This episode explores with Ranabir Samaddar the specific nature of democratic politics during the COVID-19 crisis. Anchored in the specificity of the experience of the pandemic in India, the episode also addresses the global transformation of politics in a time of crisis. How has the pandemic changed our understanding of politics? What does it mean to refocus on life as the primary object of politics? And what does the COVID-19 crisis reveal about the nature of the contemporary Indian state and the fundamental concepts of sovereignty and citizenship?
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Bibliograpy:
Samaddar, R (2017). Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age. Calcutta: Palgrave MacMillan.
Samaddar, R (2007). The Materiality of Politics: The Technologies of Rule Volume 1. London: Anthem Press.
Samaddar, R et al (2022) India’s Migrant Workers and the Pandemic. New York: Routledge.
Grebmer, Klaus von, Jill Bernstein et al (2021). Global Hunger Index: Hunger and Food systems in conflict settings: Bonn / Dublin.
Agamben, Giorgio (1998). Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. California: Stanford University Press.
Glossary:
What is Global Hunger Index?
(00:2:17 or p.1 in the transcript)
The Global Hunger Index is a peer-reviewed annual report, jointly published by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe, designed to comprehensively measure and track hunger at the global, regional, and country levels. The aim of the GHI is to trigger action to reduce hunger around the world. Source:
Who is Foucault and what does biopolitics mean?
(00:3:36 or p.1 in the transcript)
Foucault and biopolitics: Michel Foucault was a major figure in two successive waves of 20th century French thought–the structuralist wave of the 1960s and then the poststructuralist wave. Foucault’s work is transdisciplinary in nature, ranging across the concerns of the disciplines of history, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. At the first decade of the 21st century, Foucault is the author most frequently cited in the humanities in general. The concept of biopolitics was first outlined by Michel Foucault (2003, 2007, 2009) in his lectures at the Collège de France in order to name and analyze emergent logics of power in the 18th and 19th centuries. According to Foucault, biopolitics refers to the processes by which human life, at the level of the population, emerged as a distinct political problem in Western societies. Biopolitics refers to the style of government that regulates populations through "biopower" - the application and impact of poitical power on all aspects of human life. Source:
What is Malthusianism?
(00:12:23 or p.3 in the transcript)
Malthusianism: Thomas Malthus, English economist and demographer who is best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without stern limits on reproduction. This thinking is commonly referred to as Malthusianism. Source:
What was the Great Deccan famine?
(00:12:33 or p.3 in the transcript)
The 1630–1632 famine was the worst that occurred during the Mughal Empire in India. It was caused by a severe drought, followed by a huge flood and a plague of locusts. During that same period, the Ganges in East India changed its river bed, which led to bad harvests in the following years. Source:
S.R: Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores challenges that democracies face around the world today. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of the Central European University in Vienna and senior fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. In this episode, we are joined by Ranabir Samaddar, founder of the Calcutta Research Group in India, a political thinker, and a leading theorist in the fields of migration and refugee studies. His contributions span a wide range, including nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, issues of justice and rights, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labor control. Let me mention a couple of his books here, "Karl Marx and The Postcolonial Age," an older three-volume study of Indian nationalism titled "The Materiality of Politics," and most recently, "India's Migrant Workers and the Pandemic."
With Ranabir Samaddar, we attempt to understand the specific nature of democratic politics during the COVID-19 crisis. Our conversation is anchored in the specificity of the experience of the pandemic in India, but it also addresses the much larger global transformation in the meaning and content of politics in a time of crisis. Some of the questions that I want to explore with him are, how has the pandemic changed our understanding of politics? What does it mean to refocus on life as the primary object of politics? What does the COVID-19 crisis reveal about the nature of the contemporary Indian state and what does the pandemic do to some of our fundamental concepts, such as sovereignty or citizenship? So, thank you very much, Ranabir for joining me for today's podcast.
R.S: Yeah, my thanks that you have me in this program, and I was looking forward to joining.
S.R: So, let me come to my first question because as we speak, India has slipped to a new low in the newly published post-pandemic, Global Hunger Index ranking, occupying now the 101st place among 116 nations. So, it now lags behind its neighbors Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan. We can take this as only one small indication of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has really devastated the lives and livelihoods of millions all over the world but has especially affected the lives of the poor in India. The official death count of over 450,000 places India among the three countries worst affected, behind the United States and Brazil. What remains unclear is the nature of our political response to the crisis since most conventional avenues of organized politics were closed. What then constitutes politics in a time of crisis when life itself is at stake? You have argued, and I quote you, that "The crisis of life produces and must produce political responses". And in this context, you've formulated the phrase "biopolitics from below" to denote the broad contours of this collective self-organization of the poor. Could you explain the kind of politics that this phrase encapsulates and where it meets or even diverges from the more familiar understanding of Foucauldian biopolitics?
R.S: You see, Shalini, in our traditional understanding, the epidemic is seen as a disaster and a public health crisis. And the Indian state invoked at a very early stage the Disaster Management Act to cope with the pandemic. So, the overall state response was in terms of managing a disaster. This was probably the first time when a public health crisis was being interpreted as a disaster. So, you have a national disaster management force, etc., but more importantly, that the disaster management then requires a huge centralization of different powers in order to manage. India had through these two years, roughly 450,000 deaths. And in the second visit of the epidemic, it was much more devastating. Now, I cannot say whether the state willfully separated these two parts, but the fact that you saw it as a disaster, it implied, and everyone agreed that politics would be suspended.
By and large, the political parties, political forces, all of them said this is not the time to do politics. All should contribute to the war against the COVID. So, it was a war, the nation was in crisis, and as in war, therefore, we should all get together. Now, the inquiry is, was politics suspended? Democracies would say, "Okay, the state did not do it. It should have done it in this way." So, it would point out the faults. But the conventional politics response was that it should be done more efficiently, it should be done more rigorously, and politics fundamental is not going to be affected.
If we look at the lower classes, how they responded, I would only end with this, that my answer was partly from historical research, but partly from looking carefully at what was unfolding before our own eyes, that the lower classes were organizing along a different line, where the object was how to save life. And in order to save life, reorganize their own lives, own work, own relations with the political leaders, own relation with local representatives, etc.
So, they understood much more clearly, that the aim of politics at the time of crisis is the whole question of how do we manage life? What is the politics that will be revolving around life? I think COVID-19 brings out this question and social scientists should be enormously indebted to the responses of the lower classes to actually understand what they understood earlier that crisis brings out the banality of the politics that we do, and the exceptionality of the responses of the lower classes.
S.R: So I'll come to the historical point you make in a moment but let me press you on the "biopolitics from below," a phrase which you use. What kinds of responses did you see in Calcutta, among the informal settlement dwellers, for example, for whom the pandemic became especially under conditions of an extremely severe lockdown imposed very suddenly, with no advance notice, a question of life versus livelihood? You had to now make a choice of would you want to go out there despite these draconic measures and earn the livelihood necessary for your family to survive or is it a question of just sequestering yourself as the middle classes could in their homes and saying this is a public health crisis, so I must just protect myself from disease but I have the economic means at my disposal and the liberty of either working from home or not going out to work? This is the leisure which the poor didn't have. So, what is the response that you saw when you were looking at the informal settlements in Calcutta?
R.S: Let us see it in this way, this was a lockdown, which was declared with four hours notice countrywide. Trains, trams, buses, flights, everything was stopped only with four hours notice. And the Home Ministry sent orders to all the states that the migrant workers should be persuaded to stay put in where they were. So, in a way, one could argue, and others have argued that they were being interned in the cities where they were, and they were not to go out. So, we cannot say that the state did not know that there were migrant workers, and this was a huge thing. What happened in these cities, in these towns, in Surat, they were firing. Workers were shot at when they wanted to come out. And in many of these cities, the city administration or the state administration wanted to persuade the workers to stay put.
Now, let us say by a conservative estimate, within a span of 15 days, close to 7 to 8 million people were on the roads. What led to this unbelievable uniformity of response across actually a continent, if you say India, so from Hyderabad to Bangalore to Mumbai, to Surat to Ahmedabad to Delhi, almost everywhere? Thousands and thousands of workers came out on the road. It was a strike. And when we say that it was a strike by the migrant workers, and they rebelled against conditions of stay, they had no money, they had no food, the landowners or the house owners refused to give any kind of extension. And only thing that they had was the mobile. This kind of response, and remember that the All India Trade Union Congress, which in 2020 was 100 years, the All India Trade Union Congress, it didn't say anything.
So, the organized trade union movement failed. Did the workers wait for the leaders? No. They came out, they knew what they were doing, and they did. Now tell me, how do you characterize it in terms of if this is not a bio-response, what is it? But on the other hand, you cannot say, "Well, our theories of democracy are not concerned with this.” Then what is democracy if the democracy is not concerned with questions of life and the way the lower orders of society? That's why it's from below response.
