External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar Wednesday said it was “not fair” to blame the Modi government for the country’s struggles with the second Covid-19 wave.
“I don’t think that it is fair (to blame the government) either in terms of diagnosing the problem really and in assessing how the government responded to it,” he said at an event organised by India Inc. in London.
Jaishankar is in London to attend the G7 Foreign Ministers’ meeting and will also take part in some bilateral meetings there.
Speaking at the event, Jaishankar said that about two to three months ago, India was registering less than 10,000 positive Covid cases a day and since then, it has gone up by 38 times, showing “how virulent the virus is.”
“You’ve got to really understand the intensity and the enormity… The first wave also caught us unprepared,” he said. “After all, nobody had foreseen a pandemic of this magnitude and intensity. But we scrambled in the first wave as a country, as a society, as a people to get our masks, our ventilators, our PPEs, our testing kits, that was the focus of the effort. It came at a great cost. The lockdown was very painful and I still think it was an effective decision at that point of time.”
He said as 2020 came to an end, numbers were only rising in Maharashtra and Kerala. He added that as Covid-19 numbers dipped, there was a “certain amount of public confidence because you wanted to revive the economy”.
“Today it is very easy to say you should have seen that coming and kept up your guard all the time. But what was the mood of the country at the beginning of the year, which was to get the economy going, get normalcy back,” Jaishankar said. “What happened though as numbers went down, the attempt to instil confidence created the kind of societal complacency that I think all of us are part of.”
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