With Harshvardhan shown the door, the question now remains of what happened to empowered groups headed by senior bureaucrats and the Prime Minister's Office which took charge of COVID-19 management.
New Delhi: The departure of health minister Harshvardhan from the Union cabinet was the one that stood out when Prime Minister Narendra Modi effected major changes on Wednesday. Though Harshvardhan was one of the 12 ministers who resigned ahead of the reshuffle, his moving out of the council of ministers was somewhere given the hue of punishment or an admission of the Centre’s failure in dealing with the COVID-19 crisis, especially the devastating second wave.
However, while Harshvardhan was gradually sidelined and kept out of several key meetings after the wave had struck in March and intensified in April, it is unclear if he alone should shoulder the blame for not seeing it coming and preparing for a surge in cases just around the same months when the country had seen the first wave develop in 2020. The months of March-April in both the years were when the cases rose sharply.
So has Harshvardhan been made the scapegoat to protect the BJP government at the Centre at large and the Prime Minister in particular from taking the blame for the fiasco of not projecting and preparing for the second wave?
A look at some of the issues and how and why the government failed to prepare the infrastructure, especially in relation to the availability of hospital beds, oxygen and medicines, would reveal that it was not the failure of just one man but of the entire system which allowed India to slide into a crisis. At a time when some states, like Maharashtra, had already shown signs of the number of cases rising sharply, little attempt was made to prepare the other states for a coming crisis.
After all, it should not be forgotten that the Centre already had six empowered groups working on various aspects of the management of Covid-19 when the second wave struck. Four of these were headed by departmental secretaries and two by NITI Aayog officials.
While the Niti Aayog member Dr V.K. Paul headed the group on medical infrastructure and Covid management plan, the Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant was coordinating with the private sector, NGOs and international organisations for response-related activities.
This apart, the secretary in the department for the promotion of industry and internal trade was tasked with working on ensuring availability of essential medical equipment and augmenting human resources; the secretary of the department of economic affairs headed the group that dealth with economic and welfare measures; the secretary of information and broadcasting looked after the group that dealt with information, communication, public awareness, public grievances and data management; and the union home secretary led the group that deal with strategic issues related to Covid management, and facilitated supply chain and logistics management.
Incidentally, on March 29, 2020, the empowered groups were first constituted with 11 different teams. As the first wave passed, and the issue of lockdown was dealt with, in September 2020, the Centre decided to reconstitute the eleven empowered groups into six groups in view of the “current requirements” of managing the Covid-19 pandemic.
Incidentally, these groups had a large number of experts among them. Apart from the secretaries of various other departments, these also comprised health experts, senior officials of organisations like the National Disaster Management Authority, and even officials from the Prime Minister’s Office, such as OSD PMO Hiren Joshi.
So it would not be correct to say that the Centre lay largely unaware of the crisis that was brewing earlier this year – as repeated warnings from opposition leaders and others about holding assembly elections or giving permission for the conduct of Maha Kumbh Mela in Hardwar, which everyone feared could become superspreader events, were ignored and the second wave was allowed to cause widespread pain and death.
The fact that in the national capital several special Covid facilities like the DRDO-run Centre near Delhi airport or the over 10,000-bed facility created at Radha Saomi Satsang Beas Centre at Chhatarpur were closed and dismantled in February this year speaks volumes about the assessment done by these committees of the impending situation.
How Harshvardhan shot himself in the toe?
However, in Harshvardhan, the Centre appears to have found the perfect scapegoat to load all its shortcomings with. Also through his repeated statements, he brought this situation upon himself.
After all it was Harshvardhan who on March 7 declared that it was the “endgame” of Covid-19. Also, prior to that, it was he who chose to endorse the sale of Coronil, a product of Swami Ramdev’s company, Patanjali, as one that could combat Covid, evoking a strong response from the Indian Medical Association.
And as the second wave was building, Harshvardhan instead of preparing for it began taking on BJP’s political opponents for raising the issue of Centre’s inept handling of the pandemic.
In April, Harshvardhan attacked the opposition as the states demanded opening up of the vaccination saying this was a bid to “distract attention from their failures and spread panic among the people”. Then he also wrote a letter to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, accusing the Congress and states ruled by it of “spreading falsehoods” and “fuelling vaccine hesitancy…playing with the lives of our countrymen”.
He charged that it were these “irresponsible public pronouncements” which were responsible for “below national average vaccination coverage of senior citizens and even front-line workers in some of the Congress-ruled states” and contributed to the “second wave”.
It is being said that as the second wave took grip over the country, Harshvardhan was sidelined and the Prime Minister’s Office, top officials of NITI Aayog, and the empowered groups on Covid-19 took charge.
While this may be true to the extent that Harshvardhan was not present in some of the high-level meetings, the attempt to hard-sell the notion that PMO, Niti Aayog officials and the empowered groups had no role to play before that is not likely to find many takers.
With Harshvardhan’s exit, the Centre would be hoping that people would get the impression that everything possible has been done to correct the wrongs, which led to numerous deaths and hardship for patients during the pandemic, but if this is yet another attempt to pull wool over the eyes, only time will tell.
SOURCE ; THE WIRE
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(With input from news agency language)
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