Justice Markandey Katju-
Justice Markandey Katju is a former Judge, Supreme Court of India, and former Chairman, Press Council of India. The views expressed are his own.
Most of the talk nowadays in the Indian media, whether print, TV, or social media, is of the corona.
Some time back I had written an article titled ‘End this Lockdown’ which had been published in indicanews.com
In this article, I said that no doubt the corona problem is serious, but it has to be considered along with other problems plaguing the country, many of which are much more serious :
(1) Do people have any idea how many people in India die every year of malaria,flu,cholera,typhoid,dengue,TB,diabetes etc ? I have given some statistics in my article above. It may be 100 times more than corona, but no journalist or politician talks of that. So death by these other diseases is ok, only death by corona is something over which a hue and cry should be raised.
(2 India has massive poverty, record and rising unemployment, appalling level of child malnourishment ( about half of its children are malnourished, according to Global Hunger Index ), half our women are anemic, proper healthcare is almost non-existent for the masses, about 350,000 to 400,000 of our farmers have committed suicide, prices of fuel and foodstuffs have skyrocketed, etc.
But all these are conveniently forgotten amidst the dolorous cacophony of the corona, corona, the corona. Politicians, journalists, filmstars, and a host of others are falling over each other trying to prove who is the greater knight in this fight against the corona dragon. And it does not matter if poor people die of the other diseases mentioned above, it does not matter if children die of hunger or become permanently stunted due to severe malnutrition, it does not matter if unemployment and price rise keep soaring.
While not denying the seriousness of the corona pandemic, I sometimes wonder whether this continuous harping, over-emphasis and obsession about it by the media, politicians and others is not a clever ploy to divert attention from the other much more serious problems in India like poverty, unemployment, price rise, etc to which our political leaders have no solution.
