Some Unsought Advice for the Prime Minister Shri Modi !!

The situation where you are running from pillar to post to find a hospital bed or an oxygen cylinder for your loved one, and there is nowhere to go, you feel frustrated, helpless and angry.  If you are the lucky one to find some place, the ban on visitors makes you more edgy because you could not be with your loved one to offer comfort and support when he/she needed it most. The thought of not being able to see or comfort a loved one who is living with an advanced illness is heart breaking.

Time seems to freeze when you learn that someone you love has slipped from medical care to critical care in a COVID-19 facility. Maybe you instinctively pushed the news away, or perhaps you cried, or swung into action. You and your loved one may have pursued promising treatments and perhaps enjoyed some respite from the illness over the last few days.

The loss of a loved one is life's most stressful event and can cause a major emotional crisis. All kinds of emotions, denial, disbelief, confusion, shock, sadness, yearning, anger, humiliation, despair, guilt, can flood people’s minds.

 

SUCCESS, WHICH THE GOVERNMENT IS TRUMPETING

The data given out by Ministry of Health and Family Welfare website https://www.mohfw.gov.in/.

COVID-19 CASES IN INDIA as on: 15 May 2021, 08:00 IST (GMT+5:30)

Active – 3673802   Discharged – 20432898    Deaths - 266207    

Until date (15 May 2021), 24372907 people have been identified to be infected, of which 15.07% (3673802) are Active cases right now, 83.83% (20432898) have successfully survived the infection but unfortunately, the balance 1.09% (266207) could not survive and have died.

Yes, your government is right that Indian has done exceedingly well, on an aggregate basis, in management of the COVID-19 crisis as compared to any of the countries in the world. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the mismanagement of second wave of COVID is hidden behind the exemplary management of the COVID. Your government was successful in flattening the curve of cases and deaths of the first wave over a period of 11-months, something which the Western world could not do. The same cannot however be said for the second wave.

 

FAILURE, WHICH OVERWHELMED INDIA

You do not have to go to any other source of data to see this. Failure, which overwhelmed India, is buried, not too deep, in these very numbers.

Please have a relook at the data given out by Ministry of Health and Family Welfare website https://www.mohfw.gov.in/.

COVID-19 CASES IN INDIA as on: 15 May 2021, 08:00 IST (GMT+5:30)

Active – 3673802   Discharged – 20432898    Deaths - 266207    

COVID-19 CASES IN INDIA as on: 15 April 2021, 08:00 IST (GMT+5:30)

Active – 1471877   Discharged – 12429564    Deaths - 173123    

Of the 24372907 people identified as infected so far (over the last 15 and one half month – the first case was reported on 30.01.2020), 10499082 (43.08%) cases came during the last one month. Out of 266207 deaths recorded so far, 94122 (35.36%) deaths occurred during the last one month.

This is not a joke or a mere spike. It is a deluge.

·        Of all the cases – 43% came in last one month;

·        Of all the people dying – 35% died in last one month.

COVID-19 began 𝗁𝗂𝗍𝗍𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗐𝖺𝗒 𝗍𝗈𝗈 𝖼𝗅𝗈𝗌𝖾 𝗍𝗈 𝖾𝗏𝖾𝗋𝗒𝗈𝗇𝖾'𝗌 𝗁𝗈𝗆𝖾. What were merely numbers for people during the first wave, started turning into names and those names 𝗂𝗇𝗍𝗈 real 𝗉𝖾𝗈𝗉𝗅𝖾 whom people know?

 

WHAT WENT WRONG

With micro-situations continuously evolving and rapidly changing, managing Pandemics at the ground level is a very complex phenomenon involving case-by-case tactical and urgent decisions that need ‘thinking fast’. However, the policy level, at which the office of the Prime Minister sits, the foresight and strategy based thereon, is an important decision that allows wider consultations, reviews and ‘thinking slow.’

At the strategy level, dealing with pandemics involve only two sub-strategies, ensuring that the pandemic does not spread (Restriction strategy) and ensuring that those infected are able to recover from the disease (Treatment strategy).

Restriction is about reducing the number of cases, which is accomplished through controlling the spread of infection (Appropriate Behaviour and immunisation through vaccines). Where the disease is contagious, isolation and quarantine of the prospect (contact tracing) and the suspect case (symptomatic cases) is as important as that of the confirmed case. In case like COVID, where not every infected person shows the symptoms of being infected (asymptomatic cases) the inter-people-contact has to be clamped down.

Treatment is about reducing the mortality rate among the cases through proper and timely diagnosis and treatment.

