India’s Amit Shah has Covid-19 – and little sympathy from social media

The powerful home affairs minister has been criticised for going to a private hospital instead of one run by the government

Netizens have also asked why he has not tried home remedies recommended by BJP politicians, including drinking cow urine and chanting hymns

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India’s Home Minister Amit Shah. Photo: EPA

Published: 8:00pm, 3 Aug 2020Updated: 10:07pm, 3 Aug 2020

As India reels from its fifth consecutive day of recording more than 50,000 new Covid-19 cases, home affairs minister Amit Shah has come under fire for his decision to seek treatment at a private hospital – with social media users pointedly asking why he has not tried the dubious home remedies recommended by the government.

Besides Shah, the chief ministers of the southern state of Karnataka and the central Madhya Pradesh state have also been hospitalised with the disease. India on Monday reported 52,972 new infections in the past 24 hours, taking its total past 1.8 million – the third highest in the world after the United States and Brazil. It also declared 771 new deaths, meaning Covid-19 has now killed 38,135 people there.

There is widespread unhappiness over New Delhi’s handling of the pandemic. Sociologist Shiv Visvanathan said people were looking for adequate health care solutions from the government, which claimed that everything was in order – so it was seen as “poetic justice” when Shah tested positive.

“The disappointment of people has turned to contempt and they want to [take every] chance of expressing it through social media,” he said.

The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has provided Indian social media users with plenty of ammunition. Addressing the country in March and April, Modi appealed for people to light candles and clang metal plates to “defeat the despair of coronavirus”, while a minister from his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in March told the Assam state assembly that cow urine and cow dung could cure Covid-19.

Last month, one BJP parliamentarian launched a brand of poppadom that he said would help develop antibodies against the disease, while another MP from the party told Indians that reciting the devotional hymn Hanuman Chalisa five times a day would “definitely work and we will be free from coronavirus”.

A Twitter user, Khushboo, posted an image of a fake prescription for Shah that advised him to partake of these remedies. “The jibe was against the unscientific cures propagated by the government and the ruling BJP for the ordinary people,” Khushboo said.