NEW DELHI – Twelve Indian ministers, including the health minister, resigned yesterday, following a catastrophic surge in Covid-19 cases earlier this year.
The resignations form part of a major cabinet reshuffle and expansion by Prime Minister Narendra Modi ahead of seven state elections next year.
Health Minister Harsh Vardhan, 66, came in for particular criticism during the spike in infections in April and May blamed on new virus variants and lax restrictions.
The healthcare system was under severe pressure in many areas, with hospitals running out of beds, medical oxygen and drugs.
Weeks before, Vardhan had said India is “in the endgame” of the pandemic.
India’s official death toll has exploded from 160,000 at the end of March to more than 400,000 now. However, many experts suspect the true toll is several times higher.
Elections
Three dozen new faces have been inducted into the new Modi cabinet, taking the number of ministers to 77 up from 52.
More than a dozen ministers are from poll-bound states such as Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, representing different castes and regional communities – a dominant factor in India’s electoral politics.
Four members from southern Karnataka state were also added, including millionaire media mogul Rajeev Chandrasekhar and Shobha Karandlaje.
Karandlaje has several police cases filed against her over her allegedly anti-Muslim remarks.
Six other women ministers also found a place in the new cabinet.
But the expansion witnessed the shock exit of Ravi Shankar Prasad (law and justice and information technology minister) and Prakash Javadekar (information and broadcasting, environment and climate change minister).
Both Prasad, 66, and Javadekar, 70, were seen as faces of the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, with some press reports suggesting they will handle party work ahead of the key state elections.
Seven Indian states are due to hold elections next year, six of them currently ruled by the BJP. They include Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, Gujarat and Punjab.
Earlier this year, BJP suffered a major setback when it failed to wrest power in the important eastern state of West Bengal from a high-profile Modi critic.
Some commentators said this is a reflection of Modi’s falling popularity because of his handling of the pandemic. BJP did, however, retain Assam in the northeast.
Twitter spat
Prasad’s exit from the cabinet has been particularly surprising as he was locked in a bitter dispute with foreign social media companies over a new law.
He authored a law that required such firms to remove and identify the “first originator” of posts deemed to undermine India’s sovereignty, state security or public order.
Social media companies and privacy activists fear the vagueness of the rules means they could be forced to identify the authors of posts critical of the government.
WhatsApp is challenging the rules in court over user privacy violation.
But the war of words has been sharpest with Twitter, with the microblogging site failing to appoint a permanent compliance officer based in India.
Prasad has several times publicly slammed Twitter for not following the new rules, and undermining Indian laws.
His ministry recently told a court that the social media platform had lost its intermediary status in India, making the company criminally liable for content posted on the platform.
This follows police visits to Twitter’s India office in May, after the firm labelled tweets by the BJP’s national spokesman as “manipulated media”.
Twitter responded by accusing the government of “intimidation tactics”. – AFP, July 8, 2021
