Are the British Exploiting COVID-19 Crisis in India, in an Attempt To Remove Modi?

June 26, 2020 (EIRNS)—The British oligarchy is attempting to exploit the very real surge of COVID-19 throughout India, as a shaped charge to attack, and perhaps to remove Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The June 23 Washington Post, penned by its “Global Opinions contributing writer” Rana Ayyub, is titled “An Exploding Coronavirus Crisis Shows Modi Is Not Up to the Task of Leading India.” “Modi has now joined the disastrous ranks of populist like President Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro,” Ayyub writes, “who have displayed an extreme lack of empathy and repressed critical voices to further their own political interests during the pandemic.” Modi, she charges, is the force to “slide India’s democracy further into darkness as the novel coronavirus strengthens its grip on India.”

Consortium News meanwhile headlined its June 26 story as “COVID-19: The Dangerous Incompetence of Narendra Modi & Jair Bolsonaro,” again attempting to pair Modi with the hapless Brazilian President. The story’s author, Vijay Prashad, an Indian Marxist historian, pens the sub-headline, “The alarming news about the virus in Brazil and India, where neither government is taking a science-based approach or showing a regard for the people.”

Neither story addresses the fact that India’s economy, for decades, has had fundamental problems, created and nurtured by the British and World Bank. India has limited health infrastructure and significant poverty, inherited from 200 years of British rule (1747–1947). While the global average is to have 1.6 doctors and 3.8 nurses for every 1,000 people, India has only 0.9 physicians and 1.7 nurses. India would have to expand its hospitals by 500,000 additional beds to reach a level of 4.5 per 1,000 people.

While India has had an ambitious program to eliminate rural poverty, there are still considerable pockets, in cities such as New Delhi and Mumbai, two coronavirus hot spots. India today recorded the highest single-day spike of 16,922 COVID-19 cases, bringing its total to 488,200—the fourth-highest level in the world—with 15,288 deaths.

George Orwell on the Coup:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

―George Orwell, 1984