Podcast: Journalist Barkha Dutt on India’s COVID calamity

TRANSCRIPT: Journalist Barkha Dutt on India’s COVID calamity

Barkha Dutt:

It feels like citizens have been left to fend for themselves. It's almost sort of Darwinian. You have a sense of starring in your own worst science fiction survival movie where it's up to you if you survive.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. Here you'll find extended versions of interviews for my public television show and exclusive extras from the newsmakers and experts I talk to every week. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today, a look at India and the world's worst COVID crisis. Just months ago, the nation was praised for its pandemic response. Today, record highs, daily, for new cases and deaths. A 40% positivity rate in Delhi and a desperate need for supplies, vaccines, and medical equipment. I'm talking about that and what it means for the rest of the world with the deli based award-winning journalist and author Barkha Dutt who lost her own father to the virus just days ago. Let's get to it.

Announcer:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, understands the value of service, safety and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.

Ian Bremmer:

Barkha Dutt, so good to see you. Thanks for joining the show.

Barkha Dutt:

Thanks for having me, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

So of course, I want to talk all about this catastrophe as it's hitting India, your home country, right now. But when I first got in touch with you to talk about the show, I had no idea of course what was about to happen. And just a few days ago, you lost your father to coronavirus. So first of all, my heart goes out to you. Can you talk a little bit about him and what happened?

Barkha Dutt:

Yeah. In fact, Ian, when you reached out, my father was ill, but like many other people, I was hopeful that he would recover. We'd been told that this was a treatable illness for the most part, that more people recovered than did not. And I was trying to keep calm about it. Because I am relatively an Indian of privilege, I have access to private medical care. We had a team of excellent doctors monitoring him, but at home, like many elderly people, he was scared to go to hospital. He thought he may never make it back alive. He didn't want to be alone in what he feared might be his final hours. As it turned out, and as so often happens with COVID-19 cases, and we are seeing a lot of this with the second wave in India, he suddenly deteriorated. And on the day that he deteriorated and we realized that we'd have to take him to hospital, the hospital is an hour away from where we live.

And I rushed around to try and find an ambulance. I thought it would be quicker to get a private ambulance than to wait for the hospital ambulance. And this is where I would say for me, the process of the news coming home really began. For the last 15 months, I've been reporting the COVID pandemic from the ground, and I've reported on countless such stories of despair in other families. Now it became my own. The ambulance that arrived was really a rickety old secondhand car, a van that had been repurposed as an ambulance. It did not have any paramedics. It had a crew of one, a driver. It had a single cylinder. The driver assured me it would work. I was too panicked. I jumped onto the front seat, my dad at the back. The ambulance snarled through traffic. We do not even have a green corridor, despite plaintive pleas to the cops here to allow a free sort of passage for ambulances. We do not have that.

And as we reached to the hospital, by the time we reached the hospital, we found that the cylinder had not worked in this private ambulance, nothing to do with the hospital. And when we reached the hospital, the hospital told us that he'd have to be wheeled straight into ICU. He was in ICU-

Ian Bremmer:

The cylinder, the oxygen cylinder in the-

Barkha Dutt:

In the ambulance. That was really-

Ian Bremmer:

And how long did it take the ambulance to show up from when you called?

Barkha Dutt:

It took about an hour for the ambulance to show up and then an hour's ride to the hospital. And in that traffic, snarly traffic, even though there's a curfew and a lockdown, no oxygen as it should have been functioning. Dangerous drop, he gets wheeled into ICU. He ends up on a ventilator swiftly. I'm haunted by his last words. He said, "I'm choking. Please treat me." He believed in science. He believed in the medicines. The doctors did their best, but that one ambulance ride haunts me. I just feel like that played with his life.

And the nightmare didn't end then, Ian. We went to cremate him. I must tell you that I've personally been reporting on how cremation grounds across India are running short of space. It isn't just the hospitals that are overrun.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah.

Barkha Dutt:

When we went to cremate my dad, there were four other families who had arrived at the same time in the exact spot we were supposed to cremate him. There was a argument, there was a fight. We had to seek the help with the police just to cremate my father. And it just really, it was like becoming the story that I report.

That said, it's crushing for me, and I don't even know how I'm keeping calm talking to you, but I want to underline that I'm cognizant. That I'm luckier than most. Yes, I lost my father. Yes, I'm an orphan. My mom died when I was in my teens. But I think of the people I meet outside the hospitals that have shut their doors to this country's poor, who do not have access to the medical care that my father had, who do not have an opportunity to even fight for their lives, who do not have any of the privileges that I had, and I tried to give to my father. And I think of them, and I've said this before, as the orphans of the Indian state.