 

YOU HAVE RIGHTFULLY TAKEN CREDIT FOR MANAGING THE FIRST WAVE

You had the foresight and the promptness in March-April 2020, in using the Restriction strategy, when the first wave of the pandemic broke out, which resulted into definitive reduction in spread of infection and reduction in the mortality rates. Numbers speak for themselves.

However, the second wave, which started knocking at our doors towards the end of February 2021 and is peaking now, has left much to be desired at your level.

 

SHOW THE GRIT IN ACCEPTING THE DISCREDIT FOR MISMANAGING THE SECOND WAVE

COVID-19 patients tend to be sick for a long time, spending weeks in the intensive care unit in some cases. Patients improve up to a point, and then it can be several weeks before one would see them continue to improve. Families need to prepare for that, as well as peaks and valleys seen so often in the sickest patients. Hospital restrictions that prohibit visiting COVID-19 patients have been major stressors for families, as well as those in the hospital. In the unfortunate events of patients losing the fight against COVID-19, not every one of their families and friends have the emotional strength of suffering the pain sagaciously or silently. Patients, their families, and other caregivers have little patience or tolerance, and their short fuses can explode on the very people trying to care for them.

Doctors and nurses are withstanding the worst of a much angrier, more frustrated, and weary bunch. Medics falter when they witness rudeness and other bad behaviour. It interferes with their working memory and decreases their performance. Frustrated patients are making health care workers’ jobs even harder.

No medical-care infrastructure, in terms of both physical dimensions and human dimensions, can have the capacity to deal with such deluge.  No society can cope with such agony and death. Yes, Treatment Strategy has limitations in dealing with such tsunami of cases.

However, you have faltered in making use of the Restriction Strategy once the coming of the second wave was clearly visible towards the end of February 2021. This failure has resulted into the ‘unforeseen’ deluge of cases and deaths. In ability to see these coming, is itself a failure of leadership and his advisors.

Overtly or covertly, this failure is being attributed not to any lack of your foresight regarding COVID, but to your political ambitions in West Bengal and other states. I am not a political strategist, but the results tell us a story.

 

FAILURE IN STATE ELECTIONS 2021

Ever since you brought in the US Presidential style of electioneering to Indian politics in 2014, people vote for the leader as much as they vote for a party. Your inability to win Rajasthan, Punjab, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh had shown an association in your inability to project an unambiguous leader who could campaign in the same style in the state as yours in the national elections.

When you or any of your central leaders campaign in a state election, the electorate asks themselves – are you or any of those central leaders going to be their Chief Minister? Even when they wish to vote for your party, they do not know who is going to rule them. As they say, a known foe is better than an unknown friend is, the electorate ends up making choices, which may look poor from a larger perspective, but they are the best picks that the electorate could make from within the choices available to them.

Let us not forget that a day after the first round of polling took place on 20 May 1991, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated while campaigning. The remaining election days were postponed until mid-June and voting finally took place on 12 and 15 June. When the surge in COVID cases was so visible by the end of March for everyone to see, not postponing the elections was neither good strategy nor good politics. The votes polled in your favour in successive rounds of polling have shown a negative association with the rising COVID-cases in the country. Who knows, if the state elections were postponed for a better time, their results for you could have been better.

 

WHAT NEXT

Dear Prime Minister! As a leader, please accept the fact that you won the battle against the first wave but lost the battle against the second wave. You do not win all the battles. It is important that you win the war – war against COVID-19.

You won people’s mandate because they trusted you. You used your high visibility and high credibility in winning over their emotions. Trust is after all an emotion.

All Indians are one but they are not the same. Similar people are grouped into states. That we have 29 states shows similarity of people within the states but dissimilarity of people across the states. Indians are not like Americans, who have little diversity in language, culture or religion.

The unified central-command structure of decision making which you could use so successfully in running the Government in Gujarat may not be an optimal design for running the Union Government. Please remember that the entire bureaucracy that you handled in Gujarat was a unified Gujarat cadre but when you handle the union Government, your bureaucracy is not one cadre. The rules of engaging with the opposition leaders and bureaucracy within Gujarat are not suited to engaging with the opposition leaders and bureaucracy in the matters of the Union.

They still trust you but the untold agony and death, which they have seen over the last one month, has broken them emotionally. Fear & grief of COVID-19 is overwhelming ordinary people and your political rivals and bruised media (you have taken away many of their free bees) are adding fuel to this fire. Emotions are contagious. Our brains are wired to mirror the body language and emotion of others. In an era of social media, opinions occlude information and truth becomes matter of opinion. Absolute truth makes way for pre-truths, half-truths, developing truths, post-truths, my truths, your truths and no-one-knows whose-truth.

