The necropolitics of neoliberal state response to the Covid-19 pandemic in India

Abstract

We draw from the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic in India to outline that the neoliberal consolidation of the state is enabled by precariousness, violence, and inequality in overlapping planes of marginality. The pandemic showed the abysmal state of public health institutions in India as people experienced an erosion of dignity in both life and death. The harsh and sudden lockdown announced by the Indian state rendered workers jobless, hungry, exhausted, and on the borders of death. Instead of providing social security to workers, the state embarked on a neoliberal agenda of deregulation, weakening job security, and collective bargaining legislation. The state enacted a violent discourse of Hindu nationalism to blame Muslims for the spread of the pandemic in India to deflect attention from its abdication of responsibility in making healthcare and social security available to vulnerable segments of the Indian population. The neoliberal policy response of the state during the pandemic was embedded in the necropolitics of protecting the middle class and elite lives while directing structural violence against the working class and Muslims, making their lives disposable.

Introduction

On the morning of May 8, 2020, we woke up to photographs of chapatis (Indian bread), personal belongings, and footwear on a railway track in a town in the industrially advanced state of Maharashtra (Banerjee and Mahale, 2020). A goods train ran over 16 migrant workers resting on the railway track on a long journey back home spanning hundreds of kilometers. The accident mutilated their bodies beyond recognition. Photographers did not have the courage to capture the state in which their dead bodies were. We were left with the testimony of the uneaten chapatis, footwear, and personal belongings on the railway track. We were moved beyond any describable emotion about the multiple ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic and state response had rendered workers’ bodies fragile and disposable in the most ethically insensitive ways.

At 8.00 pm on March 24, 2020, Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, announced a 21-day lockdown starting from midnight to fight the Covid-19 pandemic that was beginning to appear in India. The entire country moved to a complete lockdown mode, and State Governments warned of strict punitive action against those who violated Coronavirus lockdown rules. The lockdown left millions of migrant workers jobless and homeless. Because of dwindling cash, no money to pay rents, access to food becoming increasingly difficult, and fear of being infected by Coronavirus, the migrant workers faced physical and psychological agony and trauma in the cities. They were desperate to return to their native villages. Thousands of migrant workers were left with no choice but to undertake long, inhumane, and arduous journeys of hundreds of kilometers on foot.

The 16 workers run down by train were aged between 20 and 30. They had migrated from the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh to the adjoining, more industrially advanced, western Indian state of Maharashtra. They worked in a steel factory in the Jalna district of Maharashtra (Banerjee and Mahale, 2020). Because the state had suspended all means of public transport due to the lockdown, these migrant workers were trapped in Jalna and were unable to return home. However, they had heard that the government had organized special trains to take migrants to their homes. So, on the night of May 7, 2020, about twenty workers decided to walk on foot from Jalna to Bhusawal in Maharashtra, a distance of 157 km, from where they were hoping to get a train to reach their homes in Madhya Pradesh (Banerjee and Mahale, 2020). After walking about forty kilometers from Jalna in the dark of the night, they got exhausted and fell asleep on the railway tracks. They were carrying chapatis (Indian bread) with them to eat on their journey. The following morning, around 5.15 am, they were run over by a goods train coming from Jalna, killing 16 of them (Banerjee and Mahale, 2020).

A month earlier, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Union Government had submitted to the Supreme Court that there were no migrant workers on the road attempting to return to their home states (Mathur, 2020). Without examining the veracity of the government’s assertions, the Supreme Court had refused to intervene in the matter, saying, “we can’t supplant the government’s wisdom with our wisdom” (Sachdev, 2020). Surprisingly, the Chief Justice asked petitioners representing the migrant workers “why the workers needed wages when the government was giving them food” (Sachdev, 2020). Specifically, on the issue of 16 migrant workers run over by a goods train, the Supreme Court said, “how can anybody stop this when they sleep on railway tracks?” (Chhokar, 2020). Four months later, the Indian Parliament passed labor laws, which significantly eroded even the existing abysmal physical and social security available to workers in India (“Parliament Passes Labour Bills,” 2020).

We reflect on the death of migrant workers to interpret the enactment of necropolitics as a form of state action in response to the pandemic. Necropolitics signifies the threat of violent death as a technique of governance where politics takes on the contours of war (Mbembe, 2003). The sovereign emerges through the outcome of the war, through a political determination of who lives and dies (Wright, 2011). State’s response to the pandemic in India structured the violent deaths of people belonging to the working class in India. When marginal workers were dying violent deaths in the corona crisis, rich industrialists doubled their wealth in India (Berkhout et al., 2021).

On April 20, 2021, more than 15 million people had been infected with Covid-19 in India, and more than 180 thousand people had lost their lives—only the United States had seen more infections than India. We witnessed the horror of the Covid-19 pandemic and the state’s necropolitical response from March 2020 onwards. Stranded in cities with no jobs, food, and homes, we saw the exodus of tens of thousands of migrant workers from these cities, many of whom were pushed into hunger, poverty, and death. In addition, we witnessed the rise of violence, discrimination, and hate against Muslims and people belonging to marginal sections of society (Berkhout et al., 2021; Prasad, 2020).

States embedded in neoliberal policy frameworks accentuate inequality during disaster or crisis (Harvey, 2005; Klein, 2007). Neoliberal disaster governance is embedded in Harvey’s (2005) conceptualization of neoliberalism, where the state strives to reverse the post-second world war compromise between capital and labor and structures the ground for unbridled accumulation by domestic and foreign capital. Neoliberalism has been studied in multiple contexts, highlighting specific aspects of inequality that it accentuates (Alunni, 2017; Harvey, 2005; Wright, 2011). These accounts of neoliberalism have outlined how the consolidation of neoliberal policies occurs through the intersection of racialized biopolitics, marketization, withdrawal of the state from welfare provisions, and police repressions. Yet, systematic empirical accounts that bring together a range of state practices in advancing neoliberal policy are few. Thus, a study that brings together several overlapping elements of neoliberalism can provide deeper insights into the simultaneous production of multiple violences that sustain neoliberalism. The Covid-19 pandemic context in India provides a compelling context to understand the violences of inequality in accessing health, workers’ precariousness, Hindu nationalism, and eroding legal securities available to workers and farmers.

The state’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic signifies the operation of necropolitics as the violence against migrant workers and Muslims reproduce prevailing hostilities in urban spaces against them (Bansal, 2020). Necropolitics emerges from the impunity of the state where political and corporate leaders create a context where violent deaths of marginalized actors are staged (Mbembe, 2003). In this context, we embed our inquiry in the following research question: during a crisis, how does the state consolidate neoliberal policy frameworks by structuring precariousness, inequality, violence, and necropolitics in multiple facets of life? In order to engage with our research question, we conduct a multi-sited narrative inquiry and speak to migrant workers, frontline health workers, police, government officials, patients and their families, journalists, lawyers, civil society activists, and politicians to understand the neoliberal consolidation of the Indian state during the Covid-19 pandemic. We also rely on archival material such as newspaper reports, court affidavits and judgments, first information reports (FIRs), police investigation reports and charge sheets, and social media accounts. The narrative elaborations emerging from these sources are not immersed in the episteme of objective facts but involve emotions, conflicts, predicaments, political standpoints, cultural idioms, fictions, and fantasies (Clancy et al., 2012; Gabriel, 2000; Polkinghorne, 1995). These stories reflect partial knowledges premised on our own positions on a variety of political issues. Through these stories, we contribute to the understanding of how necropolitics informs neoliberal responses to disasters and emergencies by focusing on three overlapping planes of marginality spread across inequalities in public health, worker’s experiences of precariousness, and the violence of Hindu nationalism.

