A billion jabs becomes fodder for yet another Thank You Modiji campaign.

Friday, October 22, 2021, was a day to read the newspapers. Two newspapers that I get each morning carried the same lead guest editorial on their edit page and both dutifully informed us in the end of the published piece that the writer is the prime minister of India. They chose different headlines though, one going with Made in India, Made by India while the other went with Responding to Adversity with Achievement. 

It was the same press handout or piece though in which the PM was basically patting his government on the back for successfully giving one billion doses of the COVID 19 vaccines. The concluding paragraphs said nice things about “Team India” being a team of 130 crore people who have set a model for the world, benchmarks in public service delivery and so on. 

A third newspaper seemed to have missed the PM piece but more than compensated with Bill Gates as the lead opinion writer and he too was patting the Prime Minister of India on the back. We also got TV channels playing the PM’s speech making the same point about the great achievement through the day and the next day. 

India has indeed become the second nation in the world after China to cross the mark of one billion vaccines. But if we do the very basic math and have some general knowledge we must know that India is the world’s second most populated nation after China. Indeed, these are the only two nations in the world with a population that exceeds a billion so no one else can really beat us to that number and China is way ahead anyway having given 2.4 billion vaccines. So basically, two countries ran the billion race and we came a poor second but we are declaring wow, what a feat! 

Any editorial opinion should note that it’s not the number of vaccines that counts but the percentage of vaccinated population that is a test of how successful a vaccination programme is. On that front we are behind Nepal and Sri Lanka in our neighbourhood, Iran some distance away while Mexico, Turkey, Cambodia, Malaysia and Kazakhstan are way ahead of us.

As one of the world’s largest producers of vaccines, it’s a pretty average to poor performance. It is, however, better than how pathetically we were doing in the early months of the vaccination programme when there was utter chaos over state procurement, pricing and so on. Thankfully, things are better now but only 21 per cent of India’s population is fully vaccinated and 79 per cent is not. 

We have, however, been thanking Modiji since June this year just as we came reeling out of the deadly second wave of COVID. A grotesque campaign began just then in which we saw posters issued by the government of India departments thanking the chief executive for free vaccines, even as radio jingles mocked our misery as children’s voices kept saying thank you Modiji, thank you. 

Then came September when another Thank you Modiji campaign began timed apparently with the prime ministerial birthday on September 17, in which besides thanking Dear Leader for vaccines, the poor also got crores of ration bags with his face on them and thereby a chance to thank him for that as well! A double whammy of thanks.  

It would all be rather funny if it were not so tragic. But the truth is that it’s not clear if the people of India are really thanking anyone for living through an age of disease, hunger and joblessness. But departments of the government are certainly thanking the prime minister at every opportunity and the BJP and RSS, now completely comfortable with the cult of leadership, are happily doing so too. Media is broke, and consequently broken in spirit and resolve and just needs the advertisements that thanking the prime minister brings.