COVID-19 and Disaster Capitalism in India
India’s COVID-19 pandemic has become an opportunity for the BJP government to unleash privatization, implement neoliberal policies, and crush dissent.
Joint Committee of Trade Unions (JCTU) led a protest in May 2020, against the increase in working hours of employees in various industrial sectors and the suspension of labour laws by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat. Source: AFP via Hindustan Times
In 2007, the much-acclaimed Canadian author and anti-globalization activist, Naomi Klein, released her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In this monograph on disaster capitalism, she unpacks the workings of free-market aka neoliberal capitalism in the context of disasters, natural or human-made. Klein notes that the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, a natural disaster that devastated the North American East Coast, was interpreted as an opportunity by free-market radicals like Milton Friedman (and some of his students and colleagues from the “Chicago School”) to push for the privatization of education in New Orleans.
Klein cites an op-ed written by this grand guru of unfettered capitalism in which he observed that:
Most New Orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them… This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.
Friedman proposed that instead of spending billions in reconstructing the public school system in New Orleans, the government should issue vouchers to families which they could spend at for-profit private schools. Following his advice, the New Orleans’ public schools were converted into “charter schools” run by private institutions but partially funded by the government. Klein theorized this tendency of “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities” as disaster capitalism.
According to Klein, both natural (tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.) and human-made (wars, terrorist attacks, etc.) disasters “put the entire population into a state of collective shock”. In the midst of that collective shock, neoliberals, who are always creeping in the background, find perfect opportunities to push forth their radical free-market ideals. Since citizens are recovering from the shock of the disaster, they accept free-market radicalism and drastic measures without comprehending the full implications of those ideals and policies. Klein argues that trademark free-market demands — of privatization, government deregulation, and deep cuts to social spending — are unpopular among people and invite resistance from trade unions, political parties, and civil society groups in “normal” times, but a crisis enables neoliberal governments to aggressively push forward these demands.
Naomi Klein in India
Though Klein's thesis is based on developments in the Americas and Europe, it extends to India given the increasing integration of India in the world market in the last thirty years. The opening up of the Indian economy with the 1991 neoliberal turn made India susceptible to global trends of capitalist accumulation and consolidation. In the last thirty years, India has seen the gradual withdrawal of the state from the economy, deregulation of the public sector, shrinking of welfare schemes, increasing dilution of labour and environmental laws, and slow but sustained privatization of health and education.
“In the last thirty years, India has seen the gradual withdrawal of the state from the economy, deregulation of the public sector, shrinking of welfare schemes, increasing dilution of labour and environmental laws, and slow but sustained privatization of health and education.”
The present crisis of COVID-19 in India has only made these neoliberal fractures more apparent and aggressive. With the onset of the pandemic in India, Klein’s theory of disaster capitalism has manifested itself in its full glory. The shock and chaos that ensued in the wake of the pandemic has provided a perfect cover for the ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to push forward their long term agendas of privatization, deregulation, and curtailment of labour laws, as well as suppressing and killing dissent in the country and further marginalizing and demonizing religious minorities.
Ever since the government realized that the lockdown had failed to contain the virus, their narrative around pandemic management began to shift. The Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, went from “we will definitely win this war against the virus” on the 25th of March to “we will have to learn to live with the virus” on the 12th of May. But this was not the end. The Modi-led BJP government, at the centre as well as in a number of states, smelled an excellent opportunity to speed up the policy level changes they had been meaning to push in the parliament, while also reinventing the entire narrative around their management of the COVID crisis.
Klein’s theory comes alive in the phrases that have been employed by the BJP in the last couple of months as a coping mechanism for the crisis. Some of the phrases that went on becoming mantras for the Prime Minister, along with several BJP leader and the NITI Aayog, were: “we will have to turn this crisis into an opportunity”, and asking the citizenry to practice “self-reliance” and to overpower the crisis with “positivity and hope”.
Warring with the Virus?