Theoretical framework: Neoliberalism and the structuring of overlapping spaces of marginality

In this section, we outline theoretical considerations of how neoliberalism intersects with healthcare, legislation that expands workers’ experiences of precariousness, and violence premised on religious nationalism. Theorization of neoliberalism during the Covid-19 pandemic has sought to explore whether market failures in the wake of the pandemic will lead to the retreat of neoliberalism and the return of state intervention with an emphasis on employment programs (Samaddar, 2020). Harvey (2005) contends that consent to neoliberal logics arises from the state’s abdication of its duties and responsibilities to social justice and economic welfare and the political left’s failure to resist the retreat of the state from social welfare programs. Necropolitics is embedded in neoliberal frameworks as states and corporations collude to create precariousness for marginal and vulnerable subjects (Mbembe, 2003; Wright, 2011).

Neoliberalism and public health

Da Luz Scherf et al. (2020) indicate that neoliberal authoritarianism compromises the quality of public health institutions and erodes the right to life. Neoliberal policies have an adverse impact on gender equity in the context of public health (Ewig, 2006). Kotsko (2017) contends that neoliberalism advances the discourse of responsibilization, which has adverse consequences, especially for marginalized subjects. State and market actors justify inequality in the space of health by arguing that individuals belonging to marginalized communities have higher risk factors of suffering adverse health outcomes (Nkansah-Amankra et al., 2013). The irresponsibility of state and market actors in denying marginal subjects’ access to public health, resulting in their deaths, is characteristic of cultures of impunity of necropolitics, where marginal subjects are governed through the threat of death (Mbembe, 2003).

Necropolitics emerges in the denial of healthcare and access to tools, enabling people to protect themselves from diseases (Jackson, 2013). Public health is immersed in a history of unethical state power that has deceived marginal people into believing that they were being provided medical treatment (Reverby, 2014). At the same time, their bodies were being experimented upon, leading to fatal consequences (Reverby, 2014). Stigmatic stereotypes about marginal subjects with health ailments and a history of mental illness structure tropes of demonization in the public imagination (Hitchens, 2017). These tropes of demonization normalize the murderous ways in which state actors engage with them (Hitchens, 2017). Public health processes reproduce the segregation and marginalization of vulnerable subjects and enact a necropolitics where “a form of precarious citizenship becomes visible only in the event of tragic death and provides a fleeting experience of political visibility for the citizens involved” (Alunni, 2017: 582). The state actively engages in acts of violence by sanctioning programs, which destroy marginalized lives because these people are not deemed to be adequately human (Mbembe, 2003).

Neoliberalism and workers’ precariousness

The route through which neoliberalism structures workers’ experiences of precariousness is linked to responsibilization (Baker and Brewis, 2020). Harvey (2005) indicates that the state’s adoption of neoliberal ideology leads to coercive practices, which dismantle trade unions and erode the rights of workers. Neoliberalism structures precariousness through a complex process of extraction, public deficit, and decay of public infrastructure (Bear, 2014). Harvey (2005) indicates that neoliberalism leads to factory closures and unemployment, increasing the precariousness of workers. Walkerdine (2006) points out that workers experience precariousness due to neoliberal discourses of choice, enterprise, and calls for people to understand themselves as self-made subjects. Migrant workers are particularly vulnerable as they are trapped in “low-pay, low-skill, secondary market segments, which are likely to cause insecurity, harm and overarching alienation” (Agar and Manolchev, 2020: 252).

Neoliberalism creates pressures on public financing of infrastructure, making the state engage in extractive acts, creating the conditions for declining infrastructure, unsafe conditions of work, precariousness, accidents, and death (Bear, 2014). In the intersection of finance, extraction, logistics, and militarization, the violent repression of workers’ voices is normalized to advance the necropolitical imagination of business security over workers’ rights (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2015). Socialist politics in the south, which protects workers’ rights, has been violently attacked by military coups and political murders supported by western governments (Peregalli, 2019). Necropolitics operates in the form of atrocities directed against workers’ resistance, where striking workers are killed by the police and placed under toxic regimes of surveillance (Waltersource, 2016). The entanglement of necropolitics and capital becomes evident in the violence of slavery, exploitation of indigenous people, and the destruction of nature (Mbembe, 2003).

Neoliberalism and religious nationalism

Hindu nationalists construct a narrative of Hindu victimhood by labeling Muslims as more calculative, better organized, and more skillful at political propaganda (Legg, 2020). Bansal (2020) indicates that the biopolitics of Hindu nationalism, Islamophobia, inequalities of caste and class have played an important role in the Indian response to the pandemic. Religious nationalism has close links with business interests across the world and advances neoliberal projects of individualism, enterprise, and the retreat of the welfare state (Grem, 2014). Religious nationalism becomes embedded in neoliberal thought by advancing discourses of self-help, management science, piety, financial investment, entrepreneurship, and business skills (Atia, 2012). State violence against anti-capitalist protestors and religious nationalist violence against minorities have gone hand in hand to produce neoliberal developmental trajectories infused with privatization and unemployment (Kingsolver, 2010).

The connection between necropolitics, neoliberalism, and Hindu nationalism is evident in India’s emergence of militarization and state violence, structuring deprivation, destruction, and death (Duschinski, 2009). Hindu nationalist politicians have emerged as charismatic public figures by combining their commitment to neoliberal policy and endorsement from industrialists to structure a state of impunity that abets communal pogroms against Muslims (Jagannathan and Rai, 2015). Across the world, religious nationalism is in alliance with free-market advocates to structure authoritarian, national security states immersed in violence and death (Giroux, 2006). The intersection between neoliberalism and religious nationalism occurs in the enactment of popular cultures where “representational necropolitics . . . fetishizes death for the nation” (Carney, 2018: 94). Religious nationalism is premised on the necropolitics of reproducing “a fictionalized notion of the enemy” (Mbembe, 2003: 16), which helps in advancing neoliberal interests of economic investments that secure the border of the nation, thereby producing fantasies of well-being.

Overlapping marginalities

The neoliberal policy operates simultaneously in multiple planes, shaping the retreat of the state, marketization of healthcare, increasing unemployment, precariousness, and social exclusion premised on religious nationalism (Da Luz Scherf et al., 2020). Necropolitics involving state sanctioned regimes of torture, abuse, and death is complicit in the incapacitation of minorities and other marginal subjects, even as these minorities and marginal subjects are presented as aggressive, violent beings (Banerjee, 2008; Jackson, 2013). Issues of precariousness with articulations of “work in the neoliberal age offers longer hours, greater precarity, delayed retirement and increased inequality” (Baker and Brewis, 2020: 3); state policy and forces of international business which structure precariousness such as “the emergence of an extractive central state that sought to capitalize public resources, divest itself of permanent labor forces, and draw back revenue to the central government in order to meet its obligations on the repayment of international loans” (Bear, 2014: 76); and religious nationalism premised on hate, violence, and distrust of people belonging to other faiths (Legg, 2020), have often been discussed separately with the inter-connections between these overlapping marginalities not being spelled out clearly. The connection between these overlapping marginalities is located in the intersection of neoliberalism with necropolitics, in “patterns of sustained disenfranchisement and marginalization . . . militarization, repression, economic deprivation . . . indiscriminate violence . . . denial of democratic processes, the manipulation of elections, and the jailing of political leaders” (Duschinski, 2009: 696). An understanding of overlapping marginalities connecting public health, worker’s precariousness, and religious nationalism to neoliberalism and necropolitics is important as policies which “focus on either redistribution or recognition . . . are ineffective in addressing the whole of injustice” (Ewig, 2006: 430), indicating that issues of labor and health involving redistribution need to be addressed along with counteracting religious nationalism, involving recognition. These overlapping marginalities converge in the form of a state of exception “as the original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension” emerging in “de facto rule of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight” (Agamben, 2005: 3–4).

