Suspending patents for life-saving medicines and vaccines is urgent and necessary, pandemic or not.

But allies/ friends of India also need to know that the rigging of external vaccine markets is *not* the cause of the crisis we are seeing.

India produces 1/2 the world’s vaccines and, in addition to licenses to produce the Oxford/AZ and Sputnik vaccines, it has its own indigenous vaccine, Covaxin, along with the capacity to produce at scale.

But there has been a failure to ramp up inoculation, and the Central Govt has created a dysfunctional internal market, throwing up roadblocks for individual state governments to acquire vaccines. There are state elections looming and this is the message from Modi:

Since last Summer, Modi has been loudly proclaiming that India (nay, he) has defeated Covid. He has encouraged business as usual and left it to states to take any measures. Young people with mild symptoms have therefore simply ignored them and not been tested.

Official figures for infections and deaths have been lowballed consistently. In states such as Delhi and Karnataka, this may have been by as much as 70% since the start of the year. Combined with government messaging that “it’s been defeated” you then have all the wrong signals.

Massive events, from the Kumbh Mela to the cricket to Modi’s own election rallies (drawing hundreds of thousands into packed spaces) have been encouraged with no mask mandates.

Finally, despite all evidence indicating that a second wave *will* arrive, Modi’s government has spent the last year shooting at farmers, trolling Greta Thunberg, arresting journalists, building temples and doing everything *except* preparing for this.

They get away with it because they have stifled civil society and media, and because the cult of Modi is strong and well fortified. We are counting the cost of that impunity in lives. I do not know a single home in which pyres are not lit. Honestly, fuck fascism.

For more on how the cult of Modi costs lives and makes government redundant, read this resolution that his ruling party literally spent time writing and then voting on just weeks ago: