Bunch of thoughts: A wave that goes from 3 to 100 does not stop at 130

Wait, wait, let me get in a word about Assam first. It turns out that I worry too much. I thought Assam was going to be a close election. But exit polls have made it clear that BJP is comfortably in saddle, with no exit poll showing less than 70 seats. This is a remarkable achievement, although few will notice it on May 2 because of the amount of heat generated from Bengal. That is part of what makes it remarkable. The BJP has not only scored in a part of the country where nobody gave them a chance few years ago. They have made it their own; they have made the election boring.

Assam is a genuine triumph of governance. Remember that the BJP went in shedding a number of alliance partners, knowing well that Congress would tie up with AUDF. This meant the BJP would trail by as much as 10% in vote share if you go by 2016 numbers. How do you bridge that much of a gap? You bet that your sparkling record in governance will bring the voters out for you. There isn’t even a liberal out there who can dispute the kind of fast paced development activity carried out under BJP in Assam.

And of course there is the bold strategizing of Himanta Biswa Sarma. That man has been a gem for the BJP. And just see how the party in turn has embraced him. Imagine that Congress let a man like this go just because his dad was not rich. They literally chose Rahul Gandhi’s pet dog over a gem like this. Lucky for BJP, because this man is going places. Chief Minister? Honestly, I think BJP should groom him for bigger assignments than that.

Three paragraphs in, let us start talking about Bengal. A handful of exit polls (Cvoter and Chanakya) have shown TMC leading big. A bunch of others (Axis, CNX) have shown a tough contest with BJP leading. There is Jan ki Baat which puts BJP very far ahead.

I generally don’t mistrust exit polls, but this time I must. They are telling me that a wave swept across Bengal that took the BJP from 3 seats to well over 100, but somehow it just stopped around 120 or 130. Really?

The details of the exit polls are confusing as well. If you observe CVoter, they show the TMC doing quite well in the first two phases and the BJP doing decently well in the last two phases around Kolkata. Both are hard to believe, although the second one is more credible. Why? Simply because the BJP would have picked up a lot of momentum by the last phase. That can swing some seats unexpectedly. But the TMC had nothing going for it in the first two phases. If they held the BJP to a draw there, they would have coasted to a 200 seat win.

The most important trend that exit polls confirm is that Covid had almost no impact. I was expecting as much, though it was unnerving for sure. This may sound like more Bengali exceptionalism, but we Bengalis are a “hardcore” people. A deeply ideological vote cannot be changed at the last moment because Mamata’s media told us to.

So where do I think the exit polls made a mistake? I would say Covid is having some impact on their methods of data collection. We saw what happened in Bihar where pollsters saw a wave that wasn’t there. Second, fear may have played a role.

On to Kerala. I haven’t blogged about it very much, but I have said more than a couple of times on Twitter that I find Kerala’s supposed result to be the most stunning of all. People said the LDF was going to win. I could not digest that. But after seeing all polls giving over 100/140 to the CPM, I guess the result is a foregone conclusion. Now, it is an open secret that Congress and CPM “contest” elections in collusion. So this means the Congress really gave up a winning hand and made another state Congress mukt. What did Congress get in return? Presumably, just Rahul Gandhi’s seat. Pathetic. Think about the local leadership of the party in Kerala. There is nothing in it for them any more. The high command sacrificed their political careers to secure their own Lok Sabha seat.

Tamil Nadu, oh well. I told you BJP was contesting to lose. So now both southern most states have an opposition vacuum. Meanwhile, the BJP is winning Puducherry. The familiarizing process for BJP in the deep south starts now. Come back in five years and see…

Last minute jitters in Bengal

I know I have been super positive on BJP winning Bengal. Not just from yesterday but the day the BJP won the 2019 elections. That is why no better day to have jitters than this; right before the exit polls.

During the first 5 phases, there is absolutely no doubt that the BJP was ahead. This was always supposed to happen. The way the BJP generally contests elections is like the Australian cricket team of old. If there is one run to be scored, they will run and get two. If there are two runs on offer, they will scamper between wickets for three. So, BJP with momentum on its side, probably managed to sweep these phases (except for a bit of fumble in the 3rd phase, a TMC stronghold).

The election is in its last phase today, with voting in Kolkata and Muslim majority Malda / Murshidabad areas. All areas that are good for TMC. The question is will TMC be able to sweep these to the extent needed to stave off the BJP’s massive lead in other areas.

The arithmetic is simple. If the BJP manages to get 70% of the Hindus on its side and Hindus account for 70% of the population, it works out to 49% of the vote. That’s more than enough to win.

But 70% is a huge ask. But this is Bengal, where a wave can cut quickly through an election landscape where caste is not a big factor. The BJP already had a 41% vote share in 2019, which works out to 58% of Hindus voting for them. Pushing this to 70% would have been hard in some other state, but not very much so in Bengal.

In the last paragraph, I said caste is not a big factor. By that I mean caste is not a factor in terms of political rhetoric. Not that caste is uncorrelated to voting. One of the biggest headlines from Bengal is poor, backward caste Hindus and tribals voting BJP en masse. That’s what happened to caste in Bengal: it was pushed under the surface.

So arithmetic wise, the BJP should be winning the state. But there is only one X-factor that we must discuss, if only to indulge paranoia. That’s Covid.

In 2019, the BJP won no seats in Bengal after the infamous Vidyasagar college incident. Did the second wave of Covid create a similar fiasco for the BJP from the 6th phase onwards?

First of all, I must say I don’t even know if that Vidyasagar incident played any role. The TMC probably would have won those seats anyway. It is most likely a myth that the incident actually changed the party’s fortunes. But in politics, myths can be haunting. They can have a lot of effect on morale of workers … and thus have real impact.

The Covid second wave certainly put the BJP on backfoot on mainstream as well as social media. And the TMC’s pet channels (which is pretty much every channel in Bengal except for new entry Republic Bangla) pushed the anti-BJP narrative to the max. How much effect will this have?

The BJP does have some advantages here. First, the wave has not even hit Bengal properly yet, at least not until after the 7th phase. Second, the hotspots of Covid are cities and most of the BJP vote is coming from rural Bengal. Third, it is kind of hard to blame BJP for anything that happens on the ground in Bengal because the party has never been in power. And finally, Bengal’s people have lived a hard, wretched life. The constant brutality of 3 decades of Communist rule have made them somewhat numb. It is hard to picture the average Bengali voter in a village getting too angry about media allegations of BJP government failing in a different state.

