The last episode of PM Modi’s ‘Mann Ki Baat’ alienates more listeners than ever before

Each Mann ki Baat broadcast of Narendra Modi involves elaborate preparations. Often, work on two broadcasts goes on simultaneously. All those who are familiar with television and radio shows know this. But for the average Indian, Modi speaks his mind out every time he airs his Mann ki Baat show extempore.

In fact, the nation was waiting to hear with bated breath what the Prime Minister was going to say in his last Mann ki Baat on April 25 on the unprecedented crisis in the national capital and elsewhere, in which relatives of Covid-affected patients were running from pillar to post in search of a hospital bed with oxygen facility or even to lay hands on an oxygen cylinder that would save the lives of their near and dear ones. The optics were indeed heart-breaking: patients gasping for breath in the hands of their relatives, doctors breaking down on live news channels saying they have run out of oxygen, hospitals turning away desperate people bringing their near and dear ones, oxygen being administered to patients on the road, in vehicles and amidst the most unlikely settings.

But to the surprise of everyone, there was no 'oxygen' on PM Modi’s mind and he spoke of everything else, including the much-flaunted and yet completely messy vaccination programme. This must have been the most disappointing of all the editions of the PM’s monthly radio show and would have alienated more listeners than all the previous episodes taken together.

The lapse or the omission almost certainly had to do with the logistics of the programme. But at the same time it typified a basic flaw in the approach of the Modi government, which invariably gets its timing wrong whenever crucial decisions are required to be taken. They often come either too late to be effective or are too premature, as it happened with the national lockdown, which aggravated the national crisis on account of the Covid pandemic by several counts.

The same misplaced priority can be seen in the action by the IT ministry in asking Twitter to take down some 100 posts which criticised the Modi government for the way it has handled the Covid crisis. The draconian action, the extreme step against the right to freedom of expression, is hardly surprising as the ministry itself is headed by a minister who is just opposite of what it has set out as its mission: promote’ e-governance for empowering citizens’. In fact, Ravi Shankar Prasad, as minister in charge of the ministry of electronics and information technology is patently the wrong man in the wrong seat, as he has virtually zero tolerance towards criticism.

But he seems to be blissfully ignorant of the negative impact of a Mann ki Baat that does not even make a passing reference to the oxygen crisis in India on a day when a Covid patient was dying every five minutes in the national capital, most probably on account of the failure to find a hospital that would admit him or her for treatment.

A Google satellite image of crematoriums, where the number of simultaneously burning funeral pyres gave the impression of having the entire crematorium on fire, is more damaging to the image of India as a modern nation than a thousand Twitter posts that criticised the Modi government and its ways of handling the Covid crisis. These imageries stick and haunt forever, just like the clippings of mass burial of bodies in some of the western countries during the first wave of infection last year that continue to haunt the world.

The world knows Narendra Modi, and no Arvind Kejriwal. So, in terms of global credibility, the politics of Covid management between the Centre and the Delhi government has no value. The fiasco in Delhi will be straightaway attributed to the failure of the Modi government and blaming it on the Arvind Kejriwal administration will probably give some satisfaction to the ruling party politicians at the local level, but in the eyes of the world, it is a complete failure on the part of Narendra Modi, despite an all-pervading obsession with his international profile.

The world at large has ticked off Narendra Modi as the cause for the rampaging second wave of the pandemic for a total lack of preparedness on the one hand and a completely misplaced sense of complacency on the other, both of which have contributed heavily for the prevailing situation. The government would do well to recognise the facts and act decisively rather than go shadowboxing with the critics.

(IPA Service)

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