Covid-19: The India Story

By Aditya Nigam, July 2020 T he Indian government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the state-society relationship that emerged as a result is perhaps the most surreal episode of the drama that has played out in different parts of the world. Background Since May 2014, India has had a government of the Hindu right party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is actually the political arm of the parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, literally the National Volunteer Union). The RSS was formed in 1925 and calls itself a cultural organization. Its main activities are ‘educational’ – it runs a huge network of educational institutions that spread vicious Hindu supremacist ideology alongside basic education. On another level of functioning, it is known to be actively involved in the production of the communal riot – a euphemism for anti-Muslim pogroms. Its rise to central power in 2014 was under the leadership of Narendra Modi, the former chief minister of Gujarat where, under his stewardship, one of the worst anti-Muslim carnages was enacted in early 2002. His ascent to power in 2014 was, in many ways, a signal of what was to come and the next five years saw a huge escalation of anti-Muslim violence and an increasingly clear alignment of state institutions with the Hindu supremacism project. The media, of course, was the first casualty, turning almost overnight into a propaganda machine, training its fire only on opposition parties. There are reasons to believe that the last general election in 2019, when Modi’s BJP got re-elected, was more of a coup d’état . Sections of the state institutions, like the Election Commission, colluded in a hundred different ways – not least by swearing in the government without the final results ever having been declared. This is not to say that the government had no popular support. By instituting a Hindu-Muslim polarization and the production of the Muslim as the ‘antinational’ or ‘terrorist’, it had managed to