The Plague Check: Population Culling as Pandemic Realpolitik

The COVID pandemic presented a bioeconomic opportunity to re-entrench extant differences (racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, or otherwise) and to escalate the ongoing engineering of imagined communities. This paper examines how this general paradigm unfolded in India's lockdown of March 2020, a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Catalyst (San Diego, Calif.) Calif.), 2024-03, Vol.10 (1), p.1
Main Author: Ghosh, Bishnupriya
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biosecurity
Capitalism
COVID-19
Decision making
Epidemics
Famine
Famines
France
Health aspects
India
Manual workers
Migrant labor
Migrant workers
Modi, Narendra
Morality
Mortality
Nation states
Pandemics
Sanctions
United Kingdom
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Summary:The COVID pandemic presented a bioeconomic opportunity to re-entrench extant differences (racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, or otherwise) and to escalate the ongoing engineering of imagined communities. This paper examines how this general paradigm unfolded in India's lockdown of March 2020, and the consequent "long walk home" for migrant laborers. Narendra Modi's decision exemplifies an autoimmune drive that splits the national body-politic into a visible citizenry, groomed as electorate, and the teeming masses, marked as threat and slated for expulsion from a unified body politic. Such a drive draws on moral and science-based sanctions for rationalizing what Christina Sharpe has named premature and preventable deaths. The moral sanction draws psychic force from dominant cultural symbols that mystify, sometimes sacralize, the body politic (Modi's "Lakshman Rekha" metaphor), while science-based biosecurity measures sort and segregate populations for the management of health. Plotting Malthusian historical resonances between war, famine, and disease, I characterize the Modi regime's readiness to countenance migrant deaths as a "population culling" that is, unfortunately, an iterative feature in the archives of global pandemics. Keywords scarcity, COVID pandemic, Modi regime, migrant march, population culling
ISSN:2380-3312
2380-3312
DOI:10.28968/cftt.v10i2.40297