There is no denying that you are suffering from a loss in your credibility. Your high visibility and waning credibility is untenable in public space. You cannot be complacent or disheartened. You need to make a serious course-correction.

You have to rise as a leader and restore the confidence of people in their ability to overcome and succeed under your leadership. Please work towards decreasing the COVID-19 test-positivity rate & case fatality rate and increasing the EMOTIONAL POSITIVITY among the people of India.

To everyone locked inside their homes, in fear or anxiety, and to everyone locked out from the joys of life as usual, please put a confidence in them that the sun will come again. Remind them of the vibration that passed all over their lives, make them remember everything that they shared with their loved ones, thank the Gods who helped them face the untold grief over the last one month.

You have to rise from the ashes of the second wave. YOU HAVE TO WIN ALL THE FORTHCOMING BATTLES AGAINST THE THIRD AND THE FOURTH WAVE. YOU HAVE TO WIN THE WAR.

 

**

First Published 17 May 2021

**

“Likes” "Follows" "Shares" and "Comments" are welcome.

We hope to see energetic, constructive and thought provoking conversations. To ensure the quality of the discussion, we may edit the comments for clarity, length, and relevance. Kindly do not force us to delete your comments by making them overly promotional, mean-spirited, or off-topic.

**

We Are Not Letting the Pandemic Weaken

 

The actual number of people getting sick with the coronavirus is increasing. We know this because in addition to positive COVID-19 tests, the number of symptomatic people, hospitalizations and later, deaths, are following the same pattern. Thankfully, Doctors, clinics and hospitals have learnt to reduce the fatality rate amongst the COVID-19 patients but this is no reason for people to throw caution to the winds.

Human behaviour is the major factor. State and local administrations, as well as individual people, differ in their response to the pandemic. Some follow COVID-19 precautions, such as physical distancing, hand washing and mask wearing. Others are not as prescriptive in requiring these measures or in restricting certain high-risk activities.

In some states and communities, public places are closed or practicing limitations (such as how many people are allowed inside at one time); others are operating normally. Some government and community leaders have encouraged or even mandated mask wearing and physical distancing in public areas. Others have left it as a matter of personal choice. In areas where fewer people are wearing masks and more are gathering indoors to eat, drink, observe religious practices, celebrate and socialize, even with family, cases are on the rise.

As state governments began to reopen cinemas, bars, restaurants and stores during the last few months, people were understandably eager to be able to go out and resume some of their normal activities. Nevertheless, the number of people infected with the coronavirus was still high in many areas, and transmission of the virus was easily rekindled once people increased their activities and contact with each other. Unfortunately, the combination of reopening and lapses in the infection prevention efforts - social distancing, hand washing and mask wearing - has caused the number of coronavirus infections to rise again.

There is a lag between a change in policy, and the effects of this change showing up in the COVID-19 data. An increase in the number of COVID-19 cases or hospitalizations is seen as many as six to eight weeks after change in policy. When a person is exposed to the coronavirus, it can take up to two weeks before they become sick enough to go to the doctor, get tested and have their case counted in the data. It takes even more time for additional people to become ill after being exposed to that person, and so on.

Several cycles of infection must occur before a noticeable increase shows in the data that public health officials use to track the pandemic. Due to such delays, people become careless with their behaviour, and they start moving around more. If everyone continues to wear masks, wash their hands and practice social distancing, reopening will have a much lower impact on transmission of the virus than in communities where people do not continue these safety precautions on a widespread basis. Also, after many months of cancelled activities, economic challenges and stress, people are frustrated and tired of taking coronavirus precautions. All these are factors that are driving surges and spikes in COVID-19 cases.

About 70% of the population needs to be immune to this coronavirus before herd immunity can work. People might be immune from the coronavirus, at least for a while, if they have already had it, but we do not know for how long such immunity lasts. A widely available, safe and effective vaccine is still going to take months for everyone to get it.

There is an alarming spike in the number of cases and more COVID-19 surges are likely to occur. Letting the coronavirus circulate freely among the public would result in hundreds of thousands of cases and millions more people left with lasting lung, heart, and brain or kidney damage. We must all continue to practice COVID-19 precautions, such as physical distancing, hand washing and mask wearing. We must work with our government to ensure that everyone in our household is up to date on vaccines as soon as they are made available.