Methods

We combine journalistic reports, court affidavits, orders and judgments, FIRs, police investigation reports and charge sheets, social media accounts, and interview data to present stories about the Covid-19 pandemic in India. Combining a variety of resources allows us to access stories and discourses that convey a wide breadth of the horror that informed people’s experiences of the pandemic. Such a process enables reflective conversations about a range of events occurring in the field (Jagannathan and Rai, 2015). As a part of our immersion in narrative methodology, we endeavored to access multiple sources of data to understand the politics of neoliberalism where inequalities in one sphere produced marginalities in other spheres as well. Narrative methods involve an engagement with personal reflections, stories, intuition, imagination, cultural and political beliefs, and do not merely pertain to an objective description of facts (Polkinghorne, 1995).

Narrative methodologies offer an opportunity to unravel the temporal unfolding of human lives and outline how time is situated at the intersection of the personal and political, and crises heralded by contemporary events (Clancy et al., 2012; Gabriel, 2000). For instance, for the migrant workers whose travails we described in the introduction section, the temporal unfolding of the crisis was located in the politics of the lockdown, which made them undertake the journey from Maharashtra to Madhya Pradesh on foot. Their place of work had become hostile geography where survival had become precarious. They yearned to return to space where, although their lives would continue to be precarious; there would at least be the comfort of fellow members in the community recognizing their precariousness and empathizing with their experience of unfreedom. In their geography of work, their unfreedom had been invisible to other people. In the end, their death becomes visible because it assumed a collective dimension. If the pandemic or hunger had consumed them in their geography of work, their deaths would have disappeared into the anonymity of an indifferent statistical imaginary.

In our effort to combine archival data with primary interviews, we built a database of newspaper reports, court orders, FIRs, police investigation reports and charge sheets, and social media accounts that ran slightly over 2000 pages. To understand the challenges faced by the Covid-19 patients in accessing public healthcare facilities, we engaged with eight people who had either themselves been infected with Covid-19 or whose family members had been infected with the coronavirus. We spoke to 12 migrant workers who had lost their jobs during the pandemic and were attempting to reconstruct their lives. In order to understand the state’s policy response to the pandemic, we spoke to two police officers and three civil servants currently working in the government, four trade union activists, four farmer’s movement activists, three civil rights activists, four journalists, and three lawyers. Thus, we conducted primary interviews with a total of 43 people. Overall, we built an archive of over a hundred hours of narrative data running into more than 700 pages.

For the past decade, we have been engaging with multiple themes of labor studies and police violence in India. We accessed informants who could narrate stories about the pandemic through networks that we had built over the years. We explained the purpose of our study to our informants and assured them of confidentiality. We told them that they could withdraw from the study at any point in time, and we would not use the data provided by them for the study. We had multiple conversations with most of our informants and recorded these conversations with their consent. We could access stories from all across the country as our informants were located in Mumbai, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Bengaluru, and Chennai. Owing to the lockdown, we could not physically meet our informants except those staying in Mumbai, Vadodara, and Ahmedabad. We had conversations with informants staying in other cities over telephone and other online platforms. We held conversations with the informants between April 2020 and December 2020. We held conversations in English, Hindi, Marathi, and Tamil. Later, we transcribed these conversations.

Our engagements with informants were mainly situated in the urban context. Though a few informants frequently moved between urban and rural spaces, we largely focussed on overlapping marginalities, precariousness, and violence experienced in urban settings. We held conversations with informants around their experiences of the pandemic, lockdown, health, and well-being. We were interested in questions of livelihood and precariousness for workers and their experiences of the lockdown. We attempted to understand how people affected by the pandemic experienced the state’s institutions, such as the legislature, police, civil administration, and the judiciary. We wanted to know how a range of actors perceived the state’s Hindu nationalist turn during the pandemic. We were interested in the possibility of resistance and the role of the media during the pandemic.

The informants were aware of our political positions, which stand in opposition to the rise of Hindu nationalism and class inequality in India. One of us has worked as a police officer for more than two decades before transitioning to an academic role and has consistently acted against structures of police violence. His actions have led to his persecution by the political party in power, and several informants engaged with him in the spirit of solidarity. During the course of the study, he was infected with Covid-19 and spent a week in a public hospital recovering from the infection. The treatment he received was better than what informants and narratives in this study indicate, probably due to his social capital of being a former police officer and his partner being a serving bureaucrat. At the same time, it was evident to him that he was responsible for his own well-being in the hospital, as he suffered an incident of food poisoning due to stale food being given to him while still being treated for the coronavirus infection. Many conversations with the informants took the contours of the (re)construction of solidarity. They formed a dialogical lament about how the state and other actors were complicit in producing injustice and inequality for large sections of Indian society. These conversations of solidarity and lament constituted the reflexivity of the interaction of our political stance and introspective reflection with the worldviews and experiences of informants to outline how we discovered our analytical angle in the intersection of self, other, and world in the research process (Cox and Hassard, 2005; Macbeth, 2001; Probst and Berenson, 2014).

While we signify only five stories in our study, we analyzed 50 stories from our data to understand the processes of neoliberal consolidation of the state. We considered 25 stories from the archival data and the remaining 25 from the interview data. These stories are not representative of our data, but we deeply engaged with them because they affected us in troubling ways. For instance, one of these stories from archival data was of a migrant woman who died of exhaustion and hunger on her train journey back home. Someone recorded her infant child trying to wake her up at the railway station platform and posted it on social media, which was widely covered by the electronic media. We were moved beyond repair by the child’s images; these images still haunt us about the hopelessness to which migrants were driven because of the apathy of the state during the pandemic. Similarly, the five stories presented in this study are not representative of all the stories we analyzed. These stories portray what happens at the margins of society during a crisis and how the margins slowly creep into mainstream spaces to advance the normalization of inequalities.

We analyzed our data by writing long memos to understand the horrors, fictions, and fantasies that informed the experiences of people. These memos enabled us to discern the political frames that were mobilized in the stories (Augustine, 2014). We wrote memos to understand connections between different themes we were attempting to uncover in this study, such as experiences of patients and Hindu nationalism. We were trying to discover how different thematic experiences overlapped to outline the consolidation of the neoliberal state. The state mobilized different fantasies and horrors to marginalize minorities and all forms of resistance to its project of neoliberalism.

Pandemic, marginalities, and the neoliberal consolidation of the state

We present three themes pertaining to the tragic ways in which people experienced the pandemic in India. These themes indicate how the state exacerbated prevailing inequalities to advance neoliberal logics. The overlapping of the themes outlines how the state pursued a cultural project of hate to generate consent for its class project of inequality by playing on the prejudices of the middle class and others who identified with the cultural majority. The state’s project of neoliberalism could only be advanced by breaking down collective horizons of solidarity, dialog and hope, and constructing actors as individualized and responsibilized selves.

Ill with the virus and the horror of becoming a disposable body

Harsh Mander, a former civil servant and a prominent civil rights activist, got infected with Covid-19 in October 2020. He decided not to admit himself to a private hospital or rely on his social capital to get admitted to a special ward of a public hospital. Instead, he got himself admitted to a general ward of a public hospital in Delhi. This was his way of expressing solidarity with thousands of India’s poor who did not have access to any other form of healthcare except overburdened general wards of public hospitals in India. It also stemmed from his belief that the quality of public health in India would improve only when the middle class and the elite embraced public hospitals.