I will recount here some recent reporting from a liberal Youtube channel. They went out on the streets and asked a BJP supporter how they felt about Modi. The young man answered he was ready to give his life for the PM. This is not specific to BJP. At a TMC rally, those workers had a similar response: they were willing to lay down their lives for the CM.

Imagine that. A lot of people are passionate about cars. Someone asks: how much do you love cars? Imagine them saying they would give their lives for it. Only a psycho would say that. So what is this obsession with sacrificing life for this or that ideology? We aren’t living in British rule. We are having free elections.

This is the kind of ideological loyalty that gets romanticized in media, but it’s really shameful. Why is it that the first thought of party workers in Bengal (any party) is whether they would give their lives for so and so? This is an election. Who said anything about dying?

But it’s the political culture. It’s the violent political culture created by Communists and upheld by TMC. Political workers live in an environment where violence lurks constantly. All their metaphors are therefore laced with violence.

Nevertheless, in an atmosphere of polarization and fierce ideological loyalty, I don’t know how much damage Covid could do to BJP prospects.

Of course, whatever impact Covid might have on voting will primarily depress Hindu voter turnout. This is mostly negative for BJP, but there is a small caveat here. The TMC is getting a chunk of bhadralok Hindu voters. And among Hindus, these are the people who are most likely to be scared. So, if the BJP is being impacted, TMC is not coming off unscathed.

The reasonable brain says BJP will win. With this much momentum, it is hard to see them losing the election. From the TMC’s near insane reactions to everything, they don’t look confident at all. Now if there was something people could do about last minute jitters, that would be great…

Lots to be optimistic about: Second wave in India is peaking

The first wave in India peaked at around 1 lakh cases per day. As of now, we are facing the deadly second wave, which has taken us to about 3.5 lakh cases a day. How much worse can it get? I know the risks of being over optimistic, but I do believe we are close to the peak.

How close? As little as a day or two away.

My optimism comes from earlier this month. On Apr 11, I had said that Maharashtra was close to peak. At the time, the state was reporting just over 55,000 cases a day. They levelled off at just over 60,000. It has been over 2 weeks since then and new case numbers have stalled. Yesterday they even reported a fall in net cases (i.e., recoveries were ahead of new cases). While this may be a blip due to reduced testing on Sundays, the trend seems quite clear at least in Mumbai.

Along with Maharashtra, other states that were affected early have also stalled for a while now. Numbers from Gujarat have stayed around 14000 and numbers from Chhattisgarh around 15000.

The second wave began in Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh and spread next into Gujarat. Where precisely did it start? Not in Mumbai, but in and around the Vidarbha region, at the border of Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh. You will find even Cong ministers here and there dropping hints about this fact, but I dare you to find a media house that has the balls to admit this.

Anyway, this is supposed to be a positive article, intended to lift people up. So let us stay away from finger pointing.

Understanding the pandemic is all about numbers and data. A lot of questions have been raised about India counting its death toll. The Western press and its contractors in India have been feasting on this. So let us talk about it. Here is a point that I had made in my article on “How to interpret data” a few days ago. You can’t just make an assertion like numbers are “underreported” and toss everything away. You have to ask by how much. Unlike what vulture journalists think, you don’t have to rush to crematoriums and start counting funeral pyres. Actually, that will give you very skewed estimates by putting the focus on local maxima instead of the wider data. You can estimate “underreporting” with simple back of the envelope calculations, sitting at home.

First of all, are deaths being underreported in India? If you ask that question in a very wide sense, counting everyone who got Covid and is dead, the answer would be yes. But the answer would be yes in every country on this planet. Because every jurisdiction is using a different definition of what counts as Covid death. Do you count comorbidities? And saddest of all, do you count people who die before they have officially been tested? In fact, this happened on a large scale in the US all of last spring. At one point, the number of people dying “at home” in New York reached close to 300 a day, up from the usual 25 or so. What unknown factor could lead to this spurt? The answer is obvious.

So, we have to do the next best thing. We have to select a country and “normalize.” In other words, are we under reporting compared to that country? This is the only question for which we might have a meaningful answer.

You can disagree with my choice, but I think the USA is fair enough as a basis for comparison. It is a large, diverse country like we are.

So what do we see in the data? The US so far has reported a case fatality ratio of about 1.8% and India about 1.1%. If you assume that the “real” mortality rate in both countries is the same, it suggests that the real death toll in India is about 1.63 times (i.e., 1.8/1.1) the reported number. In other words, if our counting standards were the same as those of the USA, we would have reported 3.26 lakh deaths instead of the official 2 lakh.

It really comes down to how you explain the gap between 1.8% mortality rate in the USA vs 1.1% in India. If you assume it is all because of undercounting, the worst case estimate says 3.26 lakh deaths in India so far.

So did India really miss 1.26 lakh additional Covid deaths? Remember that was the worst case estimate. We have to now take another look at our fundamental assumption: that Covid would have the same mortality rate in both countries. But, why should it? India is much younger country, with a median age below 30. The median age in the US is almost 40. Naturally, we should have a lower mortality rate than them.

Again, by how much? This can be estimated as well. For that we have to work a little harder, breaking down the mortality rates by age group and then adjusting for % of population in that group in both countries. I am gonna be a bit lazy and say we will just round India’s figure down to 3 lakh deaths from 3.26 lakh.

So 3 lakh deaths in India compared to about 5.7 lakh deaths in the US. With a population 4 times of the USA (and a per capita GDP 20 times less), we have to keep things in perspective.

The point I am making is that no matter how much you scream under reporting, there is simply no way to bridge the gap between death numbers in the USA and death numbers in India. The disease really has spread less here than it did there. And our systems have performed much better than they have been given credit for.

Okay, what about differences in reporting between various states within India. Those looking to score domestic political points would be craving for this. Well, same technique. Let us fix Maharashtra as the point of reference. They have a fatality rate of 1.5%. What about Gujarat, a state with almost same development indicators and demographic profile? We have 1.3%, which is practically the same. So as much as media may want to believe otherwise, both Gujarat and Maharashtra are “underreporting” by the same amount. Just that Maharashtra govt has liberal privilege.

What about Uttar Pradesh? Their case fatality rate is 1%. So yes, Uttar Pradesh is indeed underreporting compared to Maharashtra. But not as much as the media would have you believe. And don’t forget that UP is the second youngest state in India, so its case fatality ratio is supposed to be a bit lower than Maharashtra anyway.

But you know who is really under reporting deaths? Rajasthan has a case fatality ratio of just 0.7%! How did that happen? Do you really believe that the healthcare system in a fairly backward state like Rajasthan is responding with that much alacrity?

