The plights of India’s
poor migrant labours was the first of these. This was followed by reported
intrusion at the border with China. And now , the country is hearing about the
border being redrawn with our northern ally Nepal. PM Modi and his cabinet has long denied the reported
slow down in our economy, but now the pandemic has brought it to stop. There is
now a half planned, and half-hearted attempt to restart manufacturing in this
troubled economy, and to ‘turn the virus into an opportunity’. It is balderdash
that the nation can do in a few months what it could not do in more than 70
years. But the biggest gobbledygook of all was the stimulus package announced
by the govt, which was mostly repackaging of previously announced plans, with
the govt delegating responsibility of the stimulus to the nation’s
already trouble banks. It did not help that a section of the media sided with the
govt’s lies to keep the people in the
blind.
Day to day life has now
become increasingly dangerous in India. The govt no longer cares (if it ever
did) about its people, and is focussed on upcoming elections, and making the
people work for the govt, instead of the other way around.
Ask not, they say,
what the nation can do for the people, but what the people can further do for
the nation.