ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we describe India’s pandemic response and explain why Narendra Modi’s handling of the crisis should be viewed through his right-wing populist agenda. Prime Minister Modi used the crisis to build his strongman image, while he and his party weakened the state’s response to the pandemic by minimizing the influence of experts, prioritizing political calculations, poorly deploying state capacity and weaponizing the crisis to attack their ideological enemies. While India saw a sharp rise in deaths in the second wave, we suggest that other forms of populism prevalent in India at the subnational level (in states like Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh) insulated them from the worst of the pandemic. In these states, a combination of political will, the social bases of populist support and the effective deployment of state capacity led to a vastly different pandemic response.
