The Long 2020/21 in India: Models of Pandemic Management and Logistics of Governance

The year 2020 has a peculiar character, full of contradictions. While on the one hand, the country came to a virtual stop owing to restrictions imposed to manage the Covid-19 pandemic, on the other hand, large sections of populations—mostly the poor—were literally on the march to return home. The logistics of governance that unfolded was far more expansive than that dictated by the medical emergency. The legal mechanisms deployed were two: first was the invocation of the colonial era Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897 (popularly called the Plague Act), swiftly amended by an ordinance on 22 April 2020, to ostensibly offer protections for healthcare personnel combatting epidemic diseases. Second was the invocation of the National Disaster Management Act, 2005, under which the National Disaster Management Authority, headed by the Union Home Secretary, can (and did) arrogate to itself powers to issue any direction to anybody, including elected State governments. This chapter will examine these processes across two axes: (a) the logic, mechanisms, and implication of the National Disaster Management Act/Authority and the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897; and, (b) the political economy of testing and vaccine delivery in terms of its conversion of the process of governance from political to mere management. It is argued that this process which started unfolding during the Long 2020/21 will have a much longer and multidimensional impact on the fundamentals of the governance processes in the country. The chapter will seek to identify, document and analyse this complex process in terms of étatisation of the polity and implications thereof for liberal democracy in India, and the impact of such logistics of governance on the right to life and livelihood, especially that of the poor and marginalised.