India's vaccination policy: A U-turn and a spin

“The adeptness of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its associates in the Sangh Parivar at the politics of appropriation is well known. Indeed, this is a vulgar political record, but the latest propaganda drive that the Union government and the BJP are trying to launch on the basis of the revised vaccine policy announced by the Prime Minister recently must rate as one of the grossest, even by the Sangh Parivar’s abominably low standards of political morality.” This was how Akhilesh Yadav, president of the Samajwadi Party and former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, characterised the attempts by the Central government and the Sangh Parivar to build a political narrative around Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s June 7 announcement of the revised vaccine policy. Akhilesh Yadav went on to explain that “it is clear as daylight that the government was literally forced to alter its denial of free COVID vaccine for all on account of the consistent demands made by opposition parties and many governments led by the opposition, as well as the strong message sent out by the Supreme Court on the right of people to have vaccines”. Even though their ideological lineage is clearly with the assassins of Mahatma Gandhi, they sought to rope in the ‘father of the nation’ as their icon by inventing the nomenclature of ‘Gandhian socialism’ and parading themselves as the advocates of this philosophy.” Even a cursory perusal of the chronology of the government’s actions and declarations related to India’s COVID vaccine policy will bear out Akhilesh’s observations. Supreme Court weighs in In an order uploaded on the Supreme Court web site on June 1, 2021, the apex court asked the Union government for a vaccine roadmap and bluntly declared as “arbitrary and irrational”.its policy of not sanctioning free vaccination for those between 18 and 44.