Mander (Badhwar, 2020) described his experience in the following words,

There were about 50 other Covid patients in the ward. Nobody gave me a change of clothes. At home, people had been checking my oxygen regularly. Here nobody even talked to me. No one attended to any patient. The noise levels were so high; one could not rest. Nurses and ward boys were screaming across the ward at each other and patients. Then there were these monitors that beeped all the time. The monitor next to my bed was not functional, but it continued to beep. Nobody would allow you even to go to the toilet. You had to keep begging, saying I’m desperate.

Mander’s experience outlines why “minorities and the poor are more likely to die prematurely or to suffer disabling conditions compared with middle and upper income” populations (Nkansah-Amankra et al., 2013: 218). Mander describes how the public hospital stripped patients of their dignities with no allowance for change of clothes, lack of care, high noise levels, insensitive behavior of medical staff, dysfunctional equipment, and conditions of virtual incarceration with patients not even being allowed to go to the toilet. Mander’s experience indicates the need to resist the necropolitical effects of neoliberal healthcare, to contend that everyone deserves “respect and decent health care,” to understand “why treatment mattered,” particularly on seeing “what it meant when the most seemingly lowly among us is met with violence and contempt” (Reverby, 2014: 425). Violence against marginal subjects is part of the state’s refusal to provide universal access to healthcare and insistence on market-based, privatized, insurance-driven access to healthcare (Kotsko, 2017).

Mander’s experience demonstrates that the hospital staff behaves with impunity with patients because they consider themselves to be a part of the state, and the impunity characterizes the behavior of the state with marginal subjects. Impunity is the necropolitical project through which attention from the state’s inaction is deflected, and the deaths of marginal subjects are normalized (Wright, 2011). The behavior of the healthcare staff in the public hospital where they refuse to treat Covid-19 patients with basic aspects of dignity, such as allowing them to change their clothes and providing access to washrooms, indicates that they treated them as disposable bodies. Rather than providing them with medical care, the healthcare staff leaves these patients on their own, responsibilizing them for becoming infected with the Covid-19 virus. Implicit in the violence directed against patients is a necropolitical contempt for marginality (Mbembe, 2003). Even when the hospital staff wants to engage with a sense of compassion and solidarity with patients, they are themselves rendered precarious, as they confront “unacceptable working conditions, inadequate staffing, low salaries, long hours of work, lack of personal protective equipment” (Wielenga, 2020). The state’s message to healthcare workers in public hospitals is clear, either they can identify with the impunity of the state or become disposable themselves.

The impunity with which public hospitals behaved also characterized the response of private hospitals. Initially, private hospitals refused to admit patients infected with Covid-19. Several informants told us how they were turned away from private hospitals. Later, when private hospitals began accepting Covid-19 patients, they extorted exorbitant money from patients for providing isolation and emergency services, exploiting the pandemic to advance the subjectivity of the consumer-patient. Several informants told us about the shocking amounts of money they had paid to access healthcare from private hospitals during the pandemic. Policies privileging the marketization of healthcare, such as the turn toward insurance-led healthcare delivery, marginalized the poor, and prevented them from accessing medical treatment during the pandemic (Dhara, 2020). An insurance-centered approach to public health has been unproductive in India, resulting in human resource shortfalls in public health delivery, marginalization of outpatient care, unnecessary surgical interventions, and a decay in public health infrastructure (Balagopal and Vijaybaskar, 2019). The healthcare crisis highlighted by the coronavirus pandemic was in the making for decades as the public healthcare infrastructure in India is in shambles. While an abysmally low percentage of people have access to decent public healthcare facilities, the private sector puts profit motives ahead of patient’s healthcare interests (Krishnan, 2020).

The public hospitals become a state of exception where laws embedded in constitutional framework and human rights do not operate. Instead, public hospitals become spaces where violence and contempt against marginalized and vulnerable are enacted with impunity. The state’s sovereignty is linked to exceptional measures, which are justified by citing the serious emerging crisis, and the state of exception operates in the border zones between politics and law (Agamben, 2005). The state of exception is not merely a space of impunity; in fact, it is intimately linked to the temporality of war, where consideration of human rights or other legal protections can be arbitrarily suspended in order to win the war (Jagannathan and Rai, 2015). It is, therefore, not surprising that Prime Minister Modi used the metaphor of “war” to describe the frontline healthcare workers and others engaged with the pandemic as “Covid warriors” (“Be a Covid Warrior,” 2020). Warriors are embedded in a masculine subjectivity where they can disregard norms of civility, as they believe that violence is at the heart of the constitution of sovereign power (Jagannathan and Rai, 2015).

We spoke to a woman in Mumbai who lost her husband during the pandemic. Her husband worked in the informal economy as an electrician. The slum in which the family lived witnessed numerous difficulties during the pandemic. The lockdown had robbed several people of livelihood opportunities, and they were facing a severe crisis of food. At the same time, despite the harsh lockdown, Covid-19 cases were spreading rapidly, resulting in several deaths in the slum. The woman said,

We are Dalits, and we face many difficulties in society. My husband was associated with a political party and social outfit that works for Dalit upliftment. During the lockdown, the social outfit organized free distribution of food to people living in the slum. My husband volunteered for the food distribution effort. I told my husband to stay at home and not go out. But he would not listen. He said that it was his duty to help others; this was the preaching of Buddha. He got infected with Coronavirus and was admitted to the municipal hospital. He called me from the hospital in the initial days. He took a selfie and sent it to me on WhatsApp from the hospital bed. But after a week, I was not able to reach him over the phone. The hospital also did not give me any information about him. I was not allowed to visit him. Three weeks later, a hospital official phoned me to inform me that my husband had died. The hospital official said that since it was a Covid related death, they had already cremated the body. They did not even give me his body. I miss him. I have two children. I have never worked outside for wages in life before. But now I have to find work. Otherwise, how will I take care of my children? I do not even know the state he was in when he died. I could not even be near him when he was dying. How alone he must have felt. I could not even see his face after he died. I could not even perform his last rites.

The violence of the public hospital is evident from the fact that a living person entered it and disappeared into death. Still, no information was made available to his wife about his death. The Dalit patient’s death in the hospital shows how “structural violence is the systemic harm embedded in the socio-economic structure of society, creating unequal power and life chances” (Hitchens, 2017: 437). The disposability of the Dalit patient’s life is related to his wife’s precariousness as she has to search for a means of livelihood to protect her children from starvation and hunger. Disposable lives signify the operation of necropolitics where “to exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power” (Mbembe, 2003: 12). The language of war deployed by the state to engage with the pandemic is connected to the state of exception operating as a limit between democracy and absolutism (Agamben, 2005). Yet, necropolitics is not without resistance, as the Dalit electrician died while counteracting the violence of deprivation operating through the lockdown with structures of solidarity. The lack of medical attention to marginal subjects is akin to the violence that prisoners experience in routinely being denied access to medical care that can save their lives (Jackson, 2013; Reverby, 2014). The state considers dead bodies of marginal subjects as hazards that need to be disposed of, not as bodies worthy of dignity and mourning.

Several people informed us that state actors treated any breach of lockdown norms as a criminal act and seldom tried to understand the contingencies and extenuating circumstances that compel them to violate the lockdown norms. People, who are marginal and do not matter, make the passage into becoming disposable lives through a social relation of incarceration, normalized as a utilitarian policy measure needed for winning the war against the pandemic. The state actively criminalizes marginal subjects by engaging in acts of public articulations of hate, surveillance, displacement, and expulsion (Alunni, 2017). The structural violence of the state toward marginal subjects in urban spaces is part of the discursive construction of the living habitats of the urban poor as spaces of criminality and lawless zones (Wacquant, 2008). Even if the state did not formally declare subjects such as the Dalit electrician to be criminals, the everyday behavior of state actors reduced the lives of marginal subjects to those of criminals without rights by initiating punitive actions against them for violating lockdown norms.

