Many Indians are sinking Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his response to a terrifying rise in coronavirus cases, sick because he addressed tens of thousands of people at state polls and allowed Hindu devotees congregated for a festival.
Tags like #ResignModi and #SuperSpreaderModi have been trending on Twitter for the past two days as bodies piled up in funeral homes and crematoria and desperate cries for hospital beds, medical oxygen tests and coronavirus flooded social media. .
Having come to power in 2014 with the largest single-party majority in decades, Modi is not used to this kind of public toasting.
It has previously lost support by giving itself unpopular reforms, especially after withdrawing high-denomination tickets overnight in 2016 and last year, when its agricultural reforms sparked months of massive protests by angry farmers.
But this is different. The economy has struggled to recover from a deadlock last month, although despite the difficulties it suffered then, the second wave of the coronavirus epidemic is proving more deadly than the first.
India is currently registering more new cases of coronavirus than any other country and is expected to rise above the high tide of the epidemic in the United States this week, when new daily cases reached 300,000 in early January. . Read more
Deaths in India have risen to almost 179,000. Read more
However, Modi and his ministers have campaigned heavily ahead of the state elections in West Bengal, where opinion polls showed that the Prime Minister’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in a close race with a party. regional governing the state.
“Hold rallies while people are heading to funerals,” Akhilesh Jha, head of data at the federal Department of Science and Technology in Hindi wrote on LinkedIn, in a rare public outburst from a government official.
“People will hold you accountable, keep doing your rallies.”
Several other government officials shared similar sentiments with Reuters in private.
The eight-phase voting in West Bengal will end on April 29th.
Whatever happens there, Modi doesn’t have to worry about a national vote until 2024, but it’s currently hard to say when India’s coronavirus epidemic will subside.
A government spokesman did not answer questions about the criticism of Modi. But Piyush Goyal, the minister of railways, trade and industry, told Reuters television partner ANI that Modi worked many hours a day to manage the crisis.
On Saturday, Modi asked religious leaders to only symbolically celebrate a festival known as Kumbh Mela, after tens of thousands of Hindu devotees gathered daily nearby to immerse themselves in the Ganges.
But that was the seventeenth day of the festival scheduled to run until the end of April and has yet to be officially called off despite authorities detecting hundreds of infections among participants who had spilled from across the country. Read more
While not a force in the state, the main Congress party of the national opposition on Sunday called election rallies in Bengal. But the BJP has insisted that its candidates have the “constitutional right” to campaign for at least 14 days.
Meanwhile, COVID-19 cases in Bengal have quadrupled since early April and at least three electoral contestants have died.
“How many deaths does he need until he knows too many people have died?” Nirupama Menon Rao, former Secretary of Foreign Affairs, asked on Twitter.
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