Biopolitics of Pandemic and the Cult of Stupidity in India—Suchintan Das

The stranglehold of the Covid-19 pandemic on the world doesn’t seem to be losing strength. With over a million people infected and about sixty thousand of them dead already, the future appears rather bleak. Even if a possible end to this pandemic can be imagined, the costs—both humanitarian and economic—that it will eventually entail, are predicted to be of horrifying proportions. Needless to say, to tackle this global crisis, states have come to assume extraordinary powers, not just over the territories under their legal jurisdictions, but literally over the bodies of the populace who inhabit those territories. A global war is being waged against an external enemy—a particular strain of virus—on behalf of humanity as a species. Politics too, seems to have been remoulded in light of this all-pervasive biological threat.

Michel Foucault had argued that while in the Middle Ages, political powers were haunted by epidemics (temporary, but recurrent disasters leading to multiple deaths and exposing everyone to the threat of possible and imminent death), the issues that concerned modern nation-states more can broadly be categorized as endemics—permanent illnesses (for example diseases thriving on conditions of hunger, like tuberculosis) prevalent in a population that were difficult to eradicate and caused loss of workdays, disturbance in production, wastage of energy, and decreasing profits. The state, therefore, had to intervene in all matters concerning natality and morbidity, and everything that lay in between. Forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures emerged as important biopolitical tools to ensure the sustenance of man-as-species, ever available and docile, whose body would be agreeable to be inserted into the machinery of capitalist production, ready to be tuned in accordance with economic exigencies.

This was made possible through the exercise of what Foucault had termed “biopower” (biopouvoir), overwhelmingly concerned with “the subjugation of bodies and the control over populations” through “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques.” The domain of biopower is called biopolitics (including but not restricted to biological politics), which “deals with population, with the population as political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem.” The inadequacy of Foucault’s formulation was that he did not investigate the nature of biopower during a pandemic. Qualitatively, it seems that a pandemic is not much different from an epidemic—it is usually unanticipated, temporary, and poses similar challenges to human life. The primary difference seems to lie in magnitude—the former being relatively more extensive than the latter. Yet, this is far from an accurate picture.

In a globalized world, a pandemic can bring the economy to a standstill in a matter of days, accompanied by a sudden cessation of all flows—of men, money, and materials, so as to cut the flow of the pathogen, causing unimaginable misery to the economically vulnerable classes. A pandemic doesn’t just plunge the global economy into the trough of an imminent economic recession, but lays bare all the fault lines of capitalism, which is terribly ill-equipped to deal with such a crisis at a structural level. At this point, the capitalist state deploys its biopower, not by strengthening the healthcare system and instituting necessary economic support systems to provide relief to the economically vulnerable classes, but by fetishizing a non-existent unity of the populace, persuading them to abide by arbitrary state guidelines and directives, and above all, by condemning the exercise of civil rights and by dogmatizing all attempts to hold the state accountable as ‘dirty politics which go against national interests.’

The myth that ‘we are all in this together’ is deliberately perpetuated so as to bulldoze over all legitimate concerns regarding the disproportionate impact a pandemic is likely to have on different sections of the populace, which are subsumed under the overarching category of the nation. The state stops viewing citizens as individuals and instead ‘massifies’ them as part of the population, which it is not supposed to safeguard but control, notwithstanding the fact that within this population, some bodies are more equal than others. This point doesn’t require much stressing. One can ask why many of the world leaders who also got infected in the course of this present pandemic recovered so quickly (despite being quite elderly and having numerous comorbid conditions) when many others perished simply due to the lack of access to a superior public health system. This becomes all the more evident when one contrasts the images of travellers being screened for symptoms at airports with those of migrant labourers in India returning to their home states on foot and being bathed in bleach by over-zealous and perhaps sadistic public authorities.

The nationwide lockdown that has been imposed in India in the wake of this pandemic, among other things, has given rise to periodic appeals to theatrics by the Prime Minister, which are supposed to symbolize what has been variously touted as ‘the psychological unity of the nation’ and ‘a lift your spirits campaign’, which are parodies in themselves at best and obscene and counterproductive caricatures of the plight of peripheral people at worst. The latest of these asks people to turn off their lights at home, considering they possess one, for nine minutes at 9PM on the 5^th of April, and light a candle or diya, or a torch on their rooftops or balconies, in order to find solace in the midst of this crisis. Needless to say, this has been criticized on pragmatic grounds for being an unhelpful publicity stunt, a potential cause for the national electricity grid to trip and lead to massive problems of power supply, and for being an obvious reason for overenthusiastic supporters of the Prime Minister to flout the current social distancing norms and celebrate an untimely Diwali.

What often gets ignored in these very valid criticisms is the not so innocuous nature of the Prime Minister’s appeals. He is quite conscious of the power that he wields over a large section of the population. The secret behind his apparently improvised requests to the populace lies in what happens after his widely televised and publicised speeches get over. It is no coincidence that the subterranean leviathan of Indian politics, the IT Cell of the Bharatiya Janata Party unleashes a vicious campaign of flooding the internet with ludicrous justifications of the Prime Minister’s appeals, ranging from peddling pseudoscience to taking direct recourse to astrology, as soon as Modi stops speaking. These systematic campaigns are not so much strategies of portraying the Prime Minister as India’s saviour in ‘the fight against Covid-19’ but to simply assert that whatever the Prime Minister asks for will be fulfilled. Once ritualized, these appeals could lead to anything, from launching political vendetta to instigating violence.

The cult of stupidity—characterized by anti-intellectualism and political dogmatization—that has been gaining ground in India in a more vigorous manner since 2014, has given rise to a political situation wherein the cult of the leader, once crystallized, gets equated with the cult of nation-worship, subsuming everything under the category of the nation and excluding all those who are deemed to be misfits. The high priests of this cult are shrewd political agents, who leave no stone unturned to label dissentients as anti-nationals and members of minority communities as vermins. It is, therefore, not surprising that the Prime Minister articulates his clarion calls in a not so subtle idiom of the majoritarian religion. What is alarming is that this cult of stupidity, fostered by relentless propaganda, doesn’t just fetishize uniformity under the guise of unity but also fetishizes violence as a potent instrument for disciplining anyone who doesn’t conform to the cult, or for that matter, doesn’t obey the Prime Minister. The biopolitics of pandemic in India has therefore strengthened a fascistic state, which, operating through a cult of stupidity has successfully projected the idea that no matter how miserably the Indian government deals with this crisis, the rhetoric of a false unity and the presence of an incompetent strongman will see us through, no matter what antics he pursues, and what humanitarian costs the country incurs.