Panel Discussion on Covid Pandemic, Rising Authoritarianism, Food Insecurity and Emerging Cultural, Social, Economic, Political and Democratic Challenges

Covid Pandemic has badly affected the world. Its onset raised serious issues related to the essential determinants of food security i.e. availability as well as accessibility. The pandemic led to food poverty and insecurity as number of severely food insecure people doubled from before the pandemic to 323 million people. The poor are the worst affected. During these uncertain and challenging times of Covid many states, increased contention of political authority. The rising authoritarianism seems to influence cultural, social, economic, political and democratic institutions and even undermine their autonomy. The democratic practices in different countries seems to be affected. Some governments are undermining civil liberties, increasing surveillance and imposing unjust norms. Some regimes have aggressively channelized their resources to combat the covid, while some countries have suffered badly.

The erstwhile regulating power with the political institutions, particularly the democratic institutions, has progressively been appropriated by the transnational powerful corporations that overshadow the relative autonomy of the governing institutions. The state welfare policies are compromised. Deeper the crisis, more the chances of the rise of authoritarian politics. Henceforth this scenario has opened up most brutal dialect over whether democracy or authoritarianism is most appropriate to deal with such unprecedented threats. There is a need to explore this dimension and to examine effect of this development on the social, cultural and economic institutions such as family, marriage, kinship, religion, social stratification, community life, gendered patterns, labor-force participation, production and distribution of goods and services etc.