 cases of unusual pneumonia in the port city of Wuhan. India was in the throes of one of the largest protest movements of the country and witness since the Vendor Modi and the right wing internationalist for our church and other party, the BJP, first took power in 2014. Hundreds of thousands of people were out on the streets from Punjab in the north to Tamil Nadu in the south, protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act, the CAA, that had been passed into law in the first week of December of that year. As activists rightly pointed out, the CAA threatens to make Muslims second-class citizens in their own country. And at that point in time, the Indian nation, the world's largest democracy, looked set to face a 2020 that would be defined by a contest over the future of secular constitutionalism. As we now know, things turned out very differently. India reported its first case of COVID-19 on the 30th of January, 2020. And by the middle of the month, there were more than 100 confirmed cases in the country. At that point in time, WHO had declared that COVID-19 was a global pandemic. But this response from Indian authorities, but the response from Indian authorities was thoroughly timid. A COVID-19 awareness program was launched in early March. But the Modi government persisted in claiming that community transmission was not a problem and testing and tracing was only implemented to a very limited extent. This then changed dramatically on the 24th of March last year when Modi and its government did an about turn and introduced one of the world's strictest national lockdown policies. A 1.3 billion strong population was given all of four hours to prepare for an unprecedented disruption of everyday life involving, among other things, a sudden and comprehensive cessation of economic activities. India, in other words, had become a lockdown nation. So in this talk, I intend to throw some lights on the economic and political dimensions of this pandemic. The reason for doing so is very simple, namely that in the wake of the imposition of the national lockdown, India witnessed unprecedented forms of social suffering and political repression. My contention is this, that if we want to understand this scenario, it's necessary to think through how the trajectory and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was shaped by two pre-existing crises in India's economy and polity. These crises have different temporalities. One is a crisis of social reproduction and subsistence for the countries working poor, rooted in long-term contradictions that we can locate in India's neoliberal accumulation strategies. The other is a crisis of India's secular and constitutional democracy, which is brought about by the authoritarian populism of Narendra Modi's regime. So what I'm going to do in this talk is to present an analysis of how the COVID-19 pandemic and the national lockdown intertwined with and amplified this dual crisis. And the starting point for doing so will have to be a brief review of India's national lockdown policy and what that policy did do, what it didn't do. So in September last year, some six months after Narendra Modi first imposed a national lockdown in India, the country appeared to have become an epidemic epicenter, as it overtook Brazil and ranked second only to what was then still Donald Trump's USA in terms of the total number of COVID-19 cases. By mid-October, it was reported that India had suffered the highest number of COVID-19 deaths per million population in a select group of Asian countries, including, and I think this is crucial, its poorer South Asian neighbors. As 2020 drew to an end, 9.7 million Indians have been infected by COVID-19. And close to 150,000 people have died. And it's important to bear in mind that India has one of the lowest testing rates in the world, which means that these numbers are very likely to be under estimate. Whereas many tend to argue that relative numbers indicates that India did quite well in dealing with COVID-19, the reality is that mitigating a public health crisis was never the key motivation behind India's national lockdown in the first place. Why do I say this? Much like authoritarian populist regimes responded to the pandemic with furrow-going disregard for medical expertise. Also, Modi entirely failed to engage with concern-limited testing and limited availability of testing kits. He did not address how and at what price citizens would be able to access COVID-19 treatments. And his regime said nothing about stimulus and relief measures to cushion the coming economic and social impact of the pandemic. The focus instead was on an exhortation to citizens to do their patriotic duty to the nation by abiding to the very strict lockdown stipulations that were now upon them. But even more importantly, the government failed dismally to expand and strengthen the national medical infrastructure to cope with the increase in demand for treatment and care that would inevitably occur. Indeed, as economist Jayati Ghosh has pointed out, less than 0.04% of India's GDP was made available for immediate distribution to cover immediate health care expenditure. And less than half of these minuscule resources were distributed to state governments. So it's worth bearing in mind then also that this failure to place in a country which ranks as number 184 out of 191 countries in terms of spending on public health care. In fact, India's annual public spending on health care is just about just above 1% of GDP, which is far less than its poor South Asian neighbors. What this meant was, of course, that a population that's already profoundly vulnerable to the impacts of sudden health care expenditure was left overwhelmingly at the mercy of India's exorbitant private medical sector, which corners some 74% of the country's health care markets. For the poor, this, of course, meant a risk of being pushed further into poverty. For corporate interests, on the other hand, it presented an opportunity for windfall profits. Lockdown was extended multiple times before a phased easing of restrictions began in June last year. It's revealing when talking about this progression of repeatedly implementing lockdowns or renewing lockdowns that the COVID-19 task force appointed by the Indian Council of Medical Research to advise the government was completely sidelined in the decisions to extend the lockdown. It's also telling that just a few days after the third extension of national lockdown, members of the COVID-19 task force openly stated to the media that the lockdown had been a failure because the government had not worked to strengthen the country's medical infrastructure and also had not expanded testing and tracing capacity. So this leaves us with an obvious question. If the lockdown was not intended to mitigate a public health crisis, what exactly was its purpose? The answer in a nutshell is that it was meant to serve as a spectacle. And spectacles, as those of us who follow political developments in India have come to know only too well after 2014, is a core component of Modi's authoritarian populism. As Ravinder Kaur has rightly argued in her fascinating new book, Modi thrives on a carefully constructed strongman image. And this image, in turn, is constructed in large part through swift, unilateral, and opaque policy measures released into the public domain, as she puts it, as a thrill-inducing series of spectacles. These spectacles bolster Modi's strongman credentials. He demonstrates an unflinching capacity for action. And in doing so, also promote public celebration of a muscular Hindu majoritarianism. The spectacle of the lockdown, I believe, can be compared in several ways to that of demonetization. That is the sudden withdrawal in November 2016 of 500,000 rupee notes from circulation in the Indian economy, supposedly to combat corruption. While demonetization did nothing, in fact, to combat corruption and caused immense hardship to ordinary Indians, it nevertheless succeeded in building up Modi's image as a valiant warrior in the battle against corruption. Similarly, the sudden imposition of a national lockdown was intended to project an image of Modi as a bold protector of the Indian nation in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. As already stated, the lockdown policy did very little to alleviate the impact of the pandemic. On the contrary, in another parallel to the spectacle of demonetization, it did substantial damage to the country's working poor. In doing so, it laid bare the extent to which the Indian economy is structurally incapable of ensuring subsistence and social reproduction for the nation's most vulnerable citizens. So let me move on then to detail some of the key features and workings of what has rightly been called India's worst humanitarian disaster since partition. When the Modi government imposed its draconian lockdown policy, economic activity ground to a halt and informal sector jobs, particularly in manufacturing, construction, trade, and hotels and restaurants, were decimated. According to media reports, unemployment in urban areas went up by more than 22 percentage points. That is, it went up from 8.66%, which was already high, to 30.93%, between late March and the first week of April, 2020. This caused extreme economic distress among the working poor in India's vast informal sector, many of whom belong to 120 million strong migrant workforce that circulates between rural and urban areas. Their distress was compounded by the fact that very little by way of public assistance was put in place to ameliorate their situation. We know, of course, very well how many among the working poor reacted. Rather than abiding by Modi's exhortation to stay put when the lockdown set in, some 10 million people took to national highways to walk home as their livelihoods disappeared without warning. Many embarked on their journey without sufficient food or money and found themselves at the receiving end of harsh and humiliating treatment by state authorities. Close to 1,000 migrant workers are reported to have died during their trek home in road accidents and from causes such as exhaustion, malnutrition, and even suicide. More generally, there's no dearth of evidence of the plight of the working poor during lockdown. For example, a recent comprehensive study from researchers at Asim Premji University shows that two-thirds of their respondents lost work with casual and self-employed workers in the informal sector being hit hardest. Those who did not lose their jobs outright reported huge losses in income, sometimes as much as 50%. Indeed, overall earnings fell by between 40 to 50% and 91% of poor households reported a loss of livelihood. As the reports makes clear, this happened in a context where earnings were already very low, which means that the shock of the pandemic and the lockdown exacerbated food and consumption insecurity and also deepened indebtedness. In fact, the vast majority of households surveyed in this report reported reduced levels of food consumption during the lockdown. Now, if we want to understand why all of this happened though, we need to look beyond the poorly planned lockdown. The acute social suffering of the working poor was caused by the very structure of India's economy, where approximately 95% of the workforce eke out a living in the informal sector with low wages, poor working conditions, long working hours, limited access to social protection, and crucially, in the connection that we're currently discussing, insecure employment. More to the point, what this scenario reveals is that India's economy is most fundamentally a machinery for what Friedrich Engels in his study of the working poor in 19th century England called social murder. Now Engels coined this term to explain how the emerging industrial working class suffered premature death as a result of how capitalist exploitation subjected workers to conditions in which they could neither retain health nor live long. The workings of asymmetrical relations of power between capital and labor, he argued, undermined the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurrying them to degrade before their time. My argument is that such dynamics are also clearly foundational to the workings of India's informal economy. This becomes obvious if we consider in some detail the nature of what has rightly been referred to as the underbelly of India's economic boom, a boom which began in the early 2000s on the basis of steadily rising growth rates in the years since the early 1980s, and which averaged annual GDP growth rates between seven and 9% during the 2000s with only a minor and temporary dip after the financial crash of 2008. Now what's striking about this growth trajectory, much of which, of course, has taken place after neoliberalization began in India in the early 1990s, is that it has singularly failed to bring about a structural shift in the economy. India's economic growth, which has been driven primarily by finance, IT services and real estate, has failed to translate into employment growth and labor share of national income has in fact fallen sharply over the years. Closely associated with these trends, informal work continues to be the predominant source of employment in India. In other words, India's informal economy is a major size of precarity that has been reproduced and regenerated under neoliberalization, and which fails to adequately undergird subsistence and social reproduction for India's working poor. It's in this sense then that the economy can be described rightfully, I believe, as a machinery for social murder. The dynamics of that machinery for social murder become even more evident when we consider how the suffering of the working poor was aggravated by profoundly limited access to emergency relief and social protection under the lockdown. Numerous surveys have revealed that dismal absence of food and cash assistance to informal workers and the relief measures that were announced during the lockdown by the Modi government amounted to as little as 1.5% of GDP. Most egregiously, perhaps, authorities were extremely slow in distributing food from the public distribution system, and I know there are many at this seminar today who will be aware of this, but it's worth mentioning, of course, that India is a food surplus country. It has the means to avoid, if you will, these kinds of emergencies around food security. Now, what all of this reflects is a simple fact that India has consistently failed to extend social rights to its poorest and most vulnerable citizens. A failure which has resulted in the country having far weaker social development indicators than, and here we go again, those of poor neighboring countries, such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Now, the Modi regime's unwillingness to invest in relief measures, and indeed also in economic stimulus measures, contrast sharply with its eagerness to push through further neoliberal reforms. This is evident in how, in September 2020, the Indian parliament passed new legislation for the agricultural sector and introduced new labor laws. Both set of laws were passed in a great rush and without much scope for discussion in parliament, and both set of laws also favored the interests of capital. The new farm laws served to advance the liberalization of Indian agriculture at the cost particularly of the small and marginal farmers that make up more than 86% of the nation's agricultural producers. Already, it bears saying, mired in deep crisis, linked precisely to the political economy, if you will, of neoliberal economic reforms in the country. The new labor laws seek to expand the frontiers of informality in the Indian economy and to curtail the capacity of trade unions to engage in collective action. In sum, the new legislation introduced in September serves the purpose of pump priming the economy as a machinery precisely for social murder. In introducing these laws, Modi's government is very evidently looking after the interests of Indian big business, which as a class has stood more or less uniformly behind Modi since 2014. An Indian capital on its part has done extremely well during the crisis brought by the pandemic and lockdown. India, of course, was already a billionaire Raj. In 2019, the top 10% of the population earned 55% of all income and held a staggering 74.3% of all wealth. But it has arguably become even more so during and after the pandemic. In fact, between April and July, the combined net worth of Indian billionaires increased by more than a third. That is at the same time as India's working poor at its most excluded and marginalized groups were undergoing suffering that in many cases defied imagination even. Indian billionaires increased their net worth by 35% more than a third to 423 billion US dollars. What this meant is that all in all, what we've seen during the COVID-19 pandemic and the national lockdown in India is not only the amplification of a slow burning crisis that has plagued India's working classes for decades, but also a further consolidation of the power relations that produce these workings. And crucially, these dynamics intersect in the current profoundly perilous conjuncture with a crisis in India's secular and constitutional democracy, which is brought about by the authoritarian populism that is at the core of the BJP's hegemonic project. And I thought I would now move on to try and outline that side, that dimension of the dual crisis that has both shaped and been shaped by the pandemic and lockdown in India. So as many of those who are listening will be aware of, India has been hailed as an exceptional polity in the global South since the coming of independence in 1947. The country's secular and constitutional democracy has remained remarkably stable and it has struck deep popular roots. However, as India enters the third decade of the 21st century, Narendra Modi's BJP government has brought this democratic order to an unprecedented crossroads. This has arguably never been more evident than during the time that has passed since India became a lockdown nation. Now let me rewind that and try and outline the process through which or at which India has arrived at this incredibly crucial, incredibly decisive juncture in its political history. Now when the BJP came to power as the nation's governing party in the 2014 general election, it was at the helm of a hegemonic project of authoritarian populism. Initially this project was constructed around a narrative of development that sought to address frustrated support and aspirations in the context of jobless growth while opposing dynastic elitism and also promulgating individual entrepreneurialism. A lot of this was based on trying to project the image constructed of Modi as the man who brought development to Gujarat onto the national scale and promising a repeat of that so-called miracle. Now anyone who knows anything about Gujarat will know that there has been no miracle and that the state in fact compares poorly to other states in the country both when it comes to economic development and crucially when it comes to social development but let's put that aside for now. Now since the initial electoral victory in 2014 there's been a shift if you will in the politics of the BJP in the sense that it has increasingly come to gravitate around a majoritarian cultural nationalism that draws a line between true Indians and their enemies and seeks to rally populist support for a crackdown on those enemies. Crucially this line is defined in large part by religion. The ominous other that authoritarian populism depends on in order to frame a unitary conception of the nation and national culture is in Modi's India, the Muslim. Hate speech and vigilante violence against Muslims have escalated dramatically under the current governments and more recently the precepts of Hindu nationalism have also come to be increasingly enshrined in law. This started with of course the abrogation of Kashmiri statehood with the revocation of Article 370 of the Indian constitution. We saw it again with the Ayodhya verdict that was passed in November of 2019 and of course in the introduction of the Citizenship Amendment Act in late 2019. Now it's not only India's vulnerable Muslim citizens who constitute the ominous other in Narendra Modi's authoritarian populist project. The enemy within also encompasses the political dissident who dares to question and challenge a government that claims to be acting in the interest of the people. This is evident in how the BJP government has waged a steadily escalating war on dissent in India. The first shots in this war were fired in early 2016 when student activists at Jawaharlal Nehru University, JNU in Delhi were arrested on entirely trumped up charges of sedition. Although the students were ultimately cleared of all charges and released, these arrests helped spawn the idea that India confronts a threat in the form of anti-national forces that are undermining the country from within. This has been a crucial trope if you will in the ideological justification of the warfare that the Modi government has been pursuing on dissent and on dissenters. Now Modi's government began scaling up this war in late August 2018, when the homes of several human rights activists were raided in a nationwide police week related to what has come to be known as the Bhima-Korogam case. Since 2018, altogether 16 arrests have been carried out in connection with the case. Most recently in April this year of Dalit scholar and activist Ananteltumdut and five months later of father Stan Swamy, a Jesuit priest who has dedicated his life to fighting for the rights of adivasi groups in the state of Jharkhand in eastern India. The gravity of the charges leveled against those arrested have of course ensured that the accused have been refused bail and that they remain in police custody. The news yesterday of Varavara Rao's grant of bail for a six month period from health grounds is of course welcome. We're talking here about an octogenarian poet suffering extremely debilitating ailments who has been subjected to what can only be described as custodial torture in the sense that his health needs has been neglected is finally going to be leased on bail for a period of six months and that is indeed very welcome but the situation of those who were arrested or have been arrested since August 2018 in this case is of course alarming, especially alarming because we now know that evidence in this case has been planted. There's clear evidence of the way in which there have been forces at play to construct the allegations against those who have been thrown in jail without much of a justification at all. Now the strategy of imprisoning the centres linked to draconian sections of the Indian penal code picked up momentum as national lockdown began to quell activity in India's public sphere. To fully understand the war and dissent and the lockdown nation, it is necessary to return to the scenario that this essay began with namely the mass protests against anti-Muslim citizenship laws that shook India in late 2019 and early 2020. By late February 2020, BJP leaders in Delhi incited mobs to attack Muslim neighbourhoods in northeastern parts of the city as part of their campaign against anti-CAA protesters. In the riots that ensued, 53 people, 39 of whom were Muslim were killed and hundreds of families were displaced from their homes. Despite the repression and violence, the protests continued until late March when the national lockdown made it impossible to organise and mobilise on the country's streets and public spaces. Now at the same time then, as protesters began to retreat, the Delhi police, which reports directly to the central government and therefore also directly to the home ministry under BJP's supremo Amit Shah, swung into action. They weaponised the northeast Delhi riots and they operated under cover of the national lockdown to persecute leading anti-CAA activists. At the heart of that persecution lies the claim by the Delhi police that the violence in northeast Delhi was the result of a conspiracy carefully planned and executed by anti-CAA activists. The conspiracy the police narrative goes revolved around spreading misinformation about the CAA and the NRC and then encouraging young Muslims to join in street protests. The legal crackdown on anti-CAA activists began soon after the street protests had been cleared. As the independent research organisation the police project has pointed out, the strategy of the Delhi police, which according to Amnesty International was in fact complicit in the riots in northeast Delhi and which has of course also entirely failed to investigate any other charges against BJP leaders who were involved in instigating the riots, has been to begin by detaining and arresting junior activists from the anti-CAA protests and young Muslim men from the communities affected by rioting. Their interrogations were then used to build evidence that were used to arrest and bring charges against more senior activists. This is a strategy by the way that has been pioneered in Kashmir for a long time. So there's a way in which counter-insurgency strategies here has travelled, if you will, in India under the Maudiyushi. The charge sheets that have accompanied the arrests of more senior activists tend to make very grave allegations without much evidence. Indeed, there's much to suggest that what passes for evidence in these cases has been fabricated by the police to prop up the claim that anti-CAA activists were involved in a conspiracy to provoke violent riots. The climax so far in this process, a witch hunt by any conceivable standard, came in mid-September 2020 in the form of a 10,000-page charge sheet filed by the Delhi police under very, very strict anti-terror legislation and various provisions of the Indian Penal Code against 15 prominent anti-CAA activists. The purpose of these arrests is absolutely evident. It's to produce a climate of fear that silences citizens by criminalising the... criminalising dissent. And importantly, going back to where I started, about the construction, if you will, of a line between true Indians and the enemy within that these true Indians face, the war on dissent is joined at the hip with the majoritarian cultural politics of the Maudiyushi. I say this because during the COVID-19 pandemic, Indian Muslims have been scapegoated as superspreaders of the coronavirus. Such scapegoating, of course, aligns perfectly with the efforts of the Maudiyushi to produce a Hindu nation out of a secular constitutional democracy. Now, if the trajectory and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has provided us with a clear view of how India's economy is constructed as a machinery for social murder and how its polity is besieged by authoritarian political forces, it's only natural to wind up this talk by asking where all of this leads to Maudiyushi in relation to oppositional social movements. So during the lockdown months, there were some scattered militant protests by stranded migrant workers who demanded assistance with transport and relief and several large trade unions also voiced their opposition to the new labour laws. Nevertheless, the Maudiyushi seemed to have weathered the disastrous pandemic quite well. Indeed, both national and international media have reported that Maudiyushi's approval ratings improved during the lockdown months. With infection rates on declines in September and a vaccine drive currently underway, much energy is now being expended on creating a success narrative about how the Maudiyushi has handled India's pandemic. However, it does seem that the regime has overplayed its hand in one crucial respect. That is, in its eagerness to push neoliberal reform while the country has been reeling under the impact of both the pandemic and the lockdown. As is only too well known now, fortunately protesting farmers have laid siege to Delhi since late November last year with demands that the new farm laws should be rescinded. This movement has been sustained by a commendable resilience and steadfastness, even in the face of escalating state coercion and also vilification by a Maudiy-friendly media. Indeed, the current ramping up of the government's war on dissent, consider for example, the arrest of 21-year-old climate activist Disha Ravi on charges of sedition, no less, for sharing an online toolkit that outlined how to support the farmer's protest can be seen as an indication that the Maudiyushi has been quite seriously wrongfooted by the oppositional movement it is confronted with. I should mention here that, and many of you will know this, also Disha Ravi was granted bail today in her case. That is seen as a victory. And the thing is that in a better scenario, we wouldn't even think of this as a victory because the case should obviously never have been brought at all against her and she should never have been arrested for using her basic right to engage in political activity in a democratic country. All of this being said, there's no guarantee that the showdown, if you will, between Indian farmers and their supporters on the one side and the Maudiy government on the other side is going to constitute a decisive turning point, a kind of rock against which the wave of neoliberal Hindu nationalism will ultimately break. It remains to be seen if the demand for the repeal of the new farmers will be met and if on the back of such a victory, if it is to happen, it might be possible to build a wider counterhegemonic movement to challenge both neoliberal accumulation strategies and internationalist authoritarianism. If such a movement is to be built, it depends on the extension and consolidation of solidarities between agricultural laborers, small and marginal farmers and also crucially the urban working poor. And then in addition to that, solidarities have to be built between those groups, those subaltern citizens, especially Muslims and Dalits who find themselves at the receiving end of an aggressive Hindu nationalism and those voices who are in the line of fire in Maudiy's war on dissent. In short, if there is to be a road ahead for oppositional social movements in India, it has to be built by fusing progressive struggles against capitalist exploitation with similarly progressive struggles for recognition, for secularism and for democratic rights. And I'll stop there. Thank you. That was excellent, Al. Thanks very much. And of course, today is the day on which last year the violence in Northeast Delhi took off. We are just one year from those horrific news at the end of February of 2020. So yes, let's open up for questions. Any questions that you'd like to type into the chat, we'll take it up from there. And while we are waiting for you to collect your thoughts and formulate your questions, maybe perhaps I could kick off your, just in terms of a comparison since you were in South Africa, which also had a lockdown and which also had was commented quite heavily on the sort of fate of workers there. What kind of comparison do you see, if at all, between how informal sector fair the context? Well, I think that we went in South Africa from a scenario where it was easy to think that things were being handled quite competently in terms of the imposition of a lockdown. We had a forewarning. After a while, there were guarantees that emergency relief would be paid to the vast majority of people who are either on the margins of the economic rates are staggeringly high. But as we have sort of staggered along, if you will, through the multiple phases of these crises, it has become clear that the South African poor have been let down once again. The payment of grants has been dismally slow. There has been rampant corruption, which is basically theft from the poor. And I don't think there's any reason to say any longer, certainly, that South Africa stands out as having been a success story in any respect in that way. The negligence, if you will, of the needs of the poor majority of this country is strikingly clear. And again, we entered into this pandemic with unemployment rates that were close to 30%. It's escalated wildly. But we have not seen a response to that, if you will. That seems in any way, shape or form to express any willingness on the part of the government to finally take responsibility for the poor citizens of this country. Go ahead, if you wanted. No, and there's a sense in which I think all of this reflects a scenario that we find across many of the countries that are very often referred to as rising powers or the rising South as such. The rise of the South, if you will, spearheaded by the BRICS countries is based on economic growth that has lifted some people just above a very meager poverty line. If one is even willing to entertain the World Bank's poverty line at $1.90 a day as a serious measure of poverty, it really isn't. But let's just say