Let no one harbour the false attitude of denial that COVID-19 does not happen to them or that they are not the spreaders of the infection once they have survived COVID-19 or have been vaccinated for it. 

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused the COVID-19 disease but people are the cause of the pandemic.

*

First published 12 April 21

*

“Likes” "Follows" "Shares" and "Comments" are welcome.

We hope to see energetic, constructive and thought provoking conversations. To ensure the quality of the discussion, we may edit the comments for clarity, length, and relevance. Kindly do not force us to delete your comments by making them overly promotional, mean-spirited, or off-topic.

Demystifying Politics in Democracy

Democracies are governance by the people, presumably for the people. They are also supposedly ‘of the people’ because to govern themselves, people elect some individuals out of themselves to represent them in government.

People elect representatives based upon their personal opinions and motivations, both of which are subjective. Voting someone to office is an emotional response of people.

While people carry on with their lives working as wagers or professionals or businesspersons, some choose to take up politics as their livelihood and put themselves up for being elected to office by the people.  Most democracies are federal structures, meaning thereby that there exist multiple tiers of governments. An individual citizen thus has a Member of Parliament, a Member of Legislative Assembly, and a member of Municipality or a Gram Panchayat to represent him at these tiers of Government. Then, people also elect representatives to self-help groups like worker-unions, student unions, charities, social groups, clubs, welfare groups, cooperative societies, religious bodies, and so on. Politicians have the choices of being elected to any of these tiers in the government as well as to these self-help groups. People get the opportunities to elect their representatives every five years or sooner.

Since the governance is itself a collective of the majority of the elected individuals, politicians are categorised into affiliate groups - chosen to govern or rejected to govern – for the time being. Depending upon the pro-incumbency voting or anti-incumbency voting by people, in the next round of elections, the politicians are able to keep or reverse the nature of their affiliate category.

Accordingly, the predominant policy of the politician from the group ‘chosen to govern’ is to garner pro-incumbent public opinion and inoculate the minds of people to protect them from any counter attacks of the politician from the group ‘rejected to govern.’ They trumpet their achievements and promises through events and seek amplification of their narrative through the media and press.

The predominant policy of the politician from the group ‘rejected to govern’ is to garner enough anti-incumbent public opinion before the next election, which would result into the incumbents being voted out and the group ‘rejected to govern’ would emerge as the group ‘chosen to govern’ after those elections.

Building up of anti-incumbent public opinion is achieved through developing a passive resistance to the policies of the group ‘chosen to govern’ and this requires continuing demonstration of active-resistance by the politicians from the group ‘rejected to govern’ to the policies and actions of the incumbents. Strikes, shutdowns, slowdowns, sit-ins, sloganeering are some of the tools used in such demonstrations. Resulting events create content for the media and the group ‘rejected to govern’ seeks amplification of their events and their narrative through the media.

Both the groups, group ‘rejected to govern’ and group ‘chosen to govern’ also indulge in comparative narrative involving disparaging each other and seek the help of media in their efforts. 

The fact is that the role, purpose and importance of newspapers and news broadcasts, as reporters and chroniclers of facts, which could count as proof, has diminished. Editorials and the opinions of experts in any media, print or television, which are objective, fail to catch the attention of people.

For their entertainment value, acrimonious debates between the biased and ignorant politicians and purposive shows catch the eyeballs, but the theatrical capabilities of the performers in such shows leave false impressions in the minds of the audience. The slant of the anchors towards a particular narrative works as subliminal messaging in shaping the impressions.

Media is becoming a peddler of the narrative of the politician belonging to either the group ‘rejected to govern’ or the group ‘chosen to govern.’ Social media noise and claims do not count as proof yet they strike the emotions of people and shape public opinion.

Width, depth and sustainability of favourable public opinion is the measure of success in politics. Maximising the width, depth and sustainability of favourable public opinion is therefore the real goal of any politician. Narratives, public discourse, public policy, bureaucracy, media, political workers, safety, security, justice, growth, welfare, progress, nationalism, equality, secularism, affirmative action, patriotism, peace and rule of law are just the means in achieving of these political goals.

One can fault a politician for any of the means that they use, but none can fault them for their unwavering commitment to their goals.

*

First published 04 May 2021

*

“Likes” "Follows" "Shares" and "Comments" are welcome.

We hope to see energetic, constructive and thought provoking conversations. To ensure the quality of the discussion, we may edit the comments for clarity, length, and relevance. Kindly do not force us to delete your comments by making them overly promotional, mean-spirited, or off-topic.