(JERUSALEM) — A stampede broke out early Friday at a Jewish religious gathering attended by tens of thousands of people in northern Israel, injuring more than 100 people, dozens critically, Israel’s main rescue service said. Israeli media reported dozens of deaths.
The disaster occurred at the main celebrations of Lag BaOmer, a holiday when tens of thousands of people, mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews, gather to honor Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, a 2nd century sage and mystic who is buried there. Large crowds traditionally light bonfires as part of the celebrations at Mount Meron.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “great tragedy,” and said everyone was praying for the victims.
Tragedy in Meron: MDA is fighting for the lives of dozens wounded, and will not give up until the last victim is evacuated.
38 are in critical condition and still in the field
6 in critical condition who were evacuated
18 injured severely
2 moderately
39 lightly pic.twitter.com/xUWStFYqQh
The incident happened after midnight, and the cause of the stampede was not immediately clear. Videos circulating on social media showed large numbers of ultra-Orthodox Jews packed together in tight spaces.
A 24-year-old witness, identified only by his first name Dvir, told the Army Radio station that “masses of people were pushed into the same corner and a vortex was created.” He said a first row of people fell down, and then a second row, where he was standing, also began to fall down from the pressure of the stampede.
“I felt like I was about to die,” he said.
The Magen David Adom rescue service tweeted that it was treating 103 people, including 38 in critical condition. Israeli media had earlier reported that a grandstand collapsed, but the rescue service said all the injuries happened in a stampede.
Israeli media, citing anonymous medical officials reported up to 40 people were killed, but the rescue service did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation. Photos from the scene showed rows of wrapped bodies.
The Israeli military said it had dispatched medics and search and rescue teams along with helicopters to assist with a “mass casualty incident” in the area. It did not provide details on the nature of the disaster.
It was the first huge religious gathering to be held legally since Israel lifted nearly all restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic. The country has seen cases plummet since launching one of the world’s most successful vaccination campaigns late last year.
Health authorities had nevertheless warned against holding such a large gathering.
But when the celebrations started, the Public Security Minister Amir Ohana, police chief Yaakov Shabtai and other top officials visited the event and met with police, who had deployed 5,000 extra forces to maintain order.
Ohana, a close ally of Netanyahu, thanked police for their hard work and dedication “for protecting the well-being and security for the many participants” as he wished the country a happy holiday.
Netanyahu is struggling to form a governing coalition ahead of a Tuesday deadline, and the national tragedy is sure to complicate those efforts.
By the time federal investigators searched the Manhattan home of Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday, they had amassed a trove of evidence from his associates in Ukraine, focusing most intently on Giuliani’s ties to Ukrainian oligarchs, three witnesses in the case told TIME.
The witnesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described lengthy interviews with investigators in Europe, Manhattan and Washington, starting in the fall of 2019 and continuing through February. The calls and meetings with investigators grew more frequent and “intense” after Joe Biden’s victory in last fall’s presidential election, says one of the witnesses. Two of the witnesses say they were working with Giuliani while cooperating with federal investigators.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment on the case. Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment about his former associates in Ukraine assisting federal prosecutors. In a statement released Wednesday, the former Mayor of New York City and personal lawyer for President Donald Trump called the investigation against him an “unjustified and unethical attack,” and said he “can demonstrate that his conduct as a lawyer and a citizen was absolutely legal and ethical.”
Before they were arrested, Parnas and Fruman assisted Giuliani in his quest to connect Biden, then a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, to alleged acts of corruption in Ukraine. Drawing on a cast of oligarchs, former prosecutors and alleged Russian agents in Ukraine, Giuliani and his allies spent more than a year trying to tarnish Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father was Vice President.
The pressure campaign to coerce Ukrainian officials into providing damaging material about the Bidens ultimately resulted in Trump’s first impeachment by the House of Representatives in Dec. 2019. The impeachment inquiry found that Trump abused his office while assisting Giuliani’s mission against Biden. The Republican-controlled Senate later acquitted Trump of these charges.
While the impeachment inquiry was underway that fall, federal investigators began questioning Giuliani’s associates about the smear campaign against the Bidens in Ukraine, wanting to know “everything – every meeting, every text,” says one of people they spoke to at the time.
