Even as India dispensed a “ record ” number of Covid-19 vaccinations under its new vaccine policy , effectively doubling its previous count...
Even as India dispensed a “record” number of Covid-19 vaccinations under its new vaccine policy, effectively doubling its previous count and surpassing over 8 million vaccine doses a day on June 21, liberal tropes about “vaccine hesitancy” and “rural mistrust” in medicine continue to circulate in the media, scientific and political discourse.
Exhorting “Rural India” to comply with global biomedicine, such tropes often frame health as a civic duty and vaccines as a public good against which rural “vaccine hesitancy” threatens to undermine global and local responses to the pandemic.
However, such tropes also enact a pernicious erasure and vilification. Not only do vague, liberal notions of the “civic” and the “public” symbolically exclude those living in structural conditions of socio-cultural and economic vulnerability, they also end up framing rural India as the very paradigm of causality and culpability for the spread of epidemic disease and destruction.
In neoliberal, global health regimes it is common for the responsibility of ailing health systems to be shifted onto the afflicted. Rural regions, apart from being historically underserved. are also easy to cast into imagined geographies of blame.
This creates an enduring stigmatisation, surveillance and objectifiction of “rural culture”, “rural behaviour” and “rural health”, which become fixed as static epistemic categories by urban health bureaucracies and the urban citizenry (and netizenry), whilst failing to be...
