Vijay Prashad explains the recent events taking place in India

The Indian version of the Corona Virus was covered extensively during the past weeks in the mainstream media. The terrible images of people being cremated in the fields because the Indian crematoriums were no longer coping with the high death toll made it to the front pages of all major journals across the world.

Barring a few exceptions, there were no articles that tried to take a closer look at India to discover how the largest producer of vaccines faced such a tragedy.

India was not only notorious this year for the catastrophic management of the pandemic. The largest strike ever recorded in human history started last November when more than 250 million people joined a protest that marked their opposition against the cutting of farming subsidies by the right-wing government of Narendra Modi.

Little has been said about the structural causes of these extraordinary events taking place in the second-largest country in the world by population.

We invited On the Barricades, Vijay Prashad, renowned activist, scholar, and political commentator, to explain to our viewers in Eastern Europe and across the world how it was possible to have 250 million people on strike at the beginning of the year and how the largest producer of vaccines in the world failed so miserably in dealing with the pandemic.