India’s pandemic: spectacle, social murder and authoritarian politics in a lockdown nation

ABSTRACT

This article maps and analyses the trajectory of India’s Covid-19 pandemic from its onset in early 2020 until the outbreak of the country’s devastating second wave a little over a year later. I begin with a critique of the lockdown policy of the right-wing Hindu nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which served as a political spectacle rather than a public health intervention. I then proceed to detail how India as a lockdown nation witnessed forms of social suffering and political repression that can only be truly understood in light of how the trajectory and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was shaped by two preexisting crises in India’s economy and polity. In conclusion, I reflect on the likely political outcomes of the pandemic, considering both the impact of its second wave, and the emergence of oppositional sociopolitical forces in the country.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• Covid-19 pandemic
• lockdown
• spectacle
• social murder
• authoritarian populism

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 As both scholars and activists in India has noted, there were substantial problems with coverage in the PDS before the onset of the pandemic, with as many as 108 million people being excluded from its remit despite being eligible for subsidized grains (see Agarwal, 2020).

2 The new national labour laws were preceded by initiatives at state level to liberalize employment regulations (see Zargar, 2020a).

3 Indian capital shifted its allegiance to Modi and the BJP in a major way in the early 2010s, in part as a reaction to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance passing legislation on land acquisition that was perceived to be a barrier to business, and in the context of declining growth rates and several high-profile corruption scandals. Corporate support has been crucial in funding the BJP’s election campaigns in both 2014 and 2019 (see Nilsen, 2021a).

4 The only interruption in India’s democratic trajectory was the Emergency period from 1975 to 1977, which was presided over by Congress Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (see Prakash, 2019).

5 This process of enshrining Hindu nationalism into law - a process which is best understood as Hindu nationalist statecraft - began with the abrogation of Kashmiri statehood in August 2019, continued with the Supreme Court verdict in the Babri Masjid three months later, and advanced further with the introduction of the CAA, the National Population Register and the National Register of Citizens in December the same year (Nilsen, 2020a). At state level, legislation against so-called ‘love jihad’ and cow slaughter is evidence of the same process (Nielsen & Nilsen, 2021).

6 The key factor that has enabled the BJP to win two consecutive general elections is the fact that the party has expanded its support base beyond its traditional urban middle class and upper caste constituency. Support for the BJP has increased strongly among the poor and among Dalits - India’s formerly untouchable castes - and lower caste groups. This trend was already clearly evident in the 2014 general election, and was further reinforced in 2019, when the party increased its vote share from 34% to 44% among lower caste groups, from 24% to 34% among Dalits, and from 37% to 44% among Adivasis. Whereas the party increased its vote share across all classes, the largest increase happened among poor Indians – from 24% in 2014 to 36% in 2019 (Sardesai & Attri, 2019; Kumar & Gupta, 2019; Venkataramakrishnan, 2019).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was generously funded by the National Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences and by the University of Pretoria Research Development Programme.

Notes on contributors

Alf Gunvald Nilsen

Alf Gunvald Nilsen is professor of sociology at the University of Pretoria. His research focuses on social movements and the political economy of development and democracy in the global South. His most recent book is Adivasis and the state: Subalternity and citizenship in India’s Bhil Heartland (Cambridge University Press, 2018).