This is really not that difficult. You don’t have to be a vulture sitting outside crematoriums and counting funeral pyres. A few back of the envelope calculations can identify who is doing what.

Last throws of the dice in Bengal

Do you think that if TMC was winning in Bengal, the anchors of dynasty TV would be appealing not to count the votes? Of course not. So as far as the elections in Bengal go, the results now seem preordained. They are written on the faces of every member of the ecosystem.

Don’t believe for a moment that these people care about the loss of lives in the current Covid crisis. For Exhibit No. 1A, turn to Bengal itself. For over three decades, Bengal struggled and groaned under Left rule. An average of 4-5 murders a day for decades straight. And that is just the official number. Imagine what the real number was. But no media ever batted an eyelid about this. They never cared. In fact, their fetish for the Communists rose to a crescendo in 1996-97, when Basu was tipped to become Prime Minister of India.

I have written about how Bengal matters to the ecosystem in a way that no other state could possibly do. Because these people might be Nehruvians by day but they are Communists by night. What made them find their calling as college students? I can bet it wasn’t vanilla Nehruvianism, but hard Stalinism. It is only later, when they began a professional career on other people’s money, that they decided to sell out. Bengal is their ideological homeland. And today, the other side is taking over it. They cannot tolerate this. In fact, they have hardly gotten over the shock of losing “little Bengal” three years ago.

So Bengal had to be an unusual election. And the Covid situation has enabled them to make a few more desperate final throws of the dice. The first was to start blaming BJP rallies for the spread of the virus. It made no sense, obviously. Because the second wave came from Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh. This is a fact that cannot be disputed. But if everyone screams in unison like they did, it is a fact that can be hidden.

But canceling the last few rallies of Modi is not going to stop the wave. It will manifest itself in a historic show of public anger next Sunday. Ecosystem is now going to look for ways to manage their grief. What they want to do is bottle it up and save it for later. Here, the BJP indeed risks walking into a trap. Around this time on Sunday, there is a chance of wild celebrations breaking out in Bengal. The ecosystem, stung and aggrieved, will accuse BJP of winning an election over dead bodies. Of course, the criticism makes no sense, because an election has to have a winner and a loser. But facts don’t matter so much. What will matter is the zinging whatsapp messages that they will send out.

So that is the first trap. If the BJP wants to stay out, they have to send stern messages to their cadre ahead of time, warning them not to make public shows of jubilation. This will require careful leadership from PM Modi, Amit Shah and J P Nadda.

The second trap is even more obvious. The TMC already abdicated power like two months ago. With governance in the pits, the Covid crisis is likely to hit Bengal fiercely. Right around the time the new CM takes oath. As it is, the ecosystem has laid all the groundwork carefully, proving that somehow only BJP rallies spread the virus. Now they are going to blame everything on the new CM. And if you think it is far too ridiculous for media to blame a CM who has been in saddle for less than half an hour, you haven’t followed the tone of covid coverage carefully. No argument right now is too absurd that they won’t make it.

You might even see some PILs demanding that the election itself be canceled. Prepare to see something more absurd than anything you have known before.

What does an Indian liberal do with the money they get for writing tragedy porn?

The greatest thing in the world is sitting in India and getting paid in US dollars. This is why outsourcing works. While a dollar won’t even get you a measly hamburger in the US, seventy five rupees goes a long way in India. If you started getting paid in dollars tomorrow, what would you do? How would you celebrate?

Right now, there is tremendous demand in global media such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME magazine etc to show India’s misery as our nation grapples with the second wave of the Coronavirus. In the United States, the virus has claimed close to 600,000 lives already and continues to claim nearly 700 lives a day. In France, the country with supposedly the best healthcare system in the world, the virus has already claimed over 100,000 lives.

Make no mistake. Western egos are badly bruised. China has shown them up. The virus began in China, but Western leaders were powerless to call out the Chinese government. Also, China brought the pandemic under control very quickly. Their GDP actually expanded in 2020, while western economies struggled with contractions of 8-10%. If there was ever a tipping point in the decline of the west since the high point at the end of the cold war, this would have to be it.

How will they make up for this loss of ego? It will come from relishing the misfortunes of India. That is why you see American liberal journos sharing “stunning” images of mass cremations in India. They are in luck, because cremations make for more compelling imagery than burials. It may be worth knowing that hundreds of dead bodies of those who died in New York in spring of 2020 were stowed into freezer trucks and left in a corner of Brooklyn. This ghastly fleet of death trucks remained parked in plain sight until the Wall Street Journal found them in an “exclusive” as late as November. Both the liberal elite and the larger public must have been aware of such horrors at some level.

Who is meeting the resulting demand for stories of misery from India? We know the names of the usual suspects. We also know that these are not really reports. Because they contain very little information that is not already in public domain. This is tragedy porn, written for a mostly white audience to engage in self-stimulation. And before you get angry at their average reader, understand that those readers are victims too. Their elected leaders have failed to save them from the coronavirus and failed to stand up to China. They are now feeding them tragedy porn to calm their anger. If anyone is profiteering from this, it is the racket of global publications like the New York Times and TIME magazine. And some of this gets passed on to their contractors in India.

Which brings me back to those getting paid in dollars sitting in India. Have you ever wondered what any of these people do when the remittance hits their bank account? Well, the responsible thing to do would be to invest it in a mutual fund (no, this is not native advertising). But I suspect they will do something more reckless, something that people are prone to do with fast and easy money.

Do they call their friends over to celebrate? Perhaps a private dinner with family and close friends at a restaurant where each item costs a month of your salary? They have those, you know. Super exclusive restaurants opening secretly for the super rich despite the pandemic. It’s happening all over Paris right now. You think the same is not happening in any big Indian city? Come on, the police has targets to meet…

Well, these days it is a bit dangerous to socialize. So maybe they splurge on expensive clothes, makeup or perfume. Maybe put down some money towards that flashy car or high performance motorcycle they have always admired? Or maybe it goes towards a vacation fund. One of these days, the pandemic will be over. And then, the south of France or the beaches of Hawaii will beckon.

I am not saying any of these things are wrong. I am just telling you to imagine what their incentives might be.

Also, how do they land their writing contracts at a big publication such as TIME or the Washington Post? I have no idea, so I can only speculate. Are these articles commissioned in advance, or do they send the word out via email and whatsapp, inviting bids? How do these contractors differentiate their products from each other? Presumably, the more garish the article, the more the shock value, the higher the asking price, right? Imagine the thrill that would come with getting your essay accepted into the New York Times for what I am assuming is a few thousand dollars at least. Imagine them checking their bank account anxiously for the next few days. And the satisfaction when they finally see the SMS on their shiny new iPhone. Amount deposited.

