Swine flu exposes ‘good governance’ claim of some BJP ruled states

At the time when the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi was vaunting in Delhi state elections in January this year of being “Kismatwala” (the fortunate one) in having ‘controlled’ inflation by chance as a consequence of international devaluation of petroleum products, some chief ministers of his party were not equally blessed and fell in the harrowing spell of swine flu epidemic around the same time. Swine flu first appeared in Mexico in 2009 and rapidly spread around the world. India was also not spared by this deadly virus and firstly in June and then in December 2009 it infected 27,236 persons in the country, out of whom 981 died. The virus killed 1,763 persons in 2010, 75 in 2011, 405 in 2012, 699 in 2013 and 218 in 2014. Before the present spell of the epidemic, 4,141 patients have succumbed to its virulence during the last five years. The current outbreak seems the most wide spread and most fatal one so far and it will immensely add into the number of H1N1 victims by the time it could be fully reined in by man-made or natural control. According to the information collected by the Department of Health, Government of India, this contagious disease has claimed the lives of 1,895 out of the total affected 31,974 persons up to March 20 and the virus is still active, making its presence felt all over the country, except in 8 states and union territories. Experts suspect that the figures should be higher and feel that the vast majority of swine flu cases are actually going unreported, as people do not have access to testing or do not realize they have the symptoms. It is really astonishing that some of the BJP ruled states are most affected by the current epidemic including Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. Is it merely a coincidence or it tells something else? Andaman & Nicobar, Arunachal Pradesh, Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Daman & Diu, Lakshadweep, Meghalaya, Sikkim and Tripura comprise those parts of the country where no hog flu case has been reported so far whereas in Jharkhand, Mizoram and Nagaland some cases of swine flu infection have been noticed but without any casualty. These are the same states and union territories where H1N1 activity has been less visible in previous years as well. Assam and Bihar has been those states where the virus did not have any effect during the earlier spells but currently 10 persons in Assam and 161 patients in Bihar have been found affected by the virus. Yet, the number of deaths in these states is limited to respectively two and one only. The BJP ruled states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh top the list of swine flu afflicted deaths. In Gujarat, the number of people who succumbed to the disease has climbed to 407 out of 6,330 affected persons there. In Rajasthan, which is another worst affected state, the death toll has become 398 while the number of infected patients in the state stood at 6,356. The death toll in Maharashtra rose to 342 with 4,007 people having contracted the H1N1 virus. In Madhya Pradesh, 279 people have been killed by the virus from among its 2,069 victims. The question remains why is it happening that both numbers of persons affected and dying due to swine flu have been overridingly high in some BJP ruled states only. No doubt, Delhi has been another worst affected state in this regard, with the fourth largest number of reported cases of around 4,000, but casualties are proportionately very less there. Here arises the point to ponder. The crisis management in case of any pandemic calls for at least five specific measures: awareness, diagnostic and treatment facilities, availability and access to medicine, isolation of affected people and areas and monitoring of reach and impact. The unrestraint spread of H1N1 virus in some states speaks of failure on these grounds to some or larger extent. The New Year did not bring good news for the family of 44 year old Indira Devi who died on January 1 at Jaipur after a brief treatment leading to the first swine flu related death this year in India. Then a death trail followed in Rajasthan, initially at the rate of one death per day and mounting to the present 8 deaths per day. Gradually it spread to different parts of the state as well to other parts of the country. The virus did not spare even the former chief minister of Rajasthan, Ashok Gehlot, and the current home minister of the state, Gulab Chand Kataria, who were detected swine flu positive and were duly treated. Up to mid-February, the death toll in Rajasthan and Gujarat – the two worst affected states – stood at 183 and 150 respectively. Soon the number of cases in Gujarat overtook that of Rajasthan, and Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh also emerged as other hotspots in the country. Delhi has emerged as the best-performing state in controlling swine flu with only eleven of the 4,137 people infected succumbed to the virus till date, comprising 0.27% deaths of the overall detected cases. It remains 6.2% in Rajasthan, 6.4% in Gujarat, 8.5% in Maharashtra and 13.5% in Madhya Pradesh. Delhi’s better results have been achieved due to high alertness, early diagnosis and proper treatment. Deepankar De Sarkar remarks, “There is a clear need for more data on the swine flu outbreak: Is it spreading in certain geographical clusters within the states? In some population groups? Why is the incidence high in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh? Why is the mortality rate low in Delhi, a city that remains a magnet for migration from the rural areas?” The national convener of Jana Swasthya Abhiyan, Amit Sengupta, gives the answer to the riddle. He comments, “The steadily climbing death toll in India is an indictment of its abject public health system—without doubt, many lives could have been saved. There is little doubt, too, that most of the victims of swine flu are poor—people with little access to emergency medication, leave alone protective seasonal flu jabs.” The outbreak had exposed the hollowness of the public health system, especially in the matter of preparedness and monitoring of drug stocks, Sengupta further remarked. It is alarming to note that the average 5.66% mortality rate in the present outbreak is unimaginably high. In 2009 it was just 0.02%. In the post-World War I Spanish flu epidemic, which killed 50-100 million people, it was 2.5%. If it is so high after the formation of BJP governments at the center and in Rajasthan and Maharashtra and their continuance in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh on the poll promise of good governance, this is an unbecoming statement of swine flu on its realization. It seems that swine flu did not give any credence to the much talked about Gujarat model and fell heavily upon local people. The BJP state governments are engaged in such non-issues as Surya Namaskar, Saraswati Poojan, banning beef eating, etc and the party’s allies are lobbying for the establishment of Hindu Rashtra, procreation of more Hindu children and attacking minorities in one of the other plank for exerting a conservative agenda instead of creating awareness on the fatal outbreak. Even if they acted, they attempted to fight the virus through their conservative approach to start with. In the later phase, the Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda had to deny that the government was not combating the virus by some herbal materials and he assured that modern methods of prevention, diagnosis and treatment would be applied on the front. The insensitivity of the BJP government towards the sprawling epidemic could be marked from the fact that only after one and half months of the first death, the union health ministry got awakened, when already 500 citizens have succumbed to it. On 13 February 2015, the Health Ministry began the procurement process of 60,000 units of Oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and 10,000 units of N-95 masks and a tender was floated for 10,000 diagnostic kits to fight the menace. As a matter of fact, the swine flu has made it evident that one of the election promises of the BJP in recent times to ensure good governance remains unfulfilled, at least as of now. Its governments are miserably failing on the fronts of education and health as the prime indicators of good governance.   Source: MuslimMirror