And so while I'm crushed, the reason I'm talking and the reason I'm sharing his story is because it's necessary, even in the midst of personal tragedy, to be aware that the calamity all around me is so much worse for hundreds of thousands of Indians.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, we were very worried, Barkha, when it hit New York in the worst of this in my city a year ago. There were concerns that the healthcare system was going to get overwhelmed, that we would have to triage care. Didn't quite come to pass in New York, thank goodness. We are hearing stories that the healthcare system, not just in terms of the ambulances, but ICUs, oxygen shortages, vaccination shortages, you name it, everything, treatment is just nowhere close to the scale of the epidemic crashing around you right now. Talk about how it was when you got to the hospital and also what you're seeing in hospitals across your country right now.

Barkha Dutt:

So the people that my heart really goes out to, apart from of course, the desolate families that are running from hospital to hospital looking for help, is the doctors and the health workers who have been totally betrayed by the absence of logistical backup and infrastructure, who have been totally betrayed by a complacent, callous and incompetent preparation for this second wave. The health workers are being blamed by angry families when there is no bed or when there is no oxygen or when somebody dies. We've had hospitals in the national capital of India where in a single night, 25 patients have died in a premier hospital because there was no oxygen. And this has happened not once. It's happened three times this past week alone. And so you see your health system collapsing, but not because your frontline workers aren't doing what they're meant to, but because policy makers, the government basically dropped the ball on the second wave.

There was a misreading that the worst was behind us when the first wave was over. India decided to gift away or export vaccines. We purchased very few vaccines for ourselves. We were hung up on a made-in-India vaccine. So we did not give approvals to foreign-made vaccines, all of which we've had to do now in the midst of this calamity. We're supposed to have a major vaccine rollout for everyone above 18, but there are no vaccines that are going to power that rollout or not enough anyway. We've had the Chief Minister of the national capital, Delhi, announce that the vaccine rollout cannot happen in time because he doesn't have those vaccines. And through this period of carnage, we've had our politicians, including our prime minister, and our home minister, and our major opposition leaders, continue to address political rallies that have seen crowds in the hundreds of thousands and not intervened to have stopped religious congregations that have taken place in the heartland. If this is not mixed messaging, if this is not callousness, if this is not insensitivity, I do not know what is.

Ian Bremmer:

Talk to me about the mood. Talk to me about how it feels to be an Indian citizen in that environment.

Barkha Dutt:

It feels like citizens have been left to fend for themselves. It's almost sort of Darwinian. You have a sense of starring in your own worst science fiction survival movie where it's up to you if you survive, it's because you manage to somehow, it's because of who you knew or how tough you were, not because the institutions of the state are necessarily available equally for all. In Hindi, one man said to me at a cremation ground, and I translated in English, he said "ham bhagavaan paalo saath hai", which means we are now in God's hands. Basically, what he was conveying was that there was no state representation to turn to, whether at the doors of hospitals or at burial grounds or graveyards or cremation grounds. There's a great sense of loneliness, of desperation, of despair. I would call it a heartbroken nation, but I would also call it an angry nation.

My social network timelines are filled with plaintive pleas for an oxygen concentrator, for an oxygen cylinder, for an ICU bed, and people have even stopped tagging official handles. Civil society is just tagging each other. It's almost like people, it's now up to us to save ourselves. That's how I'd emotionally describe it. If I were to step back and be a little more clinical about it, I'd say the government has finally hit the emergency buttons. I think now they are describing it as a once-in-a-century crisis. But a once-in-a-century crisis, if you lose two months as we have in critically not purchasing those vaccines, in continuing to hold mammoth mass congregations, those two months is the difference between many, many lives, Ian, lost and saved.

And the other fear that we have in this country is that we may not even fully count our dead. I say this to you as someone who has traveled across states to multiple funeral grounds, and when I compare the numbers of funeral pyres, little burials that are taking place, to the official data released from those districts, or those provinces, or those states that day, the gap is humongous. So the official numbers are bad, but I can tell you that in fact, in actuality, the numbers of those dying is so much worse.

Ian Bremmer:

I know there aren't enough tests to be able to test everybody. I know the infrastructure is hard. It's a very rural society as well. But talk about as you are doing some of those comparisons, what kind of a gap in official numbers and real numbers to the extent that you can actually really assess them in some of these cases anecdotally, how big is that gap?

Barkha Dutt:

Look, anecdotally, strictly, because this is not an empirical compilation, and it's going to take time to do that, but the gap has sometimes been twofold, fourfold, fivefold. So let me just give you an example. I've been at cremation grounds. In one site, in one town, where the undertaker will tell me, "Today, I cremated a hundred bodies," and the entire state would've declared 78 deaths that day. Whereas I'm talking about one site in one town of that state, right? So I just think that we're absolutely under-reporting our dead, and it could range anywhere between, I wouldn't be surprised, conservatively put, if the numbers we are looking at anecdotally, in my experience, have often been four times higher, if I were just to see the cremations that are taking place and the data that's coming out.

