The growing distress across India has tarnished Modi's aura of political invulnerability, which he won by steamrolling the opposition and leveraging his personal charisma to become India's most powerful politician in decades
FILE — A Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) campaign poster featuring India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the street in Kolkata, India, March 21, 2021. India’s devastating second wave of coronavirus infections and deaths is tarnishing Modi’s aura of political invulnerability.
(Saumya Khandelwal/The New York Times)
NEW DELHI — His COVID-19 task force didn’t meet for months. His health minister assured the public in March that India had reached the pandemic’s “endgame.” A few weeks before that, Prime Minister Narendra Modi boasted to global leaders that his nation had triumphed over the coronavirus.
India “saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively,” Modi told a virtual gathering at the World Economic Forum in late January, three tricolor Indian flags displayed in the background.
Now, a second wave has made India the worst-hit country in the world.
New infections have reached about 400,000 a day. Vaccines are running short. Hospitals are swamped. Lifesaving oxygen is running out. Each day, cremation grounds burn thousands of bodies, sending up never-ending plumes of ash that are turning the skies gray over some of India’s biggest cities.
India’s stark reversal, from declaring victory to suffering its gravest emergency in decades, has forced a national reckoning, with Modi at its center.
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