Of the (im)mobility regime in India: the post-COVID medicalisation of mobilities

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we examine how the Indian welfare-capitalist state, in responding to the pandemic in diverse ways, has appealed to the ‘guilt conscience’ and played on the vexed positionality of the mobile elite, who following the pandemic, have to give up their freedom of mobility. We argue that the very condition of political legibility of the mobile subject is predicated upon the ethico-moral ideal of the ‘good citizen’, who, in the statist imagination, ought to not only feel guilty but also compromise their civil liberties in questions of mobility. Under this quasi-medical dispensation, all mobilities become transgressive acts, while the implementation of the prevailing immobility regime depends more on the good citizen’s ethico-moral imperative than any discourses of legality or pathology.

KEYWORDS:

• Guilt conscience
• good citizen
• elite traveller
• (im)mobility regime
• surveillance medicine

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neha Gupta

Neha Gupta is a research scholar at the National Institute of Technology Silchar (India). She is exploring digital memorialisation in her doctoral thesis. She has upcoming publications in Studies in South Asian Film and Media. She is part of the team that has been awarded the project ‘Photographic Expression of the Self(ie) Performativity in Contemporary India’ under the SPARC scheme. She has been a faculty member at ILead College, Kolkata (India). She holds a Masters Degree in Communication (MS Communication), from Christ University, Bangalore. Her research interests include urban studies, new media, digital societies, the posthuman, artificial intelligence.

Avishek Ray

Avishek Ray teaches at the National Institute of Technology Silchar (India). He has earned his PhD in Cultural Studies from Trent University, Canada. His forthcoming monograph is on the epistemic foundation of the heuristic construct ‘vagabond’ and the convergence between the politics of itinerancy and that of dissent in the context of South Asia. He has published in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Journal of Literary Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Multicultural Education Review, Journal of Human Values, among others. He has held research fellowships at the University of Edinburgh (UK), Purdue University Library (USA), Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia (Bulgaria), Mahidol University (Thailand) and Pavia University (Italy).