The “living dead” within “death‐worlds”: Gender crisis and covid‐19 in India

The onset of the covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown have not only impacted the political, structural, and economic systems in India but have also engendered the growing rift between the poor and the rich, the upper and the lower classes, and the rural and the urban sections of the population. Within the nation's marginalized category, it is women who have suffered most forms of oppression. Having held a subordinate position to their male counterparts within the gender hierarchy, Indian women since the colonial times have had to bear systemic oppression at the hands of the state, caste, class, gender, and religious hegemons. During the pandemic, for women such forms of subordination were followed by socioeconomic uncertainties resulting from the economic shutdown, loss of jobs, and labor oppressions. Gender disparities resulting from class, caste and minority marginalization during the pandemic crisis have further widened the socio-cultural, economic, and political inequalities within the country. Taking cue from the gender crisis in India catalyzed by the pandemic and the ensuing lockdown, in this study, I aim to explore India's "unequal" transition to the post covid-19 world order, studying gender inequality, violence and injustices from biopolitical and necropolitical lens. The framework of biopolitics and necropolitics, formulated by Foucault and Mbembe respectively have made significant contributions (following the pandemic outbreak) toward understanding how the state and social mechanisms of power that ideally should administer and foster life, guaranteeing health. and productivity of populations is currently pushing them into precarious living situations and conferring upon them the status of "living-dead".