COVID Deaths : Hiding To Handwash Culpability !

BY R.K.MISRA

Truth hurts but lies kill , calling for culpability.

 As an eagle-eyed Supreme Court personally monitors implementation of its order on  the compensation claims of covid-19 deaths countrywide, stashed skeletons are tumbling out of graveyards, clothing governments in a litany of lies . Gujarat is a frothing frontrunner with the figure of deaths pole-vaulting ten times over the official numbers followed closely by Telangana with a dubious eight times.

But what is coming out, thanks only to the heave-ho efforts of the Indian judiciary, is the way the executive has been  deviously complicit in denying the large mass of its own  Corona consumed citizenry,  the decency due to the dead. Also how the Centre indulged in foot dragging even over a  symbolic compensation for which judicial bells needed to be tolled so vociferously.

Why should the high courts and the Supreme Court need to push Governments both the Centre and the states to do what should come naturally to them?. And  elected governments installed by the very people be in constant denial of  the deaths using a moth-eaten fig leaf of official procedures ?

The Narendra Modi led BJP government is on record stating before  the Supreme Court in June 2021 that Rs 4 lakh compensation cannot be paid as it would exhaust the disaster relief funds and also that it was beyond the fiscal affordability of the state governments.

It was only after the insistence of the apex court that compensation will have to be paid and the Centre may fix the amount, that it got back in September 2021 with a figure of Rs 50,000 to be paid by the states and sourced from their disaster response funds.

Interestingly the PM-CARES Fund  has spent only 36.17 per cent of the Rs 10,990 crores, it had collected till March 2021.The fund was created in March 2020 to provide relief and to deal with any kind of Emergency . Again, the Centre had no financial stress in spending Rs 6900 crores in advertising itself since it came to power in 2014-15, Rs 1700 crores of it  in the last three years, as the information and broadcasting minister stated in Parliament on Feb 8. And this does not obviously include the amount spent by public sector boards and corporations in singing paeans to the  government . Also, see the free flowing freebie promises from the very entities  in the ensuing elections to five states. Out of power the sky is on offer, once in power, even the dignity of a pandemic death must be fought for !

  Gujarat , projected as the model state of the country, provides the best case study. It is the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi who ruled over it for about 13 years and his party the BJP for almost a quarter century. It is a different matter that during the bulk of his chief ministerial tenure, between 1999-2000 to 2009-10, the state slipped from fourth to eleventh position in per capita health expenditure and the total state expenditure on health over the same period from  4.39 per cent to 0.77 per cent.

All along , the BJP-ruled  government had stoically stuck to 10,094 (10,164 as of January 17,2022) covid related deaths. In details placed before the Supreme Court, the  Gujarat government  admitted that till February 3,2022 it has received 1,02,230 covid death claims, approved 87,045 and disbursed the compensation amount of Rs 50,000 to 82,605 families while rejecting 8994 applications with 6000 applications  still under scrutiny. The figure for children orphaned in Gujarat due to the pandemic stands at 5867 with compensation being paid in 3287 of these cases. Caught in the act, the state government has sought to explain away the discrepancy in figures  due to the Supreme Court amending the definition of Corona virus deaths last year.

Hardly lost in the obfuscation is the fact that the Gujarat High Court  Chief Justice Vikram Nath had, on April11,2021,a Sunday, taken suo moto cognizance and initiated a public interest litigation(PIL) . He had  observed that media reports on the pandemic indicated that the “state is heading towards a health emergency of sorts” and that there was an uncontrolled upsurge and serious management issues in Covid-19 control”.

News media reports in Gujarat  for the period are full of descriptions of how government agencies sought to stonewall collection of real time death data by journalists. Even police was used to thwart them but came unstuck before the sheer daredevilry of the reporters who performed their duties at great personal risk .

