Book Discussion Burning Pyres, Mass Graves and a State that Failed Its People: India's Covid Tragedy

By June 2021, at least 1.5 million people in India—several times the official figure—had lost their lives due to
COVID-19. As in the first wave of the pandemic, this time, too, the chaos and suffering were in large measure, as
Harsh Mander shows in this book, due to mismanagement by an uncaring and cynical state.
The first part of the book, ‘Locking Down the Poor’, describes the grave humanitarian crisis of 2020, which
pushed the urban poor to the brink of starvation. It shows how this was a direct consequence of public policy
choices that the central government made, particularly the imposition of the world’s longest and most stringent
lockdown, with the smallest relief package.
The second part of the book, ‘Burning Pyres, Mass Graves’, records the horrors of the following year, when
everything from hospital beds to oxygen and essential medicines fell disastrously short. Mander traces the causes
for these shortages to the criminal neglect of public health in India, a situation made worse under the Narendra
Modi government, leading to the extortion of a beleaguered population by everyone from suppliers of oxygen cylinders to pharma billionaires. He holds the state culpable for indulging in pageantry—with the PM advertising himself as a messiah—when the country needed to brace for the impact of the second wave.
Combining ground reports with hard data and first-hand knowledge, Mander chronicles the greatest humanitarian catastrophe India has faced in a century, the effects of which will be felt for decades. This powerful, even shattering, book is a necessary record of a national tragedy that too many
of us want to forget, when remembering is our only defence against a similar disaster in the future.