Institutional collapse
Bureaucracy must be held to account in India’s Covid surge
It is the opinion of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that the media’s job during the Covid-19 pandemic should be to create an atmosphere of “positivity, hope and trust”. Idealistic beginners in journalism schools will hopefully interpret that as the exact opposite of what their job actually entails. But the cautionary overtones in the statement from the ruling party’s ideological patriarch are a heartening indication that the media may perhaps be among the few institutions actually doing its job of speaking truth to power.
That cannot be said for many, especially in the context of the country’s abysmal lack of preparedness for a second surge in Covid-19. Even if one attributes the ruling party’s political resolution passed in its national executive meeting on February 21 — which declared that the BJP, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has “defeated Covid” — to lack of awareness of the political class, surely this excuse is not available to the scientific community, the research institutions and the bureaucracy.