In the week when the Bharatiya Janata Party launched a familiar drumbeat to celebrate 11 years in power, the worst aviation tragedy in recent years occurred in Ahmedabad in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat. Over 270 were killed. The country was plunged into grief, outrage, anger, and mourning.
Just days earlier, in another shocking tragedy, four were killed and several injured after falling from two local trains in Mumbra in Maharashtra. Around the same time, a BBC News Hindi report found that as many as 82 people died in stampedes at the Kumbh Mela earlier this year, against the official figure of 37.Weeks earlier, it had emerged through the government’s own Civil Registration System (CRS) data that official Covid-19 death figures were wrong, and that the actual death toll was at least six times higher. The highest falsification of these figures was in Gujarat, where the Covid mortality rate was 33 times the earlier stated deaths.
