Thread by @ashwinmahesh

The 'drive' in #LargestVaccineDrive is barely a walk. Among the major industrial nations of the world, we are bringing up the rear by a considerable distance in vaccination. If - and likely when - the third wave hits, we will still have lots of people who are vulnerable to it.

How did we land up in such a bad situation? There are lots of technical explanations - procurement, production, regulation, transportation, personnel. But there is a sweeping reason that cuts across all of them. The people we have entrusted to do the job don't know how to do it.

The science of the virus is too much for our low level of governance to tackle. The public has been making heroes out of all sorts of leaders based on their ability to win elections. But when it comes to winning real world battles, most of them are down and out.

There is an order in which we have to tackle this - science first, then health, then administration. We reversed the order, believing that some wishful proclamations and nationalism will somehow defeat the virus. We were keeping company with lampooned quacks like Jair Bolsanaro.

Now, belatedly and with our backs to the wall, we are forced to confront all the things we have been blind to - slow vaccination, variants, lack of genome sequencing, no public data, weak logistics, and so much more. And it's becoming obvious that it's a wilful blindness.

Now, belatedly and with our backs to the wall, we are forced to confront all the things we have been blind to - slow vaccination, variants, lack of genome sequencing, no public data, weak logistics, and so much more. And it's becoming obvious that it's wilful blindness.

Our leaders have closed their eyes, afraid to open them but pretending in bravado that we can defeat the virus with our eyes closed, and hoping that no one can see that. Or at least, since their eyes are closed, they can't see that everyone can see that.

It's more than pandemic failure. Education, nutrition, gender equality ... the slow progress is all-round. Various leaders have appeared as champions of causes, but after 75 years it's very hard to look back and tell what any of them did to develop India to world standards.

Day in and out, news reports are full of 'senior' leaders who are veteran of politics. Maybe, but apart from a small few, they are amateurs at solving problems. In fact, most of them cannot even describe the problems that confront us properly and articulate a solution to them.

This is the reason we have fallen behind so many countries in coming out of the pandemic. It's also the reason why some countries that we once looked down at are now passing us in development indicators. Competence matters. And not just in a pandemic.

It's alright to live with a few exaggerations; that happens in every country. But what we're doing is bizarre. We have become used to repackaging evident and wide-spread failure as success, and celebrating leaders who have delivered that. This is a huge pit we have fallen into.

Why? Because the public is also guilty of this. We find it easier to pretend that our leaders are achieving great things, even when it's evident from objective data that they are not. Going along with their dubious claims seems easier than acknowledging that we've elected them.

Sitting in the passenger seat of the car and observing that the driver has shut his eyes, we too have closed ours, hoping that the dangers we don't see on the road don't exist at all. That is the kind of experiment that ends only one way.

Partisan politics is feeding the emergence of political leaders who simply aren't up to the complex jobs they need to do today, to serve the public properly and to keep India competitive. Citizens know that such leaders are not up to the task, but we are also accomplices.

The politicians are veterans of non-performance, and we are veterans of hailing their non-performance. Together, we have constructed amateurish responses to complex and serious problems. My column in the Deccan Herald - deccanherald.com/opinion/vetera…

@threadreaderapp unroll.