Fraught Solidarities: Diasporic Hindutva and Claims to Indigeneity

This article assesses whether civil society promotes democratization, as has been argued implicitly or explicitly in the political discourse, following the publication of Putnam's Making Democracy Work. The theorists of “third-wave” transitology have advocated civil society as the indispensable instrument for the survival and sustenance of democracy. This article, however, argues that civil society is not necessarily a democratic force. It may or may not have positive implications in regard to democratization and the functioning of democracy. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the tribal-dominated south Rajasthan, this article analyses the case of Rajasthan Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad (RVKP), a Hindu(tva)-oriented non-governmental organization (NGO), to demonstrate how civil society could also be anti-democratic. It shows that by utilizing development as a medium of entry, the RVKP has not only successfully presented itself as a counter-force against the “threatening others”, such as Muslims and Christians but also mobilized electoral support for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In return, the BJP-led state government has provided economic, political and legal support to the RVKP and facilitated the Hindutva politics at the grassroots level. The article concludes that in the context of Rajasthan, a conservative state has collaborated with an exclusivist civil society organization – the consequence of which has not just been the spread of violence and demonization of religious minorities but also a serious undermining of cultural pluralism and democratic values of Indian society.

Legacies of Colonial History: Region, Religion and Violence in Postcolonial Gujarat Yogesh Chandrani This dissertation takes the routine marginalization and erasure of Muslim presence in the contemporary social and political life of the western Indian state of Gujarat as an entry point into a genealogy of Gujarati regionalism. Through a historical anthropology of the reconfiguration of the modern idea of Gujarat, I argue that violence against religious minorities is an effect of both secular nation-building and of religious nationalist mobilization. Given this entanglement, I suggest that we rethink the oppositional relationship between religion and the secular in analyzing violence against Muslims in contemporary Gujarat. The modern idea of Gujarat, I further argue, cannot be grasped without taking into consideration how local conceptions of region and of religion were fundamentally altered by colonial power. In particular, I suggest that the construction of Islam as inessential and external to the idea of Gujarat is a legacy bequeathed by colonialism and its forms of knowledge. The transmutation of Gujarati Muslims into strangers, in other words, occurred simultaneously with the articulation of the modern idea of Gujarat in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I focus in particular on the role of nineteenth-century regional history-writing, in which the foundational role of Islam was de-emphasized, in what I call the making of a regional tradition. By highlighting the colonial genealogy of contemporary discourses of Gujaratni asmita (pride in Gujarat), in which Hindu and Gujarati are posited as identical with each other, I argue that colonialism was one of its conditions of possibility. One result of this simultaneous reconfiguration of religion and region, I argue, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to inhabit a Hindu religious identity that is not at the same time articulated in opposition to a Muslim Other in Gujarat. Another consequence is that it is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for Muslims to represent themselves or advocate for their rights as Muslim and as Gujarati. How the reconfiguration of a Gujarati regional identity is imbricated with transformations in conceptions of religion is part of what this dissertation seeks to think about. Furthermore, I argue that the marginalization of Muslims in Gujarat cannot be understood through an exclusive focus on organized violence or on the Hindu nationalist movement. While recent studies on Gujarat have focused mainly on the pogrom of 2002 to think about the role of the Hindu nationalist movement in orchestrating mass violence against Muslims in contemporary Gujarat, I argue that the pogrom of 2002 is but one part of a broader spectrum of violence and exclusion that permeates the body of the state and society. In addition, I suggest that one of the conditions of possibility for such violence is the sedimentation of a conception of Gujaratiness as identical with Hinduness that cuts across the religious/secular divide. Instead of focusing exclusively on the violence of the Hindu nationalist movement, I explore this process of sedimentation as it manifests itself in the intersecting logics of urban planning, heritage preservation, and neoliberal development in contemporary Gujarat. Through an analysis of the contemporary reorganization and partitioning of the city of Ahmedabad along religious lines, I show how it is continuous with colonial and nationalist urban planning practices of the early twentieth century. Using ethnographic examples, I also argue that the contemporary secular nationalist discourse of heritage preservation is both complicit in the marginalization of Muslims and continuous with practices of urban planning and preservation that were articulated in the late colonial period. Finally, my dissertation demonstrates the enabling nature of neoliberal logics in the organization of violence against Muslims in Gujarat and argues that antiMuslim violence and prejudice are enabled by and intertwined with narratives about the promises of capital and progress. Combining historical and ethnographic methods, this dissertation seeks to contribute to an anthropology of colonialism, nationalism, religion, secularism and violence in South Asia that is attentive to the continuities and discontinuities that are constitutive of the postcolonial present we inhabit. By historicizing contemporary debates and assumptions about Muslims in Gujarat and describing some of the genealogies that have contributed to their sedimentation, I hope to have argued that colonial legacies have enduring effects in the present and that the question posed by colonial forms of knowledge and representation is not merely epistemological or historiographical but also a political one. Written as a history of the present, this dissertation is motivated by a desire to imagine a future in which Hindu/Gujarati and Muslim are no longer conceptualized as oppositional categories; in which Gujarati Muslims are able to represent themselves as Muslims and in their own (varied) terms; and where Hindus are no longer invited and incited to inhabit a subjectivity that depends on making Muslims strangers to Gujarat.