Now think about them writing their future essays. Should you call the Indian system “inefficient” or “horribly inefficient”? Well, that’s easy. At say $2 per word, you would get an additional $2 or about Rs 150 extra for calling the Indian system “horribly inefficient” instead of just “inefficient.” Calling PM Modi a “dictator” gets you only $2, but calling him “right wing majoritarian fascist dictator” gets you as much as $10!

Pro-tip: Always refer to him by his full name, Narendra Modi, instead of just Modi. That’s $2 extra each time.

Extra pro-tip: See if the New York Times will accept Narendra Damodardas Modi.

There are multiple lessons here for the taking, but let me present at least two. First, if you ever thought that US President or Canadian PM were on the side of the people of India, the joke is on you. These people won’t even release the raw materials necessary for Indians to have vaccines. Like they would give a damn if Delhi police sprayed some people with water cannon around the approaches of Delhi. How many European parliaments are discussing how to help India during the Covid crisis like they supposedly did for “farmers” of Punjab? I am guessing zero. Oh wait, the so called farmer protests were a humanitarian crisis. Unlike Covid, I suppose.

Turns out that our internal affairs are our own after all and nobody else cares about them. Now that we agree, how about we ask what was their real agenda when they were backing the protests between December and March? A few months ago, the global media was inviting people everywhere to see the “largest protests in the world.” Now they are inviting everyone to see India’s skyrocketing Covid numbers and enjoying all the same. By the way, their same contractors got paid by writing articles in praise of the so called farmer protests. They made money both coming and going.

The other lesson, of course, is that this is all about politics. The governor of New York deliberately hid some 6000 Covid deaths in nursing homes. But that governor was a liberal. And liberals had an election to win in the US. And so the New York Times could not see any of the bodies. They could not even see the trucks full of dead bodies parked near the Brooklyn waterfront. The Wall Street Journal only found these trucks on Nov 22. The election had already happened in the first week of November. See how it all worked out perfectly for the liberals?

But just as the liberal elite had an axe to grind in the US, they now have one in India. They need to get India’s current Prime Minister out of office. And that is why nobody can hide dead bodies either in Amdavad or in Lucknow right now. Unlike New York, the media is scouring these cities, looking for ways to “speak truth to power.”

Why I fear Congress rule – II

(contd from yesterday’s post)

Do I fear a Congress government in the future? It could be 2024, it could be 2029 or any other time. Yes I fear it and much more than anything in the past. Because this time it is really going to be different.

When I say Congress here, I mean any “liberal” disposition that takes power at the center at any point. But why? We’ve lived through long spells of liberal rule before, so why worry so much at the idea? And isn’t it good for governments to change once in a while?

All good points, which would make sense in the old world. But in the last 5 years, the world has changed completely with the arrival of the Big Tech monopolies. This has made possible the automation of censorship, something that no authoritarian government in history has ever had access to.

Most people still don’t realize the scale of what has happened. Every citizen is now putting out their thoughts in writing. Even if they don’t write, the data about the people they meet, what they eat, drink and do for fun, is all stored in huge warehouses of data. Super intelligent algorithms can sift through the data and construct a personal profile of every human being. No Genghis Khan, no KGB, no Gestapo and no NKVD could have ever been this effective. Do you remember the first time you used a calculator? Were you struck by how quickly a calculator can multiply two 4 digit numbers? Humans simply cannot compete. It’s like that now.

If the liberals get back power this time, it won’t be like the old days when they controlled TV and newspapers. Your conversation with a friend or neighbor will get censored too. Any time you disagree with the ruling liberal narrative, it will be labelled “misinformation.” The algorithm can do this simultaneously with every citizen at the same time. There is no bar to how much it can be scaled. The dictators of old would send the police to break down your door. As scary as that sounds, this means their capability to crack down on dissent was limited by the size, competence and loyalty of their police force. A censorship algorithm has no such constraints. Its server can handle millions of thoughtcrimes in a single second.

All the pieces are already in place. They just need a liberal at the helm to give the orders.

We have one advantage in that we can look at the USA and see what is coming. Over there, Biden is building a “party society” of the kind that was not even possible in West Bengal under Jyoti Basu. Big corporations, big media, big academia all united and marching under one banner. You disagree even a little bit and your life will become impossible. They might even impose collective punishment on your whole city or your whole state. Anyone who dares call the president corrupt immediately gets blocked, banned and boycotted. You better stay in line.

The biggest problem is that most politicians (who are generally old) are clueless about what is possible now. The BJP simply does not understand the level of sophistication with which liberals plan to run their next government in India. The BJP believes that ground campaigning and decades of hard work brought them here and will keep them here. The first part is true. The second part is not. Because everything that BJP has relied on until now has become already obsolete.

Around 2010 or 2011, social media began to emerge as the big new disruptor in India. At the time, the old establishment did not understand this new medium. The old ways had worked so well. They did not want to change.

But the BJP in general and Narendra Modi in particular, saw the potential. Of all parties in India, they have the most committed supporters, who will happily volunteer their time and effort. Social media seemed like a direct extension and an amplifier for on ground activism, which they excelled in. And it was, for a while.

See social media today. The space is entirely professionalized. A top influencer is now no less than a TV editor of old. The left has its committed cadres graduating from journalism schools. In the old days, these minions would spend a lifetime running errands for the celebrity editors, trying to make a place for themselves. Not any longer. They have the basic training already. The left is now setting up each of its cadres with a microphone, a high quality smartphone (getting cheaper every year) and putting them out there on the web. The BJP supporters, drawn from the ranks of regular people, have lost out miserably.

Who do you think people are going to watch? Regular people who have never been taught how to make an impression? Or a journalist who wears proper make up, has a studio with decent lighting, good quality sound recording and video editing? And of course, they know the latest buzzwords in political correctness. The right can try to play catch up, but it never will succeed. The left makes the speech codes. You will never be able to implement their rules as quickly as they are making them up. And the instant they make a new rule, it gets implemented by the algorithms of the social media giants. You stand no chance.

So what, you may ask? Parties come, parties go. Those who are in the opposition will just have to find new avenues to get back in power. Again, that’s an old world kind of thinking. Before Tech, if you will. Now it makes no sense. Once the party society is implemented to the hilt, tech will create a water tight political system where nobody will even know that it is possible to disagree.

There is no scientific law out there that the world has to be just and fair. Do you consider yourself on the side of “good”? Well, guess what … there is no scientific law that says “good” will win over “evil.” Or that the “good” will even get a fair hearing. Or that “good” and “evil” even matter. These are just ideas we made up to give ourselves hope. Myths we tell ourselves to make our everyday existence more bearable. And that is why I fear.

Why I fear Congress rule – I

At the moment, hospitals are overflowing, people are dying. They need oxygen, they need vaccines, they need ventilators, everything. And we don’t seem to have enough of anything. Could there be a worse time in India?

Yes. Because for all the faults of the current situation, we at least know when things are bad. It could be worse. We could have been living in an Orwellian world, where we don’t even know something is wrong. For the day to day suffering, we blame the gods or bad luck. For the little that we have in life, we thank our leaders. Those leaders have been there so long that they seem like part of the divine pantheon. On the big horizon, things always appear awfully quiet, thanks to them.

That world was Congress rule. I have lived through it and there is good chance so have you.

It was late summer in 2008. A number of BJP MPs said they had been offered bribes to support the ruling UPA during the confidence vote on the floor of the Lok Sabha. The BJP MPs came in and showed off the wads of cash on TV. They had also done a sting operation exposing those that had offered them these bribes. As I watched the coverage on TV channels and news websites, it began to hit me. The ruling Congress is actually getting good press out of this! In a bizarre twist, the BJP MPs are being blamed for lowering the dignity of the Lok Sabha by putting cash on display.

I remember beginning to doubt my own sanity. Is it wrong to give bribes or is it wrong to expose people who offer bribes? How is the latter even a crime? Surely I could not be the only person in India wondering about this. But on channel after channel, I watched the unfolding of manufactured consent. Giving bribes good. Exposing bribery bad.

The stoic face of Dr. Manmohan Singh. Backing him up, the all powerful Sonia Gandhi. You could question her rule, though. For that you had to sign up with Rahul Gandhi, who was leading the youth uprising against the system. Don’t be scared. If you feel like Sonia Gandhi is not on your side, be rest assured that Rahul Gandhi is with you.

You can see the remnants of this empire even today, in the media coverage that Congress ruled states get. Maharashtra is by far the worst hit state in the country. It hasn’t stopped the media from treating Uddhav Thackeray as some kind of champion, the so called “best CM.” Even if you think he is doing his best, just think about the numbers involved. Over 60,000 cases a day, over 500 deaths. Does it not seem a little unbelievable that not even one instance has been found where the state machinery fell short?

Once upon a time, the Shiv Sena was the most maligned party in India, the least favorite of the media, even less than the BJP. Then, they signed a deal with the empire, in 2019. And with one wave of the magic wand, all the bad press went away.

Across the large swathes of India ruled by Congress, from Rajasthan to Punjab to Chhattisgarh, there is not even one instance of state negligence. You’ve seen how the second wave has hit Gujarat. You’ve seen Uttar Pradesh. Do you not worry about what you don’t see? Last year, your TV screens were filled with desperate migrant laborers walking back to their home states. In that crowd of lakhs, there was not even one person who was from West Bengal. Everyone was going to BJP ruled Uttar Pradesh or Bihar.

Congress rule, or rule of any kind by a ‘liberal’ party, is like a step into another dimension. You feel nothing, because nobody ever tells you anything.

Come the Coronavirus, everyone has statistics to share. Do you know how many people they are vaccinating daily in the United States? Why is India behind? Shame. Look at the UK, which has already vaccinated over half of its people. Okay, but weren’t all these countries hit by at least three, sometimes four deadly waves of Covid? In what sense is it so surprising that India would be hit just like them?

More than that, take a moment to think about that comparison. Do you remember a time before 2014 when India was compared to the United States or France or Germany in terms of development indicators? I certainly don’t. Less than 40% of Indian households had toilets before 2014. Less than 20% of rural households had access to tap water.

But, where are the ventilators? How come India is falling short?

But then, nobody ever asked before 2014 why we don’t have toilets, electricity connections or gas. Nobody asked why every home in France has tap water, but not so in India. The masses just took everything for granted. That’s what Congress rule is. It teaches you not to notice how miserable your own existence is. Does that not terrify you?

The other day, a liberal was ranting to me on social media about BJP’s “sinister” plans in Bengal. I asked: what sinister plan? Is it not true that the upper caste bhadralok in Bengal has denied everyone else a fair share of power? Yes, they admitted. But the BJP has a “sinister” plan to capitalize on this and win votes!

Think about how messed up that is. Who told the bhadralok of Bengal to suppress the voices of everyone else? Who told them to ignore when TMC goons murdered 18 year old Trilochan Mahato and hung his body from a tree as a warning to anyone who goes against the ruling party? See, that’s not sinister because the TMC kept the cultural elites in good humor. There were 28,000 political murders under Jyoti Basu in Bengal, but they wanted him to be Prime Minister. Again, not sinister at all.

When Rajiv Gandhi came to power, he lamented about how just 15 paisa of every rupee sent from Delhi actually reaches the poor. For this admission, he was anointed as a rebel. The question of who feasted on the other 85 paisa, who benefited from the vast system of corruption, never came up. That’s Congress rule.

Right now, India is hurting. But we do see the hurt. And that matters.

(to be contd)

Why did 9 anti-Modi parties demand from Election Commission that rallies must be held?

If you thought that the pandemic would bring out the best instincts in people, you would be wrong. If you thought that the deadly second wave would make us all work together, you could not be more wrong. Whether people are dying or not, the apparent priority is to prove that all of this is Modi’s fault. So called liberal state governments have done a fine job of drafting letters for help addressed to the Central government. Even the states where the second wave began, which would be Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh.

So let us get into the dirt and start pointing fingers, if that is what everyone wants. How did the second wave come to be? Apparently, there were two sources. One was the Kumbh Mela in Uttarakhand. The other was the huge turnout at BJP rallies in Bengal, which left every liberal unnerved. These were the sources of the second wave in Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh. Because, as we all know, time flows backwards.

But you don’t have to control time itself. You can just control the media narrative instead. Since people want to talk about election rallies, let us do that. To find out who insisted on a ground campaign in elections, let us read from The Hindu on July 17, 2020.

All nine of them are ‘liberal’ parties; the Congress, the RJD, three Communist parties and some others. As The Hindu reports:

“Together, the parties came up with a joint memorandum opposing the EC’s decision to prohibit the traditional mode of campaign and allow only a ‘virtual election campaign’.”

