Itihas gawah hai,
Ki yeh masla bhi sulajh jayega”
Not great poetry but it sums up today’s reality neatly and also concludes on a positive note. How did we reach this situation in such a short time and how have we been caught with our pants down a second time? The first wave was not a very virulent one and we fought it successfully with our limited infrastructure. There has been plenty of coverage of what went wrong with the second wave and I do not want to repeat it.
However, there is one main reason for this tragedy ‘hubris’ from the top to the bottom rung. The leadership was in a self-congratulatory mode and paeans were being sung in praise. The ruling BJP’s February 2021 political resolution states that India had ‘set an example in front of the world for what work can be done during Covid’. We claimed that we were on the verge of producing vaccines that would help the whole world. We had the highest capacity to manufacture vaccines developed by other countries a