Five years have passed since the Delta wave of the Covid-19 pandemic hit India, and six years since the onset of the global pandemic. Yet public discussion on the calamity remains scant. This even as, according to experts, Covid-19 claimed 4-5 million lives in India, more than anywhere else in the world, and shrunk the economy by 7.3% in real terms in 2020-21. (The government disputes the death toll, putting it at 0.5 million.)The Delta wave is particularly engraved in memories as a time when people begged others for oxygen cylinders and hospital beds for their loved ones and dead bodies floated down the Ganga and even had to be buried on pavements.Since the pandemic receded, in the scarce moments when India’s handling of those years has been discussed, the government’s defenders have made elaborate assertions, insulating it from criticism. Many even celebrate the government’s response, describing it like some kind of masterstroke.Now – at a distance of roughly six years – is a good time to evaluate the Narendra Modi regime’s response to the crisis. A good starting point would be to probe the assertions made by the regime’s defenders, as a step towards a framework for evaluating the government’s response as a whole.First, supporters of the regime assert that irrespective of whether or not the government had implemented the March-May 2020 nationwide total lockdown, the government would have faced criticism. Had it not implemented the lockdown, they claim, critics would have blamed it for laggardness. When it did implement the lockdown, critics blamed it for excessiveness.But this claim elides the possibility of a more rigorous, data-based, nuanced approach; for instance, of having imposed a partial lockdown. Or having made food and shelter arrangements for urban migrants, even if a total lockdown were being implemented.Policy need not mean doing nothing or throwing the baby out of the bathtub. It can involve analysis, sophistication, game-planning. India’s lockdown, indeed, is attributed with having helped spread the virus from the cities to the rural hinterland, given that millions of urban migrants – many of them hungry and homeless, many journeying on foot – returned to their villages, taking the virus home with them.File photo: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath handing a copy of ‘COVID-19 and The Migrant Crisis Resolution: A Report On Uttar Pradesh’ to Union Home Minister Amit Shah. Photo: Twitter/@myogiadityanathFurthermore, the lockdown is attributed for tanking India’s real GDP in the first quarter of 2020-21 by 24% year-on-year.Second, the regime’s supporters insist that the government did the best it could. What more could it have done amid such a catastrophe? This is a strangely defeatist argument made on behalf of a prime minister who otherwise is presented as bearing a chhappan-inch or fifty-six-inch chest, as a strongman who keeps all threats at bay.Instead of giving the regime a free pass, questions should be asked about why the government and its ecosystem did not build social solidarity during the pandemic and lockdown periods, and instead targeted Muslims.Why did the government not challenge the unscientific, dangerous ‘cures’ being peddled, for instance by Baba Ramdev, instead of endorsing his prescriptions for the disease? There are endless such salutary measures that Modi, his government and the Bharatiya Janata Party could have taken.A related assertion that the regime’s defenders make is that critiquing, especially retrospectively, is easy, but facing the pandemic in real-time presented only bad options.It is true that for any government, particularly one of a country as vast and socio-economically unequal as India, managing the pandemic was a nightmare. That said, even as a government faced with many bad options, there were options. Locking down the country with a four-hour notice was not the only option. As just one alternative, even if a total lockdown had to be imposed, could people not have been provided a longer notice?Third, the regime’s defenders argue that the pandemic was an act of God, and that to critique the government is therefore unfair.Such thinking suggests that a government is to be insulated of criticism whenever the country faces external shocks. But there are good and bad policy decisions that a government can take in response to any such shocks, or indeed in anticipation of them. A country like India is susceptible to all kinds of shocks: heat waves, oil shortages, terrorist attacks, public health crises.Is the government supposed to throw up its hands – and its supporters shrug their shoulders – in the event of every such challenge, or are there not good or bad steps that can be taken, which can then be evaluated accordingly?Fourth, defenders of the regime question how India’s response could be criticised when even the almighty America did such a bad job. America’s response under President Donald Trump was decidedly poor. The country lost one million lives, the second most in the world. President Trump even riffed that bleach could be injected as a way of fighting Covid-19.If India should compare itself to America, however, it should be to the best of America, for instance its relatively free press, its excellent universities. It should not compare itself to the worst of America, especially not to the Trump administration’s anti-science, partisan response to the pandemic, or its frequent gun violence, racial inequalities and so on.As Harsh Mander explains in his book Burning Pyres, Mass Graves and a State That Failed Its People, China, where the pandemic began, initiated targeted, limited lockdowns – calling into question why India needed such a drastic and sudden lockdown when its case load was only around 500 and the death toll around 10 at the time.New Zealand, for instance, embraced an inclusive, pluralistic approach to fighting the pandemic, in contrast to the Modi regime’s communal response. Modi characterises India as a ‘mother of democracy’. Yet, he and his supporters absolve the government of the responsibility that that status should accord.Fifth, Modi defenders argue that it was not the government but the people who were at fault for whatever went wrong during the pandemic.This is a twisted argument and easily rebuttable through evidence. For instance, on the one hand, the regime prescribed social distancing and his supporters singled out the Tablighi Jamaat in Delhi as failing to follow norms. On the other hand, Modi himself led packed election rallies in West Bengal while exulting over the size of the crowd, and his regime permitted dense gatherings such as at the Haridwar kumbh mela.Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rally for the West Bengal assembly polls in Kolkata, March 7, 2021. On March 31, UNICEF said India had 1.29 crore active Covid-19 cases. Photo: PTI/Swapan MahapatraThe government, not the people, was to blame for sending such mixed messaging during the pandemic. Many other such areas of mismanagement, including vaccine shortages, lack of hospital preparedness were revealed during the Delta wave for which the government was squarely responsible.Far from apologising for its response, the Modi regime frequently resorted to self-congratulation. The public, which lost so much, should push back against this. A good starting point would be to rebut the above commonly offered canards by the regime’s defenders – canards that reflect false dichotomies, appeals to inevitability or to fate, whataboutery and victim blaming, all at the cost of rigorous evaluation.Covid-19 was a once-in-a-century public health crisis. Yet preparation for it and responses to it, should be evaluated in the way that preparations for and responses to any other systemic crises are evaluated. The Modi regime should not get a free pass for its fractured policy response, especially one that led to preventable human deaths and economic devastation.Abhimanyu Chandra is a grantee of the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression.