Home-made biopolitics: India's migrant workers between bare life and political existence

Social Anthropology - Journal Article

The article briefs about the issues created due to lockdown. As India went into lockdown to fight Covid-19, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers began to walk their way home, hundreds of kilometres away. As harrowing images of 'portable households' - women, men and small children carrying their few belongings with them - started to pour into the media, it became clear that the urgency of social distancing had been substituted by preoccupation about sheer hunger. The recursivity of contempt and violence against the poor and minorities and the ruination of their lives engendered by the pandemic in India is a warning against blanket arguments about exceptional measures adopted during the Covid-19 crisis and their responses, as these drastically differ globally. The life of 'second class citizens' under Covid-19 also sheds light on recent interventions on these measures as an index of wider biopolitical orders: Agamben has argued that anti-contagion measures approved by the Italian government are a testimony to governments' trend towards the establishment of the state of exception as the rule, and to the sheer defence of bare life for which Italians are willing to sacrifice virtually everything. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

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