DailyPost 1678
HUMANITARIAN CRISIS
This is not a health crisis or a crisis or black marketeering of essentials of life in a Pandemic Purge. A crisis which has impacted every individual across the country mostly directly, through loss of parents, relatives, friends or acquaintances or indirectly in your community, society and whichever place you live in. The persons infected and their plight is another story, difficult to say, how fast normalcy would return to them. Worse, still you don’t know how it would have impacted the patient on a short, medium or long term. When you don’t know what to do and you are completely helpless, that is the real humanitarian crisis. Humanitarian crisis is the breaking down of human spirit, then what is left of humanity.
Ethnic cleansing, NATO bombings and mass graves of Kosovo gets fully fresh after two decades, while seeing the visuals all over, of our cremation grounds. Might be there was more dignity in death there. Kosovo was a completely strife torn country, in a way it was not avoidable, given the circumstances. Here we have our elected governments and both the tragedy and vast majority of the deaths were avoidable. Avoidable deaths any civilized society in peacetime cannot digest. Having created all the preconditions for Purge, the less said about the response the better. Response across the country has been the real villain. Backstabbing in simple language.
It’s time to declare a national emergency where every other activity needs to be suspended till semblance of normalcy returns. No local elections and no counting. The exit polls themselves were a distraction. Lips service to the sick and dead is the last thing which anybody wants to hear. 2nd of May counting day would be another chapter in a litany of woes. Elections are completely discredited for all times. National lockdown would be just one element of a much bigger comprehensive plan. The country is anyway mourning, official national mourning should be declared as a mark of respect to the dead inclusive of the large number of avoidable ones.
International humanitarian, UN and its agencies and International specialized NGOs; Red Cross and Medicine Sans Frontiers, help can show us the way. Collaboration should happen immediately. All resources of all governments, public sector and armed forces should be used to create an army type supply chain for oxygen reaching the last hospital. One coordinated mechanism. The country is not there to witness both black marketeering and death simultaneously. Black marketeering should be eliminated in five days failing which President’s rule should be imposed. Is it not a breakdown of the constitutional machinery that too during the worst humanitarian crisis in our living memory. Same thing should be done for medicines as well. Aggravating humanitarian crises through these nefarious activities is a blot on humanity.
IF WE DON’T ELEVATE OUR SYSTEMS OF FUNCTIONING TO A TOTALLY DIFFERENT LEVEL, TRAGEDIES OF THIS NATURE WOULD KEEP ON HAPPENING.
Sanjay Sahay