During the PM’s foreign travels mammoth Indian community gatherings have been organized where the GID in multitudes have been called upon to cheer and applaud the leader of their country of origin, particularly those mobilized by the NRI groups supporting the BJP/RSS. Shouldn’t at least they be called for action now in India’s greatest hour of need? Pitiably there has been no call emanating from the government to the Diaspora, no special cell to register their urge, none whatsoever. Except for a few packages of medical equipment sent out by the American Association of Physicians of Indian origin (AAPI) and their British counterpart (BAPIO), all part of the Global Association of Physicians of Indian origin (GAPIO), not many overseas bodies or individuals have come forward to extend assistance to India. The best brains of the BAPIO have been left untouched, hardly any teleconsultations or scientific and medical advisories with them, nothing substantial to mobilize their talents which should have been a priority for the government.

A coalition of progressive Indian American and South Asian Diaspora organizations at a press conference earlier this month stressed the need for urgent steps such as mass universal vaccination and the dire need for resource building—vaccines, medicines, equipment and medical personnel—and called for greater transparency in at least calling out the numbers of those affected and dead given that there is a great discrepancy felt between Covid casualties cited and actual deaths occurring in crematoria, burial sites and sundry other places where Covid- infected bodies are disposed off. It is to nobody’s credit that the Indian variant of B.1.716 should be declared by WHO as “a variant of concern”, that it would be in the interest of every nation to see that India’s current death rate, the highest ever of all countries in the history of this deadly pandemic, does not proliferate after having spread to at least 38 countries.