In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health authorities in India presented a contradictory picture between their role in assisting the state to mitigate the global crisis and dealing coercively with the needs of its diverse populations. Conventionally, public health is viewed as an evidence-based profession that is above politics. Yet national responses to COVID-19 in India reveal the embeddedness of health and illnesses in the larger politics of the state. Although it is still early to assess the full spectrum of damage caused by lack of central-level planning, this article argues against COVID-19 being viewed as a 'great leveller'. Rather, it suggests that we inhabit somatic societies that regularly employ the vocabulary of pathology/disease to determine social health. Moreover, the Indian experience illustrates how, even during a pandemic, 'social distancing' is not an apolitical notion. It becomes a measure for the state to co-opt scientific interventions of risk mitigation and relay them to people as a metaphor for exclusion: thereby exacerbating deeper structural inequities around which access to health and well-being of the population is organised.

In 2018, the Delhi High Court held that certain provisions of the state’s anti-begging law were unconstitutional. Nevertheless, such laws continue to operate in at least 20 other Indian states and union territories even today. Begging as a social phenomenon remains an under-researched subject within the social sciences, especially in India where the rare mention that the subject finds often gets subsumed within larger debates on chronic poverty or organised crime. This article begins by tracing the history of regulations around begging, followed by a discussion on the persistence of both begging and anti-begging laws prevalent today. By examining the justification underlying the criminalisation of begging, it contends that such an approach fails to provide insight into the lived experiences of individuals engaged in this activity. It therefore proposes that the analyses of begging in the Indian context adopt symbolic interactionism that lends its rich theoretical framework to enable an interpretation of the act as one that of agency; a survival strategy among those living on the margins of the neoliberal urban experience. In doing so, it posits a view of the beggar as a powerful political symbol with the potential to subvert and interrogate the rules of the game in a globalised world.

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