The United States at the Center of the Action

This thesis examines the role of internet infrastructure and its associated discourses in processes of governmentality and subject formation in low and middle-income countries of the global South. Using data collected in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh as its core case, it asks questions about the interrelationship between policy and political discourse, new information and communications infrastructure, private capital, and how citizens come to know and/or experience internet infrastructure in their everyday lives. Since 2014, The National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN, which began in 2011 under the then UPA government) has been reshaped and rebranded as part of ‘Digital India’ by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right Hindutva Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Alongside the cables and connectivity, the BJP and allied Hindu extremist organisations have targeted minorities and women through mob violence and (on and offline) hate speech, while a small number of crony capitalist corporations have seen immense profits. Unpicking the links between these processes, the thesis argues that internet infrastructure has become crucial to expanding a particular unregulated brand of capitalism and to narrowing civic subjectivities. Infrastructures constellate and circulate material and symbolic goods in an institutionalised manner to produce collectivities. Using discourse analysis shows that since the late 1980s, in a context of increasing neoliberalism, internet infrastructure emerged within a discursive regime marked by the fetishisation of systems rationality, enumeration, scientism and economism to produce what can be called digital governmentality. Digital governmentality enables and reinforces a centralised Hindu nationalism mediated by digital technologies and networks. Using semi-structured interviews and participant observation in the city of Ambikapur, and close to 50 villages in Surguja district of Chhattisgarh, data chapters describe a wide range of ‘infrastructural practices.’ The analysis centres on how subjects imagine, frame and experience these practices. Dominant caste groups in Ambikapur seek to subvert governmentality in practice but also uphold and reproduce the rationalities that drive governmental authority – such as efficiency and transparency. Adivasis (indigenous groups) who reside in surrounding rural areas are subject to a political economic regime overdetermined by coal mining and destruction of their land, forests and water resources. Internet infrastructure is non-existent or broken, along with other missing infrastructural substrates such as electricity and water. Adivasis face infrastructural control as a specific mode of governmentality where power is exerted not from the top in directly coercive ways but rather through mundane infrastructural practices, thereby exerting authority in procedural ways. In other instances, Adivasis’ processes of subject formation are entangled with (the reality and promise of) internet infrastructure in complex ways – ranging from cruel optimism to social haunting. The thesis makes an original contribution to the emerging sub-field of infrastructure studies by providing a new way of studying communicative infrastructures involving: a renewed emphasis on relationality (infrastructures, governmentality and subjectivation as relational processes and practices); situating internet infrastructures within broader infrastructures; and a historical analysis of how infrastructure is caught up in exercise of power relations. With significant emphasis on the concerns and interests of indigenous peoples in India, the final chapters of the thesis also contribute to a decolonisation of media and communications as a field, and to avoiding orientalist essentialism.