What interested investigators most of all was the relationship between Giuliani and the Ukrainian businessman Dmitry Firtash, who is wanted in the U.S. on corruption charges, this witness says. “The main things that interested them was: How would you assess, how would you describe, what do you know about his communication with Ukrainian oligarchs,” says this witness, who spoke repeatedly to investigators over the course of more than a year. “Firtash was of course their main focus, without a doubt.”
A lawyer for Firtash declined to comment when reached by TIME on Thursday.
As TIME reported in a previous investigation, Firtash developed close ties with Giuliani’s associates in the summer of 2019, hiring several of them to work on his legal team. Firtash’s goal was to avoid extradition to Chicago, where he faces charges related to an alleged scheme to bribe officials in India. From his home in Vienna, Firtash has denied those charges and insisted they are politically motivated.
As part of his defense, Firtash hired two lawyers in July 2019 who are close associates of Giuliani: Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, a married couple known for their staunch allegiance to Trump. The couple then sought Firtash’s help in their effort to discredit the Biden family.
The nexus between Giuliani, Firtash and the two U.S. lawyers with ties to the 45th President was among the issues that interested prosecutors the most, according to two of the Giuliani associates questioned by federal investigators.
On Wednesday morning, while serving a search warrant at Giuliani’s apartment in Manhattan, federal agents also arrived at Toensing and diGenova’s home outside Washington with a warrant for Toensing’s phone.
In a statement, the couple’s law firm said that Toensing was not a target of the investigation. “She has always conducted herself and her law practice according to the highest legal and ethical standards,” the statement said. “She would have been happy to turn over any relevant documents. All they had to do was ask.”
On Tuesday, the U.S.-based rights organisation, Human Rights Watch (HRW), accused Israel of two crimes against humanity: the crime of apartheid, and the crime of persecution. Other organisations, including Israeli ones, have previously made similar claims; but it is the first time that such designations have been made by an international organisation of this stature.
Moreover, the designations declared that elements of the crimes were applicable not simply in the occupied Palestinians territories but within the internationally recognized borders of Israel itself. The assessment was predictably met with ferocious indignation among supporters of Israel in Washington D.C.; but mostly from the right-wing of American politics and not the left. The HRW report is just one report, but it’s a significant milestone in a particular trajectory, leading us towards the moment when the bipartisan pro-Israel American consensus that has endured for decades breaks apart.
Democrats and Republicans might argue tremendously in Congress but would always unite over Israel. Congress will regularly pass bipartisan motions supporting Israel, and there was cross-party consensus in Congress on moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, many years before the Trump administration actually did so.
The U.S. is near-unique in this cross-party unity. In my native U.K, for example, deep political support exists for Israel, alongside traditions of support for the Palestinian cause. The left-wing Labour Party has a long pro-Palestinian tradition within it, and even the center-right Conservative Party has had senior figures openly critical of Israel.
In his 2019 book Blind Spot, the political scientist Khaled Elgindy describes a system in the U.S. that demands accountability of the weaker side (the Palestinians), while working to prevent any meaningful accountability or consequences for the stronger side (Israel). Critics of this ‘Blind Spot’ are becoming more vocal; the likes ofLara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace,Salih Booker of the Centre for International Policy, or noted intellectual and columnistPeter Beinart, among others. The space to do so has long existed, but is now expanding. That is why it was possible for the nonpartisan Carnegie Endowment, where I am a scholar, to produce areportrecently that called for human rights to be at the center of any U.S.-led approach in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Yet the insular worlds of think-tanks and academia have the potential to be echo chambers, as does the human rights community that includes HRW. The only question that matters for policy is whether the needle will move within a major political party in the future. It’s important to note that President Joe Biden was instrumental in ensuring the 2020 Democratic platform was squarely behind Israel, and the Republican Party is even more so.
But Biden’s move didn’t go unchallenged in his party. That follows a public fracturing of the bipartisan consensus on Israel in American politics. Progressive Democratic congresswomen, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, were at the heart of that shift going against the party line. Their support for a boycott movement aimed at pressuring Israel to change its policy toward Palestinians was met with resistance from the overwhelming majority of House Democrats in 2019, who supported a resolution to condemn that movement. But Tlaib and Omar’s push received help from an unlikely quarter: Donald Trump, probably the most pro-Israel president in living memory.
