India: Federalism, majoritarian nationalism, and the vulnerable and marginalized

Tremblay, R. C.; George, N.

This chapter traces the history of Covid-19 in India and the government’s response. India has a long and tarnished history of reaching for emergency powers, which stretches back to the colonial period, in times of political crisis. Although India did not declare a formal constitutional emergency after its first reported case of Covid-19, within just under eight weeks, India went from “no health emergency” to a country-wide twenty-one-day lockdown. Despite a daily record jump in the number of deaths and cases each day since mid-March, India’s Ministry of Health, Family, and Welfare has consistently maintained a narrative that the growth rate of the Covid-19 cases in India has remained linear and not exponential;that its strict twenty-one-day lockdown, whose objective was preventive, has successfully slowed the spread of the virus;that India is “on the path of success and will win the war against the pandemic” and that the two extensions of the lockdown should be considered an exit strategy. The chapter then discusses the policy instruments invoked to respond to the pandemic and examines some of the challenges and consequences resulting from them: the federal jurisdictional management of a pandemic, particularly in the treatment of informal migrant workers;and the reinforcement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s populism and Hindutva majoritarian nationalism. © the several contributors 2021.