S.R: So, let me turn from the contemporary, which you have just pointed out to the historical precedent. This is the 1896/97 plague in Bombay, the influenza epidemic 1918/1919 also in Bengal, the Bengal famine of 1943, we've had many kinds of health crises, public health crises, but also famines and a history of contagion from British colonial India into the post-colonial India. The question in all of these emergency situations has been, which parts of the population are seen by the state as "expendable" if I may put it in inverted commas? Those whose suffering and death really do not become matters of the state? What do the histories of these epidemics and contagions tell us about our contemporary predicament?
R.S: You know, Rajendra Workers work on the worker's response to the Puna and the Bombay epidemic or Mumbai epidemic. You know, one has to reread. It's very important to see how workers responded. But it also tells us that the British government was steeped in a Malthusian kind of thing, that some lives have to be expended. I think the more important historical point is the Deccan famine. And in Deccan famine, if you recall, Lord Lytton, who was at that time, the Indian Viceroy, even such a right-wing functionary like Lytton had to plead with the Home Department to release some money. And the debate was, why should it be a colonial government's policy to give food to the rural population? Is it the responsibility of the government to look after the lives of the people?
And this idea that it is the government that must be held accountable if people die, is an idea that comes up against the widespread Malthusian idea that it's a matter of production. If these are lazy populations, if they can't produce, if they die, how can you say that’s the government's responsibility? The government has to spend money. Clearly, you have a new Malthusianism in the context of the epidemic, all governments were steeped in that idea that there is something called herd immunity, that you must allow time to pass, that if you can manage, ultimately 60% of the population to be in some way or another recovering from the epidemic, then the society is free. These responses of the conventional democracies, including post-colonial democracies and on the other hand, the variegated responses at the lower levels of society actually has shown us what you can call the very faint contours of what kind of public power can emerge in the the foreseeable future, that what is the alternative to the kind of power that we see today, an alternative that will take protection of life as the fundamental question of power? And that is what biopower tells - that are you saving lives.
In a way, therefore, we are going back to Foucault, where Foucault says that modernity changes the paradigm of power doesn't depend on how many people you kill, but how many lives you save. What he forgot was or what he didn't mention that the new liberals would say, "In order to save many lives, you kill a few." That's the new liberal paradigm, the new Malthusian paradigm. So, at one level, therefore, the answer to your question would be that there is a new Malthusian response in the democratic attitude to the question of the epidemic and the crisis of life.
S.R: The visibility and invisibility or invisibilization of certain kinds of power, but also certain groups of citizens is a very crucial argument that you make in the book. And this is your new book, titled "The Pandemic and the Politics of Life," where you describe the migrant as the central figure of this crisis. In contrast to Europe and the United States, of course, in India, we're speaking of internal migrants, those displaced from rural areas to the cities. That is, we are not speaking of a division between citizens who enjoy rights and state protection, and outsiders who may or may not enjoy these to the same degree. And yet, the lives of Indian internal migrants remain well outside the purview of citizenship rights and democratic politics, something that the crisis revealed in stark terms.
Stranded in the city without a safety net and no access to the means of livelihood, migrant workers were forced to return to their home villages, often marching on foot for hundreds of kilometers. What the pandemic then visibalized is the everyday plight, not the exceptional but the everyday plight of these 100 million internal migrants who lack a political voice. And one reason we may speculate that this is the case is because these migrant workers do not have the right to vote in the places of their residence in the city but can only cast a ballot in their home villages. But more generally, how would you understand the significance of the figure of the migrant during the pandemic? And what did it visibalize in democratic politics?
R.S: See, the relation between visibility and enfranchisement is there. I'm not denying it, but I wouldn't give it much value. What are the dynamics of visibility and invisibility in terms of labor and life? At one level, you may say that the migrant became an easily congealed figure of the precarity of life today. So, what we usually associated with the refugees or with the stateless, think of Hannah Arendt, that famous term of rightlessness, a basic rightlessness, a right to claim then other rights. So, we had already divided the world into citizens and non-citizens who are refugees and aliens, but now we saw, oh my god, they're within the country! And we had divided this world of labor, as internal migrant, and external labor. But think of the labor that was contained and, you know, interned in ships, ships which were not allowed to dock.