Public health systems treat marginal subjects with violence and contempt, leading to denial of medical treatment and adverse consequences (Kotsko, 2017; Nkansah-Amankra et al., 2013; Reverby, 2014). Scholars have focused on how a culture of impunity directs violence against marginal subjects, normalizing their deaths to advance the necropolitics of the state (Mbembe, 2003; Wright, 2011). The operation of sovereign power intersects with structural violence to construct unequal life chances for marginal subjects (Hitchens, 2017; Mbembe, 2003). We add to these conversations about the intersection of neoliberalism and necropolitics in public health by indicating that public health violence is related to a language of war that structures a state of exception with respect to the health-related crisis. We further suggest that social relations of incarceration and criminality are at the heart of structuring marginal subjects as disposable lives on whom violence and inequality can be inflicted.

Lockdown, workers’ precariousness, and geographies of death

After the lockdown, migrant workers found cities, quarantine centers, and public hospitals as hostile spaces, threatening their lives. Walking away from the cities back to their villages became both an act of resistance and survival for migrant workers. The government had permitted inter-state and intra-state movement of vehicles carrying essential supplies during the lockdown. Migrant workers made desperate attempts to reach their homes amid nationwide lockdown hiding in trucks, fuel-tankers, and even in cement concrete mixers. While the lockdown had left most migrant workers without any money, truck drivers pushed them like herds of sheep in the trucks. They charged exorbitant sums of money to transport the migrant workers stranded in various parts of the country to their homes in extremely unsafe conditions. They had to bribe police on the way. The public intellectual Mehta (2020) commented on the humiliation that migrant workers had to suffer, “the images of the migrant workers have revealed how easily we can strip millions and millions of people of their dignity and livelihood and literally not care . . . to subject them to the indignity of being dependent on civil society, to stand for hours in line for food. The sheer indignity and humiliation of it is something we are still not getting.”

A trade union activist described the orientation of the state,

Earlier workers were only insecure about losing their jobs, but they hoped they would somehow still survive. However, during the pandemic, the state left the workers to die. They knew that they could get infected anytime because of their poor living conditions, and they would not get proper medical care if they got infected. They had no access to food and shelter. Many children had eaten nothing for days. Several employers had not paid the wages to the workers for March when the lockdown was announced. When workers began their journeys home, they again faced death due to accidents, starvation, and exhaustion. After a lot of public outrage, the government began to operate a few buses and trains to enable workers to return home. Here again, the government looted the workers. They had no money but had to bear the cost of the tickets. Many trains ran late and never reached the intended destinations. Hence, the workers again had to walk hundreds of kilometers to reach their villages. In many instances, the train journeys took several days. The trains lacked basic amenities – there was no water and food. Many workers died of exhaustion and hunger in these trains. Workers were treated like slaves by the government. When business people realized that workers were leaving the cities, they made every effort to prevent them from leaving. They lobbied with the government to stop the trains. They said that the workers should not be allowed to go as it would create a labor shortage once the lockdown was relaxed. The lockdown showed that even while workers’ lives did not matter, business people still wanted to exploit their labor at as low a cost as possible. They believed that workers have become so insecure and weak that they will now accept work at any wage.

The trade union activist indicates that because of stringent lockdown measures, workers began to actively fear death due to lack of access to healthcare in public hospitals, lack of access to food and shelter, non-payment of wages by employers, and non-availability of means of transport. The fear of death forced workers to begin arduous journeys back to their villages. Instead of treating the precarious workers with dignity and empathy, the state exacerbated their experiences of precariousness, expecting them to take care of their own lives. The state is embedded in constructing neoliberal subjectivities of “a highly individualized, efficient and entrepreneurial subject that relinquishes its interdependence on others” (Baker and Brewis, 2020: 4). Migrant workers in India had to engage in risky forms of resistance by breaking stringent lockdown norms before the state agreed to begin a few buses and trains to take them to their homes from the cities in which they were locked down. The corporeal traumas and accidents that migrant workers suffered during the lockdown characterized their nightmarish memories of the state’s pandemic response. The corporeal traumas of migrant workers indicate that capitalism is invested in the project of making profit at any price, and the destruction of human lives is at the heart of capitalism (Boltanski, 2012).

Bear (2014: 82) signifies the trauma with which workers remember accidents, “my hands began to lose power . . . suddenly all my face went black . . . my muscle power collapsed. I am losing power – I lost all my power.” Migrant workers experienced innumerable traumas, accidents, and terrible memories due to the lockdown, which brought everyday violence into their lives. Several trade union activists and workers told us that they feared the emergence of a new political economy based on computing, internet, communication, and robotics technologies in the wake of the pandemic, where their existence would be rendered irrelevant. Their deaths were paving the way for a new economy based on the precariousness of platform-based work, coming into existence as a part of the fourth industrial revolution during the pandemic. Corporations and the state were using the necropolitical turn of the pandemic to coerce workers into consenting to new forms of subordination, marginality, and precariousness in the emerging economy.

Trade union activists indicated that nothing had happened to the lives of industrialists, state elites, and the rich, who appeared to have profited from the pandemic while migrant workers were languishing and facing death at every corner. The flourishing of billionaires and prominent industrialists in India during the pandemic follows the neoliberal institutional configuration of the state where “the freedom of businesses and corporations . . . to operate within this institutional framework of free markets and free trade is regarded as a fundamental good” (Harvey, 2005: 64). States and markets have enacted neoliberalism across the world through multiple waves of violence, and workers in our study interpreted the structural violence directed against them during the pandemic as the beginning of a new political economy of inequality where their lives were disposable. Worker’s experiences of death during the pandemic indicate how “violence is not confined to exclusion and expulsion; it is also ingrained in patterns and processes that differentiate and hierarchize the ways in which subjects are made and included in spaces of citizenship, labor markets, and social cooperation” (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2015: 4). Pandemic capitalism has now come into a place where a restructuring of the employment relationship has taken place with the exclusion and expulsion of marginal workers from the political economy. The restructuring encompasses the incorporation of work from home workers, medical workers, police and security, vaccine, and pharmaceutical drugs manufacturing in the emerging contours of the political economy. Pandemic capitalism outlines how capitalist accumulation occurs by constructing public space in hostile, violent, dehumanizing ways for marginal actors (Wright, 2011).

The restructuring of the employment relationship found sanction in legislation that Parliament adopted to marginalize the rights of workers and farmers. Amidst widespread opposition from the working class, the Indian Parliament adopted deregulation of labor laws in September 2020 (“Parliament Passes Labour Bills,” 2020) that made it easier for corporations to terminate workers and difficult for workers to engage in collective action. Along with labor law deregulation, the Union Government passed laws pertaining to the production, procurement, and distribution of agricultural produce as a part of its Covid-19 stimulus package, claiming that the new laws would reform the farm sector (Agarwal, 2020). The Union Government passed these laws in the colorable exercise of power by transgressing its jurisdiction and violating the basic structure of the Constitution, as agriculture is a state subject falling under the exclusive domain of state legislatures, and the Parliament has no jurisdiction to legislate on it (Mustafa, 2020).

