The COVID-19 Catastrophe in India Keeps Growing

By Vijay Prashad
April 26, 2021 – counterpunch.org

COVID-19 in IndiaIt is difficult to overstate the grip of COVID-19 on India. WhatsApp bristles with messages about this or that friend and family member with the virus, while there are angry posts about how the central government has utterly failed its citizenry. This hospital is running out of beds and that hospital has no more oxygen, while there is evasion from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Cabinet.

Thirteen months after the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the world was in the midst of a pandemic, the Indian government looks into the headlights like a transfixed animal, unable to move. While other countries are well advanced on their vaccination programs, the Indian government sits back and watches a second wave or a third wave land heavily on the Indian people.

On April 21, 2021, the country registered 315,000 cases in a 24-hour period. This is an extraordinarily high number. Bear in mind that in China, where the virus was first detected in late 2019, the total number of detected cases stands at less than 100,000. This spike has raised eyebrows: is this a new variant, or is this a result of failure to manage social interactions (including the 3 million pilgrims who gathered at this year’s Kumbh Mela) and to vaccinate enough people.

At the core is the total failure of the Indian government, led by PM Modi, to take this pandemic seriously.
Full Article : counterpunch.org

13 thoughts on “The COVID-19 Catastrophe in India Keeps Growing”

  1. Rhea Mogul, Anger grows as India orders twitter to remove posts critical of Covid response, https://www.yahoo.com/news/india-orders-twitter-down-posts-124619638.html
    Mon, April 26, 2021, 8:46 AM
    “Anger mounted in India on Monday after the government ordered Twitter to remove posts critical of its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has devastated large swaths of the country. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been accused of downplaying the country’s response to the pandemic. The government’s order was aimed at posts that criticized Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, Twitter said on Lumen, a database that keeps track of government orders for online content.”
    “India will never forgive PM @narendramodi for underplaying the corona situation in the country and letting so many people die due to mismanagement,” a politician from the state of West Bengal, Moloy Ghatak, wrote on Twitter last week.
    Modi has remained largely silent about the crisis, while allowing religious festivals and election rallies attended by thousands to continue.
    “There are many who are using social media to help those in need. So many lives have been saved,” Rohan Gupta, chairman of social media for opposition party, the Indian National Congress, wrote on Twitter Sunday. “Now [the government] wants to muzzle our last resort to express ourselves in these tough times.”
    The Asia Director of Human Rights Watch, Meenakshi Ganguly, told NBC News that the government’s “attempt to silence this criticism is neither proportionate, nor rights respecting.” “Indians are upset and angry at the state’s failure in preventing these shortages in health care,” Ganguly said.

  2. Enablers always tend put their people in peril, watching an elder father figure sitting on the side curve attached to only an oxygen tank with no bed, is really heart wrenching. Cremation politics is the Mantra being practice in South Asia as this murderous pandemic takes hold on the most populous world nation, We should not forget that the very same song that Prime Minister Modi was singing vis-a-vis Covid, the chorus was echoed by KPB and her own Janata UNC affiliate. Kamla have not receive a response to her Vacine letter from Mr Modi, because in reality, India does not control any of the drugs manufactured in the Sub-Continent, as a testing ground for pharmaceuticals and chemicals, India continues to pay a price high in human blood. The examples of Bhopal, Monsanto, and many other man made pandemics, makes India the go to place for mass murder. When your neighbors house is on fire, be sure to be on the look out. With the exception of division, there’ not much that the UNC can offer India, especially if it comes from the lowest of the caste. India’1% , like Trinidad’ are fleeing the Country en mass in their private jets, taking all they can, does this sound familiar?.

  3. COVID in India

    By Kenneth Surin
    April 28, 2021 n – counterpunch.org

    In March last year I was in New Delhi for a conference at one of the several universities there– it was my last trip anywhere since the pandemic took hold in increasing parts of the world that spring.

    Delhi’s notorious pollution relented, and there were blue skies during my week there.

