There’s only so much you can get away with while working with jokes, before you know it, it becomes satire. Yesterday in a post uploaded by the social media account of China’s top law enforcement body, they mocked the nightmarish situation in India, where new cases had crossed the 400,000 a day mark. The post has been since deleted and no trace of it can be found now. It’s clear it got removed as soon the people made it clear that the post was a complete disrespect of human life.
India’s situation really is dire, giving the whole world a reminder that the pandemic is far from over. Crematoriums are overflowing with bodies that need to be cremated and funeral pyres burning all over the country. This exact situation was mocked by China’s Communist Party’s Political and Legal Affairs Commission. The post compared the fires in India with China’s recently launched Tianhe space station module.
You can see the post below, because once on the internet always on the internet.
The post was made by two official Chinese government accounts and they sparked a major backlash by the public. The caption roughly reads as “China lighting a fire versus India lighting a fire”. What were the social media managers thinking when they okayed the post? Someone must have been fired. India is currently facing more than 3,000 deaths each day from the pandemic and this post was a complete mockery of the lives lost.
One comment read as “How can this be approved? It’s a complete disrespect of human life”. Another top comment read that “I can’t believe this was posted by a government account. Why do you need to use the suffering of others to highlight national pride?”. It’s clear the public’s opinion on the posts and why they were removed so quickly.
If the post’s goal was to stoke a sense of nationalism in the public then someone did a really bad job at it. And of course, the country’s foreign ministry came up with a reply just as quickly as they deleted the post. “We hope everyone gives attention to the Chinese government and mainstream public opinion supporting India’s fight against the epidemic. “. They also highlighted that China was still sending shipments of its vaccine to India.
Though the tensions have been high between the countries at their borders but posts like these just leave a bad taste. We wholeheartedly pray that the situation in India will improve and condolences to all those who lost their loved ones.