In case anyone is confused, the BJP does not conduct elections. The Election Commission does that. And the Election Commission had decided that coming elections should only see virtual campaigning. As the Economic Times reported on Jun 30 last year, the BJP was perfectly content with that.

“Both BJP and JDU appeared supportive of the proposal at the EC representatives’ meeting with political parties in Patna a few days ago.“

But opposition parties were sharply critical of this idea, using some really heavy words.

“Discriminatory” and “violative of equality norms.” In case the opposition did not make itself clear enough, they presented a written memorandum expressing their view.

“It will be a travesty of unparalleled proportion to officially legitimise a mode of election campaign which is not only severely limiting by its reach but exclusionary by design,” the Opposition parties’ memorandum said.

When someone uses that many big words, you know they want to be taken seriously. This is in writing. And yet, the opposition comes with a straight face today and blames election rallies for spreading the virus. They demanded it. They got exactly what they wanted. Evidently, they don’t like it so much any more. And that is somehow Modi’s fault.

I want you to do a thought experiment. I want you to suppose that the EC had rejected the memorandum from opposition parties. Suppose that the EC had ordered that election campaigning should be restricted to digital mode only, which the BJP was perfectly happy to accept.

You know exactly how that would have gone. The opposition parties would have rushed to the Supreme Court, armed with their best PIL trolls. From New York to New Delhi, the refrain would have been the same. Modi is using Covid to throttle democracy. He is enforcing digital only campaigns to restrict voter participation to rich, upper caste, heterosexual males with smartphones. The rhetoric practically writes itself. After all, this is what the opposition parties had said at the mere suggestion of this from the EC:

“RJD, Congress, the Left parties and others have argued that the concept “is socially and economically discriminatory” and, thus, against the “principle of equality” and “violative of a level-playing field in the democratic exercise” as virtual campaigns could exclude a large section of the rural people and the poor who have no access to digital connectivity.“

Of course, the real complaint is not about digital campaigns or ground campaigns. The real complaint is that BJP is campaigning at all. And that people are coming to their rallies in large numbers. Does anyone seriously believe that if the TMC was winning in Bengal, there would be so much discontent in media against election rallies?

If I had better English, I would have said that the liberals want the elections to be “exclusionary by design.” As in they get to campaign, but BJP does not.

Despite getting their wish in the campaign, the liberal parties failed to make way with the electorate in Bihar. Does anyone remember what happened after that? The liberals decided to rally an entire army of supporters and march them to the outskirts of the capital. Missives were sent out to global media to come and see the so called largest protest in the world.

No, it was not the largest protest in the world. Not even close. But the hyperbole shows the kind of message they wanted to give. For three months, there was saturation coverage of this event. People saw this on their TV screens. Now tell me who gave the message to the country to stop worrying about the pandemic. Remember this crafty smile?

You seem happy, Ravish ji. It seems you want the viewers to know that massive crowds attended the mahapanchayat in Muzaffarnagar. It wasn’t just him of course. Most of the media wanted India and the world to know.

And from the tone of their coverage, it does not seem they were particularly bothered by the flouting of Covid norms. See all those face masks in the picture below?

Now tell me what message people across the nation got from these three months of saturation coverage. Nobody even talking about the Covid hazard any more. Mass protests with zero protocol being followed. Did it not send the message that the pandemic was over and people could go back to living life exactly as before?

In 2013, during the initial stages of his campaign, Narendra Modi had accused the Congress of hiding behind a so called burqa of secularism. In India of 2021, as long as you wear a face mask of “liberalism” you can do anything. Because only BJP rallies and Kumbh mela spread the virus.

BJP is paying a huge price for being in power but not in control

Who is more powerful? Modi or Mamata? If Modi had told the EC to cancel rallies, would they not have listened? Someone asked me this on Twitter. I didn’t cross check, but I am going to assume this individual was a BJP supporter, because so many are asking very similar questions.

Indeed, so who is more powerful? Modi is the Prime Minister and so he should be. It certainly sounds like that would make the most sense. It certainly sounds like the logic that would convince an average person.

The BJP is extremely good at winning elections. It has a huge number of dedicated cadres, organization builders, an ability to produce leaders and so on. But when it comes to real control of institutions, the party does extremely poorly. Some of this weakness is not in spite of the BJP’s electoral victories, but because of it. A bit like a blind person whose other senses are heightened. The BJP depends very heavily on elections to assert any kind of power at all.

But who would listen to excuses like this during an unprecedented national crisis such as this? Hospitals are overflowing, people are dying. Nobody will listen to how even a small regional party like the TMC has more influence over the Election Commission than BJP does.

Let us look at what is happening. Pictures of massive BJP rallies in Bengal are going viral, making it look as if these rallies are the cause of the second wave. Do you think the TMC is not doing rallies? Of course they are. On Friday itself, Mamata Banerjee addressed a massive rally in Nadia. TMC’s worst leader, the abusive tongued Mahua Moitra, was in attendance as well. But pictures from TMC rallies and roadshows have disappeared completely from media, almost as if it is contraband.

Last year, there there lakhs of migrants trying to make their way to eastern states during the lockdown. At the time, the eyes of a thousand media vultures were upon them. Yet, do you remember a single image of a migrant who was going to Bengal? Never! Every migrant on TV was going back either to Uttar Pradesh or Bihar. If you walk for five minutes on the streets of Bangalore, you will realize just how many migrant laborers come from Bengal. But last year, the media’s million eyes could not spot even one of them.

Why? Because the BJP does not control the media the way Congress still can. There might appear like some channels and anchors do indeed support the BJP. This is in fact, mostly an illusion. People no longer respect journalists enough to take orders from them. What they say on an issue is much less important than the issue they are talking about. And it is the Congress which decides, night after night, what matter is talked about. If they want to talk about 10,000 farmers, then everyone will talk about that. An entire election in Bihar, home to 10 crore people, was forgotten in a week because Congress wanted to talk about 10,000 people.

In cricket terms, this is like an India Australia Test series where all the games are played on a green wicket at Melbourne. In a technical sense, the game is played fairly, with both sides allowed 11 players and 2 innings each. But in reality the game is massively rigged in favor of Australia. They picked the pitch and the playing conditions.