that has lifted people just above that. But without really expanding social citizenship, without really lifting people out of what we might call actual poverty, I mean, in the Indian context, we know that more than 60% of the population lives on less than $3.10 a day. So the growth process that has given us this narrative of the rising South is one that lets down, that continually betrays, if you will, the interests of poor citizens at the same time as it battens itself on their cheap labor. So I think that's what we're seeing here and that's what creates grounds for comparison between those countries and between the trajectory of the pandemic in those countries. There's a question from Iskander Abdulayev and his question, it seems to me, connects the tensions between China and India, whereas he's talking specifically about how this might relate to the internal dynamics of the Modi government. How do you see this playing out in the context of the pandemic? So if you wanna take any thoughts on that one, that would be good. And I'm just looking for a quotation on the basis of which I'm going to ask you a slightly different question as well. Okay, well, I don't really see much of a connection in terms of between the COVID pandemic as it unfolded in India and the crisis, the geopolitical crisis, if you will, that has unfolded in Ladakh with the Chinese invasion and so on and so forth. I mean, obviously what is spectacularly unbelievable but also spectacularly demonstrative of the ability of the Modi government to create these spectacles that actually sell us hotcakes politically is the fact that at the same time as Modi was posing as a grand protector of the Indian nation, a man capable of introducing a swift lockdown policy and all the rest of it to protect the Indian nation, China was happily sitting on the Indian side of the border and then Ladakh and nothing much was done about that, which testifies to a kind of geopolitical incompetence, if you will, which is confounding because it doesn't seem to have any ramifications. It doesn't seem to backfire. And we know this with a lot of what the regime has been doing geopolitically, of course, going back to the 2019 election campaign and what it did or didn't do in response to Balakot and all the rest of it. And I think all of this is evidence of the smoke and mirrors effects that this government constantly uses, if you will, to reinforce its position as a hegemonic political force in the country. So I think I'll leave it at that. Yeah, well, perhaps one thing that could come into this is the near complete control over media because you did mention Rabindra Kaur's work on her book, Brand New Nation and her sort of idea of the spectacle in all of this. And I basically had slightly a different take on that, which is that perhaps no government in the world at the moment, especially within a democracy has a media which is so completely within the Modi hegemonic project. So in relation to the lockdown, if you remember, Modi had called, I think, all the prominent editors of newspapers and television, news television channels where he had said he would like positive coverage of the news, which basically meant no criticism of him. And also in response to China, you've got a near complete control over the messaging on that as well, where the idea that it was bad leadership or a kind of failure of the strong man, et cetera, was never seriously entertained. So where does media come into creating this, on the one hand, invisible cloak for Modi to be able to do what he wants to do. And then on the other hand, creating this sort of hegemony that you're talking about. Well, it's striking, isn't it? I mean, I agree entirely with you. The kind of coherence, if you will, between a government messaging, if you will, and media messaging is remarkable. And it's interesting here to go back to a talk and or a lecture and later on a chapter written by Siddharth Varadarajan, which I think we're both familiar with where he contrasts the media under Modi with the media under Trump and points to the fact that despite American media being corporate controlled and all of that, there has been far more critical journalism happening in the American context than it has been in the Indian context, something which is worth considering. Look, this is one of the great strengths of the Modi government. It's a key part of its hegemonic apparatus. And I think it's one of combined, of course, which those things as the WhatsApp university culture and all the rest of it, the simple circulation of bogus stories and narratives around the great successes of the great leader. I mean, we're talking here about a leader who has presided over a massive economic slowdown who failed to act on a terrorist attack, the attacks in Balakot. And we know, of course, that there was intense communication with some of the more rabid sections of the Indian media around that, which has then entirely failed to mitigate the public health disaster that COVID was and we know that the economy has retracted dramatically around that. But still, the pillars of support in the media are unwavering and obviously that's an asset. There's a key asset. There's a bunch of questions for you in the chat if you can take a look. There is one from Dilan Solanki. There's one from Shreya Sinha. And then there's one from James Heath. Let me read out the three questions and then you can take whichever that you might want to address. Dilan says, do you think this continual crackdown on dissent by movie has affected the ability of civil society and NGOs to effectively perform their role in promoting democracy, helping the working poor, et cetera? That sounds suspiciously like an essay question that you have to answer, Dilan, but let's have that one. Shreya Sinha says, would you say that your thesis of social murder and authoritarian politics stands in the Indian case regardless of the lockdown? That the lockdown is only a moment that sharpens this thesis? Also, the idea of social murder has something quite final about it, death. While you speak of reproduction or not even subsistence condition as a way to allow continuous accumulation. Do you think there is a tension here between the death side and the reproduction side? And then you've got James Heath. Can you comment on the effectiveness of political opposition to movie and what in practice the opposition is doing to challenge these policies? We'll come back to Dominica's question after you answer this one. Okay, so if I was to answer very briefly for two first questions, I would say yes and yes, but that would be too flippant. Let me start with the first question about the continual crackdown on dissent. Look, my interactions currently with activists in India leaves no doubt that the capability of civil society, the capability of social movements, the capability even just of public intellectuals if you were to operate in the way they are supposed to operate is seriously constrained. And if you allow me a digression of sorts, I think the current situation is by far the most serious threats to the life, if you will of India's public sphere and civil society that the country has seen since 47. The reason why I say that is that the obvious point of comparison which is the emergency that unfolded from 75 to 77 was conducted by a political party that was in disarray in so many ways that didn't really have a meaningful organization that mostly only had the party leader trying to cultivate the personality around her. So even though it was a serious juncture in Indian politics, it doesn't compare to the current situation where you have not only a political party that has an absolute majority in parliament that has extremely consolidated support from what you might call the Hindu electorate in India that has the support of the media, and that has also colonized the state apparatus with its own people, right, left and center, but that also, if you will, sits on top of a social movement that has been active as we all well know for more than a century in India, burrowing its way through civil society. And that's, I think that's a decisive factor. That movement now has a hold on the state apparatus. And there's greater unity. There's a significant greater unity, if you will, between the RSS and the BJP, then there arguably ever has been. So that is, that's why this is such a crucial and such a perilous conjuncture. And that is why I think we also see now activists being highly constrained, being rightfully concerned and afraid of what is going to happen. And I think, yes, that this is a real threat to the meaningful life in this constitutional democracy. To Shreya's question, I do think that, I mean, part of my point in this paper is that it's absolutely necessary to not fall into the trap of saying that all of the social suffering and all of this crackdown, it happened simply because of the pandemic and specific conditions created by the pandemic. My argument is that the pandemic has amplified conditions that were already at play in the Indian economy and also in this political system, albeit with different temporalities. As I said, the crisis, if you will, or the workings of the machinery of social murder must be understood in relation to a reform process that's gone on since the early 1990s. Whereas the political crisis, the crisis of authoritarianism is one often you're making. It's one that belongs specifically to the rule of the BJP, despite the fact, of course, that the Congress government, the UPA government, which was supposedly a civil society-friendly government, was also very capable of deploying coercion when they wanted it. And we saw that especially towards the end of the second UPA regime. But let me dig into some of Shreya's remarks on social murder, because I think that, I mean, those are really thought-provoking questions. I think that, I mean, when I talk about premature death, I think there's strong evidence to suggest that that is a feature of the Indian economy and a feature of the way in which the Indian economy fails to underpin social reproduction and subsistence. I'm thinking of like staggering infant mortality rates, staggering levels of malnutrition, all the rest of it. Levels of malnutrition, levels of infant mortality rates, which one shouldn't technically, there's no need to see in a middle-income country. And that for me is what's decisive here. I mean, we're talking about an economy where growth is continually channeled into the pockets, if you will, of the richest 1% and the richest 10% and where the subsistence needs of the majority of the population are neglected to such an extent that one can rightfully ask whether meaningful life is in fact being lived and many, many, many people, of course, come to the end of their lives before their time. I understand the question around finality, if you will, that an excessive crisis of premature death would ultimately undermine accumulation. But the point here is, of course, that this links to the issue of surplus populations, that there are large surplus populations in India that circulate within an economy that preys on the labor of that surplus populations at some point, and then simply divests its responsibility for that neighbor at others. And there's more of the latter arguably than the former, given how, given the size of that footprint is proletariat. So, yeah, I would stand by it and I would say that India's economy is a machinery for social murder. And I think it's about time that we call it out for that in order to get a handle on how the country's developmental trajectory over, well, since the early 1990s, a trajectory that's too often celebrated, in fact, continually fails to meet the needs of the majority of the population. The effectiveness of political opposition to Modi and what in practice the opposition is doing to challenge policies. One of the great tragedies, if you will, of Indian democracy is the fact that oppositional politics is fragmented, directionless. And I think, and this is crucial, it unable to bridge or to create a kind of link with social movements and therefore to create a two-way traffic, if you will, between those movements that have emerged against the odds in Modi's India and if you will, the parliamentary political space. There has been opportunity after opportunity after opportunity that has presented itself. And I think we've particularly saw this around the anti-CAA movement for opposition parties to unite, for around basic demands for, for example, upholding secular democracy in India and fusing that demand that was happening on the streets in the country, but it hasn't happened. I think the Congress is a spent force, no matter how much Raul Gandhi sometimes has little flashes of light in the rhetoric that he deploys against the Modi regime. The Congress party is a party now with even less of an organization I had back in the mid-1970s. It's, I mean, that's not where we wanna place our bets, unfortunately, and that is one of the real, one of the real predicaments of our current situation. Okay, we have, thanks very much for that, Alf. And then we have Dominika asking, well, firstly, thanking you for your insightful lecture, but then also asking, were you surprised by the failure of the Supreme Court to assist migrants at the beginning of the lockdown? And below that, we have Tom Chambers, and you can see his question, despite numerous protests and pushbacks, we'll see ongoing electoral successes by the BJP. Do you think the farmers' protests represent a true turning point in this trajectory, or will the Modi regime manage to control the narrative again and situate Modi as the savior of Indian nationhood again? And you're asking about the role of social media to the extent you're gonna bring that in. I wasn't surprised at all that the Supreme Court failed to step in. The Supreme Court that we see in India today is very, very different from the Supreme Court of, let's say, the late 80s, early 90s. Which wherein public interest litigation had been pioneered and the question of using the Supreme Court to vindicate, if you will, the rights of the poorest of the poor, the rights of vulnerable citizens and all the rest of it. That's all gone. And what we've seen more and more clearly ever since the Ayodhya verdict, actually, in November last year is a Supreme Court that, well, let me be impolite and say that it has sutured its lips to the backside of the current regime. That's the reality that we're looking at. The alignment, if you will, between executive and the upper tier of the judiciary is quite remarkable. It's obviously also scary. It means that checks and balances, basic checks and balances in a sort of liberal political system are going out the window. I mean, we know that those checks and balances have limitations in and of themselves. But the current situation with the Supreme Court that is so unwilling to challenge the government is dramatic and obviously stepping in, if they had stepped in at the start of the lockdown to address the immediate needs of migrant workers, that would have been a move that would have been at least an implicit criticism of the Modi regime. It was obvious that they weren't going to do it. It wasn't surprising and that's testimony to the deep institutional rots and the deep institutional crisis in this political system right now. It's not just that there isn't a meaningful opposition in parliament. It's also that there isn't even an independent judiciary. And then we think about the fact that the media, the dominant voices of the media are hogotied to the government's messaging. I mean, this is dramatic and it's a scenario that, well, the parallels, if you will, the historical parallels are obviously very disconcerting. Predictions and projections. I'm really not sure what's going to happen in terms of the farmers' protests. There's at least one participant in this seminar who knows far more about the internal dynamics of the farmers' protests than I do. And I would actually like to invite Shreya to comment on this because I think you would get a more insightful answer to that question. And I'm obviously a very huge fan of what Shreya has written so far on the farmers' movement and the farmers' protests. It's amazing work. Look, I think it depends on a couple of things. I mentioned at the conclusion of my talk the necessity of building extensive solidarities. And I think that's really crucial if this is supposed to become a sort of