Daijiworld Media Network - New Delhi
New Delhi, Apr 30: After Indian foreign policy establishment sought to lecture 'The Australian' which had said, "Modi leads India into a viral apocalypse", Le Monde, the French newspaper blamed Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his 'arrogance and demagogy' as much as the 'unpredictability of the virus' for the second deadly wave of the pandemic.
“The spectacle of lines of ambulances at the gates of overwhelmed hospitals, of sick people’s relatives begging in vain to obtain oxygen and of mass cremations does not lie. From cities to rural areas, from the rich to the poor, the carnage does not spare anyone. Declining until February, the curve of new infection is nearly vertical,” Le Monde said in its editorial.
“Such a backfiring cannot be explained solely by the unpredictability of a virus and its variants. Narendra Modi’s lack of prediction, arrogance and demagogy are clearly among the causes of a situation that now seems out of control and requires international mobilisation. The Prime Minister, after paralysing and traumatising his country in 2020 by decreeing a brutal confinement, abandoning millions of migrant workers, completely lowered his guard at the beginning of 2021,” the editorial added.
The French newspaper took note of the campaign rallies Modi held even as cases rose, sans mask and social distancing. It observed that Modi allowed the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage where millions immersing themselves into the Ganga were turning the place into a 'giant hotbed of contagion'.
The editorial tore apart Modi’s much publicised vaccine strategy, contending that the vaccine diplomacy was subservient to his ambitions, ignoring the reality of the country’s production capacities.