The Flimflam Show

India has, under its nationalistic BJP Government ...

India Dreams Of Being A Big Power .....

.... long had pretensions of joining the Superpower club.

The BJPs muscular nationalism, has been a balm for Indians at home and overseas, and long promised the emergence of a new superpower. After all it has rockets going to the moon, and nuclear missiles to defend itself against any threat .... well apart from Covid-19 it seems. 

For while India may have grandiose military and space programs, it has spent little or nothing on public healthcare for decades. The rich, which includes all politicians, use private health systems, as do the middle classes for a lot of their health needs. But the 70 - 80 per cent of the population who can't afford private health care, have often had to pay 'gifts' to get their treatment from an overworked, and under funded, public health system. So India's disease burden during the pandemic is being borne mainly by the poor.

For example, for the past six years India's healthcare spending, including both private and public, has been around 3.6% of GDP. This is the lowest percentage spent on health by any of the five Brics countries: Brazil spent the most at 9.2%, followed by South Africa at 8.1%, Russia at 5.3% and China at a very lowly 5% in 2018.

Indian Health GDP Care Expenditure Doesn't Compare Well ...

All the developed nations that India likes to compare itself favourably with, actually spend a far higher proportion of their GDP on health systems. In 2018 for instance, health spending in the USA was 16.9%, and in  Germany it was 11.2%. 

What particularly galls the Hindu nationalists, in both the diaspora and at home, is that even smaller nations like Sri Lanka (3.76%) and Thailand (3.79%) spend more on public health than India, and have had better outcomes so far against Covid-19. India also has a lower doctor / population ratio than many of its neighbours, with fewer than 10 doctors per 10,000 people (with some Indian states having less than five!).

But nevertheless, India appeared to have got away with the Covid-19 pandemic, when the infection figures fell early this year, and so Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said that India was in the "endgame of the novel coronavirus pandemic," and that under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India, had emerged as the world's pharmacy, and it had supplied 5.51 Crore (55.1m) COVID-19 vaccines to 62 different countries!

So when in India, the Covid-19 infection rates started to rise very quickly, and social media suggested that there was a crisis in public health care, BJP officials from India's federal government told journalists that there was for example no shortage of oxygen in Delhi, or anywhere else in the country. 

In fact so insistent was the BJP that this was all false news, that Police in India arrested and prosecuted a man who used Twitter to try to find oxygen for his dying grandfather. Officers in Uttar Pradesh state charged Shashank Yadav with spreading a rumour over oxygen shortages "with intent to cause... fear or alarm". Mr Yadav, who did not even refer to Covid-19 in his brief tweet request, could even face a jail term.

The BJP has now suggested that a "foreign conspiracy" is afoot to discredit India, and asked Twitter to take down posts it doesn't like .... But they have now cancelled exports of any vaccines and other Covid aid abroad. They have even screwed up the foreign aid, that countries around the world have sent them to help fight Covid-19 (The UK, USA, Israel, UAE, Romania, South Korea, France, Germany, Australia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Singapore, Portugal, Sweden, New Zealand, Kuwait, Mauritius and Russia have all sent medical aid to the aspirant 'superpower')  .... with reports that red tape apparently stopped immediate distribution. We don't expect TV adverts for medical and cash aid for a superpower .....

Perhaps India Needs To Rethink Its Priorities?

But there's also been a real mess made of the vaccination program at home. The Government has said that all 18-44 year old's in India have to register on the government's CoWin web platform (they can only do so on-line), to get vaccinated (Its now open to some 960 million people to do so), however as hundreds of millions of Indians don't have access to smart-phones or the Internet, then they can't register ... so another sign of the Indian elites losing track of the reality of India. Even those who can get on the Internet are having trouble registering, as in any case demand for jabs is far outstripping available supplies.

All this has caused considerable embarrassment and anger amongst Indians worldwide, as they have got used to bragging to their foreign friends, about India being a rising superpower, and which claim is now being exposed for the shadow claim that it always was ... in fact all a bit of a flimflam show, or as my granny would have said "All Fur Coat, and No Knickers".