anti-systemic turning point. Let's say that the media demands for the repeal of laws and maps is the movement going to continue after that. Well, we don't know because we don't know how deeply vested the coalition of groups that has laid siege to Delhi is beyond those immediate demand of the repeal of the farm laws. If it is to proceed, then solidarities need to be built. Those solidarities would have to defy some very entrenched divides, if you will, in oppositional politics in the Indian context, which is why I said solidarities will have to be built even more strongly than now between farm workers, agricultural labor and small and marginal farmers, and then the urban working poor. Someone would have to discard the whole discourse of a rural barat that's exploited by an urban India. That would have to go out the window. And one would also have to build links with the movements of subaltern citizens, Dalits and Muslims, which is not necessarily something that's easy to do. Anyone who knows anything about the history of India's farmer's movements would have reservations about the ability of some of those movements and the willingness of some of those movements to engage in that kind of protracted negotiation. So it depends on that. And then there's obviously the question of when will the Modi government reach the point where it goes, OK, that's it, we're clearing the streets again. Obviously, the stakes are higher this time because it's more difficult, even though attempts have been made with the vilification of the farmers as being Kalestani treasonists to tar them with a brush of being precisely an anti-national enemy within. But it's much more difficult to do this in a credible way than say it was to tarnish the image of those who were on the streets protesting against the CAA. So it's a difficult balancing act. And I can't predict, I mean, you'd have to be a sharper observer than I am to predict what's going to happen there. Social media. Yeah. OK. No social media. I mean, it plays a similar role to the media. It's a megaphone that it's a giant megaphone that sort of reproduces the messaging. And this is why, and it's a point that I make quite consistently, the current regime that's in power in India is way ahead of the curve in terms of authoritarian populist politics than anything that we see in the global north. And that's something that observers, whose eyes are fixed mainly on the global north, whether in the media or in the academy, generally fail to understand. I'm going to ask you a question, Alf. And this relates to someone that you and I both read. And this is an essay from 1930. And here are quotations from that essay. This is Gramsci's essay on writing subaltern history. He sets out a task for himself. And he says, formation of subaltern social groups by the development and transformations occurring in the sphere of economic production, their quantitative diffusion, and their origins in pre-existing social groups whose mentality, ideology, and aims they carry for some time. Their active and passive political affiliations, how do they press claims when they join? How do they, how do new political subjectivities emerge? He goes on to say, how do dominant groups contain subaltern groups? And what autonomous practices do the latter evolve? And finally, claim making within hegemonic formations and outside and against hegemonic formations. So do you see anything here regarding subaltern complicity in the authoritarian populist, majoritarian violent project that we are looking at? We normally think of subalterns as resisting these things. What's your take on subalterns being a part of the coalition that supports authoritarian populism and Modi? Well, I mean, you've cited my favorite page of the selections from prison notebooks there as you know very well. But more seriously though, to your question, I mean, one of the defining features of Modi's hegemonic project is its solidity, by which I mean that contrary to the attempt of the UPA to construct a hegemonic project around neoliberal accumulation strategies that were coupled with an expansion of welfare as legal rights in the introduction of rights-based legislation. What the Modi regime has managed to do is to actually really expand its support among subalterns social groups. And that's been, as you know, decisive in terms of bringing about these dramatic electoral victories. The UPA was capable of doing very little of that in its time in power. It actually expanded its reach in a short period in 2004 and 2009 among key elements of the BJP's constituency, among the middle classes. That was more crucial along with, of course, the way in which it built coalition partners to enable those two election victories and just temporarily stall the downward slide of Congress. So yeah, subaltern complicity to this hegemonic project is one that has to be taken very, very seriously. I don't think we yet have the kind of rigorous ethnographic studies that will enable us to pick apart that complicity. I think right now we're sort of be guessing on the basis of what we know from election studies and what we know from what limited work has been carried out. And also from sort of critical media reporting. But to me, I think we need to start reflecting about what it is, reflecting about what it is about, you know, that segment of the population which has emerged in India as India's become a middle-income country with high economic growth rates that Modi refers to as the Neo-Middle Class. I think, I mean, the concept of Neo-Middle Class is meaningless. It refers to people who are actually by most standards, most reasonable definition, poor, who are also in many respects aspirational and who weren't being offered much by the kind of inclusive neoliberalism that the UPA tried to propagate. I wonder if what is at play is a kind of India-specific version of the dynamics that W.E.B. The Boys wrote about as the wages of Hindunas, which is the psychological wage that might accrue to even subaltern, if you will, members of the Hindu majority. That is the satisfaction that comes from thinking that, well, at least I'm part of a rising nation, at least I'm part of that rising Hindu nation that's no longer in history's waiting room. And this touches upon, if you will, of course, also the sort of the ideology, the discursive messaging that Ravinder Kaur again discusses in a very new nation, the fusion of the Hindu nation and the rising neoliberal nation as this construct that people feel a sort of attachment to, an effective attachment to that place of role here. But again, this is speculation, right? I'll have to add that sort of caveat, this is speculation, but I wonder if we won't have to reckon with the power, if you will, of the wages of Hindunas in explaining supporting complexity to Modi's authoritarian public project. There's a question here from Bhupendra Kumar. Thanks for the talk. Your idea of social murder, authoritarian politics essentially highlights the oppressive role of the Indian state and Modi's Hindu nationalist agenda of suppressing dissent. I was wondering if the role of Indian civil society, I would call it caste society, equally is in tune with the ruling elites when it comes to the question of Dalits and Muslims. And then Leandro Vegarra Kamus who confesses to cooking while he was listening to you. Fascinating, suggestive. Time to eat now. All right, that was not a question, that was just his declaration. Okay, thank you for coming, yep. Okay, so to Bhupendra's question, it's unclear to me what's meant here actually if the role of Indian civil society equally in tune with the ruling elites in India. Look, if we talk about civil society in Gramscian terms, not in sort of liberal political theory terms, then I think what we're seeing right now is a moment when the long march of Hindu nationalism in Indian and through Indian societies is really coming to a hand. I think that what we saw slowly and evenly in fragmented ways from going back to the 1920s, that as a patient movement building is finally paying its dividends. And it's paying its dividends of course in the way in which they've been able to advance from civil society to the state. And it is precisely then that sort of congruence between