Farmers fear that the new farm laws, which deregulate the sale of their crops, are corporate-friendly and anti-farmer. Several farmer groups see these laws as unfair and exploitative. These laws would marginalize their livelihoods by enabling a corporate takeover of agricultural production and eroding access to state-mandated procurement of agricultural produce with minimum support price guarantees. While farmers engaged in sustained protests against the new farm laws that eroded their rights, the government stigmatized and criminalized their protests, deployed threats of violence, and arrested many protestors under draconian national security laws (Schmall and Singh, 2021). Despite repression and strong-arm tactics of the state, the strength and endurance of farmers’ protest have kept the Union Government away from the early implementation of the farm laws (Schmall and Singh, 2021).

The assault against farmer’s and worker’s rights took place in the context of an institutional collapse of democracy. The public intellectual Guha (2021) mourned the collapse of democracy in India, “The Modi-Shah regime, which is authoritarian by instinct and belief, has used the pandemic to further undermine the processes of constitutional democracy and strengthen its hold over State and society.” The government used the vaguely worded provisions in the Disaster Management Act, 2005 and Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897 to usurp sweeping, almost unbridled powers to create an emergency-like situation without formally declaring a national emergency and suspending civil liberties (Bhatia, 2020).

The state and the market advance neoliberal subjectivities premised on entrepreneurship and individualized responsibility, expanding the precariousness experienced by workers (Baker and Brewis, 2020). Precarious workers caught in processes of extraction and restructuring of the state trapped in financial and economic crisis experience numerous perils and threats (Bear, 2014). The neoliberal state defends the freedom of corporations by enacting structural violence leading to the expulsion of marginal workers and their incorporation into an emerging political economy under more severe conditions of precarity (Harvey, 2005; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2015). We add to these conversations about the necropolitical project of the neoliberal state by articulating the emergence of pandemic capitalism where marginal workers are threatened by death in every turn. Under extreme precarious conditions, a new political economy based on platform-based work, expansion of home-based work, and increased use of algorithms, computer, internet, and communication technologies is emerging. In this new political economy, the condition of incorporation is consent to the expanding power of the extractive corporation.

Hindu nationalism and the politics of hate as the grammar of the state

The lockdown further cemented the Hindu nationalist turn of the state as the state targeted Muslims and blamed them for spreading the pandemic in India (Prasad, 2020). An Islamic religious congregation known as the Tablighi Jamaat had taken place in the Nizamuddin Markaz area of Delhi between March 11 and March 13, 2020, after the state gave the requisite permission (Singh, 2020). Many Muslims had come from abroad to participate in the Jamaat. While most foreign delegates left the country after the event, about 1000 foreigners were stranded in India because of the sudden announcement of the lockdown and cancellation of international flights.

Contrary to the guidelines against stigmatizing any community, the Union Government constantly blamed the Tablighi Jamaat delegates for spreading the coronavirus in India (Singh, 2020). The Ministry of Home Affairs blacklisted 960 foreigners and cancelled their visas (Singh, 2020). The accusations were a part of the Hindu nationalist agenda of the government to persecute Muslims. It helped the government in consolidating the sense of fear against Muslims. It helped in deflecting attention from the government’s colossal administrative failure in providing even the basic healthcare facilities and social security to vulnerable sections of India’s population during the pandemic (Prasad, 2020).

Police agencies across the country arrested Muslims who had participated in the Tablighi Jamaat and charged them with violations of the Foreigner’s Act, 1946, Disaster Management Act, 2005, and Epidemic Act, 1987. During the pandemic, several Muslims experienced various forms of hate, such as violence, denial of medical care, and social boycotts (Afeef, 2020). BJP activists, the majority of media houses, and the BJP-led government unleashed communal propaganda demonizing Muslims, especially the Tablighi Jamaat delegates, for the surge in coronavirus cases in the country after some delegates were detected as Covid-19 positive (Afeef, 2020). They described the threat of Covid-19 as “corona jihad” or Tablighi virus” (Afeef, 2020).

The head of the IT cell of the BJP, Malviya (2020), tweeted,

Delhi’s dark underbelly is exploding! Last 3 months have seen an Islamic insurrection of sorts, first in the name of anti-CAA protests from Shaheen Bagh to Jamia, Jaffrabad to Seelampur. And now the illegal gathering of the radical Tablighi Jamaat at the markaz. It needs a fix!

Malviya refers to the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in his post, a law introduced by the BJP government that discriminates between people applying for citizenship on the basis of religion. The CAA is the continuation of Hindu nationalist politics, which builds a discourse of hate against Muslims, as articulated by some Hindu nationalists such as BS Moonje in the early 20th century, “which points to the defeatist mentality that all Hindus have developed. They behave like they can’t do without Moslems who on their part aspire and conspire to swallow all into themselves from Maharajas to the lowest Hindu in the street” (as cited in Legg, 2020: 27). The CAA is the beginning of a political process, which, combined with a planned National Register of Citizens (NRC), is likely to disenfranchise Muslims in India, and deprive them of citizenship (Prasad, 2020).

Malviya and the BJP signify the intersection of neoliberalism, Hindu nationalism, and necropolitics, “tied to neoliberal economic expansion, these extreme ideologies of nationalism and communalism produced violent and long-lasting schisms associated with religious fundamentalisms, hyper-patriotism and xenophobia, ethnic cleansing, patriarchal hierarchies, and caste oppression” (Duschinski, 2009: 699). Several thousands of people in various cities in India came out on the streets to protest against the CAA to register their resistance against the intersection of religious fundamentalism with the neoliberal state in India. Following these protests, the Delhi Police colluded with Hindu nationalist mobs to enact a pogrom against Muslims in Delhi (Bal, 2020). While the Delhi Police did not act against the Hindu nationalist mobs involved in the pogrom, it invoked conspiracy charges against anti-CAA activists and young Muslim students (Bakshi, 2020). The Delhi Police arrested them under draconian provisions during the pandemic (Bakshi, 2020).

In his post, Malviya describes the anti-CAA protests as an Islamic insurrection, outlining that all protests directed against the BJP threaten the emerging order of the national security state. He contends that the pandemic is an outcome of the same Islamic insurrection, deflecting the attention from the structural violence of the government’s response and blaming Muslims for the spread of infection. A lawyer indicated to us that the structural violence of the government’s response is premised on implicitly criminalizing the patient infected with Covid-19 and treating her as a potential spreader of the virus. The BJP normalizes the inadequacy of public healthcare infrastructure by building the politics of hate to individualize and criminalize the responsibility of spreading the virus to Muslims.

The prosecution of foreigners in the context of the Tablighi Jamaat was embedded in the Hindu nationalist project of hate. Since most of them had been quarantined and had not tested positive for Covid-19, they could not have been responsible for spreading the pandemic. While quashing cases registered against foreigners, the Bombay High Court (2020) made scathing observations,

There was big propaganda in print media and electronic media against the foreigners who had come to Markaz Delhi and an attempt was made to create a picture that these foreigners were responsible for spreading covid-19 virus in India. There was virtually persecution against these foreigners. A political government tries to find the scapegoat when there is pandemic, or calamity and the circumstances show that there is probability that these foreigners were chosen to make them scapegoats. The aforesaid circumstances and the latest figures of infection in India show that such action against present petitioners should not have been taken. It is now high time for the concerned to repent about this action taken against the foreigners and to take some positive steps to repair the damage done by such action.

The court’s observations indicate that the cases filed against Muslims were part of the media propaganda to demonize them for political purposes. The connections between religious nationalism and neoliberalism are located in creating responsibilized subjects who think of themselves as individuals who need to care for themselves through self-regulation and entrepreneurship (Atia, 2012). Propaganda based on religious nationalism, neoliberalism, and necropolitics presages how “entire populations are now seen as disposable, and state sovereignty is no longer organized around the struggle for life but now entails an insatiable quest for the accumulation of capital, leading to . . . the destruction of human bodies” (Giroux, 2006: 100). When people are consumed by the anxiety of being responsible for their own well-being, they become vulnerable to propaganda that constructs minorities as enemies of their well-being.