    But the pandemic was looming. A conference participant from Tokyo took ill with what turned out to be Delhi Belly (aka traveller’s diarrhoea). However, since Covid-19 has already taken hold in Japan, and some of its symptoms overlap with Delhi Belly, the organizers took him to a nearby clinic. They were not equipped to administer a Covid test, so he was sent on to a hospital with this capacity. To the relief of all at the conference, his test result was negative.

    India did relatively well at the start of the pandemic, prompting the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi to claim at the beginning of March that the country was in Covid-19’s “endgame”.

    Full Article : counterpunch.org

    1. Thanks, News… But these ‘intellectuals’ seem to be pushing the ‘vaccine is the only answer’ mantra, yet they will not acknowledge its ineffectiveness against the emerging mutants…Now, they are throwing India under the bus to save ‘stock’..

      BTW, whatever happened to the Dreaded South African Variant? Let’s look..

      It’s amazing how they can hide stuff right in front of your eyes… Not even Dr. Rowley can see..

      https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-africa/

  4. India’s Covid-19 ‘nightmare’: A product of majoritarian Hindutva ideological praxis?
    https://www.counterview.net/2021/04/indias-covid-19-nightmare-product-of.html

    Remember, these are the ideological and political mentors of indian politics in the T&T, Guyana, Suriname, Fiji, Mauritius, South Africa, Uganda, etc. before T&T’public’s eyes, agents of this regime and ideology have been increasing their influence in caribbean politics via indian politics in T&T (UNC/COP) and Guyana (PPP)

  5. Trinbagonians are in a quandary borders close, thousands of citizens stranded and yet Covid exploding.

    1. But not in Tobago…

      >In a press release on Friday, the Division of Health reported that there were no new Covid-129 cases recorded over the last 24 hours, and that the total number of active COVID-19 cases on the island, remained at 44. <

      https://trinidadexpress.com/newsextra/tobago-spared-covid-spike-reports-zero-new-cases/article_5e4d9ce0-a9db-11eb-93d6-8b27192aa0c4.html

      Aye Mamoo, yuh think they already sequenced John Hollis’s ‘anti-bodies’ and we can expect the vaccine anyday now?

      https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews/videos/the-man-with-covid-super-antibodies/742646919788801/

      Dem ‘AfroCentrics’ (Sorry IT) dem really got played in ‘their’ game.. Black susceptibility to covid my foot.. Stuppes..

      1. Quoting RamK:

        Black susceptibility to covid my foot..

        Let me give a scriptural take…

        First, we are not “black”. We are of the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, more specifically of the southern kingdom of Judah, and more specifically still, of the House of NEGA (king) David. The term “black” is derogatory by design, a sorcerer’s term of art. When we use it we put a spell upon ourselves — we call ourselves a bleached out useless bleak thing of no value. We are better called “Negro”, notwithstanding the sense of derogation — imparted by our enemy — that now attaches to that word. It means, loosely, “the people from whom come the king,” referencing the NEGA (=king) David. (They have tried to keep the Hebrew word, “nega”, out of circulation. But it turns up in odd places and contexts, e.g. “Nag Hammadi” actually should be vowelized “NEGA Hammadi,” and the name “Abed-nego”, meaning “servant of the king”, should better be vowelized, “Abed-Nega”, or “ObedNEGA”.)

        In brief, the Negro is Scriptural Jacob or Israel, coming out of 400 years’ servitude. Jacob’s trouble accordingly is coming to an end, and the Judgment of “that nation” that afflicted Jacob is beginning. Covid is part of that Judgment.

        Genesis 15:13-14. “And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years;
        14 And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance..”

        The implication is that the Most High must put separation between the Negro and “that nation” in the way the plagues fall. (This was the case also at the first Exodus out of Egypt under Moses, the template for what is happening now.) Ultimately, the Negro, as a people, will be proportionately less affected by Covid than “that nation”. Conversely, “that nation” will be proportionately more affected. That is also why the Negro is admonished to “come out of her my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and receive not of her plagues (Revelation 18:4).