civil society and political society that is so disconcerting in this moment. And that is what makes this hegemonic project so resilient and so powerful. It's compared to even, I mean, you can compare it to the Brazilian context. There's no doubt in my mind that the Boltonar regime, although it is tapped into, if you will, subordinate anxieties and also subordinate aspirations in a way that enables it to construct a form of subordinate complicity then with an authoritarian populist project, is much weaker than that, which we are seeing in Indian Indian context. This is a project that's been built over a much longer time. It has a tissue, if you will, that extends in ways that, in ways that most authoritarian populists can only dream of. But I'm not sure if that answers the question though, but that's what I've got for that. Okay, any further questions? Okay, in that case, Alf, I think we are going to let you go. And thanks so much. Okay. There's such a lot that was put out on the table by you. And I hope that people who came here and listened to you will be, oh, well, here's a new question. Well, this is a thanks from Dylan. And I'm sure that people who will have points of contact with what you've said about India. And of course, going forward, the pandemic is not over. And of course, authoritarian populism is not over. This was a unique moment in which the two things came together. So in closing, I just want to sort of, you know, go back to the comment from Arundhati Roy, where she was very hopeful that pandemics bring the end to tyrants. Do you feel that pandemics also strengthen tyrants, or at least authoritarian populist leaders? And if you think so, then what makes it different this time around as compared to earlier? Why in this... I, BBC authoritarian populist regimes, guide over massive pandemics which otherwise in previous generations and decades have sometimes resulted in the end of those kinds of governance. Sure. Look, I think there's a sense that it's almost a bit frustrating that, you know, our current debates are characterised by this strange kind of immediacy, that when a problematic situation occurs, we seem to expect almost like an immediate collapse of the powers that be, and I think we need to rid ourselves of that. And I think we need to start thinking in terms of crises as not being simply a sort of a short moment of a disturbed equilibrium that's then stabilised again due to some kind of transition from, like, let's say, one set of governing elites to another. I think instead, and there's good historical reasons for this, of course, as well, that we think of periods such as that which we're living in as long-interregnums, right? And again, we're harking back to our favourite thinker from it in the 1930s, and Gromsi's argument that interregnums are those periods in which the old is dying, but the new cannot be born. And those are long periods when we don't necessarily see any clear pathway out of the mess that we're in. Obviously, it was precisely that kind of moment in which Gromsi was writing, and he must have been writing against what was seemingly an overpowering opponent sitting in prison doing that, an opponent that might have seen this, though they had won the day by ceasing power and over the state and so on and so forth. My point here is this, that if we look at the decade that passed up to the outbreak of the pandemic, it was a decade that was generally agreed even by liberal media as having been a decade of protest. Obviously, that decade of protest follows upon a great financial crisis that leveraged downwards. A crisis that the global south seemed to escape for a while, but it's been quite clear since 2014 for 2015 that growth trajectories in the global south have also fallen, have also stagnated. We know this from Ray Kiley's work, among others. And we have seen, we were on the cusp, if you will, of huge things, both in, let's say, in Chile, and the example of Lebanon just before the omnishampos of the pandemic kicked in and sort of derailed things. Obviously, what has happened is a further leveling down, if you will, of people's livelihoods and people's prospects. So I think we're going to see in the coming years a situation in which the stakes have never been higher, both for those in power and for those who are posting those in power, who knows where we're going to end up. Obviously, the situation can go both ways. It can lead to a strengthened authoritarian populism. It can lead to more fierce resistance in all likelihood. In all likelihood, I think, we'll see both things. We'll see hegemonic powers trying to hold on to their dominant position, becoming more coercive in doing so, and we'll also see high-pitched battles for different kinds of futures. That's also what we've seen in previous and similar conjunctures in history. There's a late question here for Pankuila, that you can see. And of course, welcome to Pankuiri. She's someone who did a masters with us and is now doing a PhD with Pankuira. She asks, I guess, from here, it's important to pay attention to the language of rights in India, which the workers use. This language is welfare oriented by making the state accountable rather than labor rights oriented. My question is, if alternatives can be imagined for informal workers movements, where this thesis of why workers are complicit can be challenged for mobilization and solidarity. And I think she's basing it on Rina Garwala's book on informal politics and dignified discontent in India. Superb question, I wonder that I doubt that I can do justice to, but it's struck me sort of in my work lately and thinking through some of these questions in my work lately that I think a broad language of citizenship can actually have tremendous power in the current Indian context. I say that because it's a language that has the potential, I think to speak to what I see as the dual crisis that's currently unfolding, which is a crisis of subsistence and social reproduction, which ties in eminently with ideas of social citizenship and which is also a crisis of secularism and constitutional democracy, which ties into, if you will, the civil and political dimensions of citizenship. For me, it can't be a question of just one sector of support and groups, be it workers, farmers, whatever else. There has to be a new universal language of opposition. There are plenty of limitations to the language of citizenship, but I think that simply abandoning it would be a mistake because it can be appropriated in a way that can be used for what I call non-reformist reform and demands that being about reforms that can be used to attempt to bring about reforms that can really shift the balance of power between social forces. So I would be interested in reflecting more in the long-term about the potential of a radical language of citizenship in India, a language that can address things that have never been put in place in the first place. Social rights as the right of the citizen has never been put in place. And also as a language that can be used to push back the onslaught against even the most basic precepts of liberal democracy and secular democracy in the nation right now. Hope that there's some kind of justice to the question. Yeah, you know, it's a big question as well. And obviously, one of you guys, you know, activists and academics and people just hoping for a better future. Thanks very much, Alfa. You know, as I was saying in my closing remarks, before some more questions, I'm very good questions as well. You know, you've put a lot on the table for, you know, for us to think about and to chew over and to, you know, take in various directions. Always a pleasure to talk to you and to discuss your current work, which I believe this is. Yes, and we look forward to having you in more of these things, one, you know, I think the webinar now is the way to go. We don't have to... Yeah, well... If you're playing... Thank you. If you are for dinner. It's been a pleasure to speak to you and to have this discussion. And but I do now have to go and address the needs of a puppy that's outside the door and... Yes, I can hear it down. All right, then, yeah, and we'll speak soon again. All right, thanks so much. Bye-bye. Yeah, OK, bye now. Bye.