The Hindu nationalist politics of demonizing the Tablighi Jamaat as “corona jehadis” contains many elements of the neoliberal politics of securitization in the face of growing distrust in society. During the pandemic, people were afraid of losing their lives as the state had failed to provide even minimum healthcare and attentive medical treatment. Through the deployment of Hindu nationalism, the state channeled people’s fears away from state failures to a fictitious threat of “corona jehad” putatively launched by the Tablighi Jamaat. A civil rights activist told us that by demonizing the Jamaat as “corona jehadis” and coronavirus super-spreaders, the state labeled Muslims, especially the members of Tablighi Jamaat, as terrorists. In the absence of an effective public healthcare system for curing Covid-19, the only method for engaging with the pandemic was preventing its spread, advancement of securitization, and border making at the household level in every residential colony and slum. The spectacle of the Jamaat normalized the imagination of securitization in the hearts of most people as they began building borders against outsiders by enforcing draconian provisions in residential spaces that mimicked the operation of the national security state.

To see the propaganda of hate and criminalization of the Jamaat merely as Hindu nationalist prejudice against Muslims would be an act of misrecognition because it does not reckon with the deep entanglement of Hindu nationalism with neoliberal logics of responsibilization. Religious nationalism, ethnic conflicts, and neoliberalism intersect to structure violent worlds informed by death, precariousness, unemployment, frustration, loss of agency, silencing, and disempowerment (Kingsolver, 2010). The criminalization of the Jamaat is the use of Hindu nationalist hate to normalize the neoliberal logic that people have to manage their lives and well-being on their own. Religious nationalism and neoliberalism deploy events such as the criminalization of the Jamaat structure spectacles that advance a disciplinary apparatus for manufacturing consent for the state (Carney, 2018).

Hindu nationalism is located in a politics of painting an image of Hindu victimhood to structure the disenfranchisement of Muslims (Legg, 2020; Prasad, 2020). Religious nationalism, neoliberalism, and necropolitics intersect to structure subjectivities of responsibilization and self-regulation while advancing the accumulation of capital by rendering entire populations disposable (Atia, 2012; Giroux, 2006). We add to these conversations by suggesting that implicit in the Hindu nationalist structural violence directed against Muslims during the pandemic is the neoliberal logic of responsibilizing people. This is associated with the discourse of criminalizing Covid-19 patients by treating them as spreaders of the virus rather than engaging with them with care, healing, and social regeneration. In conjunction with neoliberalism, Hindu nationalist politics inserts distrust and suspicion in the everyday life of neighborhoods and normalizes processes of securitization through which people give consent to draconian curbs on life and move away from structures of solidarity and social cooperation.

Apart from constructing a politics of hate against Muslims and clamping down on civil society, the pandemic response across the country was characterized by police brutalities against civilians (Asthana, 2020). The intersection of neoliberalism with religious nationalism and curbing of civil liberties is in line with the thrust of conservative religious nationalism toward consumer culture and corporate capitalism and its tensions with socialism (Grem, 2014). The BJP government’s Hindu nationalism and the advancement of neoliberal logics were aided by censorship of the media. The state repressed the critical voices questioning its misgovernance in handling the Covid-19 crisis by foisting serious criminal charges of sedition and arresting them (Simon, 2020). The vicious ways in which the state hounded the critical voice in the media demonstrate that public expressions of dissent are not sites of safety. Hindu nationalist violence is a project of building the nation by advancing a politics of fear and is “deployed for purposes of cleansing unworthy bodies and renewing the organizational body of the nation” (Jagannathan and Rai, 2015: 812) around Hindu supremacist lines. Hindu nationalist politics of criminalizing the Jamaat, imposition of the most stringent lockdown in the world, repression of civil society resistance, press censorship, and criminalizing Covid-19 patients normalized the transformation of the state into a police apparatus to engage with the pandemic. Hindu nationalism stands against calls for solidarity, social justice, expansion of public health, collectivizing the response to the pandemic, and providing medical treatment to infected patients rather than criminalizing and responsibilizing them for spreading the pandemic.

Discussion

In this study, we wanted to analyze the policy response of the Indian state during the pandemic to understand how the state may advance neoliberalism by structuring precariousness, violence, inequality, and necropolitics in multiple facets of life. Extant studies have focused on how neoliberalism constructs inequalities in numerous spheres of life and advances responsibilization by outlining how individuals are responsible for their own well-being and welfare in the domains of education, health, and social security (Alunni, 2017; Harvey, 2005; Reverby, 2014). Scholars have noted the intersection of neoliberalism with necropolitics where sovereign power becomes centered in the state of exception and normalization of the right to kill while advancing the accumulation of capital (Agamben, 2005; Banerjee, 2008; Mbembe, 2003). Previous research has focussed on discrete contexts such as health (Da Luz Scherf et al., 2020), the employment relationship (Baker and Brewis, 2020), and the violence of religious nationalism (Grem, 2014) to examine the enactment of neoliberalism. In this study, by tracing the Indian state’s policy response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we contribute to the understanding of neoliberalism by looking at overlapping marginalities in the contexts of health, worker’s precariousness, and religious nationalism. . By focusing on overlapping marginalities, we advance Harvey’s (2005) theorization that neoliberalism draws on projects of cultural nationalism to build consent for the economic inequality that results from policy preferences, which build wealth for elites while repressing working-class demands for justice.

Our frame of overlapping marginalities indicates that the inequalities produced by neoliberalism in different realms of life are interdependent, and the resistance against neoliberalism needs to be simultaneously charted in multiple social planes. Our findings are not entirely new as several theorists have outlined the intersection between cultural and economic inequalities produced at the intersection of neoliberalism and necropolitics (Giroux, 2006; Harvey, 2005; Mbembe, 2003). The context of the pandemic helps us to add to these theorizations by going beyond a general imagination of consent that outlines the relationship between processes of cultural othering and class solidarity (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2015; Peregalli, 2019). We offer insights about specific forms of social relations and subjectivities, which are activated at the intersection of neoliberalism and necropolitics that overwhelm people and compel them to give consent to a range of inequalities. The state’s stratagem of censoring the press and initiating criminal proceedings against journalists who highlighted the state’s misgovernance in responding to the pandemic helped in aiding the processes of spreading disinformation and building consent (Simon, 2020). The project of consent is always incomplete and punctuated by numerous acts of resistance that provide hope about the possibility of counteracting the worlds of inequality, violence, and death structured by neoliberalism (Alunni, 2017; Reverby, 2014; Wright, 2011). The state is always wary of the incompleteness of consent and uses disaster crisis for disciplining and brutalizing the dissident subjects (Klein, 2007).

During the pandemic, the deliberative and representative institutions—the Indian Parliament and the state legislatures—were completely bypassed and prevented from questioning, scrutinizing, and overseeing executive actions (Bhatia, 2020). The loss of legislative capacity to question the state implied that the executive could function with impunity in inflicting structural violence on marginal subjects, normalizing an unequal “distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state” (Mbembe, 2003: 17). Further, the higher judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, abandoned its constitutional duty to review the executive actions during the Covid-19 pandemic. The cryptic orders, blindly accepting the government’s averments and praising the government on multiple occasions during oral proceedings for efficient and effective handling of the pandemic not only raised serious doubts on the Supreme Court’s ability and willingness to impartially review executive’s action but it has also seriously dented its credibility. Justice Gowda (2020), a former judge of the Supreme Court, remarked that the Supreme Court had failed to live up to the people’s legitimate expectations to protect the interests of the vulnerable working class during the pandemic. The judiciary’s irresponsibility emerges from the structural violence of the state where the deaths of vulnerable people no longer shake the public conscience. Rather, “a long process of dehumanizing and industrializing death” (Mbembe, 2003: 18) implies that there is a lack of moral outrage against the state’s culpability in structuring the deaths of marginal subjects.

