MUMBAI, India — Outside an upscale Indian hospital last week, Baljeet Asthana put her phone on selfie mode, propped her eyeglasses on her head so she could stare directly into the camera, and hit record.

Through a white polka-dot mask, she described her family's ordeal: Her 82-year-old mother was inside the hospital "struggling for her life," Asthana said.

Near the end of her video, Asthana addresses Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as well as Delhi's chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal.

On Friday, they confirmed 414,188 new cases, a global record since the coronavirus pandemic began.

His pre-pandemic slogan, Aatmanirbhar Bharat — Hindi for "self-reliant India" — no longer resonates in a country now struggling to process tons of international coronavirus relief supplies landing daily at New Delhi's airport.

Anger is growing against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi amid surging coronavirus cases!

These scenes challenge the idea of India that Modi sought to sell: a proud new global power with an ancient Hindu culture and a booming economy that had put its impoverished past behind it.

The prime minister hasn't given a televised speech to the nation since April 20.

That day, India confirmed 234,692 new coronavirus cases — more than 20 times its daily tallies from late January and early February.

For weeks, Modi's Hindu nationalist government had also refused to halt the huge Kumbh Mela pilgrimage, in which millions of people gathered to bathe in the Ganges River throughout April.

An Indian investigative magazine has since reported that a state official who urged that the pilgrimage be restricted was summarily fired by Modi's government.

About six weeks before Modi's April 20 televised speech to the nation, his health minister had declared that India was in the "endgame" of the pandemic.

When cases plummeted this winter, India disassembled extra coronavirus wards it had set up in 2020.

Indian diplomats celebrated the country's role in exporting COVID-19 vaccines, but the government didn't order enough to be manufactured and distributed to the domestic population.

As thousands of Indians die of COVID-19 every day, even some of Modi's staunchest supporters are angry with him.

India is struggling with shortages of oxygen for patients as well as shortages of medicine and hospital beds?

India is struggling with shortages of oxygen for patients as well as shortages of medicine and hospital beds.

NPR contacted seven spokespeople for Modi's government or party to comment on the criticism.

Meanwhile, the government has been asking Twitter and Facebook to block certain posts it deems as critical of its handling of the pandemic.

(While India is on the United Kingdom's travel ban "red list" of countries with high coronavirus rates, diplomats are exempt.).

He was asked about COVID-19 and whether the party and prime minister were concerned about it.

Prime Minister Modi is taking meetings, discussing, taking very proactive steps," Nadda told reporters.

Still, Modi's pandemic response has struck many Indians as inadequate, observers say.

Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., says he hasn't seen this level of outrage at Modi at any time since the prime minister was first elected in 2014!

"It's the ferocity of the virus, coupled with what people perceive as mismanagement, as a lack of empathy, as a prime minister who's usually leading from the front but seems to be receding into the background," Vaishnav says.

Under a tent installed along a roadside in Ghaziabad, India, a patient breathes with the help of oxygen provided by a gurdwara, a place of worship for Sikhs, amid the coronavirus pandemic on May 2.

Modi has been India's most popular prime minister in decades

While political opinion polling in India is often unreliable, a poll by the data analytics company Morning Consult shows Modi's approval rating fell in April

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In the meantime, as India breaks world records for daily coronavirus cases and its death toll mounts, shock across the country is turning to sorrow, and sorrow is turning to more anger

Next year, the state will hold legislative elections — which will be a key test for Modi, whose close confidant is the head of the state's government

Video filmed at a crematorium in the city of Meerut and posted to Twitter on April 30 shows an argument between a family that had just cremated their loved one, who died of COVID-19, and another man who interrupts the family and scolds them for bemoaning the government