"New York Times" actually carried a long series, a fantastic series about people stranded at the seas. Think of the hundreds and thousands of Gulf labor. What happened to them? The migrant is the congealed figure of the precarity, one. The second thing is that precisely because of the precarious situation, you can now think of the fundamental point that you raised. What ordains the visibility, invisibility of labor in society? Very briefly, and it's almost a formulaic response that I would give because of shortage of time, one is that liberal democracy begins with the refugees and migrants, we will not be able to give you jobs, but we will give you shelter. So, you have the right to take asylum. And with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Refugee Convention in 1951, we all agreed that we will protect them. And politically it became important as a humanitarian issue and democracy state responsibilities.
So, refugees were a politically visible question. Economically, nobody bothered. But down the line with 70 years, what happens is that economically they are very important, whether as migrant labor, refugee labor, logistical labor, footloose labor, sex labor, nursing labor in nursing care industry throughout the world, and digital labor; you find that without labor, the world doesn't move for a day. Labor is visible in economy. But in politics, you have therefore now a shift, that in politics, they can't be visible. But the order goes on in a way so that the visibility and invisibility, invisible in politics, they're visible in economy, while they had been visible in politics and invisible in economy. But it is the workers, migrant workers' act of moving out. It is basically declaring politics on feet, that they've moved out, this act of being mobile, violating all restrictions of the government; that made them visible.
S.R: So, one of the things the crisis revealed was the state control of its borders because that is what the state immediately took control of, closed borders which had been opened within Europe, for example. So that there was an exercise and a very visible exercise this time from the side of the state of the practices of sovereignty. And one of the questions which Giorgio Agamben, for example, in his response to the pandemic he raised that this act of declaring a state of exception should lead us to rethink the everydayness of the state of exception with relation to state sovereignty. Do you think this is a response which one could generalize across globally or is it a very specific European point of view?
R.S: I tend to agree with the last point that you raised. And I think if there is an everyday experience of exceptionality, this is not exceptional anymore. I think Agamben - I do not want to join issue with him - but I think and I have written elsewhere also that it's a kind of very individualized, but I wouldn't say anarchist response, but I would say it's a kind of an individualized response sticking to a philosophical ground that does not take into account -while I sympathize with the concerns-, the libertarian concerns with the way power is welded.
On one hand, if you take up the question of opening of borders, closing of borders, you know, modern border management has become flexible. It's neither fully closed nor it is fully open. And with digitized border management, they know that for three months, we have to close it and they will be the first one because it's a new liberal world, where much more than production, it is trade and commerce. It's a new mercantilist world where it is impossible that they can close the economy. So, therefore, some lives will be gone but we will have to calibrate it, how to open it, when to open it, how much to open it.
So, it is not a strict polarity between closing and opening. In fact, the Americans have shown it, that how to flexibilize border management. You have at one level may be an extreme kind of response with the earlier U.S. president, now you may have a more calibrated response. But globally, you can see that your orange mark India, red mark India, in terms of COVID, so are you coming from a dangerous country, and you can see that whole disaster management is digitized. And it depends on artificial intelligence, it depends on algorithms, it depends on what you may call the big data capability of the government to cope with pandemics. So, you have enormous modeling exercises on which these responses are made. So, in a way, therefore, the earlier leftist or new leftist thinkers, where they were taking a very traditional route of freedom versus restriction. No, the new liberalism doesn't move along that line. It is neither pure freedom, nor pure restriction.
S.R: So, let me close with the last question with a quote from your book where you write "The shock of COVID-19 is simply too great for the old order to return. Even with the restoration of trade, resumption of supply lines, initiation of large-scale work for wages schemes, such as we have seen in India, such a return may not be possible." So, would you like to speculate on what kind of a post-COVID future, and we definitely are not post in the real sense of the post, because COVID is going to continue to be with us, and yet, what kind of a future after the immediate impact of the lockdowns in the emergency could we imagine in post-colonial countries like India and what role would an ethics of care play in such a response?
R.S: What we call the future anterior, in other words, if you want to look to the future, you look to the past, and it is through the excavation of the past that you can see in a long 2020 mode, that what is 2020, the year of the COVID, the arrival of the COVID will mean for the future. Something is very important that a power that is not caring, a power that doesn't take care as the most important thing is a power that will not have legitimacy. So, Foucault at one point in time had told a pastoral power. And he said that in the evolution of the modes of power, the pastoral mode was important. And while we have breaks in the appearance in the history of power, new modes of power have appeared.
