ABSTRACT
This chapter intends to explore the three events that shaped the public discourse and the state response during the Covid-19 pandemic in India. It provides a plausible reading of online news and social media content engaging with the issues of mass reverse migration of the workers, Jamaat congregation at the Nizamuddin Markaz and the state-initiated symbolic gestures of collective solidarity, to understand how the neo-liberal state uses the necropolitical approach in order to manage the deeper crisis of infrastructural inadequacies, and pushes the ordinary citizens into a state of exception. This allows for a shift in focus from the state’s mismanagement and lack to an ‘other’ that takes the fall for the pandemic.
