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ANIKET_SRV
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So is India back to being a 'Third World country, dependent once again after 16 years on aid from other countries? No, and Yes. No, because India has given aid before getting it. As the foreign secretary has said, it’s an interdependent world. Besides, this is a once-in-a-century event, and mistakes will be made, so let's cut some slack to those in charge. But the answer is also Yes because extraordinary bungling and incompetence lie at the root of the need for emergency help from overseas. Institutional weakness is a feature of most Third World countries and explains the two most egregious failures of the last few months: To set up planned oxygen plants and to ramp up vaccine-manufacturing capacity. Add to that the failure to spot those failures before funeral fires began overwhelming us, despite official busy-making by high-level task forces and committees.
In many ways, India has returned to type. Like its weakness for declaring victory midway as with the virus, or at Doklam or its new variant, celebrating setback as a victory, as at Depsang. Also making a comeback is the old prickliness about criticism overseas. That prickliness sits poorly with the reports on the guardians of red tape turning away a foreign vaccine manufacturer, doubtless by following the rules. We are the world’s vaccine capital, after all except that daily vaccinations have dropped from three million to two million in a country that needs upwards of two billion.
The inadequacies (like not having a proper public health infrastructure) have long been obvious and commented on, but were obscured by more recent successes that had begun, however belatedly, to script a different story. So India moved from "Third World" to "Emerging Marke"t; in some especially patriotic eyes, even a potential superpower. The virus has merely exposed that obscured underbelly for the world to see and report. The same world that had been happy to join in the cheering of recent successes while, perhaps out of politeness, not puncturing the puffed up comparisons with China. So the counterpoint to the super-patriots is the predictable schadenfreude in recent andolanjeevi comments about premature triumphalism. A mature view would acknowledge failures and successes, the jobs done, and remaining to be done.