The saga of suffering continues unabated and unchecked. If the cities in India were gasping for breath in the absence of oxygen, villages across northern and western India are now suffocating due to the lack of life-saving gas and basic medical facilities.

For over a month, since the second wave of Covid-19 hit the country, India has travelled back in time by at least 100 years. The nation is as devastated as it was during the Spanish flu that wrought havoc in British India between 1918 and 1920, killing over 12 million people.

We might not have lost as many lives as 100 years ago but the magnitude of suffering, lack of preparedness and callousness of the government are not less than the British regime.

It is not that the pandemic has hit suddenly, it has been there with us for almost a year, there were sufficient warnings about the second wave and the government in Delhi was aware about the urgency to address the medical infrastructure of the country.

Countries across the world that prepared themselves after the first wave were alert about the impending danger. They made the arrangements — be it improving the health sector or expediting the vaccination process to cover as many people as possible.

What has India been doing in the last one year? Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, which never fails to raise India-first slogan and play nationalist card at the drop of a hat, failed to prioritise India and its people. Ever since the beginning of his second term, Modi has been so preoccupied with pursuing his Hindu majoritarian agenda that he forgot the people who trusted him and gave him a historic mandate.

Even at the peak of the pandemic in early April, Modi and his party were busy campaigning in regional elections in West Bengal, the largest state in eastern India which the BJP wanted to wrest to consolidate and expand its majoritarian imprint. Perhaps the people of the eastern state understood the design of the BJP and gave it a historic drubbing.

The crucial one year that the government got since March 2020 when the first wave hit India was wasted due to the ruling party’s preoccupation with politics. The government created a PM Cares Fund where all the donations and contributions meant to fight the Covid would go. The central government became the sole in charge of dealing with the pandemic and the states had to follow direction.

When the second wave hit the country in late March and early April this year we were as unprepared as we were a year ago. Our testing facilities were as inadequate as last year, we could not arm ourselves with sufficient oxygen plants and facilities and hospital beds went into short supply in the very first week of the surge.

The government is squarely responsible for not only not containing the virus but also for acting as a super spreader.

In January, the PM declared victory against the Covid when the world’s leading countries were arming themselves against the surge in cases. This premature chest thumping sent a bad signal to the people across the nation who lapped up the government’s lies.

Then came the election in the West Bengal. The government forced the pliant Election Commission to hold eight-phase elections, thereby stretching the campaign for over a month. The regional election could have been wrapped up by the middle of April but the Election Commision refused to listen to reason and sage suggestions from the civil society and opposition parties.

Modi, along with his whole central government, remained engaged with the elections even after the surge in virus was claiming hundreds of lives. India is paying the price for the BJP’s obsession with politics and its hegemonic ambition.

The BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest and most populous state, went ahead and conducted local level elections despite protests from teachers and civil society. The BJP wanted to monopolise the local bodies before holding the regional elections next year. This political calculation thrust election on a hapless people and today they are suffering. The local elections not only exposed thousands of school teachers, who were on election duty, to the virus but also took the pandemic to the rural hinterland that had remained unscathed in the first wave.

According to media reports, over 1,500 school teachers lost their lives in the elections that took place in several phases between March and early April. The penetration of virus caused havoc in the villages and let loose blood baths. Thousands of dead bodies lie half buried and thrown in the Rivers Yamuna and Ganges in Uttar Pradesh. They do not figure in official statistics. The suffering in the villages showed how no effort had been made over the last one year to address the poor medical infrastructure in rural areas.

The permission to hold the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival where over three to four million people gather at a place in the course of one month to take holy dip, was also a blunder. The festival in the northern city of Haridwar, between mid March and end of April proved a super spreader.

Finally, the government has had a lacklustre vaccination policy. New Delhi launched the vaccination drive on January 16 with the ambitious goal of inoculating some 300 million people above the age of 45 by July-August. From the first of May the government added another 600 million to the vaccination list by including the adult population above the age of 18.

This drive was lost in optics with the government not ordering enough doses to inoculate the first category. Governments world over ordered two or three times the number of doses strictly needed for their populations to reach out to as many people as possible. India, however, has still not inoculated even 10 percent of its population. The so-called largest producer of vaccine in the world is now facing vaccine shortage not because of the manufacturers but because of the lack of foresight by the Modi regime. At this rate, India will take another three years to vaccinate 75 percent of its population.

The number of cases has started coming down but patients are still dying and suffering is widespread. India is a wounded nation. The country has never looked as helpless as it looks now.

Amidst the crisis when the need of the hour is to save as many lives as possible the government and its machinery and the whole right wing ecosystem are worried about saving Modi’s image as a mascot of majoritanism. The government leaders worry that Modi is getting bad press locally and internationally. If the buzz in the media circle is to be believed the government has asked the Indian media not to name Modi in their Covid reports and blame the system for the failure.

No matter how hard the BJP and its echo system try, Modi is a diminished man after this crisis. He has failed India and presided over the sufferings of the millions of people. His majoritarian political agenda has wrought untold misery on this nation. To hope that this crisis will help the ruling party learn some lessons is to live in denial.

The writer is a New Delhi-based journalist covering South Asia