The government, it appears, is continuing to take a cavalier approach to the colossal pain and loss the Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked on the country. Instead of making good for its inept handling since the outbreak early last year, it is still propagating unscientific and unfounded beliefs in the country’s traditional knowledge that has no answer to this lethal virus.
That alone can explain Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s inanities on International Yoga Day extolling the supposed powers of yoga to help Covid-hit people fight the disease better. There is no doubt that yoga is a great means of achieving physical, mental and spiritual balance. Unfortunately, propagating and singing paeans to the virtues of yoga during a pandemic such as the one the world is witnessing right now is foolhardy. This is similar to the earlier messages dished out by the Prime Minister about banging thalis or switching off electric lights at 9 pm for nine minutes that were supposed to protect people from the coronavirus. It has to be understood that when a leader with a mass following purposefully utters such misleading guidance to her or his people, the outcome could be devastating as has been proven in India. Concern could be cast on a completely different thought also. When the goodness of yoga is spoken about publicly at a wrong time in history, where people will not benefit by following those directions in relation to the pandemic, the ensuing damage could create mistrust for yoga itself in the minds of the younger generation.
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Also, the government’s backtracking on the issue of paying compensation of `400,000 to kin of victims who succumbed to coronavirus speaks of the hollowness of the governance system. The first problem arose when the Supreme Court put up uncomfortable questions in its quest for finding out true Covid related deaths in the country. The Centre, in its affidavit to the court in the second week of June, had said that the demand for ex gratia of Rs 4 lakh to the families of Covid victims is ‘genuine’. However, that statement about genuineness on the part of the government depended solely on the unfounded death figures that had been fed to the people. The query by the SC resulted in enormous growth in number of deaths. The Centre came back to the SC in the third week of June and submitted its inability to pay the compensation that it had earlier committed simply because the true death figures are very high.
The lack of concern of the government for the health of its citizens got exposed when it was reported that a meagre allocation of less than 2 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was marked for health.
The Centre has no compunction in allocating over Rs 30,000 crore for constructing buildings under the Central Vista Redevelopment Project in Delhi to satisfy some people’s bloated ego and rewrite history while it expresses inability to compensate kin of Covid victims. This proves that buildings appear to be more valuable and important for this government than human lives perishing in the pandemic.