But I'm willing to wait for someone to do this number crunching. My worry is that nobody may ever do this number crunching and, lost in the debris of this calamity, the second wave will be swept away. Those who are not even counted as having been taken away by it. And I think that almost seems more criminal than anything else, that we may not even count all our dead.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, certainly in terms of what's happening with the healthcare system and seeing deaths that are still in terms of total numbers per day, less than the United States, at its peak, a country with about one fifth the population of India, it does feel like there has to be a gap of the sort that you're talking about. I want to go back a little bit because it was back, I remember when Prime Minister Modi gave his speech at the World Economic Forum, this was back in January when, I mean, the story not just being delivered by the prime minister, but globally was that India was doing a pretty good job. I mean, people were trying to figure out why. Was it the mask mandates? Is it's because it's a fairly young population? Did they lock down early enough and effectively enough? What created the false confidence and how did they get it so wrong?

Barkha Dutt:

So I think two things have changed from 2020 to 2021. The first is that in 2020, people were willing to forgive the government for making mistakes because the world was grappling. None of us knew what to do. Lockdowns were considered the way to go. For a country like India, that lockdown, the national lockdown, actually proved to be a bad idea because a one-size-fits formula does not apply to a country as diverse as this. And this year, I will grant that the government has been smarter and it's gone the root of localized lockdowns as opposed to a Pan-India lockdown. But in 2020, the biggest crisis was a humanitarian crisis when poor people, daily wage workers, started leaving the cities to go to their villages in the millions. It was the largest exodus of human beings that we'd seen since Partition. Yet people forgave the government, though it was a policy error to not have contingencies in place for them because it was so unexpected what happened.

I think the complacency set in, because as a percentage of infections, the fatalities seemed to be not as high as the rest of the world at all. So what we were able to take away from the 2020 data is that many more Indians were infected, again, than the official data told you. The serological service all pointed in that direction that many people had COVID and not even known that they'd had it. But the IFR, the infection fatality rate was actually so low that some experts I knew globally were calling it a mystery, a mystery of science. The science had no answer to it. And I still don't know. I still don't know what happened, but it doesn't explain to me why we should have got lulled into not needing contingencies.

I will confess that even someone like myself, when India started giving away vaccines, I felt quite proud. I was like, "Oh, this is the right thing to do. We're a big country. We're an emerging part. We should be helping people in distress." I had no idea that there would not be enough vaccines for a vaccine program, that we would've purchased such few vaccines that our bureaucrats would drag their feet on, let's say, clearances for a company like Pfizer or Moderna or even Sputnik. Even those approvals came much, much later than they should have.

The other mistakes that we made, and you're right, I mean, we were all caught up in this, hey, the worst is over. It wasn't just the government, it's just that we looked to the government to put the plan B and C in place. The other big mistake that we made was to think that there would be vaccine hesitancy in the beginning, that the vaccine rollout would not see a flood of people. There was some hesitancy in the beginning, but the moment everybody wanted vaccines, there weren't enough to go around.

And finally, there was an overcentralization. It's now been let go of, but Delhi and the Modi government was trying to decide which state should get how many vaccines. And so when the state of Maharashtra, which had the maximum number of cases, which has India's financial capital, Mumbai, when it said, we've got the most cases, give us the most vaccines, it seemed like a no-brainer to me. The central government did not oblige. They also suggested a door-to-door vaccination program, which I thought was a smart idea. The central government turned it down. That overcentralization has now had to be surrendered. Now, the states have been told that they're free to purchase vaccines if they want to, they're free to follow their own vaccination programs-

Ian Bremmer:

Directly from the private sector.

Barkha Dutt:

Yes.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. And is that going to work, do you think?

Barkha Dutt:

Well, the richest states are going to be able to obviously get more vaccines than the not so rich states. The centralized programs will also continue. But I do think that we are not. We've said that we are liberalizing the vaccine regime, but just today, my colleagues, my reporters have been in vaccination centers where the elderly have had to come away without their scheduled second dose because they weren't enough vaccines. So there isn't a lot of optimism right now.

And here's where I think, okay, these mistakes have happened, I think we're all very angry, I think there will be a time to demand that heads should roll, but at the moment, we need the world's help. We need the United States of America. And I know there was a lot of heavy lifting, and those AstraZeneca vaccines are coming, but beyond the AstraZeneca vaccines that are never going to get used in the United States of America, we need surplus vaccines. There's even been some public health experts who've said that maybe before countries look at vaccinating 16-year olds in their country, they need to come to the help of India. Not for India's sake, but because, you know Ian, the nature of this virus, you know the nature of this mutant, it's in the end, a porous world.

