Rural India is starting to turn on Modi

In India’s thousands of villages, citizens have been left to fight the pandemic’s deadly second wave alone.

After crippling New Delhi and Mumbai, the Covid-19 surge has hit the vast hinterland that’s home to about 70% of the country’s 1.4 billion people, where there’s mostly no health-care facilities, no doctors and no supply of oxygen. And unlike India’s social-media literate urban population, residents can’t appeal on Twitter to an army of strangers to help.

Now anger is growing at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration for failing to boost health infrastructure during a lull last year in cases. There is also residual anger over his proposed agriculture laws, which farmers say give private corporations too much power.

After losing the battle for the fiercely contested state of West Bengal in elections earlier this month, his Bharatiya Janata Party was defeated in several seats in local polls in Uttar Pradesh, one of the worst-hit states for the virus, although it held ground in two other votes.

It suggests trouble ahead for Modi as his party heads into more state elections next year, with unemployment on the rise and the economic recovery following India’s first recession in decades curtailed by the latest virus outbreak and state lockdowns.

The fallout from India’s outbreak also goes beyond the country itself. The highly transmissible India variant has now been identified in 2,323 cases in 86 districts across the U.K., prompting authorities to accelerate vaccinations in affected areas.

Analysts say Modi looks out of his depth for the first time since he came to power in a landslide in 2014. With a legislative vote in Uttar Pradesh early next year, the question is how much more he could suffer at the ballot box. — Ruth Pollard Bloomberg