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.
The covid situation in India has gone totally out of control, with about 350,000 fresh cases being reported daily and government hospitals run out of oxygen and beds.
Covid19 has fully exposed the Indian health care sector and today the majority of the people in almost all the states of the country struggle to even get a bed in a hospital. Most of the government hospitals as we all know are substandard and kaput.
The middle class doesn’t have a choice but to go to private hospitals where I am told the cost per day is running to almost 1 lakh rupees. A lot of people are spending their life savings in the hope to save themselves or their loved ones.
An average middle-class family hardly saves anywhere from 10 to 15 lakhs rupees in about 5 years and is on the verge of losing all that money just in a span of 15 days causing huge financial distress. In some cases the families are losing the lives of their loved ones and also their life savings, putting them into total despair..
A relative of mine who had done his Ph.D. in nuclear science from America, where he had lived for many years, and had worked in NASA, died 3 days back of corona in Delhi.
The problem is there was no place to cremate his body, as all the crematoria in Delhi ( Nigambodh ghat, Lodi Road crematorium, Kalkaji crematorium, etc ) are full and booked, with bodies of corona victims waiting in a queue.
His body has now been placed in a mortuary, and with great difficulty, the cremation has been arranged for tomorrow morning.
The situation is getting worse and nightmarish. Many states have declared lockdown/curfew, and one does not know when one will see light at the end of the tunnel.
However, one silver lining is the overwhelming support by Pakistanis in support of covid victims in India. This makes it evident that the people of India and Pakistan love each other despite all the false and nefarious propaganda by vested interests to artificially create hatred, as stated in my article ‘The Truth about Pakistan’ online. I have said therein that India and Pakistan are really one country, only temporarily separated on the basis of the bogus two nation theory by that historical British swindle called Partition, but are bound to reunite one day, like West and East Germany ( see indianreunificationassociation.weebly.com ).