Ian Bremmer:

I want to ask you a little bit more about that. Is there a backlash? Is there a feeling that India is too close to the United States, and where is the US? Is this going to change the way the Indian government thinks about a country like China? I mean, how do you see this so far playing out geopolitically, if at all?

Barkha Dutt:

I think there was some disquiet and anger at the initial responses of the Biden administration, especially in relation to the raw material. We know all prominent Indian American citizens did a lot of work in the back channels to get the Biden administration to change its mind. But you did see from policy makers a disenchantment, a kind of expression of frustration. I mean, the court was supposed to come together to use vaccines as an instrument of almost counter-diplomacy against the rise of China, which has also been using its vaccine program in the region for influence. And I think that's the game, the geostrategic game that India had got caught up in. At the time, it looked like a smart idea, but given the calamity, the humanitarian calamity unfolding, I think now the domestic opinion is that it was a big miscalculation. We are not at that point where we can talk about vaccine diplomacy, or vaccine wars, or vaccines as instruments of soft power.

Yes, I think in India, there is sometimes a strange sort of feeling that Democrats in government are less kindly disposed towards India than Republicans. You'll hear a lot of this from the average Indian, as I'm sure you've had on your trips to India. But I do believe that that hump has been crossed. It's my sense now that the two administrations are working together. I still think India would be very hesitant with China, especially given the year long standoff in the upper Himalayas in Ladakh, which is by the way, not been fully resolved. The media isn't talking about it because who has the time? Yeah. So I think that's where we stand right now. It's too early to see how that's going to play out, but I don't see us rushing to China for help at all.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, you have said that the government in India has now recognized that this is a once-in-a-hundred-year calamity. Does that mean that they have suspended all of these mass in-person election rallies? Does that mean that we are getting the kind of leadership in terms of telling the people, here's the way you need to behave now?

Barkha Dutt:

Well, it was only about a week ago, roughly, that the prime minister himself suspended his campaign. I just wish he'd done it way earlier because everybody takes the cue from him. And what was also happening at these rallies were that leaders were not wearing masks. They could have used these moments to make them a moment about mask wearing. They could have made these rallies with one-seat gaps, even if they were out in the open and said, you will not be allowed in. There were ways to do it if you had to do it. I personally think that these rallies should never have been held.

So all that I think is now past us, but I just have the sense that we are still in denial. Either we think that's the way to contain panic. Our health minister, for instance, made a statement in the last 24 hours saying that India is better equipped to fight COVID in 2021 than 2020. That's simply rubbish. We had India's solicitor general tell India's supreme court that there is no oxygen deficit as of now. That's simply not true. I have just reported from a gurdwara, that's a place of worship for Sikhs, where the situation is now so bad that this place of worship now has oxygen cylinders at its doors, and it's called an oxygen langar. Langar is a Hindi word for a feast that the gurdwara normally provides. It's normally food. Now, instead of food, there are cylinders being offered for the elderly who cannot get access to hospital. They drive up in their car, they take a puff of oxygen for about half an hour. They calm themselves down, and then they go back home.

This is the situation. It's dystopian. I never thought I would see it in my country. And so when I hear the senior most law officer tell the supreme court that there is no oxygen deficit, it makes me very, very angry. You just feel enraged when you're asked to believe that everything is okay. I understand the need to not create panic, but containing panic will not be done by lying to people about how bad the situation is. We need help. We need the world's help, and we should have no shame and no nationalist pride in asking everybody at this point to come to the rescue of the Indian people.

Ian Bremmer:

Going through this, for your country and for you right now, where are you turning to for some hope?

Barkha Dutt:

I think in people. I think the fact that people have come through for each other, that strangers have come through for each other, that whether it's this place of worship that's opened its doors, or it's, you go on to Twitter, and yes, there's a lot of ugliness sometimes on social media, but sometimes you just say, "I need help," and some complete stranger will connect you to someone who'll connect you to someone who will get you a hospital bed. I've personally been trying to do it for as many people as I can.

When my father died, I know I got messages from across the world. And what is it about this crisis? It's basically that you feel displaced, you feel scared, you feel alone. And I think the only hope that we look for right now is in the humanity of connections. Sometimes with people we don't know, and sometimes with people we know. And frankly, at this point, that is the hope. Otherwise, there's an overwhelming sense that we've been left to fend for ourselves.

Ian Bremmer:

Barkha Dutt, my heart goes out to you. Thanks, really, for joining us today.

Barkha Dutt:

Thanks for having me. Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Like what you've heard? Come check us out at gzeromedia.com and sign up for our newsletter, Signal.

Announcer:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company understands the value of service, safety, and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.

Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.