Srinivas B.V. barely sleeps at night. His phone rings 24 hours a day with cries of help from Indians begging for oxygen supplies, ventilators, hospital beds whatever he can provide. If we miss a call, we call back and ask what we can do, said Srinivas, who leads the youth wing of the opposition Indian National Congress party. Earlier this week, Srinivas and his team rushed an oxygen cylinder to the New Delhi home of a woman whose father was suffering from COVID-19. Despite their best efforts, the man died later that night. Scared, alone and COVID-positive herself, the woman had nobody to help cremate her father s body so Srinivas s team arranged an ambulance and facilitated the cremation.
Young Delhi resident describes India’s COVID-19 catastrophe
India is submerged in a horrific surge of COVID-19, believed to be driven by a double-mutant strain of the coronavirus. Like the Brazilian and South African variants, this variant appears to reduce vaccine effectiveness and natural immunity acquired from previous infections. India is now the country recording the most cases of COVID-19 in the world, nearly 400,000 per day. Over 220,000 people have died of the virus in India.
Vaibhavi, a youth from Delhi who has been unemployed and is now living with family in nearby Gurgaon since returning to India last year after graduating from college abroad, spoke to the WSWS on the catastrophe unfolding in India.
One example of the New Zealand High Commission which tagged and asked the chief of the Indian Youth Congress for help in oxygen cylinders will suffice. The foreign office got upset and the mission had to apologise and delete the tweet. The Youth Congress still supplied the oxygen. It is clear that managing optics is the forte of the BJP government, not addressing the crisis.
I wrote this long preamble my dear readers of SWAT analysis to try and explain the new lease of life to the federal impulse which was evident in the recent state elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry, which seemed to buck anti incumbency.