COVID-19 Through the Lens of Risk and Bio Politics: A Peep into Indian Scenario

Abstract

Corona virus pandemic is the biggest crisis that the world is facing today since post World War II. The main issue confronts us that how could progress virtually on all fronts of human endeavour also be accompanied by a society prone to more risk, more danger and more harm than ever before, that is, the paradoxical existence of both progress and risk. The episode of COVID-19 has shown how globalized modernity mediated through market relations and various social institutions are shaping the future-one dominated by the matrix of risk. The transition from the industrial to risk epoch of modernity occurs unintentionally in the course of a dynamics of modernization and reflects the happenstance of rather unintended consequences. In the global risk society (Beck 1996, 1999), no one any longer knows with certainty the extent of the risks we face through our collective technologies and innovations. For example, we don’t know when COVID-19 will go away, whether it will at all go away forever, or it may reoccur, or if it reoccurs then what would be the timeframe, how much humanity as a whole will lose economically, socially and existentially and above all in terms of mortality as a nation or globally. The handling of this pandemic rather looks like a bio political dream, where governments, (in varying degrees) probably advised (?) by a group of physicians, impose pandemic dictatorship on entire populations. Getting rid of all democratic obstacles under the pretext of “health”, even “survival”, they are finally able to govern the population as they have, more or less openly, mostly done in modernity as pure “biomass”, or as “bare life” to be exploited. The purpose of this article is to analytically explore and explain whether through this pandemic, biopower addresses the well-being of a population and is structured by decisions about “making live” and “letting die” (Foucault 1978), as most state responses to the SARS-CoV-19 virus have been justified in bio political terms by a “re-biologization” (like young vs. old, less immunity vs. more immunity, issue of co morbidity etc.) of the population, and a perceived overarching imperative to keep as many people alive as possible. What we are experiencing is some of the most prominent means or familiar tools of state sovereignty (Foucault, 1977), that is orders and decrees forbidding certain activities, deploying in a broadly bio political sense, for making (rather than letting) live. The disciplinary character of some of these measures is likewise fairly clear, especially in the case of (total or partial) quarantine (Foucault, 1977). The paper focuses on the disavowal of official responsibility for decisions made is also underwritten by a hallmark of both disciplinary power and various forms of bio politics especially through “process of medicalization of politics” and a more recent “politicization of medicine”, invested with tasks of social control that do not belong to it. The paper empirically will highlight mostly the Indian scenario.