OpinionOn Covid-19, India’s Narendra Modi is no Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro, but the country’s coronavirus outlook is grim

Name: India’s coronavirus case count now third-highest in the world, but death rate remains low
Uploaded: 2020-07-14T14:00:19.000Z
Duration: 1 min 23 s
Description: India’s coronavirus case count now third-highest in the world, but death rate remains low

India’s prime minister imposed one of the strictest lockdowns in the world on his country, but a few weeks or even months was never going to make up for health-sector upgrades that should have taken place years earlier

3-MIN READ3-MIN

An Indian youth in front of a poster of Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a lockdown in Bangalore on May 1. Although the country's initial 21-day lockdown was extended, case numbers have continued to climb. Photo: EPA-EFE

Rukmini S

Published: 10:00pm, 14 Jul 2020Updated: 4:17am, 15 Jul 2020

Once a day, every morning at 8am and then only, the Indian government’s health ministry updates its website to put out a handful of basic Covid-19 numbers, including what the current cumulative count of cases is. Many Indians watch it as if it were the scoreboard of a cricket match, and last week, India recorded the third-highest number of cases in the world.

Will India climb to the top of the scoreboard? It might well happen, but that scoreboard hides a lot of nuance about India’s good intentions and impossible implementation.

Both the United States and Brazil are currently reporting more new cases on most days than India is, but new cases are rising far faster in India. So theoretically, India could overtake the two countries within months. However, if India does overtake the US and Brazil, it won’t be for entirely the same reasons that cases are currently swelling in the two Western countries.

01:23

India’s coronavirus case count now third-highest in the world, but death rate remains low

Both the US and Brazil are led by men who have in the past made light of the severity of the virus, did not wear masks, have not maintained the recommended social distance while meeting supporters, and rail against restrictions on the economy and on free movement.

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro was ordered by a court to start wearing a mask, and was diagnosed with Covid-19 on July 7. US President Donald Trump continues to push back against public health measures that in any way curtail individual “freedoms”, tweeting on July 8 against his own health agency’s safety regulations for schools.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on the other hand, might lead the most hardline right-wing Hindu administration to have governed India, but the Indian political right as it operates on the ground does not organise around individual freedoms in the way the right is understood in Western political theory. Modi has been deadly serious about the threat of the pandemic.

By the last week of March, if there were Indians who were still unaware of the scale of the spread of the coronavirus in India, Modi’s televised address to the nation on March 24, a Tuesday night, left little doubt.