A lot has happened in past two weeks in India, in the aftermath of Corona’s second wave. Indian government’s 24×7 efforts to fully mobilise all its machinery to supply medical equipment and provide aid to every nook and corner of the country have started showing the results. The graph of daily infected cases and daily Corona deaths have started showing a decline and the initially overhyped crisis of oxygen cylinders, shortage of hospital beds and other medication appears to have suddenly disappeared.

As wrote in my previous article that this is one subject I would always want to keep writing about. The worst thing that has come out from the crisis is that for some people in India, this pandemic crisis has come as an opportunity or they have treated it as an opportunity. Many opportunists in businesses, community and in political sphere left no stone unturned to take advantage of the situation and to malign the Indian government even at the cost of nation’s pride and dignity. What made the situation even worse was that a section of Indian media has been playing in hands of some staunch ant-India foreign forces. Historically, these foreign powers have always done everything to show India in bad light and to put halter in the way of India’s progress and development. These forces are well aware that if they do not create hurdles in the path of India’s progress, then there is no stopping to India from becoming a world leader soon. Adding salt to the injury is that this nexus of Indian media, politicians and anti-India forces have succeeded to some extent in their efforts to create a wrong impression about Indian government in minds of some Indians.

A harsh fact however has come out from some foreign media outlets, (that unfortunately is a guarantee for most Indians to trust) is that no country in the world was capable or prepared to handle this kind of crisis. The magnitude of this pandemic was so big and sudden that even the world’s most advanced countries were shaken, and all their medical infrastructure collapsed to the pressure of its magnitude. I sometime wonder about all those people who are now crying hoarse about the mismanagement in medical system in India and medical facilities being so inadequate to handle the crisis. Do we ever think that these facilities were never ever created or developed in a systematic or planned way in India in past 73 years? I have no intention of pollicising to such a sensitive issue but how can only the present government be held liable for all the debacles? This is despite of the fact that what has been done by the present government in past 6-7 years, which includes 1-1/2 years of Covid crisis, equates to what was done in previous 65-66 years.

This is for the first time in India’s recent (past 100 years) history that India was one of the first countries to develop a vaccine indigenously and has done the greatest number of vaccinations of 200 million so far. All other vaccines in the past could only reach India after a minimum of 10 years to up to 50 years, after they were invented. So, the world powers and the very powerful pharma lobby of the world could not digest this sudden rise of India in pharma sector. This pharma lobby considers India’s breakthrough in developing a vaccine, as a threat to their businesses which runs into several trillion dollars. They would go to any extent to stop India from marching forward including stopping the supplies of raw material to make these vaccines.

Actually, we should not blame foreign powers or anti-Indian forces of any wrongdoing as long as we have some weak links among our own people. There are many people in our own community who rely more on foreign information and foreign sources than their own. We will keep getting into such troubles until we all get wiser and start trusting our own people. – Yugal Parashar