Disasters as Political: A Flood Perspective

Name of Author : Shruti

Abstract: The relationship between disasters and politics is intertwined: disasters as producing politics and politics as producing disasters. In the first case, disasters usurp the power to regulate the political discourse in different political contexts. This can be necessarily deciphered in the prevailing power relations and structural inequalities within the inner societal domains in the segregated political contexts. The latter case, takes how politics produce disasters. This is evident in the number of technocratic and rigid objective scientific solutions against disasters. These kinds of solutions reflect a particular kind of politics which reveals how humans connect to nature. This paper tends to examine such relationship between politics and disasters from a flood perspective. The paper picks up the prevailing politics of flood control in the context of Bihar, presents the scenario and tries to explore the above relationship.

Keywords : Disasters, Politics, Technocratic, Flood, Flood-control

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