COVID-19 - Glands of Human Emotions Going Dry but 'Shirtless' Siyaasat Continues!

· TIOL Editor Shailendra Kumar Hits Out at DoR for Covid Insensitivity – Free only Imports of All Duties and Controls in Disaster

-By Shailendra Kumar, Founder Editor TIOL-

WHAT we are witnessing today is the panoply of human tragedies of Shakespearean proportions! During the pandemic the social media is also undergoing a cataclysmic character change. It has willy-nilly turned into pulse-pumping medical bulletins of rising tide of beseeching cries for help; never-ending anecdotes of health trauma; uncontrollable grief of bereaved families; display of callousness by Sarkari machineries and even hospitals, venting of fury against the political system; bitter tales of crises of trust, unseen shades of extortion and human greed, macabre spectacle of COVID-ravaged human bodies being scornfully dumped into rivers as families and even governments cannot afford costs of their decent burial and also shameless crowing about heroic efforts being made by governments to tide over the crisis! Indeed, a spine-chilling display of shirtless siyaasat (politics) at the cost of human life - perhaps, unparalleled in human history because of its horridly gargantuan scale!

My last fortnight was inundated with frantic calls for oxygen cylinders, hospital beds and plea to connect with a helping hand in the medical fraternity. I initially thought that it was the end of the cruellest and eerily mind-numbing period of my life! Then ensues an abyss of time filled with unbearable grief, queasiness and Wild West kind of abuse and neglect where my acquaintances in social and professional life were found leaving this planet faster than I could keep track of their counts! Oof, no end to soul-crushing shocks! Stoicism being thrust upon me! The gigantic load of terrifying tales of untold human suffering virtually sucked dry all the 'tears' of hitherto known human emotions snared in various human glands like millions of others! All these tales emphatically register in our mind how fragile and perishable have become our lives in the ever-expanding brolly-shaped spread of the pandemic and our elected governments largely keeping shtum, weird indeed!

However, the tale of tariff on imported oxygen concentrators and other life-saving medical devices constitute a different shade of the story where our tax bureaucracy believes that life is not as fragile as the faucets of revenue collections are! As against the rising mountain of COVID-19 related deaths, the policy makers have literally once again proven the age-old proverb that very similar to death, tax is no less certain! I always mistook that our policy-makers are also, like us, human beings made of skeletons, flesh and blood vessels! But they have made me skin off the layer of my deep-rooted folly - they are only 'living beings' snared in the majestic corridors built of red sandstone by Sir Edwin Lutyens! And very true to the property of red sandstone, they are 'fine grained', rough, tough and have propensity for low absorption! Indians are dying in thousands but their pain fails to affect them because of 'low absorption' property borrowed from red sandstone! Stone me! Their stone-cold approach towards fiscal administration is not about leaving any stone unturned to buoy up revenue but about robotic mindset cast in stone!

Although the onus to exempt from tax solely lies with the political leadership but our fiscal machinery is also duty bound to sensitise and alter the folly-inducing mindset of the political bosses - not to impose 12% IGST when exemption from basic customs duty and Cesses has been granted. The fact that a flurry of import of such concentrators is only to save fast-evaporating lives and, secondly, it is certainly not a regular import item, there was no question of any dent being made into regular revenue projections. More importantly, how can an elected Government even think of revenue when it knows that such imports are coerced by the pandemic and citizens are resorting to such imports only because our governments have failed to save lives - putting premium on breath!. All praise for MNCs, Indian corporates and charitable bodies who made quick overtures where the Government burnt its humanitarian bridges with the people and paid for imported concentrators and distributed them free! Why is it necessary for the Government to mandate that the import consignments have to be donated overseas or ought to be free of cost if exemption is to be availed? Why should Indian 'persons' be discounted or not counted on for such donations? If Indian entities are buying and then distributing free to the States and charitable hospitals, where is the febrile rationale for the Government to tax the device which prevents an event turning the ill into corpses? The Delhi High Court is seized of the issue and if any stately grace is left in our system, it should not wait for the court to direct it to grant IGST waiver!

