Juridicalising justice?: COVID-19, citizenship claims, and courts

Abstract

In what was perhaps the ‘harshest coronavirus lockdown in the world’, this governmental measure saw an outpouring of workers from cities and towns they had migrated to in search of work, back to their native villages that they had left in search of better lives and survival with dignity. The turbulent waves of internally displaced persons on the highways and railway tracks heading back ‘home’ will remain an enduring image of the pandemic in India. The rights of internally displaced persons during the lockdown and the forced migration that it triggered needs to be understood as constitutive of the understanding of justice under the ‘triadic ethical framework of the Constitution’. In considering issues around access to health care as a core element in justice claims, it is important to look at the entire range of concerns around the right to health as also health care access specific to the pandemic.