The Plague Check: Population Culling as Pandemic Realpolitik

Abstract

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.