The dictum “crisis is an opportunity” is not a novel one, and in fact derives from the wisdom of the ancient Chinese military general and philosopher Sun Tzu’s famous quote: “in the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”. As capitalism, in its latest neoliberal avatar, waged a war against almost everything, it adopted this ancient Chinese wisdom and made it its modus operandi.
The war metaphor has been widely employed by the Indian government and its propaganda machinery to manage the pandemic. In addition to creating a sense of urgency and society-wide resource mobilization, “war” also prepares the citizenry to accept drastic as well as draconian measures in order to fight and win it. In this case, the war is purportedly against the virus.
In the last four months, the BJP, in the name of fighting a war against the pandemic, has actually waged a war against the environment, labour laws, and public sector units. It is imperative to state here that in the last four months, the Indian parliament has not met even once, and all the decisions have either been taken by the cabinet or the standing committees. This goes against the very fundamentals of democracy, and let’s not forget that India is ostensibly the “world’s largest democracy”.
Protests in Guwahati, Assam on 20th August, against EIA-2020. Source: Janwar
The first sector against which the BJP made a radical move was the environment. The government brought the “Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)-2020” notification at the very beginning of the lockdown, on 23rd March. The proposed draft seeks to erode the EIA process to facilitate the “ease of doing business” and “industrialization”, and boost the economic growth of the country. The timing of this draft proposal demonstrates the undemocratic nature of the current government and “disaster capitalism” in its true essence. In the spirit of the draft EIA, the Minister of Environment, who also happens to be the Minister of Heavy Industries — two sectors whose interests are contradictory — also announced clearance for a range of "developmental" projects via a tweet on 7th April. One need not wonder who these “developmental projects” will benefit.
The second sector adversely affected in this wave of disaster capitalism is labour. Up until now, four BJP-ruled states have suspended the majority of their labour laws — products of decades of hard-won battles — in their respective states to attract foreign and national investment. Diluting labour laws in the name of “reform” has been one of the prime agendas of the BJP government and the pandemic provided them with an excellent opportunity to do this. Many of the suspended labour laws are the ones that guarantee the occupational health, safety, and welfare of workers. These include: the Minimum Wages Act of 1948, the Factories Act of 1948, the Payment of Bonus Act of 1965, and the Contract Labour Act of 1970, among others. Even the Trade Unions Act of 1926, which allows workers to organize and bargain collectively, has been suspended. The BJP-led government, driven by capitalist interests, struck the working class at a time when it was barely managing to stay afloat amidst an unplanned and impromptu lockdown.
Next in line was the privatization of Public Sector Units (PSUs) and expanding the limits on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). The 'self-reliant' economic relief package, presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, was nothing but a blueprint for further privatization of the Indian economy. Be it the privatization of electricity distribution in the union territories, the auctioning of airports, the opening up of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) to private capital, or the latest proposed auctioning of forty-one coal blocks and the privatization of railways, the “shock” of the crisis has been transformed into a full-blown “opportunity” to push for more and more privatization.
Durgapur Central Trade organizations protest against privatization of the Indian Railways in July 2020, particularly the running of passenger trains by private investors over the Indian Railways network. Source: CPI (M) West Bengal via Twitter
“The ’self-reliant’ economic relief package, presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, was nothing but a blueprint for further privatization of the Indian economy”
As part of this privatization wave, the BJP government then passed the New Education Policy (NEP). The NEP is nothing but a carefully worded policy document that aims to further privatize education and produce neoliberal subjects and workers. Its founding principle is “flexibility” — a neoliberal mantra to institutionalize and legitimize the lack of jobs and social security in these critical times, and to normalize the “hire-and-fire” policy.
The crisis was further employed by the Indian government to witch-hunt dissenting voices in the country, including the anti-CAA protesters. On the directives of the Home Ministry, anti-CAA activists — hailing from both the Muslim community and many Left organizations and universities — were either slapped with notices or arrested and put in jail by the Delhi police for allegedly inciting riots in East Delhi in February this year. Even the human rights activist and lawyer Harsh Mandar was named in an FIR by the Delhi Police. As the government continues to ban any form of protest or gathering, citing the pandemic as the reason, it has found a perfect pretext to harass those who have been critical of their policies.
