When the Covid-19 pandemic swept through the world in 2020, it rendered our healthcare systems overwhelmed and left thousands dead. Many leaders responded to these deaths in a grim fashion, framing them as inevitable, and failing to acknowledge the devastating social and emotional impact they had. A year later, societies worldwide have returned to some semblance of normalcy made possible by the advent of Covid-19 vaccines, and the ever-increasing number of deaths remains overshadowed by emphases on recovery efforts. In public policy circles, bereavement and grief are often considered outside the ambit of the government considering the public-private divide. Grief and personal loss are seen as private and vulnerable experiences, and the government subsequently has no real responsibility to prepare a cohesive response to it.

However, such ideas are being challenged, as citizens around the world grow discontent with their governments’ dispassionate and superfluous responses to the populations’ losses. In India particularly, deaths linked to the April 2021 Covid-19 wave in the country have been obscured, dismissed by some public officials as never having happened. The staggering drop of popularity — from 66% to 24% — that the incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi experienced after such dismissive claims make it clear that it is fundamentally important for the state to appropriately facilitate and legitimise national bereavement. Consequently, Dr Katharine Millar of The London School of Economics rightly argued that not addressing public grief is a serious mistake. Citizens need the state to ‘see’ their loss, rendering their grief acknowledged, legitimised and felt, in order to pave the road to recovery.

The idea of death or bereavement being a public policy concern is uncommon but essential, especially considering the current socio-political landscape. However, the act of grieving, while private, has always been a deeply political one. A population’s grief over an unforeseen event or series of events is often shaped by the narrative created by the state machinery. A cohesive, empathetic narrative that creates space for public bereavement and the creation of solidarity through mass death events (for example, national minutes of silence) allows citizens to duly process death and move forward. However, a lack of such a narrative indicates too much distance between statesmen and the lived, ground realities of the public. 

In the Covid-19 pandemic specifically, a general lack of government acknowledgement of the incredible losses faced by its citizens and an overemphasis on recovery efforts can make bereaved citizens feel left behind or invisible. Furthermore, the characterisation of these deaths as inevitable, or never having happened, belies a cavalier and insincere attitude from the government that may spark discontent within the citizenry. This holds true more so for minority communities, who have experienced disproportionate losses and are already heavily discriminated against, leading to a social disconnect and a lack of cohesion. 

This is especially true for India’s Dalit population, which is considered ‘untouchable’ due to the low stature of Dalits in the country’s archaic caste system. The curse of ‘untouchability’, compounded by the severity of Covid-19, has led to a hesitance among some doctors when it comes to treating these patients. This leads to higher morbidity-mortality rates within this community. Other depressed classes and minorities — such as the Muslim population of the country — have also been disproportionately hit by the pandemic. 

The under acknowledgement of pandemic deaths by governments in favour of recovery efforts is arguably because these losses are understood as ‘bad deaths’. This is a term coined by Dr Yuna Han, Dr Martin Bayly and Dr Katharine Millar to encompass “sudden deaths, enforced disappearances or mass catastrophes that do not fit into the narratives of the ruling elites” as cleanly as the patriotic, tragic, but acceptable deaths of soldiers in war. These ‘bad deaths’ may reflect unwise decisions by the ruling elites or the unpreparedness of the state machinery and accordingly undermine public faith in domestic institutions. To mention these deaths would be to legitimise them, and legitimising them may unleash a slew of criticism that governments would rather bury.

This certainly is the case in India. The country’s second wave of Covid-19 in 2021 left many people choking as oxygen became scarce in hospitals around the country. Media around the world was flooded with heart-breaking sights of Indians struggling to find ICU beds, basic medication and lifesaving supplies of oxygen. Medical care became outlandishly expensive even for the middle class, and so the poor and marginalised buckled completely under the force of the new wave of infections. Swathes of citizens could not even provide their deceased loved ones with funeral rites, and hundreds chose to burn their dead on the banks of the Ganga River in a haunting mass cremation. The second wave ravaged the country shortly after Prime Minister Modi’s speech at the World Economic Forum where, despite repeated warnings about a tremendous second wave, he claimed that “India had beat all odds in the global fight against coronavirus” and had hence “saved the world.”

The government’s assurances that India had beat the virus left the citizens unprepared for this second wave, which in turn greatly compounded their emotional devastation from Covid deaths. Worst of all, however, was the government’s outrageous denial of these deaths altogether. Indeed, Dr Bharati Pawar of the Ministry of Health and Family specified that “no deaths due to a lack of oxygen had been reported by states” — an assertion that has sparked a wave of outrage among Indian citizens who see this as a cold-hearted denial of the terrible reality faced by countless families. In addition to this, the government has also come under fire for severely under-reporting deaths. Official data records 418,000 Covid-related deaths, while recent studies assert that this number is truly closer to five million. The government has vehemently denied this claim, seemingly more concerned with managing criticism on Twitter as opposed to taking accountability or offering sympathy to grieving citizens.

The effects of such disconnect are tangible. Modi’s popularity has notably suffered due to the mismanagement of Covid-deaths and the abject lack of sympathy when it comes to oxygen-related deaths specifically. Even his most ardent supporters have said that they “won’t forgive Modi for Covid indifference”. The ruling elites’ handling of the Covid crisis is currently being heavily critiqued, and unless Modi chooses to allow his public a chance to grieve their losses, he runs the dangerous risk of provoking further dissent and fuelling fragmentation.

The current conspiracy of silence in the ruling circles with regards to death is unsustainable, and public grief simply cannot be buried indefinitely without consequences.