Vaccine politicking

Free inoculation for Bihar is cynical populism

The concept of free Covid-19 vaccines for all, in principle, is a powerful commitment for any government to make. Even Democrat Joe Biden has promised free vaccines if elected president, but his promise is for “all Americans to get ahead of the virus”. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has chosen a cynical approach to the issue by making it an election pledge only for Bihar, which goes to the polls starting October 28. In her stout defence of the upsurge of criticism of this manifesto promise, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has described it as “perfectly in order”. Health is a state issue, she pointed out, so any party fighting the Assembly elections is well within its rights to make the citizens a promise premised on health care. This is factually correct, but somewhat disingenuous. It ignores the fact that the party making the pledge also happens to be the ruling party at the Centre, which has a responsibility to all Indians. In fact, it is campaigning in Bihar transparently on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s charisma and perceived prime ministerial achievements.

This dichotomy has not escaped the opposition parties, which have rightly said the BJP is politicising a national health crisis in which nearly eight million Indians have contracted the Covid-19 virus and access to a vaccine may be outside the reach of many people in the country. Indeed, Bihar is not among the states with a high number of Covid-19 cases — it ranks 13th in terms of the number of cases, with 210,000 of them, and has a high recovery rate (199,000) — to warrant a poll promise of this nature. Unusually, the opposition found allies in the BJP’s former saffron associate Shiv Sena, which has weighed in trenchantly on the issue in an editorial in its mouthpiece Saamana, describing the move as “dirty low-level politics” in singling out poll-bound Bihar for free Covid-19 vaccines. “Bihar should get the vaccine but other states are not Pakistan,” the editorial stated, and underlined the fact that this campaign promise contradicted an announcement two days earlier by the prime minister, who said the government would make every attempt to provide vaccines to all Indians, irrespective of caste, religion, region, or politics. Indeed, the political cynicism of the BJP’s move is accentuated when it is set against the conspicuous mismanagement of the migrant labour crisis as a result of the 21-day Covid-19-related lockdown in March and April by both the Centre and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in Bihar.

This poll promise also raises the stakes considerably for the BJP in delivering a vaccine in a state where road connectivity and basic medical infrastructure are abysmal. Whether for Bihar specifically or the nation generally — assuming the prime minister makes good on his nation-wide promise — it is imperative that the government has a vaccine-delivery plan rooted in practicalities. Rather than opting for the rhetoric of providing free vaccines for all, the government should account for the fact that a section of the population would be willing to pay for it. This would help the government focus its efforts and spend on those who cannot. This is an exercise that will involve not only massive institutional training programmes for people to administer the vaccine but also setting up cold chains and transportation links to deliver the vaccine, which requires refrigeration, to those who live in the more remote and inaccessible parts of India. Unlike the usual freebie-fest that accompanies all poll manifestos, delivering this one will prove a stringent test for the ruling dispensation.