On April 6, a division bench headed by the chief justice had specifically summoned government counsels and suggested that a lockdown for a few days may help the state in controlling the cases besides cracking the whip on social gatherings. The Court had raised doubts about the actual  number of Covid-19 cases and the numbers given by the state government.

On April 16,2021, in an order, the division bench of  Chief Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Bhargav Karia had asked the state government to release the actual figures of death of COVID-19 patients and those who died with co-morbid conditions. ”Suppression and concealment of accurate data would generate more serious problems including fear, loss of trust and panic amongst public at large”, it had pointed out.

And this was not the first time that the  Gujarat High Court  had asked the BJP led government to come clean with disclosures and  streamline management of a medical crisis.

Apparently, the government and it’s bureaucracy had  learnt no lessons from the  disaster that befell a harried populace when the first Covid wave hit the country and state in 2020 . Then too, the high court, moved by the plight of the people, had suo moto initiated a PIL and hauled the Vijay Rupani government over the coals for its handling of the pandemic. In an order on May 23, 2020, it had termed conditions at the Government Civil hospital in Ahmedabad  where 377 Covid-19 patients had died by then as “ pathetic “. “The hospital is as good as a dungeon, may be even worse “, a division bench of Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice IJ Vora had observed as it issued a host of directions to the state government. “Does the health minister of the state have any idea about the problems which patients, doctors, nursing staff  and other employees are facing ? How many times  has the concerned minister interacted with medicos and staff on the spot to understand their difficulties, the order questioned. A year later, it was  again the high court which rallied to the help of the citizenry.

But for all the wake-up calls, by the high court from one pandemic wave  to another, a somnolent state government sat placid, in stubborn denial of the mountain high Carona- caused fatalities, clinging to a  figure of around 10,000.  Even after  the Supreme Court directed the state governments, through an order dated October 4, 2021, for paying Rs 50,000 to next-of-kin of Covid-19 patients and for disbursing the same within 30 days. The clear instructions emanating from the apex court said that no state government will deny the benefit because the cause of death on the death certificate is not Covid-19 and the district authorities should take remedial measures to get the cause of death correct.

The Gujarat government was again in the cross-hairs of the apex court  after practicing lawyer Amit Panchal knocked at its doors to draw attention to a Gujarat government notification of October 29 forming a scrutiny committee to certify the claims. ”The notification is an attempt to’ overreach’ the courts directions, pointed out the Supreme Court, slamming the Gujarat government for being insensitive to the sufferings of the bereaved by forcing them to “run from pillar to post” to get their compensation. The Apex Court  threatened to summon the state chief secretary and home secretary.

 Taking advantage of the court order to simplify procedures through setting up of district committees to address grievances of compensation seeking families, the government had gone  ahead and appointed a scrutiny panel to award compensation inviting the ire of the judicial Supreme Court.

Not a day passes in Gujarat when newspapers and local TV channels do not  carry advertisements with the PM and the CM’s faces staring down  at you for the most trivial of official reasons, sometimes a multiplicity of  them. And yet  when the Supreme Court bench of Justices M.R.Shah and B.V.Nagarathna  on December 13, asked the Gujarat counsel if adequate publicity has been given to the compensation scheme in print and electronic media, the reply was that publicity had been given through All India Radio, eliciting a strong retort” who listens to AIR, do so in newspapers particularly vernacular dailies”, the bench said .

The primary issue that this throws up is the conduct and culpability of an elected government and the bureaucracy that functions under it  in fudging death figures and in tackling a health Emergency. Prime Minister Modi sought to whitewash the failures  by replacing the Vijay Rupani- led BJP government in Gujarat lock, stock and barrel in September 2021 but this was  to stave off anti-incumbency  as elections are due in the state later this year. It merely amounted to brushing things under the carpet. The issue is of culpability and the need is to bring the guilty to book.

You cannot run a funeral parlour without being accountable for it !

https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/in-gujarat-govts-concealing-of-covid-deaths-revealed-1081713.html