I was talking about the Election Commission. Due to its miserable performance in the 2019 election, the TMC fell short of the criteria of being a national party. Not to worry. Votes are only a small part of power. There are always “institutions.” The Election Commission should have taken away the TMC’s status, but it did not. I am not very sure why. Some people say the interval at which parties are assessed for their status by the EC has been increased from every five years to every ten years. If the TMC does poorly in 2024, I am sure it will get increased to 15 years… and possibly then 20 or even 50 years…

This is after the EC changed the definition of national party twice : in 2000 and 2016 to make sure that a number of liberal parties can keep their status despite falling short in elections. The CPI has just 2 seats in the Lok Sabha out of 543. But by some miraculous application of the rules, they are still a national party.

This is real control of the kind BJP cannot even imagine.

Do you think that if one day BJP was reduced to 2 seats in Parliament, the EC would change the rules to give them special favors? LOL!

Despite this, Mamata Banerjee is overtly at war with the Election Commission. She does not have the slightest fear that the EC would actually act against her and take her privileges away. Can you imagine power like that? She knows the EC will grin and bear all her insults because the EC is under the thumb of Indian liberalism.

Do you know what happened when the Chief Election Commissioner wrote to the President saying one of his Election Commissioners should be removed because of his political biases?

Nothing. Nobody even heard of the letter. I think Rediff was the only website which even mentioned the existence of the letter. The individual in question was soon promoted from Election Commissioner to Chief Election Commissioner.

This happened a lot more recently than you would think. No this is not from the days of Nehru or Indira. Today, a letter from Pratap Bhanu Mehta can generate more discussion in media.

And that is how we have reached a point where the BJP even has to defend its right to campaign in elections. The TMC campaign is in full swing. Imagine the kind of disadvantage from which the BJP fights elections, given its lack of control over media. Bengal 2021 will truly be an election to remember. When all else failed, the final throw of the dice was for ecosystem to say that BJP should stop campaign and surrender the election to Mamata Banerjee. That is how ridiculously unfair the demand is. Yet, somehow the BJP is on the defensive, explaining why BJP candidates should be allowed to contest elections.

Do you seriously believe that the TMC would be willing to stop its campaign because of the Covid situation?

Interestingly, it was the BJP which first came up with the idea of an all digital campaign. They suggested this in Bihar. At the time, liberal political parties told the EC in writing that such a thing would be “unpardonable” and “exclusionary by design.” The BJP, they argued, is rich and so a digital only campaign helps them.

So BJP is not allowed to campaign on the ground. BJP is not allowed to campaign digitally. Only surrendering to Sonia Gandhi is allowed. Everything else is “insensitive.” They will not say this outright, but this is the only logical conclusion, looking at their demands. If all forms of campaigning are to be banned, then BJP really has lost its right to contest elections.

Is the BJP even able to remind the people that it is liberals who objected to digital only campaigning? Of course not. For that, they would have to know how to control institutions.

In Bengal, something truly unprecedented is happening. The other side is pushing the buck farther than the BJP had ever imagined possible. The BJP simply were not prepared to defend their right to contest elections. They were taking this for granted. They assumed no controversy could be generated around this question. Ha! They got blindsided … again.

Where did the second wave begin? Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh. But who spread the virus? Kumbh Mela in Uttarakhand and BJP rallies in Bengal. Even now, 10-20,000 people are sitting on borders of Delhi. Anybody blaming them? Never! For 3 months, we saw saturation coverage of their gathering on our TV screens. Liberals were chest thumping about how these are the “biggest protests” in the world. Who drilled in the message that Covid is nothing to worry about? Doesn’t matter, because you can always blame BJP rallies in Bengal.

How far can the ecosystem push things into the realm of absurdity? As it turns out, much farther than anyone could imagine in their wildest dreams. Are you disappointed as a BJP supporter that media is giving a walkover to “best CM” in Maharashtra? Well, that’s nothing… a lot more is possible. As of now, they are simply ignoring problems in Maharashtra. At a future date, media might tell you to support Uddhav Thackeray to punish the state health department for its failures during the pandemic.

Yes, you read that right. It’s not as absurd as you think. This is what is happening in the United States right now. People in big cities are angry about police atrocities. For these atrocities, they blame not the government which controls the police, but the police itself … along with opposition parties! In a city like Chicago for instance, people are fed up with how the police works. So they decided to show their anger by giving the ruling party an astounding 82% of the vote in the recent 2020 election. That will teach the opposition parties a lesson for their failure to control police departments that are not under them. Ask the Americans: they genuinely think it makes sense to reward the ruling party for its failure to control the police.

In India, things are not so absurd yet. As yet, people still have some grip on reality. If Yogi Adityanath sat on a dharna against UP Police tomorrow, people would think he has gone mad.

But the day is approaching when liberal parties will leverage their control over media and institutions to extreme levels. Don’t be surprised if soon enough Uddhav Thackeray sits on a dharna against his own Health Department. This is only a beginning.

How to think about data : on Covid vaccinations, case numbers and death counts

You must have heard the old adage: if you torture the data enough, it will confess to anything. Let me add an important note of caution to this. If you begin by confessing to everything, the data will torture you.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, the public has been hit with a flurry of data; on daily case numbers, vaccinations, death counts and the like. They have also been exposed to a variety of data related terms, such as flattening the curve, reproduction number, doubling times and so on. Now, as any interaction with a class of middle or high school students will quickly convince you, numbers are not everyone’s best friend. And when numbers on Covid begin hitting you from all sides, it can be overwhelming. Coupled with the human tendency to fear the worst, it will make you numb.

In this forest, the data snipers will thrive. Because it is only too simple to pick up say state level data from somewhere along with some metric and tell you how bad things are. Then, you can pick up another metric and maybe country level data from somewhere else and reinforce the same feeling of hopelessness. Somebody is doing the best in vaccinations, someone else is keeping the case counts low, someone has high case counts but low death numbers. And hence, depending on your agenda, you can draw whatever conclusion you want: BJP ruled states are the worst, Congress ruled states are the worst, European countries are doing the best, anything.

But if you observe closely, no one entity is doing the best or the worst on all of these metrics. If you fix a state or country and follow up on its performance on all metrics over the course of time, the picture is generally very spotty. Let me give an example. Many would remember how New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden became a global icon last year for her supposedly efficient handling of the pandemic. Seeing the coverage, several Indians would have wondered: why can’t we be like that?

Well, let us follow up. How is New Zealand doing on vaccinations? As on date, only about 2% of people in New Zealand have received at least one dose of vaccine. Compare this to around 7% in India. When you compare the total size of our population and think about our challenges, New Zealand now seems so inept in comparison that it is almost laughable. But that is the point. India should never have been compared to New Zealand; not now, not ever. And yet, we let ourselves be hoodwinked last year. That was thanks to folks with an agenda, who I call data snipers. They came, they fired and they ran.