It’s ironic indeed. The Trump White House had withdrawn funding for UNRWA, the UN’s organisation for taking care of Palestinian refugees; closed the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s office in DC; and had moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
But Trump made a crucial mistake. In 2019, it was widely suspected Tlaib and Omar were banned from Israel owing to a direct request by Trump to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and that forced criticism of Israel by senior Democrats. The then-Democratic House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, pushed Israel to allow the congresswomen to visit; Senator Elizabeth Warren did the same. Tlaib, herself of Palestinian descent, declared, “If you truly believe in democracy, then the close alignment of Netanyahu with Trump’s hate agenda must prompt a re-evaluation of our unwavering support for the State of Israel.” It was a message that resonated with many Democrats.
But the seeds were laid before then. The more progressive wing of the Democratic Party, with whom Tlaib and Omar are immensely popular, is growing in strength due to simple demographics. Disproportionately, younger Americans, and Americans of color, are more likely to be progressive. They are more likely to favor civil rights for minorities, whether it’s the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement in the U.S. or overseas. It’s hard to square that with support for the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, say, where Israeli settlers are granted substantially more privileges as compared to the indigenous Palestinian population. As the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, said in 2019: “There are new voices that are more critical, single-mindedly toward Israel and they’re obviously making themselves heard.”
The Republican Party remains stalwart in its support for the Jewish state; but that’s a complex situation. White supremacist thinking appeals to many Trump supporters; and that ideology contains a strong element of anti-Semitism. At the same time, mainstreaming of white supremacy in the Republican Party only invigorates progressive activists on the Democratic side — and because of the deep polarization of American politics, it makes sense for the Democrats to resist fracturing at all costs, and hold a united front against the Republicans. That means, inevitably, more, not less, progressive influence within the party. And, invariably, that will mean more critical voices on Israel.
There’s little chance of immediate changes in American policy; the U.S. president, and the Democratic leadership in both houses of Congress, are still solidly in favor of the consensus. But the direction is becoming clear – we’re on a path toward the end of uncritical bipartisan support for Israel’s policies towards Palestinians.
Chained to a hospital bed “like an animal” while suffering from COVID-19. Not allowed to visit the bathroom, and given a bottle in which to urinate instead. Unable to eat because of a fractured jaw.
Those were the conditions that jailed Indian journalist Siddique Kappan described to his wife this weekend in a phone call from a hospital in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. “He is in deep pain,” his wife, Raihanath, told TIME in an interview on Tuesday, a day before a top court ordered Kappan—who has diabetes—to be moved to a different facility in New Delhi. “He is not receiving proper treatment.”
Kappan, who is Muslim, was jailed in October after traveling to the village of Hathras in Uttar Pradesh to report on the allegedgang-rape and murder of a Dalit womanthat sparked nationwide protests over caste injustice and sexual violence. Police haveaccusedhim and the others he was traveling with, under a draconian anti-terror law, of being a member of a violent group who was traveling to the state to incite disturbances. Policesaidthe men “were going to Hathras under the garb of Journalism with a very determined design to create a caste divide and disturb law and order situation [and] were found carrying incriminating material.” His lawyer and journalist colleagues say the charges, which carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, are baseless.
Despite the Supreme Court order, Kappan has not yet been moved to Delhi due to a shortage of hospital beds.
“It is shocking beyond words that such grave violation of human rights is happening in our India, a democracy,”said11 lawmakers from Kappan’s home state of Kerala in an April 25 letter addressed to the chief justice of India. “Denying Kappan his human rights amid the catastrophic COVID crisis and its mismanagement further illuminates the priorities of the Indian state,” says Angana Chatterji of the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley.
Uttar Pradesh police did not respond to a request for comment, but a lawyer representing the state said that Kappan was receiving adequate medical treatment in jail, according to court records on Wednesday.
Even as a deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections ravages India, Kappan’s case has drawn widespread attention. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, which just months ago was declaring victory over the pandemic, has been accused of turning a blind eye to the risks of a resurgence at the same time as cracking down on India’s democratic freedoms. Dozens of journalists were arrested in India last year amid a wider crackdown on dissent, according to U.S.-based NGOFreedom House. Now, the government is leaning on tech companies, too. At the same time as Kappan was chained to his hospital bed, the Indian governmentdemandedthat Twitter and Facebook block dozens of posts that criticized the government’s handling of the pandemic, including some by elected opposition lawmakers.
