Religion and urban political eco/pathology: exploring communalized coronavirus in South Asia

ABSTRACT

wWe use the urban political ecology perspective to explore how communities of homo religiosus (re)configure politics of COVID-19 in India and Pakistan. This urban health crisis unfolds in five parallel registers of conflictualities: (i) where religious communities carve out a domain for self-governance of the pandemic with their own ‘knowledge and truths’, (ii) where embodied religious practices challenge or undermine state biopower and transform governmentalities, (iii) where the spatial dimension of conflict evolves into the crisis of technologies of governance, (iv) where religious identities are stigmatized and the minority groups are excluded and (v) where communalism organizes around international relations. It is argued that religious groups in South Asia influenced the urban political (eco)pathology with their disruptive potential which transformed biosecurity regimes and enhanced health risks on the one hand and on the other, they embraced and internalized discords of disease within their antagonistic communal and sectarian memories and histories and weaponized the pandemic to produce more cracks in the social fabric. This essay underscores the significance of unusual actors in the urban political ecology framework and calls for a renewed understanding of human–nature interface by incorporating religion and religious beliefs and how they view and shape the metabolic flows in the urban spaces for social sustainability of the city as a ‘natural object’.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• urban political ecology
• religion
• South Asia
• India
• Pakistan

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the reviewers/editors for their valuable comments/feedback on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Further information

This Special Issue article has been comprehensively reviewed by the Special Issue editors, Associate Professor Ted Striphas and Professor John Nguyet Erni.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Asif Mehmood

Asif Mehmood is a doctoral student at the State University of New York, College of Environmental Sciences and Forestry (SUNY-ESF), Syracuse, NY, USA. He is interested in questions of urban political ecology, infrastructure, land, and nonhuman ecologies.

Sajjad Hasnain

Sajjad Hasnain is a development practitioner. He works with the themes centred around religion, environment, and public affairs.

Muhammad Azam

Muhammad Azam is a development practitioner. His areas of interest include urban governance, social policy, and digital geographies.