For months, COVID-19 statistics have almost become ordinary. Every morning there are new cases, new deaths and new restrictions. But this week in India, the numbers stopped feeling like numbers.
Hospitals are struggling for beds. Families are searching for oxygen. Crematoriums are overwhelmed. On Sunday, India recorded almost 350,000 new cases in a single day.
And yet, only days earlier, enormous political rallies were still being held.
This is what I find hardest to understand.
West Bengal is currently holding elections, and politicians from different parties have spent weeks campaigning in front of huge crowds. At the same time, millions have travelled to the Kumbh Mela. Prime Minister Narendra Modi eventually asked for the festival to become symbolic, and political rallies have now been reduced or cancelled as the situation has become increasingly serious.
But why did it take a crisis this large for that to happen?
It would be easy to place all the responsibility on one person. I do not think that would be completely fair. Nobody attending a rally was physically forced to go. Governments cannot control every decision made by more than a billion people, and India faces an enormous challenge simply because of its population.
Still, I do not think leadership can be judged by the same standard as individual behaviour.
When political leaders stand in front of enormous crowds during a pandemic, they are not simply making their own decision about risk. They are showing everyone watching what behaviour appears acceptable.
That makes responsibility unequal.
A person deciding to attend a gathering is responsible for that choice. But someone with political authority has another responsibility: understanding that their actions can influence millions of those choices.
Perhaps that is why this week has made me think differently about what leadership actually means.
We normally associate political leadership with making speeches, winning elections and taking important decisions. But leadership must also involve knowing when not to do something, particularly when doing it benefits you politically.
Cancelling a rally might cost votes. Restricting a religious gathering might be unpopular. Imposing restrictions might anger businesses and workers who have already suffered through a year of lockdowns. None of these decisions are easy.
But that is precisely why governments exist. If every decision were obvious and painless, we would hardly need leaders to make them.
There will be plenty of time later to determine exactly what went wrong during India’s second wave and who was responsible for which failures. Right now, people need oxygen, hospital beds and vaccines more than they need political arguments.
But there should eventually be accountability.
Not because every tragedy must have one person to blame, but because understanding the decisions that made a crisis worse is how we avoid making them again.
Maybe leadership is not proved when everything is going well.
Maybe it is revealed by what you are willing to give up when it isn’t.