“India will never forgive PM Narendra Modi for underplaying the corona situation in the country and letting so many people die due to mismanagement,” said one of the tweets that was blocked in India after the Modi government’s legal demand. Its author, Moloy Ghatak, is a cabinet minister in the state of West Bengal, where Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) hopes to defeat the All India Trinamool Congress party in elections this spring.
On Wednesday police in the BJP-run state of Uttar Pradesh, where Kappan is imprisoned,charged a manwith “spreading misleading information” after he shared tweets seeking an oxygen cylinder for his grandfather. Yogi Adityanath, the state’s chief minister, has ordered police to seize the property of anyone spreading “rumors” of oxygen shortages. Adityanath also reportedly ordered “action” to be taken against hospitals that werereporting shortages of oxygenand beds amid a spike in cases in the state, which has the highest population in India.
Also on Wednesday, the Indian Supreme Court dismissed a legal plea for Kappan’s immediate release, but ordered he be moved to a hospital in New Delhi. He should be transferred back to jail in Uttar Pradesh upon being discharged from that hospital, the court said.
India ranks 142 out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders (RSF)2021 world press freedom indexpublished in April. “The unjustified detention of Siddique Kappan has turned into the worst of nightmares to the point where it is now a matter of life or death,” said Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk, in astatementcalling for his immediate release. “[Kappan] should never have been arrested for simply trying to do his job. If he does not survive, the provincial authorities will bear responsibility for his death.”
Earlier this year, Freedom House downgraded India’s democracy rating from “free” to “partly free,” citing attacks on press freedom as a contributing factor. “Attacks on press freedom have escalated dramatically under the Modi government, and reporting has become significantly less ambitious in recent years,” the NGO said. “Authorities have used security, defamation, sedition, and hate speech laws, as well as contempt-of-court charges, to quiet critical voices in the media.”
While independent media do exist, many are fighting losing battles against the government. In February, the government brought innew rulescovering digital publishing that give officials the power to block the publication of stories or even shut down entire websites. “There are very few independent news channels in the country,” says Dr. Gagandeep Kang, co-author ofTill We Win: India’s Fight Against The COVID-19 Pandemic.
Raihanath Kappan, the wife of the jailed journalist, told TIME that his colleagues know him as a calm and composed reporter who rarely shows frustration or anger. His reporting, she said, tends to focus on those persecuted by the law—which is why he traveled from his base in Delhi to report on the gang-rape in Uttar Pradesh. “He speaks for persecuted people,” Raihanath says. “He reports the truth without thinking about the consequences for himself.”
It was a speech heavy on domestic policy, detailing ambitious plans to revamp American infrastructure, education, jobs and healthcare. But at the heart of U.S. President Joe Biden’s first address to Congress late Wednesday lay a theme common with his mercurial predecessor: competition with China to “win the 21st century.”
In a departure from prepared remarks on the eve of his first 100 days in office, Biden felt it necessary to spell out that Chinese President Xi Jinping “is deadly earnest on [China] becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world. He and others, autocrats, think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century.”
Referencing a two-hour telephone conversation he had with China’s strongman on the eve of the Lunar New Year holiday in February, Biden said, “I told him that we welcome the competition — and that we are not looking for conflict. But I made absolutely clear that I will defend American interests across the board.”
Biden’s tone was far less acrimonious than that of Donald Trump — who went conspicuously unmentioned throughout the 65-minute address to a half-empty Capitol — but left onlookers in no doubt that checking Beijing’s rise will dominate U.S. foreign policy under the new administration.
“Decades ago, we used to invest 2% of our GDP on research and development,” said Biden. “Today, we spend less than 1%. China and other countries are closing in fast.”
In a departure from the “whole of society” competition that characterized bilateral relations under Trump, the president said that he would seek ways to work with China where interests aligned. In an easing of COVID-19 restrictions Monday, U.S. officials announced that Chinese students due to attend American universities after July 31 were free to enter the country.
Yet there was no mention of an end to the trade war that has so far cost tens of billions of dollars and up to 245,000 American jobs, according to one study. Far from scrapping the tariffs, Biden championed his own nativist economic policy: “American tax dollars are going to be used to buy American products made in America that create American jobs.”
“There’s no reason the blades for wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing,” he added. “No reason why American workers can’t lead the world in the production of electric vehicles and batteries.”
When it comes to human rights and democratic principles, Biden also insisted that he would hold China to account. Last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken labeled Beijing’s treatment of its Uighur Muslim minority “genocide,” as the previous administration did.
