LAUSR

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on the Indian migrant crisis in the context of the state’s handling of the pandemic. It argues that the migrant situation in India pries open ‘problem spaces’ that, if attended to, reveal how many of the now normative solutions for governing and containing the virus are exceeded by bodies – of migrants in particular – that cannot be kept safe by solutions in place to check the contagion. The essay first raises questions about the unequal distribution of ‘saveability’ in the Indian context (but this can also apply to others). It asks who cannot be included in the frame of ‘human life’ that underlies the solutions offered for protecting lives in the pandemic. Second, the essay offers a description of the migrant crisis in India that has ensued in the pandemic. Following that description, the essay focuses on three problem-spaces or aporias that the pandemic has pried open and that call for a more politically complex, contextually sensitive, and humane response to the management of the virus: unequal temporalities, the dilemma of im/mobility, and the challenge of recording death.