India’s internet shutdowns as biopolitics: The formation of political will and opinion through collective action under attack

ABSTRACT

During the 2020–2021 farmers’ movement in India, the central government argued that its temporary internet shutdowns in specific areas associated with the protest aimed to prevent law and order violations. Scholars have analyzed internet shutdowns as a method to control speech, which amounts to an infringement on the freedom of speech and expression. Additional studies have pointed out that such shutdowns directly interfere with the right to assembly. This paper adds to the existing scholarship by positing that internet shutdowns during mass protest movements interfere with a fundamental democracy-related value of the right to assembly, which, to borrow Salát’s phrase, is “the formation of political will and opinion.” Drawing on Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, the paper argues that shutdowns associated with collective protest should also be understood as an interference in the formation of political will and opinion by trying to manage the circulation of information and control a particular behavior, that is, dissent.

KEYWORDS:

• Internet shutdowns
• Foucault
• biopolitics
• freedom of assembly
• farmers movement
• India

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Prof. Nick Dyer-Witheford at the University of Western Ontario for his feedback on an earlier version of this paper, and for offering the term “network collapse” to understand how the internet works and how it can fail. I also thank the anonymous reviewers and the journal editor, Rachel Alicia Griffin, for their detailed feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.