Entre as dinâmicas associadas a encontros interculturais, encontra-se a de (re-) elaboração de universos simbólicos por grupos sociais participantes de relações de alteridade. Em se tratando de relações de dominação imperial, entre os séculos 18 e 20, na Ásia, tal dinâmica envolveu a reinterpretação de universos simbólicos preexistentes, como os religiosos, bem como a criação de novos modos de organização simbólica da vida em sociedade, como as comunidades nacionais. Este artigo se concentra na análise da construção de um universo simbólico nacional-religioso em um contexto fortemente influenciado por relações de alteridade. Trata-se do discurso sobre a nação hindu e seu outro muçulmano, elaborado nas primeiras décadas do século 20, no subcontinente indiano, por um ideólogo nacionalista hindu, V. D. Savarkar. Adota-se como referencial teórico a fenomenologia, em sua vertente sociológica, e procede-se à análise do conteúdo da fonte primária Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? Argumenta-se que o ideólogo nacionalista hindu formulou uma retórica da aniquilação, em que o outro da nação hindu, o muçulmano, é inferiorizado por meio das estratégias de: exagero seletivo de características atribuídas ao muçulmano; transferência de definições socialmente negativas ao outro.

Religious syncretism can function as an instrument of inter-group control and domination. Rather than consistently promoting cross-religious forbearance and knowledge, syncretism enables a proximity that allows forms of violence otherwise inaccessible to religious majoritarian groups. By choreographing performances of syncretism between themselves and a subordinate religious community, organizations like the Indian Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) produce an intentionally incomplete proximity. This proximity draws close minority groups like the RSS' Muslim wing, the Muslim Rashtriya Manch, but without allowing final inclusion or incorporation. Muslim proximity to the RSS becomes a spectacle of humiliation and domination rather than a measure of inclusion into the Hindu right. Muslims must perform Hindu nationalist religious rituals, while denigrating mainstream Islamic tradition. Drawing on extensive interview- based fieldwork with the RSS and the Manch, I argue that syncretism can function as domination because it reinforces ethnic hierarchies, but that this domination is not a form of hierarchical encompassment. Rather, subordinate religious groups are kept in a perpetual humiliating limbo as a way to reify the superiority of a dominant religious group.

This essay examines common representations of religious minorities in Hindi popular cinema within the context of dominant post-Independence Indian religious and political ideologies—from a religiously pluralist secular socialist framework to a Hindu nationalist late capitalist orientation. We begin by examining the more recent turn to film as a legitimate conveyor of middle-class Indian values worthy of interpretation, and the coeval shift among Indians from embarrassment to pride in film as the industry followed the liberalizing nation-state onto the global stage. Equipped with this interpretive strategy, we turn to the dhārmik, or religious elements within the Hindi sāmājik, or social film, demonstrating concretely how particular notions of Hindu dharma (variously if imperfectly translated as “duty,” “law,” “cosmic order,” “religion”) have long undergirded Hindi popular cinema structurally and topically. Finally, and most significantly, we examine representations of religious minorities, particularly Muslms, Christians, and Sikhs, in Hindi popular cinema against the backdrop of evolving religious and cultural ideologies up to the electoral victory of Prime Minister Modi of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. It is argued that minority representation, like other aspects of Indian public life, can be interpreted as an index of majority concerns about the religious Other. While such representations have never been static, more current depictions present the viewer with a troubling, even ominous picture of the place (or lack thereof) of religious minorities in contemporary Indian society, revealing majoritarian chauvinism and sectarian tensions that call into question the identity of the Indian Republic as a pluralistic secular nation, as well as the easy elisions between Hindu and secular Indian nationalisms. When we now look at past films cognizant of the Hindu nationalist dispensation to come, discontinuity is not the only striking feature. Ideological inconsistencies, tensions, and contradictions have long been manifest on the silver screen, particularly with regard to the religious minorities. The present ascendance of Hindutva as a national (indeed international) religio-political ideology forces us to reconsider past films and the ideologies embedded therein.

Decolonization refers to both the global decolonization movement where countries in Africa and Asia overthrew imperial powers and also the struggles of Indigenous peoples in settler contexts. The following focuses primarily on the struggles of Indigenous peoples and the ways they use research to advance decolonization by centering questions of land and Indigenous knowledge. In settler colonial contexts academic research can easily avoid Indigenous peoples even though the foundation of settler societies is the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from land. Decolonial methods require us to evaluate what knowledge is absent from our personal and collective analysis when we set out to do research. More specifically, it asks everyone, even when Indigenous peoples are not the centre of your research to consider questions of land, Indigenous knowledge, and settler colonization.

