Urbana, Illinois. -- In a phone call from India, someone close to me voices a cruel truth: “Every day we learn of more people known to us dying of Covid.” A great many unknown to us also die. Thousands of the homeless of Delhi knew Dr. Pradip Bijalwan, but I did not until I read about him in this piece by Harsh Mander in The India Forum.
https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/dr-pradip-bijalwan-unsung-journey-equal-world
Harsh Mander himself is one of India’s finest human beings. After quitting the IAS in 2002 in protest at the Gujarat government’s failure to protect the lives of helpless Muslims, he has worked (in the teeth of obstacles and hostility) to bring solace and succour to victims of hate crime. Covid almost killed Mr. Mander, but he recovered to organize a service to take health care to Delhi’s homeless.
Dr. Pradip Bijalwan joined Harsh Mander in this exercise, regularly going in a van after sunset to the capital’s “hostile, unsafe, poorly lit and unsanitary” spaces to which the homeless returned after work. Assisted by a male nurse, another health worker, and the van’s driver, Dr. Bijalwan examined patients and prescribed medicines. In some cases, hospital beds were found for patients in dire straits.
“Serving those most in need is the only work I ever wanted to do,” Dr. Bijalwan, apparently around 70 in age and for much of his life an idealist communist, told Mr. Mander. But Covid got to the doctor and took his life. His body was kept in his home for two whole days while the family desperately sought a place to cremate him. When a slot in a distant crematorium was finally found, his wife and daughter, also infected with the virus, could not join the funeral.
Tens of thousands across India have faced similar ordeals. “Surely this is the end of Modi?” asks an American friend. I tell him that nationwide elections aren’t due until 2024, and also that the “climate” is influenced by toxic TV channels and a vast social-media army of Hindu nationalists.
But the climate is changing. The Modi regime’s dereliction over Covid is not the sole reason. Mamata Banerjee’s triumph over Modi in Bengal has been a blast of fresh air.
Not many had the courage to expect it. Not after all the might that Modi and Shah directed against Mamata for the last two years. Plus the communal poison injected in Bengal, the big money behind the BJP, the propaganda blitz of March and April, raids by state agencies against Mamata’s associates, and an election schedule designed for the BJP’s benefit by an Election Commission that seemed to surrender its impartiality.
The fresh air came when the results showed Mamata’s bandaged foot striking goal after goal against a Modi weighed down by his armour.
For over a year, Dr. Ashish Jha, the renowned public health expert of Bihari origin, has been explaining the Covid graph to Americans. Dr. Jha’s reading of Covid’s attack on India is that while the vast number of new infections there might start to come down, hospitalizations and deaths will continue to grow for a while.
For the time being at least, Modi and company seem to have gone silent and left Covid-control to state governments. How and where these state governments can get vaccines does not seem clear. What seems plain is that much of the day-to-day critical response will have to come locally and from individuals.
A great many lives will be saved because a number of “ordinary” Indians have something of the noble spirit of Dr. Pradip Bijalwan. We must also assume that, exhausted as most of them must be, India’s health experts, doctors, civil servants, politicians and judges will come up with responses.
After typing the above, I run into these lines from one of India’s most experienced journalists, Shekhar Gupta, in The Print:
“The ‘state’, top leadership, its institutions, including the bureaucracy and scientific establishment, are all either missing in action, or scurrying about to cover up, somehow airbrush the image, not alter reality…
“This collective denial and the inability of any institution to speak the truth has invited an unimaginable calamity upon us. It has greatly dented India’s global stature. Tens of thousands of Indians are dying every week in official figures (about 26,000 last week) and the graph is rising. Everything, from pathology labs to hospitals to crematoriums, is collapsing…
“The Prime Minister has retreated…”