Can Covid Shift Our Politics?

It’s a national emergency now. Let it bring to an end our Age of Hatred

- Gurcharan Das

The dreaded second wave of the coronavirus has created a national emergency. You’d think it would have united our republic, but India remains hopelessly divided. A straightforward problem of vaccinating our people becomes the subject of political football. While aam admi scrambles helplessly from hospital to hospital in search of oxygen, a bed, a ventilator, our political parties behave like prehistoric tribes, fighting elections as though they are battles for extinction. They don’t even share a common vocabulary to empathise in this Age of Hatred.

A curious political drama unfolded in four acts last week. The background was a sudden realisation that India, the world’s largest producer and exporter of vaccines, faced a grave shortage of Covid vaccine. The state hadn’t contracted in advance, nor offered a price that would have incentivised vaccine makers to build sufficient capacity. It hadn’t learnt from past mistakes.

In the first month of Covid, government had restricted testing to state laboratories. The infection was spreading, government labs couldn’t cope, India was repeatedly cited for testing failure. Realising its mistake, the government liberalised. It allowed in the private sector and testing took off via many competitive services, including home visits by skilled professionals, monitored by an excellent app.