When I told my boomer relatives this, their response was:

Don’t believe everything the Chinese media says.

Meanwhile the various states/national government of India continually downplays the number of deaths. Yesterday my state reported just 40ish deaths. I know for a fact that there were 20 new corpses that arrived at just one of the countless crematoriums/burial places in my city. Just one.

I remember how just a couple of weeks ago people used to go around without masks, no social distancing, nothing and I’d be the only one wearing a mask. And they’d all say:

Corona to khatam ho gaya. (Covid is finished).

People were organising election rallies with hundreds of thousands of people out in the street, there was a massive fucking religious festival with literally millions of people attending.

Indians just assumed we’d somehow escaped Covid. We hadn’t gotten any of the second or third waves other countries were getting and even our first wave did far less damage than people had thought it would.

These past 10-15 days have truly shown all the “the cure is worse than the disease” people what it is we were trying to prevent. Why it isn’t okay to say we’ve already got herd immunity. Or that India has a young population. Or that rural people have better immunity so they don’t get Covid. All things I’ve heard multiple times.

Even now, you can’t compare India to countries that have contained it well. Why? Because countries like Australia are rich, Vietnam has far fewer people, and China is a totalitarian state that just lies.

This pattern of thinking applies to everything in India. We can’t compare ourselves to other developed nations because they’re rich off exploitation. True. But we also can’t compare ourselves to other developing nations because they have far fewer people. That’s a shit excuse, but okay. That only leaves China right? Nope. Because China doesn’t have “freedom”. The people are oppressed. The state controls everything. And India, for all its flaws, is a democracy.

Drives me nuts. China is the only country we can compare ourselves to. They got their freedom in 1949. We got it in 1947. They were an incredibly rich civilisation utterly destroyed by western powers and left to rot. The same happened to us. There is no other country India can compare itself to. But we’re too busy terrorising Pakistan, and our Muslim & Dalit citizens, and cozying up with Amerikkka and other western fascists/capitalists to try to learn from China.

I don’t remember where I read this, but it’s so fucking true. You take a hundred of the poorest people in India and send them to China for a month to live like the poorest there. And send a hundred of the poorest people in China to India for a month and tell them to live like the poorest here. See who wants to return back to their country after the month is up. Who still thinks whether bourgeois ideals that do not have any material basis in reality are what makes India better than China.

Sorry for the rant. Kudos to all Chinese comrades who managed to achieve not just an national independence but social and economic independence too.