That doesn't mean "here's why I blame COVID on my political opponents, AKA the evil-doers", is an interesting or useful start to a discussion. If it is, the counterpoint about protests is equally valid.
However in a situation with very little in the way of actual verifiable facts, what is someone actually asking for in terms of something that will support the evidence? What is a source in this environment? And at various thresholds of that, I will give you many sources (mostly medical) that will support 1-2 orders of magnitude increase. The article itself says only 196 people died in Kanpur during a 3 week period, but there were 8,000 cremations (obviously not all covid related, and without a baseline I can't tell you where this sits, but there is an implied increase given the other statements about lack of cremation space)
I would also challenge your definition of 'significant'. In the US last year, there was a 20% increase in excess deaths (0). Having an extra 20% of humans die in your country counts, I think, as significant.
Now granted it really depends on whether you are talking about India, the US, or the rest of the world but your statement is demonstrably false - in a country with good data, there were an extra 20% of humans dying last year; in a country with terrible data with an out of control epidemic and no way for people to isolate safely, the facts are we will probably never know what the true deaths are but if you're saying (and here a couple of things don't compute) about the same number of people are dying every year (?in India? how do you know that in the absence of data? and generally death statistics take several months to become solid) and the Ganges is a large river, are these two statements logically linked? And how?
(0) https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778361
My brother's two employees died. One was 28 and other in 30's. No complications, physically active people.
What you say is 'Mostly' true - in a bad flu season the medical community has a name for it, clearing out the dead wood.
But 'Mostly', when scaled to really large numbers, is still a scarily large number. And Mostly, in this instance, is still a long way from the truth.
First, there is a significantly increased risk of dying beyond the first 30 days of illness (ie when many people have recovered) [0]
Beyond the first 30 days of illness, individuals with COVID-19 had an increased risk of death (hazard ratio of 1.59 (1.46–1.73)). We also estimated the adjusted excess burden of death due to COVID-19 per 1,000 persons at 6 months on the basis of the difference between the estimated incidence rate in individuals with COVID-19 and all VHA users. The excess death was estimated at 8.39 (7.09–9.58) per 1,000 patients with COVID-19 at 6 months. Individuals with COVID-19 had a higher risk of requiring outpatient care (hazard ratio of 1.20 (1.19–1.21)), at an excess burden of 33.22 (30.89–35.58; all excess burdens are given per 1,000 patients with COVID-19 at 6 months) and at a greater frequency of 0.47 (0.44–0.49) additional encounters every 30 days
Secondly, it is not just death that is a concern (and again i'll stress that really, a lot of young people, through sheer weight of numbers, are dying of this. Huge number of infection, huge number of death, even at <1% CFR). It's long term morbidity. Your risk of death may be less than 1%, but your risk of hospitalisation may be 5-10% depending on your comorbidities and age. A person admitted to hospital and requiring ICU support and ventilation may have a 4-6 week hospital stay during which they lose 30% of their muscle mass. Once they come out of hospital, they need to learn to walk and eat again and go to Rehab for a couple of months. What would that do to your life?
The basis for this is data from places with at least some level of health care. From the reports I'm hearing, a lot of India's rural population is not making it medical care.
Also, worth mentioning that 1% of India's population is 13.8 million people.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
The absurdity of asking is even stronger when almost any understanding of the situation on the ground in India would mean an understanding that there is widespread and systemic problems with data collection in India, essentially as there has been throughout the pandemic globally, reflecting the difficulty of determining infection rates, CFR vs IFR and deaths in a testing scarcity environment. I don't know for sure but I would anticipate that there is a good chance that many indian deaths are never registered which would make other post pandemic methods of determining true 'excess mortality' very difficult.
The particular irony in this whole post extending from your question being that the BBC itself, in the linked article, in the second paragraph, states that 'experts say the real death toll is several times higher'.
Now that isn't your 1-2 magnitudes but you don't have to travel far from there to get those types of sources, but depending on how strong-systemiser you go on requiring hard numbers, the fact is no-one will ever know because no one is counting