‘Those who died in second wave left behind living document of our failure’: RJD MP Professor Manoj Jha

In an evocative speech in the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday, RJD MP Professor Manoj Jha said that those who lost their lives in the second wave have left behind a “living document of our failure”.

Arguing for a shift from the politics of numbers, Jha said that even the poorest in the country were taxpayers and a responsibility of a welfare state, and urged the government to work on the right to health and right to work, and “leave demography to the demographers”.

Jha began his address with an apology to those who died in the second wave, but whose deaths were not even being acknowledged. “This apology is not just from me… we should issue a collective apology from this House for those people whose bodies were floating in the Ganga,” Jha said.

The MP said that never before has an obituary of 50 people been read out between two sessions of Parliament. He said there is “not one person in this country, in this House” who can say they have not lost someone known to them.

“People would call for oxygen. We could not arrange it. People think he is an MP, he will arrange oxygen. Of a hundred phone calls, in the evening we would sit and see. Success rate two, success rate three. Who will explain numbers to me? I don’t want to talk about numbers. The people that have gone have left behind a living document of our failure,” Jha said.