How can scholars critically engage premodern Indic traditions without falling prey to Hindu conservatism or Brahmanical-Hindu apologism? This question is pressing for Indic political theory and contemporary Indian democracy because of ethnically exclusivist, Hindu nationalist movements that have emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This chapter argues that a positive answer to the question must begin by taking seriously the tremendous pluralism in India’s political and philosophical history, which requires systematically engaging with premodern source material and uncovering the internal pluralism within a longer and larger Brahmanical-Hindu tradition of political thought. The author explains how it is both possible and politically necessary to internally subvert Brahmanical-Hindu political thought, which can help diffuse essentialist and exclusivist arguments coming from the Hindu right. Locating such plurality and engaging in internal subversion can help challenge historical justifications for Indian nationalism and contribute to decolonization, thus contesting the Hindu right on its own conceptual and genealogical turf. To advance this argument, the author provides a critical reinterpretation of the infamous “Puruṣa Sūkta,” which is often viewed as the locus classicus of the modern caste system, providing a novel interpretation that challenges caste hierarchy and supplies new resources for democratic thought and practice in India.

Why and how does a right-wing social movement mobilize workers along class lines? The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), the labor wing of the Hindu nationalist movement in India, marshals working-class support by emphasizing workers’ class positions and identities. Following Gramsci, I argue that the BMS represents the Hindu right's recognition of workers’ class power and is thus key to the Hindu Right's efforts to incorporate workers into hegemonic capitalist social relations. The form that right-wing activity takes depends on the histories of working-class mobilization and the class power of workers. Thus, right-wing actors do not exclusively dictate the terms of the engagement with workers, but workers also exercise agency in shaping and contesting this interaction.

This thesis tries to answer two main questions in Indian economic reform and liberalization: the initiation and consolidation of the reform. Contrary to most of the prevailing explanations focusing on one level or one dimension, this thesis tries to analyze them in a more historical and broader framework, namely historical-structure and state-centered structure. Post-independent India has gone through three main periods: Indian Nationalism (1947-1964), Communalism (1964-1979), and Globalization (1980s onwards). Comprehending the causality between these three periods helps we better understand the roots of economic crisis in 1991. That is, the rise of Communalism led to the erosion of the state’s autonomy, so a certain kind of reform became a must. And the rise of Globalization gave neo-liberalist economic reform a preference. This thesis further argues that the antagonism between Secularism and Hindu Nationalism, the competition between India and China, and the transnational globalization consolidate the economic reform after 1991. These three main factors could be comprehended as a dialogue between Globalization and Hindutva. Therefore, through this thesis, we found that there were subtle relations between so-called “Identity Politics” and economic reform in Indian political economy.

Given that the way of life of indigenous peoples is usually associated with low living standards, the government has an important role to play in ensuring that the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous communities is narrowed. Unfortunately, as the program to improve the quality of life of indigenous communities has been widely implemented across the country, tension has begun to escalate among the indigenous community on the real motive of the program. Government policy objectives to assimilate indigenous communities into mainstream society leave little scope for indigenous groups to pursue their own life projects. Several studies have reported that the development of the government within traditional indigenous lands has caused conflict between the developer and the indigenous community. This situation has caused the indigenous people to bear the consequences of losing their traditional land, which is very important to reflect their identity. The aim of this paper is therefore to examine the current issues related to the land development initiative on the way of life of indigenous peoples in Malaysia. Documents search from published and unpublished material is used for this paper and a guide with a set of settings five years prior. The findings of this paper show that the development of the government in indigenous traditional lands has disrupted the traditional way of life, leading to multiple adverse effects on the community and the environment. In other words, the core of the indigenous people's struggle to this date is therefore concentrated in their involvement in making decisions in any development proposed to enhance their quality of life. Apart from that, the perspective of land development between the government and the indigenous peoples is quite different from one another. In conclusion, it is important to elicit knowledge and opinion from both indigenous peoples and government agencies to ensure the impact of land development activities can be minimized and implemented appropriately.