India’s Disaster Capitalism Complex
In The Shock Doctrine, Klein notes the existence of a “military-media-technology-corporate- ideologue-politician” think tank nexus that aggressively pursues neoliberal agendas. She called this nexus the “disaster capitalism complex” whose job is to aggressively push and normalize free-market ideas as well as grab the opportunities in the wake of any crisis or disaster. The examples cited above demonstrate the presence and active employment of this complex, even if in a crude form, by the BJP government.
Surprisingly, the state has faced resistance even from free-market ideologues, like the investment consultant Krishna Memani who penned a letter to the Prime Minister, which was very much in line with Klein's thesis. In an op-ed in Economics Times, he wrote: "the virus has provided the current government the perfect political cover to implement whatever policies they deem appropriate”. Yet Memani is an exception. Prominent Capitalists like Narayan Murthy, for instance, proposed to increase the working hours to compensate for the economic slowdown. State representatives like Arvind Pangariya, the first Vice-Chairman of NITI Aayog, also advised that it would be a pity for the Modi government to let this crisis go to waste.
In the disaster-capitalism complex, Klein gives an important role to the media, which fuels mass hysteria and a feeling of permanent insecurity among citizens. This sense of insecurity becomes an excuse for the government to curb dissenting voices by projecting them as a threat to the nation, society, or “way of life”. This aspect of disaster capitalism in India can be gleaned from the fact that in the initial days of the lockdown, following the Tablighi Jamaat incident in Delhi, the media communalized the pandemic by referring to the Jamaat’s Muslim participants as “corona bombs” who are out to do “corona jihad”. This communalization of the pandemic is very much in line with the aggressive ethnonationalism of this Hindutva government and only further aggravated the anti-Muslim sentiments that have been riding high in the country since the BJP came into power.
The Indian government has pressured people to download the Arogya Setu app built for location tracking and mandated its use by government employees. Contact tracing by monitoring people’s movements through smartphones has raised many concerns of increased state surveillance under the existing authoritarian regime. Source: ANI via Hindustan Times
Klein also notes that, under disaster capitalism, information technology, which once played a key role in toppling authoritarian regimes, now serves the opposite purpose, becoming a tool for mass state surveillance. Writing in 2007, some six years before the smartphone and social media revolution, Klein rightly notes the trajectory of digital technologies. In the Indian context, this aspect of disaster capitalism found its expression in the launch of the Arogya Setu App, which, as several privacy rights activists have pointed out, is an advanced surveillance application. This is in addition to the already present practices of data mining and manipulation for electoral purposes.
India has thus become a classic case of Klein’s thesis. The BJP government has fully utilized the chaos and crisis created in the wake of the pandemic to fast forward privatization and deregulation, destroy the environment in the name of “ease of doing business”, and police and suppress any kind of dissent.
“The BJP government has fully utilized the chaos and crisis created in the wake of the pandemic to fast forward privatization and deregulation, destroy the environment in the name of “ease of doing business”, and police and suppress any kind of dissent.”
The only problem with Klein’s thesis is her understanding of capitalism, which she more or less equates with neoliberalism. Her addition of the qualifier “disaster” before capitalism implies there is — or can be — capitalism without a disaster: “good” capitalism, a “capitalism with a human face” or “a green capitalism”. But the fact of the matter is that capitalism is a disaster-ridden economic system in its very nature. What Klein calls “disaster” is “creative destruction” for several ideologues of capitalism. In its never-ending thirst for profit, capitalism wreaks havoc upon human society and the environment. “Disaster capitalism” is not an aberration in the system; rather it is “the system” and only through a socialist reconstruction of the economy and human society can we do away with it.
Harshvardhan is a Research Scholar at the Centre for Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is also a Left activist, interested in the latest developments in physics, social theory, folklore, and politics.