COVID-19 and Indiaâs New Viral Necropolitics
The pandemic has devastated the lives of Indians across classes and castes but will it help shape a new intersectional approach to public health and politics?
A man walks past burning pyres with people who died from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), on the banks of the river Ganges at Garhmukteshwar in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India, May 6, 2021. Photo: Reuters/Danish Siddiqui
In
Necropolitics (2019), Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe describes the power of âliberalâ democracies â which never addressed or abandoned their founding violence of dispossession, exploitation, and extraction â to give death and withhold death as the sovereign rite of regulating life. This ânecropowerâ is exercised not only through spectacular, if occasional, forms of terror but also by inflicting âsmall dosesâ of death on people living âat the edge of lifeâ.