Rana Ayyub
The disturbing video went viral across India in a matter of hours: Scores of bodies, feared to be of covid-19 victims, washed up on the shores of the holy Ganges River in the northeastern state of Bihar. The villagers were surprised and suspected the bodies had floated from far away, according to a reporter on the ground.
Investigators are still trying to understand what happened, but it appears to be another grim reminder of the raging death toll in the country — a death toll that is going largely undercounted, especially in rural areas, even as the official figures break records: On May 19 there were more than 4,500 deaths reported in a single day.
While a lot of media coverage has focused on the lack of oxygen and hospital beds in large cities, the real carnage is unfolding in our villages, where access to basic health care is virtually nonexistent.
India’s leading Hindi newspaper, the Dainik Bhaskar, has dispatched brave reporters to several towns in Uttar Pradesh, which neighbors Bihar and is governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, and their dispatches should shame the collective conscience of the nation. The journalists counted more than 2,000 bodies that had either been dumped or hurriedly buried by local officials in a clear effort to underplay the coronavirus casualties in the region.
Village after village is being wiped out in Uttar Pradesh, and it’s impossible not to draw a link to local elections that were not postponed. People traveled to the state from cities like Mumbai and Delhi to cast their votes, and they brought the virus with them, infecting an already vulnerable population.
Vikas Singh, a villager from Lalganj in Uttar Pradesh, developed a cough and fever a few days after casting his vote. Six of his relatives developed similar symptoms. The local doctor, who had no coronavirus tests, suggested it was a flu and treated the entire family with what he said was medicine that would help cure them of their breathlessness. Within four days, Singh succumbed to covid-19 as the virus ravaged his lungs. His daughter, Mirsha, 22, who was to be married in two months, died from the virus, too. When the time came to cremate Singh, none of the villagers were willing to help. His wife had to pay $300 from the only savings in the house to get locals and priests to help her perform the last rites. Singh was fortunate: He got dignity in death, a privilege that is not being accorded to thousands of Indians who are dying in villages, and whose bodies end up on river banks and sometimes even dragged by stray dogs.
In a village in Darbhanga in Bihar, Madan Mohan Jha’s family pleaded for an ambulance as he struggled to breathe. The village had no local hospital, and by the time his son and uncle found an ambulance, Jha had already exhaled is last breath. His son Ramu, 20, devastated by the fact that he was unable to get medical help for his father, reportedly went to a neighbor’s field and took his own life.
Similar stories are emerging from across rural India. In Ghazipur, in Uttar Pradesh, villages are reportedly experiencing deaths in “almost every second” house. A district magistrate from a town in Uttar Pradesh, who has been very active on social media attending to requests for medical help, tells me that he feels as complicit in the death of the people he needed to take care of as the elected representatives who were last seen during the local elections. The magistrate told me that his office has received orders to not make a “spectacle” of the covid-19 deaths.
But as hard as officials try to hide the truth, people are suffering and showing their discontent. Yogi Adityanath, the radical monk who is the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and is seen by many as a possible successor to Modi in the next general elections, is now facing the wrath of the villages — his party suffered a defeat in the local elections.
Local health volunteers tell us that the scale of the devastation in rural India won’t likely be fully known. I’ve also been reporting from the ground and have spoken to hundreds of villagers. It’s probably an understatement to suggest that the real death toll is at least five times the actual figures.
But Modi and his deputies are nowhere in sight. We are seeing a complete failure of leadership. The scathing criticism of India’s handling of the pandemic is coming from all over the world. But his acolytes are focused only on salvaging the prime minister’s reputation — not on saving lives. They denounce journalists from international publications, saying they are writing at the behest of the opposition. Government ministers go on news channels talking about an international conspiracy. They denounced the existence of a “toolkit” to discredit the government. Alt News, India’s leading fact-checking website, called the bluff of the Modi government. The alleged “toolkit” was created on a forged letterhead of the opposition Congress Party and was amplified on social media to distort the reality.
Misinformation is spreading fast, but Modi and his political henchmen should know their lies can do little when the dead are speaking for themselves. Washington Post
