Crisis as catalyst: Covid-19, social citizenship and political transformation in India

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The spread of the Covid-19 in India, and the nation-wide lockdown imposed to limit the circulation of the virus precipitated a large-scale economic and social crisis. This crisis was sharpened by the heterogeneity of the country’s welfare institutions, which limits the social entitlements of large portions of the population. The project examines the Covid-19 crisis as a crisis of social citizenship, articulated at three levels: 1/ it created unprecedented strains on India’s infrastructure of social redistribution, 2/ it impacted on existing modalities of governance and created new fields of contestation over issues of social entitlement and 3/ it gave rise to contradictory discourses and perceptions of “social citizenship”. The ongoing crisis is analysed as an unfolding historical event: as a moment of societal acceleration creating sudden socio-political strains, triggering efforts at absorbing these strains, and opening new possibilities for consolidation as much as for contestation. Applying methods of historical research to the present, the project will provide an analytical chronicle of the crisis from the first weeks of 2020 when the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 were registered in India, until the summer of 2021, half a year after the start of the country’s vaccination drive. This analytical chronicle will trace the socio-political mutations of the crisis through the articulation of three spatial scales: a) It will investigate the formulation, implementation and contestation of the country’s social policy during the pandemic at the level of the Indian Union. b) It will juxtapose divergent regional trajectories of the crisis through the study of the states of Maharashtra (a highly urbanized and industrialized region at the receiving end of inter-regional migration) and Bihar (an overwhelmingly agricultural region of outmigration). c) A “test case” study of Bihar’s Bhojpur district will serve to examine how the pandemic was experienced, and how access to social entitlements was negotiated at the local level. The analytical chronicle will be documented through the consultation, at each scale, of a range of sources, both published and digital, and through the collection of oral testimonies in the district of Bhojpur. By creating an account of the first eighteen months of India’s Covid-19 crisis while the event continues to unfold, the project aims at capturing the dynamism of social perceptions, behaviour and the contradictory possibilities opened up by the crisis. Oral testimonies, in particular, should be collected as soon as possible before the memories and impressions of the crisis fade, or are reframed by subsequent developments. The analytical chronicle generated by the project is intended to serve as the basis for a deeper historical investigation of the mutations of post-colonial India’s uneven and contested structure of “social citizenship” – the very processes that are foregrounded as the crisis unfolds.