COVID-19 second wave has not damaged India’s international standing

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There’s a huge gap between how India is perceived and how India perceives itself. We’re an inferiority complex ridden, feel-good nation whose world view revolves around flattering documentaries and headlines.

For a country that fawns so much on a few words of praise from the West/developed world, we’re also notoriously touchy about criticism from the same folk. As a country whose self-worth seems disproportionately dependent on external validation, we often fail at putting our point across to the rest of the world.

These weak points are amplified during a national crisis, and the COVID-19 second wave has just done that. The problem isn’t about how the foreign press portrays India, it is about the collapse of intergovernmental communications, or sheer lack of articulation that is worrying.

Misconceptions 

The COVID-19 second wave has neither improved nor worsened India’s standing, but has just reinforced a stereotypical belief in foreign governments about India being a clueless, governance-deficit country with a penchant for hyperbole. To be fair, we did handle the first wave of the epidemic admirably; our health system did not collapse, deaths were (and to note still remain) very low compared to the population, even allowing for underreporting.

The government did, at least by December, accurately gauge that falling adherence to social distancing and masking norms would result in a second wave. What it did not account for, however, was the virulence of this second wave.

Another misconception that needs to be addressed is that there isn’t a shortage of products required to combat this wave, rather there is a severe logistics, transportation, and co-ordination problem. That said failures abound — bureaucratic and political at both the central and state government levels.

While tabs were being kept on production, the ball was dropped when it came to means of delivery. For a government machinery that prides itself on its managerial prowess, how could it fail to notice this missing link in the chain!

Commissions And Omissions 

The problem here isn’t a crime of commission, but rather an accretion of errors of omission, which thanks to Indian jurisprudence (and much to the relief of the political and bureaucratic class) aren’t treated as crimes. This has always played a distinct role in how we are perceived on the one hand by the western media and on the other by western governments.

The foreign press focuses on crimes of commission explanation, given that most of its representatives after a short stint in a metro become ‘India experts’ and depend on echo chambers. On the other hand, western governments, as a rule, prefer the errors of omission explanation. They invest in primary information which has enormous intelligence value, they benefit from inherited institutional knowledge and wisdom and are trained to write without hyperbole in a bland factual style.

Right Communication

Where the government failed was it confused foreign governments with the foreign press corps. When it should have proactively been briefing governments, be it during the Delhi riots or the Republic Day riots, it went into stealth mode refusing to brief privately or to communicate. Instead whatever communication happened was public displays of petulance, like the external affairs minister on the US council for religious freedoms. That isn’t healthy, that isn’t diplomatic, and that’s just pointlessly counterproductive.

So where does this COVID-19 second wave leave us? Has it damaged whatever ‘international standing’ we had? Emphatically, No!

It just left us exactly where we were in 2019 prior to our handling of the first COVID-19 wave. That is to say, the western press will continue to run stories about “rising intolerance”, and “neo-fascism” in India, and western diplomats will shed the awe of India they gained for managing the first wave, and go back to the default mode of gauging India as a governance-deficit country where incompetence abounds.

Some will feel empathy for the current situation, the less charitable will take sadistic pleasure that our boasts of having ‘conquered COVID-19’ were premature. All up, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.