Who Let The Hyenas Out?

 

It was an onslaught that shook India. 

Not only did the virus raise its ugly head once again and touch every doorstep in some way but it also seemed as if the rest of the world had descended upon us, almost in jubilation, feeding on our grief. 

Finally, India was experiencing the chaos, mayhem, suffering, death that they had been predicting and eagerly hoping for since the first attack of Covid-19. Not since the Migrant Labour Exodus had such a juicy bone been thrown to them, to chew on. 

WhatsApp, social media, phone calls were abuzz with a lexicon that not many want normally to familiarise themselves with - Remdesivir, oxygen concentrators, ventilators, plasma!

Heightened anxiety and panic was made worse by scavengers hoping to catapult into fame by baying and circling hospital corridors, wards, cremation grounds and now even ICUs, for that one perfectly captured image of a suffering person, not caring in the least if they were bereft of dignity in private grief.

Occasional moments of calm, achieved by barely silencing the cacophony in one’s head and observing the littered landscape were cruelly shattered by faces and voices on television, on social media, familiar and shrill - lecturing, virtue signalling, hectoring. 

From deriding a shortage of oxygen cylinders to ICU beds...

From encouraging vaccine hesitancy, then disparaging our vaccines to mocking vaccine diplomacy...on to questioning the shortage of vaccines....

From going on and on about a ‘broken’ healthcare system, selectively ignoring decades of neglect....

Rarely assuring people that our suffering was not unique and that every country, even with an enviable healthcare system had faced this attack as best as it could and yet not quite successfully...

It finally all boiled down to blaming the Modi Government for mishandling the situation.

The image that best encapsulates those days is a lone man surrounded by snarling hyenas, fangs bared, salivating in anticipation of the kill. Now going for his leg, then his arm, tearing flesh in a howl of glee.

Was the delivery van carrying oxygen cylinders intercepted at the gates of New Zealand High Commission the moment of epiphany or was it the radio silence after the Government of India demanded an audit of the available oxygen stock?

It took but a single tweet of Minhaz Merchant to bring everything into focus. 

Yes, seriously, it was only a four-week window, for every issue, question, doubt to be crammed into a wall of noise that would make us come to believe that Apocalypse Now was upon us and we were surely doomed to oblivion.  

Soon after, the ToolKit was exposed. 

The veracity of the document is still to be confirmed. Yet even if didn’t exist there was/is certainly a template that was/is being followed.

~It is important to keep using this term ‘super spreader Kumbh’ to keep reminding the people that it is the Hindu politics of BJP that is causing so much distress~

~Our non-party office bearers and supporters can be encouraged to use social media posts to highlight by carefully using pictures, that Kumbh is a show of political power in the name of religion while Eid gatherings are happy social gatherings of families and communities~

Both main stream and social media were strewn with this canard till it was countered....

~International media has already tried to establish this. Collaborate with like-minded international media and journalists to further the same narrative~

Some of our journalists played the role of tourist guides and touts promising sights and wares to their foreign counterparts - Come!Come! At special prices we will show you something that you will never forget!

No doubt, there were frightening shortages experienced in the availability of drugs, hospital beds. But with sustained focus, quiet and practical determination the status improved to the extent that hospital administrators and doctors who till recently were posting on Twitter “only one hour of oxygen” melted away.

~Liaise with local ground level political leaders in cities to keep some beds and other facilities blocked in friendly hospitals to be released only on our request~

As in one recent video clip, a driver of an oxygen tanker parked for five days with eight others in Delhi said with some satisfaction – Sab shaant hai.

~Mobilise former civil servants to raise questions about PM Cares like 

they did earlier~

A weary Veteran said of them recently - Opportunists and Post Event Specialists!

~If any celebrity donates to PM Cares, then aggressively question them. If they are on social media, then use Congress social media department to harass them~

~Modi’s vanity project amidst the pandemic~

First, to sow seeds of anger by implying that a proposal on the anvil since UPA2 was about PM Modi's 'mahal'. Then to infer the connection between vaccines, hospitals, availability of oxygen with the Central Vista Project exposed an embarrassing ignorance of how  budgetary allocations are made.

Followed by editorials of architects and sculptors, favoured by the Ancien Regime displaying ugly snobbery, a scant knowledge of architectural styles, rants of professional jealousy, liberally scattering extreme terms such as fanatic, fascist, disastrous, coerced, destruction...that ended up (phew!) muddying their own reputations and credibility.

 

                   

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As we will struggle to recover from this assault, both, of virus and dangerous opportunists, we know as people accustomed to natural and man-made calamities, survivors of the worst, that there may well be a Third Wave. 

Not only since it has come to light that the virus was allegedly leaked, knowingly or unknowingly, from a laboratory in Wuhan, China but even before in many groups and circles, people have voiced suspicion that the Second Wave was nothing less than a deliberate act of bio-warfare.

Also, not too long ago it was brought to light that during UPA1 in 2008, the Congress Party and the Communist Party of China (CPP) had signed a deal in Beijing. 

It must be reiterated that it was not a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between two Nations but between two foreign political parties. 

This MoU was to provide the two foreign parties with the “opportunity to consult each other on important bilateral, regional and international developments”.

We demand to know, what may they be?

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So now there is only one question that Indians who care deeply about this country, their future and that of their children must ask the Government in office, as they pick up pieces to resume life and work.

Will these people who created divisions, agitation, confusion, hopelessness, panic and anger with rumours, lies and criminal activities of procurement, hoarding and negligence, at a time of National Crisis be investigated, prosecuted and incarcerated for their treacherous crimes?

No doubt, there are many serious matters at hand -

the ongoing battle with the virus, 

the logistics of the vaccination drive 

and of course the unwieldy business of governing India, 

as is the tension on our borders with China....

But, if truth be told what is most alarming here and now, is the Trojan Horse planted and standing in full view with its exposed soldiers plotting daily at carving out the heart of this country - deeply disturbing and debilitating to a pandemic weary people. 

Till this Horse is slayed we will lurch from one cataclysm to the next, treating the symptom not the cause.

For us, their actions and their words are not in any way less than an Act of War.

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