Foreign newspapers are not exactly quaking in their boots after the Indian foreign policy establishment sought to lecture an Australian newspaper that had said “Modi leads India into a viral apocalypse”.

Le Monde, the French newspaper, on Wednesday chipped away at the hitherto Teflon-coated image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The French newspaper blamed his “arrogance and demagogy” as much as the “unpredictability of the virus” for the second deadly wave of the pandemic in India.

“The spectacle of lines of ambulances at the gates of overwhelmed hospitals, of sick people’s relatives begging in vain to obtain oxygen and of mass cremations does not lie. From cities to rural areas, from the rich to the poor, the carnage does not spare anyone. Declining until February, the curve of new infection is nearly vertical,” Le Monde said in its editorial.

“Such a backfiring cannot be explained solely by the unpredictability of a virus and its variants. Narendra Modi’s lack of prediction, arrogance and demagogy are clearly among the causes of a situation that now seems out of control and requires international mobilisation. The Prime Minister, after paralysing and traumatising his country in 2020 by decreeing a brutal confinement, abandoning millions of migrant workers, completely lowered his guard at the beginning of 2021,” the editorial added.

“Preferring nationalist harangues to the advice of health experts, more inclined to self-celebration than to protect populations, Mr Modi only aggravated the situation,” the newspaper said, referring to the election campaign and also the Kumbh Mela which turned the Ganga’s waters into a “giant hotbed of contagion”.

The editorial tore apart Modi’s much publicised vaccine strategy, contending that the vaccine diplomacy was subservient to his ambitions, ignoring the reality of the country’s production capacities.

On Monday, the Indian high commission in Australia had sent a rejoinder to The Australian newspaper for an article criticising the Indian leadership’s handling of the pandemic. During Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, Indian missions used to issue counters to negative news in foreign publications.

The mission had described article in The Australian as “baseless, malicious and slanderous”.