Many Indians rob Prime Minister Narendra Modi of his response to a frightening increase in coronavirus cases, sick of addressing tens of thousands of people at state election rallies and letting Hindu supporters gather for a festival .
Tags like #ResignModi and #SuperSpreaderModi have been trending on Twitter for the past two days, as bodies were piled up in graves and crematoria and desperate cries for hospital beds, medical oxygen and coronavirus tests have flooded social media.
After coming to power in 2014 with the largest single-party majority in decades, Modi is not accustomed to such public frying.
He realized that he had lost previous support, causing unpopular reforms, especially after he decommissioned the big-name banknotes overnight in 2016 and last year, when his agricultural reforms sparked months of mass protests by angry farmers.
But this is different. The economy struggled to recover from a deadlock for several months last year, however, for all the hardships suffered then, the second wave of the coronavirus epidemic is proving more deadly than the first.
India is currently reporting more new cases of coronavirus than any other country, and this week is expected to rise above the high wave of the epidemic in the United States, when new daily cases reached a peak of nearly 300,000 in early January. Read more
Deaths in India rose to almost 179,000. Read more
However, Modi and his ministers campaigned hard ahead of the West Bengal state elections, where opinion polls showed that the prime minister’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in a close race with a regional party that leads the state.
“Hold rallies as people head to funerals,” Akhilesh Jha, head of data at the Federal Department of Science and Technology, said in Hindi on LinkedIn in a rare public outburst by a government official.
“People will hold you accountable, you keep doing your rallies.”
Several other government officials privately shared similar sentiments with Reuters.
The eight-stage vote in West Bengal ends on April 29.
Whatever happens there, Modi does not have to worry about the national vote until 2024, but it is currently difficult to say when the coronavirus epidemic in India will disappear.
A government spokesman did not answer questions about Modi’s criticism. But Piyush Goyal, the minister of railways, trade and industry, told Reuters television partner ANI that Modi works many hours a day to manage the crisis.
On Saturday, Modi urged religious leaders to symbolically celebrate a festival known as Kumbh Mela, after tens of thousands of Hindu followers gathered daily nearby to immerse themselves in the Ganges.
But this was the seventeenth day of the festival scheduled to run until the end of April and has not yet been officially canceled, despite authorities detecting hundreds of infections among participants spilling across the country. Read more
Although not a force in the state, the main national opposition party in Congress convened election rallies in Bengal on Sunday. But the BJP insisted on its candidates the “constitutional right” to campaign for at least 14 days.
Meanwhile, COVID-19 cases in Bengal have quadrupled since early April and killed at least three electoral contestants.
“How many deaths does it take to know that too many people have died?” Nirupama Menon Rao, former foreign secretary, asked on Twitter.
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