Die Krise als Katalysator: Covid-19, soziales Bürgerrecht und politische Transformation in Indien
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
The introduction of a nation-wide lockdown in India on 25 March 2020 with the objective of putting a stop to the circulation of the Covid-19 virus triggered a large-scale social and economic crisis, the combined product of a sudden interruption of most economic activities and the closure of inter-state boundaries, which prevented India’s vast population of trans-regional migrant workers to return to their regional homes. Through a detailed reconstruction of India’s first lockdown, the project examined the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on post-colonial India’s uneven “social citizenship”, a contested articulation of welfare discourses, modalities of governance, and infrastructures of social redistribution. Applying methods of historical research to the present, the project approached India’s Covid crisis as a historical event, as a moment of societal acceleration creating sudden socio-political strains and opening new possibilities for consolidation as much as for contestation. The main scientific contribution of the project lay in its endeavor to account for the inner dynamics of an event in the making. This novel methodological approach resulted in the elaboration of an analytical chronicle, laying out a broad, and as far as possible open-ended narrative of India’s first lockdown. Drawing on a diverse range of sources (newspapers, government and court orders, reports by state and non-state organisations), the chronicle seeks to reproduce the ebb and flow of occurrences, weaving together different threads – the successive mutations in official policy and discourses, the crisis of the welfare system and its repercussions, the emergence and apparent sidelining of the (unorganized) labour question, or the tensions within India’s federal structure. It is supported by a digital repository, available both at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen, and with the Centre for Education and Communication in New Delhi. A parallel study of the trajectory of “labour”, both as a category of state policy and a social group, during India’s first lockdown, allowed to further instantiate the analytical potentials of this perspective. It shows the way, over the first weeks of the lockdown, what had initially been seen as a crisis of labour, triggered by the sudden interruption of economic activity, was reframed as a crisis of citizenship and access to infrastructures of social redistribution, thereby highlighting, and further accentuating, the ongoing tension between “labour” and “citizenship” as two parallel, and potentially conflictual, vehicles of social and political claims.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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“The lockdown as historical event. COVID-19 and the crisis of labour in India”. Conference “The Political Ecology of Work in Times of Disaster”, Internationale Tagung der HistorikerInnen der Arbeiter-und anderer sozialer Bewegungen (ITH) on 22-25 September 2022
Ravi Ahuja