“I told [Xi] what I’ve said to many world leaders — that America won’t back away from our commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms,” said Biden. “No responsible American president can remain silent when basic human rights are violated. A president has to represent the essence of our country.”
STR/AFP via Getty ImagesContainers are seen stacked at a port in Qingdao in China’s eastern Shandong province on January 14, 2020. China’s trade surplus with the United States narrowed in 2019 as the world’s two biggest economies exchanged punitive tariffs in a bruising trade war
Reactions to Biden’s Speech in China
Biden received a mixed reception in the world’s most populous nation, where some saw his preoccupation with the country as an attempt to intimidate. “Chinese leaders have never talked about China-U.S. competition,” tweeted Hu Xijin, the strident editor of Communist Party (CCP) mouthpiece Global Times. “It is you and your team who are talking about China every day. It seems that you have no idea what you should do if [you] don’t compare [yourself] with China. Pity.”
Wrote one cynical user on Weibo, the giant Chinese messaging platform, “On the 100th day of Biden’s arrival in the White House, my nostalgia for Trump is overwhelming.”
Said another: “Biden is tougher and more insidious with China than Trump. Trump is all explicit, Biden is more conspiratorial.”
But Trump’s full-throated attacks — especially his referring to COVID-19 as the “China Virus” and “Kung Flu” — made him deeply unpopular in China and contributed to the unleashing of Beijing’s belligerent “wolf warrior” diplomacy in response.
“You can’t just allow this kind of hostility or racism, to push China against the wall, so that people believe that the Chinese government is cornered without any way to hit back,” Victor Gao, director of the China National Association of International Studies, tells TIME. “Whatever differences there are between China and the United States, we need to have leadership and statesmanship with mature views of both sides to engage with each other.”
Trump’s animosity also enabled the CCP leadership to forge stronger cohesion within Chinese society, casting America as the common enemy. On a visit to Guanxi province last week, Xi visited the site of a key battle during the fabled “Long March” of China’s Civil War and said the fight should provide inspiration for overcoming current tribulations. “No matter how big our difficulties, we should think of the Red Army’s Long March and the bloody Xiang River Battle,” he said.
Many in China hope that Biden’s more statesmanlike approach will lower the geopolitical temperature. On Friday, Foreign Minister Wang Yi delivered a speech to the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations in which he said China would “welcome the Biden administration to return to multilateralism” and called on the White House to treat his nation fairly.
“The key is whether the United States can accept the peaceful rise of a major country with a different social system, history, and culture,” said Wang. “It is undemocratic … to label China as ‘authoritarian’ or a ‘dictatorship’ simply because China’s democracy takes a different form than that of the United States.”
But on this point, as with many, it was clear Wednesday that the two sides remain at odds. Biden declared that he wanted to be “leading with our allies” to preserve the liberal democratic order. “We will maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific just as we do with NATO in Europe — not to start conflict, but to prevent conflict,” he said.
The president added: “The autocrats will not win the future.”
Dusk is falling in the Indian capital, and the acrid smell of burning bodies fills the air. It’s the evening of April 26, and at a tiny crematorium in a Delhi suburb, seven funeral pyres are still burning. “I have lived here all my life and pass through this area twice a day,” says local resident Gaurav Singh. “I have never seen so many bodies burning together.”
Scenes of mass death are now unavoidable in what’s often called the world’s largest democracy. Social media is filled with images of body bags and urgent requests for medical aid. Indians gasping for breath are being turned away from overwhelmed hospitals, sometimes simply because they don’t have lab reports confirming COVID-19 infection. Health workers plead for basic supplies. “We feel so angry,” says Kanchan Pandey, a community health worker in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh. “At least give us some masks and gloves. Is there no value to our lives?”
Photograph by Saumya Khandelwal for TIMEAt a crematorium in New Delhi on April 27, Shivam Verma, in white PPE, helps carry the body of his sister-in-law Bharti, 48, who died of COVID-19.
Such devastation would have been hard to imagine just a few months ago. Children were back in school, politicians were on the campaign trail, and people were dancing at weddings. “Soon the winter of our discontent will be made glorious summer,” India’s usually staid central bank said in a Jan. 21 bulletin. The next day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi heralded the spirit of atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) that had helped India secure victories in two major battles: on the cricket field against Australia and in the pandemic.
“A positive mindset always leads to positive results,” he declared. That ebullience did not fade even as epidemiologists noted that cases were starting to rise in a few key states. On Feb. 21, Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party passed a resolution unequivocally hailing the “visionary leadership of Prime Minister Modi” in turning India into a “victorious nation in the fight against COVID.”
Two months later, India’s crisis has blown well past the scale of anything seen elsewhere during the pandemic. For six of the seven days beginning April 21, India set new global records for daily COVID-19 infections, repeatedly surpassing the 300,000 tally previously set by the U.S. Its total confirmed cases—more than 18 million—are second only to that of the U.S. By official counts, more than 200,000 have now died, and some 3,000 are dying per day. The true daily death toll is at least two times higher, says Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, from a caseload likely at least 10 times higher, based on modeling of data from the first wave.
India’s health system is on the brink of collapse. Hospitals across the country are running out of oxygen supplies, ventilators and beds. Indians are rushing to buy drugs like remdesivir, causing prices to surge, while labs struggle to process growing backlogs of COVID-19 tests. Its humanitarian crisis will not just be devastating for the country’s nearly 1.4 billion citizens. In the words of the director general of the World Health Organization, the pandemic is a global inferno: “If you hose only one part of it, the rest will keep burning.” In India, where crematoriums have been burning so long that their metal structures have started to melt, the hose isn’t even turned on yet.
Atul Loke—The New York Times/ReduxWith hospitals full, COVID-19 patients receive oxygen outside a Sikh temple in Delhi on April 25.Danish Siddiqui—ReutersA volunteer performs CPR on a woman with breathing problems in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, on April 24.Danish Siddiqui—ReutersFamily members mourn after Shayam Narayan, a 45-year-old COVID-19 patient and father of five, is declared dead outside the COVID-19 casualty ward at Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital in Delhi on April 23.
When the pandemicswept the world last year, India braced itself. Modi announced a sudden national lockdown in March, sparking an exodus of migrant workers, hundreds of whom died en route from cities to their hometowns. India’s economy was one of the hardest-hit in the pandemic, and lockdown was eased in June to allow businesses to reopen.
Cases peaked around 93,000 per day in September—less than a third of the daily tallies India is reporting this April—and then the curve began to flatten. A narrative emerged that India may have quietly achieved herd immunity, thanks to its comparatively young population—the median age is 27, and just 6.4% of Indians are over 65—and the fact that 66% of its population live in rural areas, spending most of their time outdoors. That optimistic account has since been complicated by two facts: cases are now hitting the young, and also surging in poor, rural states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
The scale of the current crisis may have been driven by more-transmissible variants, though data are limited because of a lack of widespread genomic sequencing, says Dr. Ashish Jha, dean at Brown University School of Public Health. Other factors are contributing to the surge. The virus moves quickly through the multigenerational households that account for 4 in 10 Indian homes. Chronic underfunding of the health system over decades has also left hospitals ill-equipped to deal with the surge.
India’s total health care spending is a mere 3.5% of GDP, far lower than in countries ranging from the world’s wealthiest like France (11.3%) and the U.K. (10%) to other emerging economies like Brazil (9.5%) and South Africa (8.3%). And only a third of India’s health care spending comes from the government, with the rest mostly coming out of citizens’ pockets. “It essentially means that those who can afford to purchase health can have it,” says Dr. Gagandeep Kang, a virologist and public-policy researcher at Christian Medical College, Vellore.
Arun Sankar—AFP/Getty ImagesAt a facility on the outskirts of Chennai on April 24, workers check medical oxygen cylinders that will be transported to hospitals.
For all those vulnerabilities, experts say the current crisis could have been avoided if the government had acted earlier. “It is the virus, but it’s way more than the virus,” says Sumit Chanda, an infectious-disease expert at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in California. “It’s equal parts complacency and incompetence.” Many Indians who took strict precautions last year abandoned their masks and gathered indoors when the broader public messaging implied that India had conquered the virus. They were “pristine prey,” as Mukherjee puts it, when the virus resurged this spring.
Crucially, this complacency was encouraged by the government’s “mission-accomplished mentality,” Chanda says. India’s leaders ignored warning signs in the data and the news of variants circulating in other countries. “By early March, it was really starting to be clear, and by late March, we had flashing red lights,” Brown’s Jha says. “Even then, the government was largely acting like there wasn’t anything serious going on.”