        In biblical terms, “that nation” now to be judged is Esau-Edom, Jacob’s twin brother. Esau was granted the dominion — for a time, now run out — during which he would rule “by the sword” (Genesis 27:40).

        Esau today notably includes the so-called “white” ruling elites in the world, and as well the brown brahmin indo-Aryan ruling elite of India. That would explain the countries so far the worst hit by Covid — Europe/US/Brazil and now India. It would also explain the relatively low Covid rates in Negro/Bantu Africa.

        It would be interesting to discover the relative incidence of cases and deaths — in all countries — as between Negro/Bantu and non-Negro. The prediction based on the seedlines now to suffer the judgment vs “thy seed” now to “come out” of affliction, would be that Negro/Bantu would show a lesser incidence. See print article here for a possible hint of this in the case of John Hollis you mention.

        All the seedlines joined with Esau in the affliction of the Negro are also to be judged, notably the (Ishmaelite) Arabs, and including brown/black Hamitic seedlines who have joined with them, e.g. Islamicized Fulani tribe in Nigeria, and elsewhere.

        Note in this regard that Covid is only one aspect of the judgment, which will include war, earthquake, fire, hail, flood, whirlwind, locust, famine, etc., all of which we are also seeing unleashed to greater or lesser extent around the world.

        Shalom.

        Isaiah 51:22-23. “Thus saith thy Lord IYEHAWAH, and thy Eloah that pleadeth the cause of his people, Behold, I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling, even the dregs of the cup of my fury; thou shalt no more drink it again:
        23 But I will put it into the hand of them that afflict thee; which have said to thy soul, Bow down, that we may go over: and thou hast laid thy body as the ground, and as the street, to them that went over.”

      2. RamK,
        Do you actually perceive me as an ‘afrocentrist’, or is that just a blanket term you throw around at anyone speaking unapologetically to social justice for african people? The fact that you use afrocentric as if to imply quckery dpeaks volumes to your psyche and character.As i’ve alluded to before in half measure, your desire to seek validation from an entity as racist, foul and unprincipled as mamoo, invalidates your pseudo intellectualist posturings and reveals…tah-tah!

        1. I don’t think of Mamoo and Co. as ‘Racist’.. They are victims of the system that TT allows to perpetuate.. Do you think it is a coincidence that Africans are denied access to the airwaves there, to tell their story and by extension India’s and world history?

          Anyway, my criticism of ‘The AfroCentrics’ was not directed at you.. We have the ‘educated intellectuals dem’ who came early in this pandemic talking bout, “Black are 4 times likely to contract Covid.” Yet today, not a word on Africa’s stunning performance in it.. Maybe, if they were to raised it, we won’t be waiting to die like India and Brazil, just maybe they could have influenced Dr Rowley to look at Africa and stop the foolish dependence on the ineffective vaccines.. As for TaTa.. if you think India and Brazil is bad.. just wait for TT.. with our foolish leadership..

          Anyway, Nigeria recorded 0 Covid deaths yesterday with its 206m population.. And Dr Rowley playing blind..

  6. What escapes the gaze and narrative of the international media on india’s covid crisis, is the absence of any genuine humanitarian culture among indians REGARDLESS OF race/caste. The only genuine mass humanitarian efforts are from other countries and races along with some westernized diasporan indians (judeo/christian culture). Brahmanist Karma = inferior (black/lower caste) people DESERVE their suffering, and helping is interferring with the gods’ will and dharma (race/caste specific earthbound duty and lot in life) i.e. If you suffer the indignities/injustices inherent in low caste and untouchable life (know your place) with a smile and humble subservience to higher castes, you will be reborn whiter and whiter through successive rebirths until brahmin status aka full european.
    There’s an inherent moral equivalent to taqqiyah that justifies denying this.

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