We find that the public health response of the Indian state was punctuated by impunity, denial of dignity to Covid-19 patients, and the refusal to offer medical treatment and care in attentive ways. The state’s abandoning of “the right to life and duty to protect life; the right to health and access to healthcare; and the duty to provide support for vulnerable populations” (Da Luz Scherf et al., 2020: 4) is akin to human rights abuse structured by the state. Scholars indicate that states often justify human rights abuse by describing the prevalent contexts as war-like emergencies, requiring human rights sacrifices for winning the war (Agamben, 2005; Giroux, 2006). The human sacrifices are a part of “sovereign violence as both the use of force through suspension of law to harm someone by clearly defined actors, and as more insidious – but equally harmful – lawful forms of systemic coercion that go unnoticed in the smooth functioning of political, social, and economic systems” (Varman and Vijay, 2018: 308). While acting with impunity, the Indian state invoked the metaphor of war to describe its response to the pandemic, invoking the frame of national security to shield itself from criticism. We show that the language of war structures the lockdown as a social relation of incarceration and enables state actors to treat Covid-19 patients dependent on public healthcare virtually as criminals, denying them access to basic healthcare facilities. While the public health infrastructure has always been hostile to marginal segments of India’s population and stripped the poor of their dignity, the pandemic reinforced the conception that there was no hope for reversing the structural violence against the poor during the crisis. Instead of social relations of solidarity, the state and the market enacted the necropolitics of exacerbating the lives of marginal people as being disposable.

The language of war invoked by the state in delivering healthcare spilled over into constructing vulnerable workers, particularly migrants, as disposable populations. The state pursued a necropolitical project of privileging the lives of the middle class and elites who could endure the lockdown with the resources they had and abandoned vulnerable workers who had no resources to the hauntings of death. This is in line with earlier findings of neoliberal governmentality which make “the relatively wealthy or privileged more active and entrepreneurial, thus including them in neoliberal society” while “socioeconomically underprivileged or subaltern groups are excluded from the opportunities generated by the neoliberal regime” (Varman et al., 2012: 19–20). Implicit in the necropolitics of the state was a project of neoliberal responsibilization, where people were expected to take responsibility for their own well-being (Alunni, 2017; Baker and Brewis, 2020; Harvey, 2005). By constructing vulnerable workers as disposable populations, and the pandemic further weakening the possibility of workers’ resistance, the Indian state brought in sweeping legislative changes that would usher in the fourth industrial revolution premised on internet and communication technologies, robotics, platform-based work, and the corporatization of agriculture. The working class and farmers resisted the state’s intention to use the worlds of inequality and death structured during the pandemic to restructure the political economy in ways where corporate hegemony would deploy technology in coercive ways to expand inequality and injustice to unprecedented levels. While we collected data from multiple states in India, ruled by different political parties, our informants told us that the neoliberal character of the state and antagonistic orientation toward the working class was not radically different. The only factor that ameliorated the conditions of marginal actors in some states was the history of relatively better public health infrastructure (Balagopal and Vijaybaskar, 2019).

The language of war found resonance in Hindu nationalist violence directed against Muslims during the pandemic, when the state advanced a discourse of hate by labeling Muslims as responsible for the spread of Covid-19 in India. The scapegoating of Muslims enabled the state to use worlds of hate to deflect attention from the structural violence it enacted by criminalizing vulnerable patients and responsibilizing them for the spread of the pandemic. The spectacle of Hindu nationalist violence directed against Muslims normalized the state’s abdication of its responsibility in providing attentive medical treatment to those infected with the Covid-19 virus. It also enabled the state to present securitization at the level of living and working spaces as the only solution to the pandemic. The discourse of securitization took such strong root that people in India’s villages started handing over migrant workers who had returned home by undertaking arduous journeys to the police, believing that the migrants were carrying coronavirus to the villages (Agrawal, 2020). The marginalization of workers and the disenfranchisement of Muslims during the pandemic are clear indications of how the Indian state embedded neoliberal policy in the necropolitics of protecting some lives while directing structural violence at others. They indicate how worker’s experiences of precariousness intersect with ethnic marginalization and the criminalization of large populations (Wacquant, 2019). The rise of right-wing extremism has a detrimental impact on workers, as “dispossession and precariousness foreground the currents of vulnerability” (Segarra and Prasad, 2020: 175) that migrant workers experience. The structural violence of the state and the market in privileging some lives while constructing the lives of marginal workers and Muslims as disposable became visible beyond doubt during the pandemic.

Specifically, we make three contributions in understanding the necropolitics that underlies the expansion of neoliberalism in India’s pandemic response. First, we add to the literature about the structural violence embedded in the delivery of healthcare, outlining the marginalization of the poor, and the working class (Kotsko, 2017; Nkansah-Amankra et al., 2013; Reverby, 2014), by delineating how the pandemic response is embedded in a state of exception through the use of language associated with war, social relations of incarceration and criminality.

Second, we add to conversations about the emergence of extractive capitalism and policies which normalize workers’ precariousness to justify corporate competitiveness (Bear, 2014; Harvey, 2005; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2015), by indicating that the pandemic has structured the deaths of workers in several, violent ways, and these deaths are the foundation of emerging forms of precariousness and consent for fourth industrial revolution premised on platform-based work, acceleration of information and communication technologies, and the expansion of logistics and pharmaceutical companies.

Third, we contribute to extant literature about the immersion of religious nationalism in a politics of victimhood and disenfranchisement of cultural others by constructing them as a disposable population (Giroux, 2006; Kingsolver, 2010; Prasad, 2020), by indicating that religious nationalism advances neoliberal logics of responsibilization and securitization through othering mechanisms of suspicion and criminalization of Covid-19 patients. Our focus on overlapping marginalities suggests that the structural violence of Hindu nationalism normalizes the invocation of war metaphors, the enactment of a state of exception, responsibilization and criminalization of Covid-19 patients; while the consequent erosion of public health and the terror of death intersect to expand worker’s precariousness and restructure the political economy around the fantasy of a fourth industrial revolution centered around information and communication technologies, logistics, security, and pharmaceutical industries.

In conclusion, the horrors of the necropolitics of neoliberal state response became increasingly visible from the middle of April 2021, as India began recording infections of more than three hundred thousand people a day, a scale of daily infections not seen anywhere in the world (“Coronavirus India Live Updates,” 2021). The deaths of people were characterized by the shortage of oxygen supply in hospitals, shortage of vaccines, unavailability of hospital beds, fires, and oxygen leakages in hospitals (“Coronavirus India Live Updates,” 2021). While thousands of people were getting infected every day, the state pandered to Hindu nationalism by initially allowing a Hindu religious congregation known as the Kumbh Mela where hundreds of thousands of people congregated (Roy, 2021). While hundreds of people were dying every day, in an attempt to grab power in an eastern state, the Prime Minister held large election rallies where crowds of hundreds of thousands of people not wearing masks surged without social distancing (Roy, 2021). While people were dying, business continued as usual for India’s elite, with a billionaire announcing a major international acquisition and several film stars and socialities posting pictures of their international vacations on social media (Chakraborty, 2021; Dhar, 2021).