Twelve Indian ministers resigned on Wednesday including the health minister
following a catastrophic surge in Covid-19 cases earlier this year.
The resignations form part of a major reshuffle by Prime Minister Narendra
Modi ahead of seven state elections in 2022.
Health Minister Harsh Vardhan, 66, came in for particular criticism during
the spike in infections in April and May.
The health service was under severe pressure in many areas with hospitals
running out of beds, medical oxygen and drugs.
The Covid-19 explosion was blamed on new virus variants and the government
having allowed mass religious and political gatherings to take place in
January, February and March.
Modi had declared victory over the virus in January and critics say his
government failed to use the time to prepare the historically underfunded
health system for another wave.
India’s official death toll has exploded from around 160,000 at the end of
March to more than 400,000 now, the third-highest in the world.
But many experts suspect that due to undercounting and incorrect recording
of the cause of death, the real number of dead could be several times
higher.
Elections
Ravi Shankar Prasad, minister for law and justice and information
technology, also resigned, according to a statement from the president’s
office.
Prasad, 66, a close ally of Modi, was however expected to be given an
important role in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ahead of the state
elections, press reports said.
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 the 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 was a reflection of Modi’s falling popularity
because of his handling of the pandemic. The BJP did however retain Assam
in the northeast.
Prasad has been locked in a bitter dispute in recent months with foreign
social media companies.
His ministry authored rule changes that require the 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, fearing that it will have to
break its system of encryption that prevents anyone other than the sender
and receiver from reading messages.
The war of words has been sharpest with Twitter, with the microblogging
site failing to appoint a permanent compliance officer based in India.
In May, Indian police visited Twitter’s offices in Delhi and Gurgaon after
the firm labelled tweets by the BJP’s national spokesman as “manipulated
media”.
Twitter responded by accusing the government of “intimidation tactics”.
Prasad then had his Twitter account briefly locked after he posted a video
containing music that breached US copyright law.
He called the move a “gross violation” and said it showed how his “calling
out the high handedness and arbitrary actions of Twitter… clearly ruffled
its feathers”.
The others resigning include Prakash Javadekar, minister for the
environment, forests and climate change as well as information,
broadcasting and heavy industries.
Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, minister for education, also quit. (AFP)
