Tag: Dr Harsh Vardhan

Justice delayed but a ton of bricks await

From ‘SC declines Ramdev, Patanjali apology; expresses concern over FMCGs taking gullible consumers ‘up and down the garden path’’, The Hindu, April 10, 2024:

The Supreme Court has refused to accept the unconditional apology from Patanjali co-founder Baba Ramdev and managing director Acharya Balkrishna for advertising medical products in violation of giving an undertaking in the apex court in November 2023 prohibiting the self-styled yoga guru. … Justices Hima Kohli and Ahsanuddin Amanullah told senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi that Mr. Ramdev has apologised only after being caught on the back foot. His violations of the undertaking to the court was deliberate and willful, they said. The SC recorded its dissatisfaction with the apology tendered by proposed contemnors Patanjali, Mr. Balkrishna and Mr. Ramdev, and posted the contempt of court case on April 16.

… The Bench also turned its ire on the Uttarakhand State Licensing Authority for “twiddling their thumbs” and doing nothing to prevent the publications and advertisements. “Why should we not come down like a ton of bricks on your officers? They have been fillibustering,” Justice Kohli said. The court said the assurances of the State Licensing Authority and the apology of the proposed contemnors are not worth the paper they are written on.

A very emotionally gratifying turn of events, but perhaps not as gratifying as they might have been had they transpired at the government’s hands when Patanjali was issuing its advertisements of pseudoscience-backed COVID-19 cures during the pandemic. Or if the Supreme Court had proceeded to actually hold the men in contempt instead of making a slew of observations and setting a date for another hearing. Still, something to cheer for and occasion to reserve some hope for the April 16 session.

But in matters involving Ramdev and Patanjali Ayurved, many ministers of the current government ought to be pulled up as well, including former Union health minister Harsh Vardhan, Union micro, small, and medium enterprises minister Nitin Gadkari, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi’s governance and policies both written and unwritten enabled Patanjali’s charlatanry while messrs Vardhan and Gadkari were present at an event in February 2021 when Patanjali launched a product it claimed could cure COVID-19, with Vardhan – who was health minister then – speaking in favour of people buying and using the unproven thing.

I think the Supreme Court’s inclination to hold Ramdev et al. in contempt should extend to Vardhan as well because his presence at the event conferred a sheen of legitimacy on the product but also because of a specific bit of theatrics he pulled in May the same year involving Ramdev and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Ramdev apologising because that’s more politically convenient rather than because he thinks he screwed up isn’t new. In that May, he’d called evidence-based medicine “stupid” and alleged such medicine had killed more people than the virus itself. After some virulent public backlash, Vardhan wrote a really polite letter to Ramdev asking him to apologise, and Ramdev obliged.

But just the previous month, in April 2021, Manmohan Singh had written a letter to Modi suggesting a few courses of action to improve India’s response to the virus’s spread. Its contents were perfectly reasonable, yet Vardhan responded to it accusing Singh of spreading “vaccine hesitancy” and alleging Congress-ruled states were responsible for fanning India’s deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections (in 2021). These were all ridiculous assertions. But equally importantly, his lashing out stood in stark contrast to his letter to Ramdev: respect for the self-styled godman and businessman whose company was attempting to corner the market for COVID-19 cures with untested, pseudo-Ayurvedic froth versus unhinged rhetoric for a well-regarded economist and statesman.

For this alone, Vardhan deserves the “ton of bricks” the Supreme Court is waiting with.

On The Lancet editorial

On May 8, The Lancet published an editorial criticising the Narendra Modi government’s response to India’s second COVID-19 outbreak, which has been redefining the meaning of ‘snafu’. All hell broke loose. Of course, hell has been breaking loose for quite some time in India now, but the latest episode was in one specific sense also gratifying to behold.

There were the usual rumbles in the week following the editorial’s appearance, until on May 17 India’s health minister Dr Harsh Vardhan shared a blog post penned by a Pankaj Chaturvedi deriding The Lancet‘s choice of arguments. (I’m fond of emboldening the honorific: it shows doctors can be stupid, too.) The post is mostly whataboutery studded with a few gems about how people who liked the editorial aren’t pissed enough that favipiravir and hydroxychloroquine were approved for use – as Dr Vardhan’s ministry did. More importantly, it seems Dr Vardhan, and his colleagues in fact, threw themselves into the barrel looking for anything with fully formed sentences that said The Lancet was wrong – a sign that their government still gives a damn about what foreign journals, and perhaps magazines and newspapers too, say about it.

We need to use this to the fullest extent, and I daresay that it’s the sort of resource the government is going to find difficult to duplicate as well. There was recently an article about Modi doing a great job during India’s second wave, published in an outlet called The Daily Guardian. There was enough confusion to draw the UK’s The Guardian forward and clarify that it was an unaffiliated entity – but no amount of confusion can supplant an institution, no matter how illiberal. Aakar Patel wrote in 2018: “The fact is that intelligent and intellectual bigotry is very difficult. There are very few people who can pull that off and that is why we can count the major ones on our fingers.” This is also why the government has twitched every time the New York Times, the Washington Post, BBC, The Lancet, Science and The BMJ have published articles critical of India, even if this isn’t the full picture.

It’s doubly interesting that the sophistry of the rejoinders aside, Dr Vardhan, his colleagues in government and his party’s supporters have all been antagonised by what they perceive to be a political act by a medical journal. This is an untenable distinction, of course – one that fantasises about a clear divide between the Watchers, who look out, and the Watched, who dare not know what the Watchers see. More pertinently, it’s a reflection of what they desperately expect from their own compatriots: to ignore how bad political leadership could help a virus ravage hundreds of thousands of families.

Laurie Penny wrote an essay in 2018 with some life-saving prescriptions, including that victories against fascists can never be had in the realm of reason. But when The Lancet publishes an editorial, The BMJ the work of an investigative reporter or even The Economist a tightly worded admonishment, they’re both reasoning and enacting a theatre of reason, and the latter seems to bother right-wing ideologues. These people are not going to heed reason, not now and not ever, but it’s heartening, even if my hope is naïve or misplaced, that they’re tractable in some meagre measure… less like dark matter and more like neutrinos.

Featured image credit: Kunj Parekh/Unsplash.