Truth hurts but lies kill, calling for culpability.
As an eagle-eyed Supreme Court monitors implementation of its order on the compensation claims of Covid-19 deaths countrywide, stashed skeletons are tumbling out of graveyards, clothing governments in a litany of lies. Gujarat is a frothing frontrunner with the number of deaths pole-vaulting ten times over the official numbers, followed closely by Telangana with a dubious eight times.
But what is coming out, thanks only to the heave-ho efforts of the Indian judiciary, is the way the executive has been deviously complicit in denying the large mass of its own Corona consumed citizenry the decency due to the dead. Also, how the Centre indulged in foot-dragging even over a symbolic compensation for which judicial bells needed to be tolled vociferously.
Why should the high courts and the Supreme Court need to push governments, both the Centre and the states, to do what should come naturally to them? And elected governments installed by the very people be in constant denial of the deaths using a moth-eaten fig leaf of official procedures?
The Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is on record stating before the Supreme Court in June last year that Rs 4 lakh compensation cannot be paid as it would exhaust the disaster relief funds and also that it was beyond the fiscal affordability of the state governments.
It was only after the insistence of the apex court that compensation would have to be paid, and the Centre may fix the amount that it got back in September 2021 with a figure of Rs 50,000 to be paid by the states and sourced from their disaster response funds.
Interestingly, the PM-CARES Fund has spent only 36.17 per cent of the Rs 10,990 crore collected till March 2021. The fund was created in March 2020 to provide relief and deal with an emergency. Again, the Centre had no financial stress in spending Rs 6,900 crore in advertising since it came to power in 2014-15, Rs 1,700 crore in the last three years, as the information and broadcasting minister stated in Parliament on February 8. This does not include the amount spent by public sector boards and corporations in singing paeans to the government. Also, see the free-flowing freebie promises from the very entities in the ensuing elections to five states. Out of power, the sky is on offer, but once in power, even the dignity of a pandemic death must be fought for.
Gujarat, projected as the model state of the country, provides the best case study. It is the home state of Prime Minister Modi, who helmed the state government for about 13 years and his party, the BJP, for almost a quarter-century. It is a different matter that during the bulk of his chief ministerial tenure, between 1999-2000 and 2009-10, the state slipped from the fourth to the eleventh position in per capita health expenditure and the total state expenditure on health over the same period from 4.39 per cent to 0.77 per cent.
All along, the BJP-ruled government had stoically stuck to 10,094 (10,164 as of January 17, 2022) Covid related deaths. In details placed before the Supreme Court, the Gujarat government admitted that till February 3, 2022, it has received 1,02,230 Covid-19 death claims, approved 87,045 and disbursed the compensation amount of Rs 50,000 to 82,605 families while rejecting 8,994 applications with 6,000 applications still under scrutiny. The figure for children orphaned in Gujarat due to the pandemic stands at 5,867, with compensation paid in 3,287 of these cases. Caught in the act, the state government has sought to explain the discrepancy in numbers due to the Supreme Court amending the definition of coronavirus deaths last year.
Hardly lost in the obfuscation is that Gujarat High Court Chief Justice Vikram Nath had, on April 11, 2021, a Sunday, taken suo moto cognizance and initiated a public interest litigation (PIL). He had observed that media reports on the pandemic indicated the "state is heading towards a health emergency of sorts" and that there was an uncontrolled upsurge and serious management issues in Covid-19 control."
News media reports in Gujarat for the period are full of descriptions of how government agencies sought to stonewall the collection of real-time death data by journalists. Even police were used to thwart them but came unstuck before the sheer daredevilry of the reporters who performed their duties at significant personal risk.
On April 6, a division bench headed by the chief justice had specifically summoned government counsels and suggested that a lockdown for a few days may help the state control the cases besides cracking the whip on social gatherings. The court had raised doubts about the actual number of Covid-19 cases and the numbers given by the state government.
In its order of April 16, 2021, the division bench of Chief Justice Vikram Nath and justice Bhargav Karia had asked the state government to release the actual figures of death of Covid-19 patients and those who died with co-morbid conditions. "Suppression and concealment of accurate data would generate more serious problems including fear, loss of trust and panic amongst the public at large," it had pointed out.
And this was not the first time that the Gujarat High Court had asked the BJP led government to come clean with disclosures and streamline the management of a medical crisis.
Apparently, the government and its bureaucracy had learnt no lessons from the disaster that befell a harried populace when the first Covid wave hit the country and the state in 2020. Then too, the high court, moved by the plight of the people, had suo moto initiated a PIL and hauled the Vijay Rupani government over the coals for its handling of the pandemic.
In an order on May 23, 2020, it had termed conditions at the Government Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad, where 377 Covid-19 patients had died by then, as "pathetic ". "The hospital is as good as a dungeon, maybe even worse," a division bench of justices JB Pardiwala and IJ Vora had observed as it issued a host of directions to the state government.
"Does the health minister of the state have any idea about the problems which patients, doctors, nursing staff and other employees are facing? How many times has the concerned minister interacted with medicos and staff on the spot to understand their difficulties?" the order stated. A year later, the high court again rallied to the help of the citizenry.
But for all the wake-up calls by the high court from one pandemic wave to another, a somnolent state government sat placid, in stubborn denial of the mountain high Carona-caused fatalities, clinging to a figure of around 10,000. Even after the Supreme Court directed the state governments through an order dated October 4, 2021, for paying Rs 50,000 to the next of kin of Covid-19 patients and disbursing the same within 30 days. The clear instructions emanating from the apex court said that no state government will deny the benefit because the cause of death on the death certificate is not Covid-19, and the district authorities should take remedial measures to get the cause of death correct.
The Gujarat government was again in the crosshairs of the apex court after lawyer Amit Panchal knocked at its doors to draw attention to a Gujarat government notification of October 29 forming a scrutiny committee to certify the claims. The notification is an attempt to 'overreach' the court's directions, the Supreme Court pointed out, slamming the Gujarat government for being insensitive to the sufferings of the bereaved by forcing them to "run from pillar to post" to get their compensation. The SC threatened to summon the state chief secretary and home secretary.
Taking advantage of the court order to simplify procedures through setting up district committees to address grievances of compensation seeking families, the government had gone ahead and appointed a scrutiny panel to award compensation inviting the ire of the judicial Supreme Court.
Not a day passes in Gujarat when newspapers and local TV channels do not carry advertisements with the PM and the CM's faces staring down at you for the most trivial of official reasons, sometimes an assortment of them. Yet when the SC bench of justices MR Shah and BV Nagarathna, on December 13, asked the Gujarat counsel if adequate publicity has been given to the compensation scheme in print and electronic media, the reply was that publicity had been given through All India Radio, eliciting a sharp retort. "Who listens to AIR, do so in newspapers particularly vernacular dailies," the bench said.
The primary issue this throws up is the conduct and culpability of an elected government and the bureaucracy that functions under it in fudging death figures and tackling a health emergency. Prime Minister Modi sought to whitewash the failures by replacing the Vijay Rupani-led BJP government in Gujarat lock, stock and barrel in September 2021, but this was to stave off anti-incumbency as elections are due in the state later this year. It merely amounted to brushing things under the carpet. The issue is culpability, and the need is to bring the guilty to book. You cannot run a funeral parlour without being accountable for it.
(The writer is an Ahmedabad-based veteran journalist)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the authors' own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.
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