How Modi turned Covid-19 into a cash machine

'To Narendra Modi, Covid-19 is not so much a disease as a deus ex machina. Before he announced the largest lockdown in human history on 24 March, the Indian prime minister was submerged in a pool of self-engineered crises. Citizenly protests against his legislative disfigurement of Indian secularism had erupted in every major city, more than four dozen lives were devoured at his doorstep in February in the worst religious bloodletting in Delhi since the 1984, unemployment was soaring, and the economy was poised to post the slowest pace of growth in a decade. Modi’s “New India” appeared to be on the precipice of an implosion precipitated by the malevolence and incompetence of its own progenitor. Then came the saviour from China in the guise of a pathogen...'

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