Employing and building on Michael Foucault’s “biopolitics”, Achille Mbembe’s “necropolitics”, and Giorgio Agamben’s “bare life”, this paper explores how biopolitical and necropolitical spaces within the borders of the nation states govern people, and how the state’s sovereign power becomes a persistent recurrence of the process of exclusion and disposition of people. More specifically, this paper examines the ways in which the Nepali state’s sovereign power produces the “state of exception” to imperil the lives of Nepali migrant workers returning from India during the COVID-19 pandemic while exploring the possibility of resistance against the exercise of state sovereignty even in the face of precarities. We delve into these three questions: Whose lives matter, or who gets to live and who dies? How does the Nepali state exercise its sovereign power over the migrant workers returning from India? Why are these migrant returnees ignored and trivialized while the national economy significantly depends on their remittances? Following the onset of the pandemic, the barring of the “Lahures” as they are popularly known in the public discourse can be taken as an instantiation of how the state, through the imposition of the state of exception, produces precarities citing the “bare life” as a potential threat to the nation.
The paper draws on the secondary data sources, particularly the publicly available media reports and photographs/images, pertaining to the interceptions of the Nepali migrant workers on the Nepal-India borders. To analyze those photographs/images, we employed visual methodology (Barbour, 2014), a new and novel approach to qualitative study which captures rich multidimensional data by adding valuable insights into the everyday worlds. We conclude our paper that the government of Nepal should develop and implement effective and efficient bilateral labour migration policy particularly targeting to migrant workers in India. The bilateral policy should be a ‘work-worker- centered’ to ensure labour migration and safeguard workers’ rights.
