Five years have passed since the Delta wave of the Covid-19 pandemic hit India, and six years since the onset of the global pandemic. Yet public discussion on the calamity remains scant. This even as, according to experts, Covid-19 claimed 4-5 million lives in India, more than anywhere else in the world, and shrunk the economy by 7.3% in real terms in 2020-21. (The government disputes the death toll, putting it at 0.5 million.)

The Delta wave is particularly engraved in memories as a time when people begged others for oxygen cylinders and hospital beds for their loved ones and dead bodies floated down the Ganga and even had to be buried on pavements.

Since the pandemic receded, in the scarce moments when India’s handling of those years has been discussed, the government’s defenders have made elaborate assertions, insulating it from criticism. Many even celebrate the government’s response, describing it like some kind of masterstroke.

Now – at a distance of roughly six years – is a good time to evaluate the Narendra Modi regime’s response to the crisis. A good starting point would be to probe the assertions made by the regime’s defenders, as a step towards a framework for evaluating the government’s response as a whole.

First, supporters of the regime assert that irrespective of whether or not the government had implemented the March-May 2020 nationwide total lockdown, the government would have faced criticism. Had it not implemented the lockdown, they claim, critics would have blamed it for laggardness. When it did implement the lockdown, critics blamed it for excessiveness.

But this claim elides the possibility of a more rigorous, data-based, nuanced approach; for instance, of having imposed a partial lockdown. Or having made food and shelter arrangements for urban migrants, even if a total lockdown were being implemented.

Policy need not mean doing nothing or throwing the baby out of the bathtub. It can involve analysis, sophistication, game-planning. India’s lockdown, indeed, is........

© The Wire