Leftist politicians in India are calling for the country to enter a “full lockdown” to curb transmission of the Chinese coronavirus as India continues to battle a massive surge in coronavirus cases and deaths nationwide.
“The GOI [Government of India] doesn’t get it,” Rahul Gandhi, a leftist member of the Indian parliament and leader of the opposition, wrote in a statement posted to Twitter on May 3.
“The only way to stop the spread of Corona now is a full lockdown- with the protection of NYAY [a proposed minimum income guarantee program] for the vulnerable sections,” Gandhi wrote.
“GOI’s inaction is killing many innocent people,” the politician alleged, referring to India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Rahul Gandhi belongs to the Indian National Congress (INC), a left-wing opposition party in India, and hails from the most powerful left-wing political dynasty in modern Indian history.
“I just want to make it clear that a lockdown is now the only option because of a complete lack of strategy by GOI,” Rahul Gandhi wrote in a separate Twitter statement posted May 4.
“They allowed, rather, they actively helped the virus reach this stage where there’s no other way to stop it,” Gandhi claimed of India’s right-wing BJP.
“A crime has been committed against India,” the politician alleged.
Another left-wing Indian politician named Raghuram Rajan echoed Gandhi’s incendiary statements in a television interview with Bloomberg News on May 4.
“If you were careful, if you were cautious, you had to recognize that it wasn’t done yet,” Rajan said of India’s Chinese coronavirus outbreak.
“Anybody paying attention to what was happening in the rest of the world, in Brazil for example, should have recognized the virus does come back and potentially in more virulent forms,” he said.
Rajan served as the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India from 2012-2013 under former Indian Prime Minister — and left-wing INC-member — Mohan Singh.
India’s federal government in recent weeks has been reluctant to order a “full lockdown” nationwide despite the country’s surging coronavirus caseload because it significantly harmed the national economy last year by doing so. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi advised Indian states not to lock down their cities in a nationally televised speech last month.
“We have to save this country from lockdown. I appeal to States to consider lockdowns only as a last resort,” Modi said on April 20.
New Delhi has “left it open for states to decide on local lockdowns, and places like the national capital Delhi and the financial hub Mumbai have imposed restrictions — though they are less strict than last year,” Bloomberg reported Tuesday.
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