POLITICAL REALITY OF RURAL WEST BENGAL IN COVID-19 LOCKDOWN: CHALLENGING HUMAN RIGHTS

Abstract

The present study offers an understanding of the current situation in Indian rural areas due to the outbreak of COVID-19, a new form of coronavirus. With just a four-hour notice, the honourable Prime Minister of India announced a complete 21-day (first phase) lockdown throughout India on 24 March 2020, which was later extended to the second and third phases to contain the spread of novel coronavirus. The impact of the sudden lockdown has been remarkable in people’s everyday lives and lives particularly on village dwellers. This study has tried to explore how people were becoming victims of this situation and suffering from human rights violations. Their experiences will explain the reality generated out of the COVID-19 outbreak and will contextualize the condition of the rural areas within its political reality. The study has followed ethnographic techniques within a constructivist paradigm for data collection. Phone calls and video calls are the only ways to understand the contradictions, complexity, and multiplicity of the realities during the lockdown phase in India. Interpretative analyses have facilitated the comprehension of facts and exploring the meanings based on the understanding of the participant’s interpretation of their experiences. Further, trouble was added as they were in some way connected to the medical professionals or profession. Lockdown on an urgent basis has influenced to refuse people’s right to look for security or return to safe places from where they face harassment or torture.