Dear Government,
Hindsight is a great tool for objectivity, for course correction or even soul searching.
Your hindsight though has thrown up insensitivity and utter callousness.
Your singularly horrifying statement that ‘no deaths due to lack of oxygen were specifically reported by states and union territories in the COVID-19 wave’ has been brazen at best. You might be syntactically correct hiding behind a technicality but what about the underlying semantics?
It is not hyperbolic to say after the second wave of the pandemic that hit India in April 2021, there weren’t many families that were untouched by the horrors unleashed by COVID-19.
Every family knew either someone who was affected or someone who lost a loved one.
It was herculean to get a hospital bed. People were turned away from the gates. People died gasping in their homes, outside the inundated hospitals, while the loved ones ran around helter-skelter, trying to arrange for that elusive cylinder.
Doctors were working the phones, flooding the social media saying they were running out of oxygen and patients would die. Many Hospitals such as New Delhi's Batra Hospital, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital and Jaipur Golden Hospital and Goa Medical College (GMC) in Goa had reported deaths due to lack of oxygen. More than seven hospitals in Delhi moved the Delhi High Court as a last resort. This has been the situation as reported by many mainstream dailies. The real picture however is far more gruesome. Ask any afflicted, or a front line worker or a final-rites man. There are multiple tragic stories hidden behind their barely dry eyes.
It was like a crisis none other when doctors broke down helplessly.
The standard of good governance is how a government gets its act together in a crisis. As governance came to a standstill it was left to us citizens to help each other.
Strangers became friends. Friends became family.
We tried. We tried hard. Yet so many succumbed.
Parking lots got converted into crowded crematoriums.
And the living were left with scarring memories of seeing their loved ones die in spite of their best efforts, prayers, and more.
After all this mayhem, when you declared in the hallowed portals of the parliament, that no one died due to lack of oxygen, you scratched open our still raw wounds.
The dead deserved some acknowledgement, some respect.
Their grieving families, wondering at the futility of all, have not even found the closure yet.
You left us seething at the rampant insensitivity.
The wise say that transparency is essential for vibrant governance. Your owning up to the mistakes committed would have worked as a balm to our festering wounds.
A sincere apology would have been accepted gracefully.
Sorry! A word with such immense healing power!
If only you had the courage to say ‘Yes, there has been a bungling, a Himalayan mistake, a costly error of judgement’
If only you weren’t this insensitive and this blatant!
If only there was accountability!
Where does the onus of responsibility lie?
Anupama Jain is the author of 'When Padma Bani Paula', a breezy novel about acing the second chances of life by staying true to one’s roots, and 'Masala Mix: Potpourri Of Shorts', a short story collection on the myriad manifestations of love. A community builder, a multi-awarded blogger, and an educator, Anupama is based out of Gurugram
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