BJP CMs and leaders as poor administrators and poor losers, too!

At the start of this summer our air conditioner at home conked out. It was still bearable but once into the lockdown, the mercury rose proportionally to the Coronavirus cases around the country. When I called our handyman to see if his electrician, a familiar individual we had faith in, could come fix it, he said, “The boy went off to his village to get married and has got caught up in the lockdown. He won't be back soon.”

According to his boss, the electrician was having an extended honeymoon and a rum time in his village in Bihar. “There is no problem here. Khuli hawa mein ghoomrahe hain, kheton mein bhatak rahe hain. All rations are available, only there is no transport,” he recalled the boy telling him.

There was also, evidently, not a single case of Coronavirus at the time, at the beginning of April.

After the trains and buses ferried migrant workers back, the electrician desperately called his boss. “Saab, my village has become a Red Zone. There is no way I can return to Mumbai so soon. Please get me out. I don’t want to catch the virus.”

Now this is exactly what Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had warned about during the first lockdown. It was only a pause button on the virus, Gandhi had said. The moment you open the doors, the virus too would come rushing out and spread across the country. Gandhi had advised the government to use the lockdown to put systems in place, which it did not. Now as migrant workers return in large numbers to their villages, who knows how many will live and how many will die without even knowing they have Coronavirus?

And yet I notice, far from any remorse, the BJP is not beyond playing politics with the lives of the people. In Gujarat, a friend of Narendra Modi is contracted to manufacture ventilators but all he produces are ambubags, which can have no effect in saving a patient’s life.

In Uttar Pradesh, even as the Congress decided to send the migrants home in their own buses, the government got into a needless fight over the exact numbers of buses and their state of fitness.

In Madhya Pradesh, as the virus spreads due to early preoccupation with toppling the previous government rather than fighting the virus, the chief minister asks Yoga guru Ramdev to step in whose only solution is to stuff the nose with mustard oil so that it passes to the stomach and kills the virus with its acidity!

Does he even know how the virus affects the human body and how it transmits? In the meantime, he promotes a sanitiser of his own, whose packaging looks like that of a leading brand that is a household name in India. Well I would rather have the original than the wannabe!

As for Maharashtra, all that the BJP can do is to target chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, who is among the most sincere non-BJP chief ministers trying hard to quell the virus. His health minister Rajesh Tope has even been consulting with his Kerala counterpart Shailaja Teacher who seems to be well on way to beating the virus in the state.

In Maharashtra, however, former chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, who desperately tried to topple Thackeray and is equally desperate to return as chief minister, has played so many dirty tricks in the past month that I am not surprised BJP in the state is facing a backlash from the local citizens.

Last month, two senior BJP leaders Sudhir Mungantiwarand Ram Kadam attempted to hold live interactions on social media. The interactions were meant to last an hour but within ten minutes they were so swamped by all the angry viewers that they had to hastily call off the discussion. Later, Mungantiwar accused the IT cell of the Nationalist Congress Party of flooding him with those nasty messages, although IT cells of other political parties are nowhere close to pulling off proficiently such tricks as BJP’s own IT Cell.

That event was before Thackeray was elected unopposed to the state legislative council. It should have told the BJP something. But when they failed to judge the public mood, much ridicule was poured upon the party when they complained to the cops about how their leaders were being trolled on social media.

However, as though even that was not enough, the BJP is once again attempting to destabilise the government – not just that they have used young children to stand with their party flags without masks and other protective gear outside their party offices, but they are also citing high figures of infection and deaths in Mumbai and Maharashtra to try and impress upon people that Thackeray is simply incapable of controlling the spread of the disease.

I have been speaking to a lot of doctors across the cities and while they are all under tremendous pressure, there is a general consensus that Maharashtra's figures are high because the government is not fudging the data.

The BJP raised a huge shindig over dead bodies lying side by side with coronavirus patients at a particular public hospital. But speaking to the doctors I realised that there is a protocol to deal with COVID deaths. You cannot shift the bodies to general morgues and they must go straight to a designated section in the cemeteries or cremation grounds.

Now if someone bothered to count the COVID positive bodies being sent to these places, the figures are almost exactly what are being given out by the government. Unlike in Delhi for example, where municipal authorities in charge of cremations and burials have counted more than 800 bodies while the government maintains COVID deaths are below 200.

Which once again brings us back to square one. If governments across India fudge figures, the common people are likely to take that as a safety signal and risk getting infected.

Our electrician now in Bihar reported that the returning migrants rushed home as soon as the buses or trains pulled up near their destinations. I have a first-hand report of a health worker from Mumbai living in Govandi, who somehow dodged the police and managed to reach his village in the Konkan on his motorcycle. Hewas immediately held by the authorities and quarantined in a school for three weeks (he is still in confinement).

The Sarpanch would not let him in or allow him to go home fearing the possibility of him infecting the villagers. As he struggles to return to Mumbai, that is also being disallowed. He can see his siblings working in the fields from the school but has to maintain a safe distance.

So, who says the Maharashtra administration is not doing the best possible under the circumstances?

Long after states like Kerala and Maharashtra have fought it back, others fudging their figures will still be struggling. If the BJP does not pull itself up by the bootstraps, considering how badly all its chief ministers are faring, along with a clueless centre, they are sure to go down in history not just as poor administrators but, in the case of Maharashtra, as poor losers too.