THUNDER IN THE COURTS

THAT the courts and the judiciary have had to step in to virtually dictating how to address the corona holocaust that is cutting a swath of death and destruction across the country is an ample demonstration of malfeasance, misfeasance and the collapse of governance throughout the nation.

- INDERJIT BADHWAR

The politicians of India, backed by oligarchs and opportunists, are so obsessed with winning elections through deviousness and treachery that they have forgotten that the fundamental reason for coming to power and forming governments is to serve the people. They come into power using the instruments of democracy to showcase their purported legitimacy and then proceed to serve themselves instead of the people, thereby making a shameful mockery of democracy. They publicly swear by the tenets of that system while simultaneously disembowelling it.

We watch in helpless horror the unfurling of this phenomenon in the way the central and state governments have been mishandling the most devastating wave of the Corona pandemic. They are unapologetic. They are even self-congratulatory even as the world clucks its tongue with pity as the world's fastest growing economy and the global vaccine manufacturing and “medical tourism hub descends into by stooping internationally with a begging bowl to meet its medical supplies needs in the way it did in the 1960s to obtain charitable food grains to feed its people.

Which Arab or eastern European or African patient would now want to come to Apollo or Max or Medanta or AIIMS for treatment? They'll avoid you like the plague (literally) after seeing the TV and YouTube images of funeral pyres in parking lots, babies dying outside hospitals in their mothers' arms and the elderly choking to death in alleyways because their children could not find hospital beds or oxygen support systems.