‘Does the Prime Minister Care?’

Abstract

Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s theorization of care as a “fictitious commodity”, Rashna Darius Nicholson’s article ‘‘Does the Prime Minister Care?’: Spectacular solidarity, infelicitous performatives and the doubly fictitious commodification of care in India during the COVID-19 pandemic’ describes how organised gestures of care in India work to interpellate Indians into soft, palliative forms of populism and authoritarian governmentality. Through an analysis of inter-related state-sanctioned gestures of care such as symbolic acts initiated by the Narendra Modi administration during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the PM Cares fund, and artist-in-aid programs, this article suggests that state-affiliated, spectacular care functions in the contemporary Indian context as a doubly fictitious commodity. Fictionalized first through commodification by the neoliberal marketplace and subsequently by a government seeking to advance a Hindu nationalist project, care as state-affiliated mass spectacle has become an infelicitous performative, that is, a seductive aesthetic mode that facilitates the political choreographing of (extra-)legal political interventions. Through an analysis of the infelicities of institutional care, the article shows how the state’s systematized affirmations of public concern obfuscate the breakdown of civil society-state relations, normalization of Hindu culture and increasing violence in contemporary India.