But I think clearly, it's not pastoral power in that sense, but something is happening where care, the new liberals who turn it into a great care industry and the new liberals understand much more than our Liberal Democrats the crisis of life, and that today calls for a change and they are working for a future much more than we or let us say “critical thinkers" are working. New liberals are one step ahead. Yesterday, I remembered we were discussing, I said, today's Biden administration, the series of reforms they're producing, it's the new liberal time, but you can't compare it unless you are immersed in mythmaking exercises with what Roosevelt wanted to do in the wake of the Great Depression, and therefore the New Deal.
What else is Biden trying? It's a different question, that if there were no war, the New Deal probably would not have had such a chequeen carrier. The New Deal was successful, finally, because there was war, expansion of production industry. We all know the story and the revival of Europe through Marshall Plan. Today, you have a similar problem. And the problem starts with 2008-2009. So, the COVID crisis is the moment of the conjunction, which I wrote of several crises. It's a long-term financial crisis that starts with 2008. You have a public health massive epidemiological crisis. You have a climate crisis coming and you have a political crisis, which we were trying to figure out by saying right-wing populist governments. Basically, liberal democracy was in crisis.
And therefore, all this combined, and they initiate a search among political thinkers and political class, what to do, that's where the future question. One line is there for the series of reforms that Biden and others would try to do. We don't know whether they will be successful, but you can easily say comparable to the American ruling classes what they wanted to do in the 20s, and 30s, and in the 40s.
On the other hand, you find in China and many other countries a different kind of public order is emerging on the basis of stability, where the call is: make politics stable. If there is stability, people will be able to cope with the uncertainties and this crisis of life. And care, final answer is, if you look at the sections of society which are involved, they are expanding. In India now the policeman, the street constable, the traffic constable is considered as a frontline care worker. Rightly so. Because so many traffic police died because they had to work out in the open in the initial days, nurses, doctors, paramedical officers, volunteers, took Ayas, hundreds and thousands of care workers. They will become even more crucial in keeping us alive. So, care will become a very important segment of life. And a public power that cares for human lives, it will be audient along that line. And the questions of restriction freedom, they will be redefined. I'm not saying they will go away. So, I think that liberal democratic lingo, the language, will undergo change, if they have to remain pertinent.
S.R: Thank you very much for this fascinating discussion of the afterlives of COVID, as well as its impact in what you describe as a conjunction of several crises, public health crisis which is evident, political crisis of liberal democracy, and also the economic repercussions of the 2008 debt crisis persisting into today. Thank you.
R.S: Thank you, Shalini. For me, it was also a very clarifying exercise. So, it helped me very much. I'm grateful. Thank you.
S.R: So, we have seen that the pandemic is a public health crisis, but one that was initially viewed as a national disaster which the state needs to manage. One which therefore meant centralization of state power, and one in which politics, normal, conventional politics was suspended in the time of a so-called war against the virus. But at the same time, a different politics emerged, what Ranabir Samaddar calls politics from below, the self-organization of the poor, to protect their lives and their livelihoods at the same time.
We saw that the figure of the migrant is crucial to understand this political response as all across India millions of migrant workers in the informal sector, who had no safety net were no longer able to remain in the towns which they had made their home and they were forced to go back on foot often to their villages far away. Organized political parties and organized trade unions and labor movements failed to respond, whereas the poor took their lives into their own hands in order to respond in ways which were unexpected.
The colonial and the post-colonial states' response has often been a complex one to these kinds of situations of public health crises. It has been on the one hand, always Malthusian, making a calculation of which lives should be saved, which ones are expendable. And yet at the same time, there is a continuity from the colonial to the post-colonial we saw, where the state is held responsible for saving lives. The migrant today is then the congealed figure of the precarity of life and the condition of rightlessness which became visible in the pandemic was a much more generalized condition since COVID somehow upturned the division between migrants, citizens, refugees.
Finally, what we saw is that public power must include a politics of care, a politics of protection, but that politics of care is predicated on the labor of immigrants and the labor of migrants, both internal and external. This was the fourth episode of season three. Thank you very much for listening. In the next episode, we delve into the world of journalism and media, especially the radio. The radio, as it impacts the building of democratic politics in societies struggling with internal conflict.
My guest will be Caroline Vuillemin, director of the Swiss nonprofit organization Fondation Hirondelle, and Said Nazir, co-founder of Tribal News Network, TNN, a radio and multimedia platform providing local news in Northwest Pakistan. Please go back and listen to any episodes you may have missed. And of course, let your friends know about this podcast. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.cu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.