But, the data snipers have a way out. They say they just want the best for us, on everything. This is a fallacy and I will get to it later. First, let us talk about how India is really doing.

Yesterday, India reported roughly two lakh new cases and over one thousand deaths. While each of these is a human tragedy, unprecedented hard times such as World War 2 or Covid-19 force us to keep things in perspective. Right now, most of Europe, as well as Canada are building up to their third wave. In the US, the picture is slightly better right now, although there are early signs of a fourth wave emerging.

How bad are these waves? As it turns out, really bad. So much so that the second and third waves make the first one look like a ripple. Yesterday, France reported some 40,000 cases and close to 400 deaths. Considering that India’s population is over twenty times bigger, it puts our Covid numbers in a somewhat different light. By no means have I cherry picked France here. Next door Germany reported 30,000 new cases and about 250 deaths yesterday.

This is where the first of our gnawing insecurities about India comes in. Are our numbers as reliable as those from say France or Germany? Maybe not. Maybe we are under-counting and under-reporting. The trick is not to stop there, but to ask: by how much? Take the death count of 400 from France, multiply it by 20 and you have 8000. By contrast, India reported around 1000 dead. So, even if you believe that 80% of Covid deaths in India are going unreported, it would not make up the difference.

Some of our underlying assumptions about the west may not even be true. For instance, Germany does not count Covid deaths in cases where the deceased were suffering from comorbidities. Then, there is outright fraud. In New York for example, nearly 6000 Covid deaths in nursing homes were hidden by state authorities to save face for the ruling party during elections.

There are of course other ways to make excuses against ourselves and feel miserable. India has a young population and Covid mostly impacts the elderly. The median age in India is under thirty, while in Western Europe, it is above forty. Okay, but if we are taking that into account, surely we should also note how much more resources the rich nations of the West have; about twenty times more per capita. At the moment, do we really expect the health systems in Lucknow or Patna to keep up with Paris? If we do, then surely there is something good to feel about India, after all.

Let us take vaccinations, which is the hottest topic right now. India has given at least one dose of vaccine to around 7% of its population. This is low. But as many states have argued, the vaccines must go where the disease is. A useful way to think about this is to take our states and compare them to individual countries of Western Europe. The state of Gujarat, for instance, has 6 crore people, the same as France. Maharashtra has 12 crore people. These are two of our worst affected states right now. As of now, Gujarat has given 1 crore vaccine doses and Maharashtra around 1.2 crore doses. Although second doses come with a time lag, this suggests that Gujarat has so far given vaccine to around one in six people or around 16%. For Maharashtra, the rough calculation gives 10%.

In both France and Germany, around 16% of people have received at least one dose of vaccine. While there is much to be desired regarding vaccine distribution in India so far, the numbers from India’s western states are definitely in the same ballpark as western Europe. Rajasthan, which has a population of around 7 crores, has given out 1 crore doses as well, or roughly 14%. The country of Italy also has a population of around 7 crore and has reached a coverage of around 17%. While 14% is less than 17%, it is again in the same ballpark. Did we mention that the World Health Organization had designated France as having the best healthcare system in the world, followed by Italy?

This is not to put a feel good band aid on a gaping wound. I also understand that this is cold comfort for someone who is suffering from Covid or has lost a loved one to the pandemic. The purpose here is to show what an all-round, fair comparison looks like. We fixed on France and Germany, two rich nations with advanced healthcare systems and considered all metrics: case numbers, death counts, vaccinations. We looked at absolute numbers and we looked at percentages.

Let me come back to the issue of what I called data snipers and how to deal with them. When you see someone making a comparison, don’t jump to conclusions with one or two facts in front of you. Ask them to fix an entity, such as a state or a country, demand to know its performance on all metrics and follow it through time. More often than not, a data sniper will carry a toolkit consisting of deaths per million in Norway, daily case numbers in New Zealand, vaccinations as a percentage of population in Israel and total vaccination numbers from the US. These facts, cherry picked from individual states or countries around the world, a different metric from each country, mean nothing. In fact, this is how myths are born. For instance, if the famous Kerala model was real, it should have been possible to duplicate it elsewhere. Or at least in Kerala itself, when the state was hit by a second wave and now when it is hit by a third wave.

The problem of data sniping happens everywhere. But Indians are more vulnerable, generally due to our deep insecurities about our country. When presented with favorable data, it is all too easy to suspect that it may be wrong or fudged. The trick is to ask: by how much could it be fudged? Could it be that 80% or more of deaths are going unreported? At this point, your rational self will realize probably not.

Finally, here is the fallacy of listening to those who say why not have the best of every country. It may feel like they are setting us a noble goal, but they are not. Because the goal is not achievable, they are simply setting us up to fail. The question is what their agenda is. Why did the same people who pushed vaccine hesitancy in January and said vaccines were a waste of money in February, now saying that we are not vaccinating fast enough? Are they well-wishers or are they simply hecklers?

Let me give another example of how such people play with our insecurities about India. Few days ago, I came across a report that the Prime Minister of Norway had been fined by the police for not wearing a mask! Many people wondered if India could ever reach a point of such transparency and fairness in law enforcement. Good question and probably well intentioned. But when I searched the story on the internet, I realized that most websites reporting it were Indian. Why did this story not go viral in say Canada, the United States, Britain or France? Is it really possible that ruling political classes in all these countries never have a sense of entitlement nor corruption? Obviously not. But people in most western countries are not so insecure that they would beat themselves up over every little thing that happens elsewhere. In other words, good for Norway, but we have great things to show them too.

How has India fared during Covid-19? The pandemic hit us hard, because it hit us where we were weakest of all, in healthcare. But we made it through the first wave. Like everywhere else in the world, there were surprises, a lot of driving blind and getting blindsided. When you fix any state or country and compare on all metrics, India’s numbers look fair enough. There isn’t a model out there yet for stopping the pandemic, at least not in any free country. If it did, the West would not be dealing with second or third waves. Our economy suffered heavily in one quarter, but it recovered smartly and ultimately our GDP contraction for the whole year was less than that suffered by countries with advanced healthcare systems. As of now, India is running the world’s biggest vaccination program. We are giving more vaccine jabs a day than most European countries give in a week. And absolute numbers matter. If they did not, China’s economic might would not worry anybody. In fact, China’s per capita GDP is not even in the global Top 50. It is the total size that makes a big difference.

Right now, India is fighting hard, against an invisible, microscopic enemy. We cannot afford to let our insecurities keep messing with our heads as we go about this fight.