So far as vaccines are concerned, I am unconvincingly willing to buy the much-orchestrated GST explainer shared by the Union Finance Minister where ITC holds the counter-key to the rising demand for GST exemption by the States. However, when no ITC is available on 12% IGST paid on oxygen concentrators, why should a popular government risk mirroring insensitivity and being deprived of any fealty to the concept of public interests? At this hour of national trauma, even a notoriously pachydermic Government would like to grant duty waiver to import of all necessary drugs and medical devices. Why has the Modi Government leaned on bureaucratic shoulders rather than displaying political and humanitarian wisdom at this crunch time? Why should an elected government enforce a sense of utter abandonment in its citizens which would inevitably result in backlash?

My mind's eye is clearly able to see a state of governance paralysis and a battering experience of being frozen in time-warp - a series of electoral setbacks and a tidal wave of public excoriation about not preparing the nation for the apocalyptic second wave! Admitting a folly makes a man wiser and also saves the day! Such a timeless wisdom perhaps does not apply to political elites. They are engraved in stone only for the proletariats and lesser mortals! Fine! Not admitting an error may be a political choice in the short-run but keeping shtum or burying neck in the sand is Ostrich-like and unfathomable! Ideally, the Prime Minister who has intrinsically relished the power of spectacle, should have addressed the nation and given hope to the people that everything is not yet lost and his government would fire on all possible cylinders, minus the oxygen cylinders, perhaps!, to retrieve the situation! He should have tied down each of his senior Cabinet Minister to three or four States for 24 x 7 coordination with the State machineries and provide them all possible assistance - oxygen containers, drugs, medical staff and timely scientific information. Since they clearly demonstrated a state of paralysis, the Supreme Court of India had to suo moto take cognizance of the snafus. Yes, many jurists of purist genre may view it as a case of judicial overreach but it is an extraordinary state of emergency in the country and when the Executive stands paralysed or has abdicated its responsibility and the legislature has largely turned into a lackey for the Executive, at least one of the pillars of our constitutional democracy was required to take a stand and retain the trust of the people in the democratic institutions even if the same is fractured!

What mirrors the receding care for scientific approach to grapple with the pandemic is the petulant and insouciant dealing with the most critical fact-finding - the genome sequencing of the rapidly mutating virus! As late as in the December month, a task force was set up to keep track of the mercurial and 'skin-shedding' virus through genome analysis. However, funds initially earmarked, was royally reduced and the States having no infrastructure to store the samples of infection, were given carte blanche to default in sharing samples. As a result, in place of 80,000 samples initially envisaged, India as a country, culled out only 3500 where double mutant and the presence of UK and South African variants were found. Notwithstanding the inadequacy of the study samples, our scientists knew for sure that unchecked spread of the virus may create fertile ground for further mutation and which may be more dangerous. Knowing all these facts, the Task Force did a routine job in a deadpan manner and failed to sensitise the Government which was more besotted by poll campaigns and spiritual bathing in Kumbh. And today, the Indian variant which may further mutate with the ever-expanding penetration in the hinterland, has turned out to be deadlier than earlier variants. And it has spread as far away as Argentina. It has been found to be more transmissible and deadlier which is corroborated by the growing bags of dead bodies. The WHO has warned that it may even give rude treatment to the vaccinated which means our much-feuded vaccination campaign is also in trouble! Seychelles is a good case for intensive study as it managed to vaccinate its major swathe of population of one lakh but the latest wave has infected almost one-third of the vaccinated populace!

Before I conclude, a good news on the vaccine manufacture front has come from the Biden Administration which has agreed to grant IPR waiver for sharing the vaccine formulae for large-scale production and distribution of vaccines. India and South Africa may share the claim for the initiative but it is not a case of low-hanging fruit. The issue is to be debated at the WTO forum; followed by domestic amendment of the IPR laws and then fixation of royalty and many more vexatious issues. Meanwhile, I do wonder when ICMR is one of the key stakeholders in the manufacture of Covaxin vaccine, why cannot India ease the IPR curbs and share the knowhow with dozens of large pharma companies so that India's domestic demand deficit could be bridged. When it is now beyond debate that vaccination is the only sure shot answer to the spiky balls, no effort should be spared to ramp up production rather than hinging on capacity expansion by Bharat Biotech alone! Let's hope that good sense prevails and the Central Government takes timely steps not to disappoint its citizens on vaccine front too!