Rather than intensifying public-health messaging and ramping up interventions like banning mass gatherings and encouraging mask wearing, Modi and his officials did the opposite. They held mass rallies ahead of elections and promoted the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu pilgrimage that drew millions of worshippers to a single town—an event Jha predicts will end up “one of the biggest superspreader events in the history of humanity.” On April 17, after India had overtaken Brazil to become the second worst-hit country in the world, Modi told a rally in West Bengal that he was “elated” to see such a large crowd.
Modi’s insistence on atmanirbhar Bharat, the principle of self-reliance, also made India slow to approve and purchase foreign vaccines, including Pfizer-BioNTech’s, in favor of its own Covaxin. In the meantime, the government was keen to wield its heft as the “pharmacy of the world,” exporting doses even as it vaccinated only 0.2% of its population per day. “The complete policy complacency created a scenario where we allowed COVID-19 to get the better of us,” says Yamini Aiyar, president of the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. “We couldn’t have predicted the scale, but the complete lack of preparedness and crowding in pursuit of power is really unforgivable.”
Atul Loke—The New York Times/ReduxWorkers build new platforms to expand a mass cremation site in New Delhi on April 27.Saumya Khandelwal for TIMEClothes of the deceased lie on the terrace of a building within crematorium premises in New Delhi on April 27.Saumya Khandelwal for TIMEA man waits for his family’s turn to cremate the body of their loved one, who died from COVID-19, in New Delhi on April 27.
Though Modi hasbeen reluctant to admit failures handling the pandemic, his tone has become more somber as India has started airlifting oxygen generators and other supplies from abroad, with countries including Australia, the U.K. and even India’s rival Pakistan offering support. The White House is sending ventilators, test kits, PPE and oxygen concentrators to Delhi, and has overturned a ban on the export of raw materials India needs to ramp up vaccine production. In the short term, this emergency disaster relief—along with lockdowns in hot spots and a national mask mandate—is key to curbing the second wave.
In the longer term, vaccinations are desperately needed to prevent a third wave. Only 9% of Indians have had at least one vaccine dose (some, like Covaxin, require two doses), and the current pace of inoculation is too slow. It’s also not realistic, says Dr. Prabhat Jha, an epidemiologist at St. Michael’s Hospital, University of Toronto, for India to try to rapidly vaccinate 1 billion people. With limited vaccine supply, the most effective way to reduce transmission may be to target hot-spot areas and higher-risk people—which means India needs better data, fast.
How India handles its internal crisis is already having spillover effects. Modi has suspended India’s vaccine exports and is looking to import doses from other countries. This will have critical repercussions for millions in Africa and Latin America, who depend heavily on India’s vaccine production. Serum Institute, the Indian vaccine manufacturer, was already running behind. Expected to deliver 100 million doses for other countries by May, it so far has delivered only 20 million.
India may be far less wealthy than the Western countries now lending support, but it also has the tools to emerge from this crisis. It has a history of successful, large-scale immunization programs for diseases like polio and tetanus, first-rate scientists, highly trained doctors and powerful networks of community health workers. What has been lacking, experts say, is the political will to get ahead of the crisis—and to use data and science to its advantage. “Without data—on who is testing positive, where the hot spots of cases and deaths are, who is really vulnerable—there’s no easy way for India to walk out of the pandemic,” Prabhat Jha says.
Many say the government has lost sight of its priorities. As cases soared to record highs in April, the government ordered Twitter and Facebook to remove posts critical of the authorities. Independent journalists have scrambled to identify massive discrepancies between official figures and deaths. “Those who died will never come back,” the Chief Minister of Haryana said in response to questions on April 26 about whether COVID-19 deaths were higher than official figures. “There is no point debating if the number of deaths is actually more or less.”
Modi entered the pandemic with sky-high approval ratings of nearly 80%, and polls from as recently as January suggest those numbers have barely dipped. Now, anger is rising among those spending their days trying to find beds for relatives or caring for their communities. But for most Indians, whether Modi can survive this crisis is now less urgent than whether they can. “The cries for help are growing—but not our capacities,” says Usha Thakur, a community health worker in Najafgarh, Delhi. “The governments are fighting amongst each other. They don’t care about the people but it’s the people who are losing their loved ones.”
—With reporting byNilanjana Bhowmick/New Delhi, Alice Park/New York and Billy Perrigo/London
