“Any creature that comes out of there, shoot it”: Hindu Nationalism, Viral Bodies, and the Political Imaginaries of COVID-19

Abstract

In this paper, I draw on digital ethnographic analysis of social media posting around the crisis. I argue that anxieties about the disorder of urban space co-exist alongside caste-based discourses of cleanliness and bodily regulation in Hindu nationalist social media users’ repudiation of COVID-19 as a disease of the urban poor. Alongside discourses of caste, their invocation of the alleged role of the Islamic proselytization group Tablighi Jama’at in the spread of the disease in urban North India, and discourses around the intimate life and spatial organization of poor urban Muslims, demonstrates how the Hindu nationalist response to the COVID-19 crisis focuses on the site of the Muslim male body as an invasive “viral” force. I then trace how the Hindu nationalist response to COVID-19 is integrated into existing concepts of unruly bodies, legitimizing a state-based response of repression and violence.