Settler Violence? Race and Emergent Frontiers of Progress in Honduras Christopher A. Loperena (bio) The displacement of black and indigenous peoples from sites of economic opportunity in Honduras, and the systematic enclosure of the natural resources within their territories, is intimately tethered to white socio-spatial imaginaries and the politics of frontier making. In this essay, I analyze how elite investors, with support from the state and multilateral development banks, mobilize the ideology of national progress to further disenfranchise rural communities of color and to legitimate acts of violence against land and environmental activists. This violence has increased dramatically since the 2009 coup against Manual Zelaya Rosales, which was followed by a surge in extractivist activities throughout the national territory. In the quest for land, mestizo elites harness both legal and physical coercion to seize vital natural resources within indigenous and black territories.1 The process of turning indigenous territories into frontier zones for economic development underscores not only the racialized dimensions of dispossession but also the ways in which violence is used to hasten the power and racial domination of mestizo settlers over indigenous and black peoples.2 Settler colonialism, according to Patrick Wolfe, entails conquering the land and then populating the conquered territory with the victorious people. Although qualitatively different from the colonial project imposed by the Spanish and Portuguese—at least from an ideological perspective, since it was contingent on the incorporation of indigenous peoples into the national body politic—settler colonialism remains pertinent to analyses of race relations in Latin America. Wolfe states that settler colonialism is an ongoing process premised on a “logic of elimination.”3 Through an analysis of settler violence, I elucidate the relationship between settler colonial logics and contemporary development practices in Honduras. The ongoing removal and elimination of indigenous and black peoples is epitomized by the targeted repression and killing of key indigenous social movement activists, including the March 2016 assassination of Goldman Environmental Prize winner Berta Cáceres. [End Page 801] The logic of elimination is also expressed through legal arrangements that erode collective property rights and undermine black and indigenous sovereignty over the natural resources within their territories. Although Honduras has signed and ratified international legal conventions on the territorial rights of indigenous and tribal peoples, the state has aggressively pursued development projects that directly violate these rights. Even communities in possession of titles to their lands are subject to these forms of expropriation, particularly when the motive is couched within the discourse of national progress. Progress as Settler Colonial Logic In Latin America, national progress is crucially bound up with white socio-spatial epistemologies, which relegate indigenous peoples to a mythical past and thus render invisible contemporary indigenous peoples’ existence and political vitality.4 Indeed, the ideology of indo-Hispanic racial mixture, or mestizaje, has been used to negate indigenous and black territorial claims and to buttress the political and economic aspirations of the mestizo elite. The incorporation of indigenous peoples into the nation through the ideology of mestizaje ultimately furthers the whitening project on which postcolonial national identity was founded.5 Aspirations to whiten the nation gain material coherence through development practice. Following Keisha-Khan Perry, I understand development projects as the spatial dimension of the whitening ideology.6 The proliferation of extractivist economic activities within black and indigenous territories asserts national sovereignty over the natural resources to which rural communities of color lay claim, and thereby buttresses white spatial imaginaries. Sharlene Mollet’s research in the Honduran Mosquitia illustrates how indigenous land use practices are defined as backward and thus deemed, by the state, unsuitable for market production.7 In this way, racist understandings of indigenous inferiority position mestizo colonos (settlers) as more apt to use the land productively and thus legitimates their continued presence and spatial dominance over black and indigenous peoples. Indeed, the notion of “idle” or “underutilized” land has served as a central justification for the usurpation of lands in areas populated by indigenous and black peoples and which have been folded into the agrarian reform policies adopted by the state, beginning with the Agrarian Reform Law of 1962. Because indigenous and black peoples’ lands were often classified as underutilized, they were subject...

The focus of this paper is on the demolition of a sacred space, the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth century mosque, in Ayodhya, India, in December 1992, an illegal albeit well‐organized act by the Hindu right. Drawing on postcolonial theory, and feminist geographical theory, and using a discourse analysis primarily of Hindu nationalist texts, and of significant action as text, the author examines the strategic construction and deployment of cultural meanings pertaining to space, and the engagement of social actors on that basis, towards political, violent ends. The author argues, firstly, that Hindu nationalist ideologues, notwithstanding pretensions to Hindu ‘authenticity,’ make use of Western thought to rewrite Hindu‐Muslim relations in antagonistic terms, and to signify these oppositional relations through sacred spatialities (mosque, temple, and Motherland as the body of the mother goddess Bharatmata). Secondly, in this framework, the Babri Masjid, one particular mosque, became a site of conflict because Hindu nationalists were able to transform it into a symbol of Muslim military invasions and Muslim male sexual aggression against Hindu femininity (as Motherland and Hindu women's bodies). Thirdly, Hindu nationalists, through a well‐orchestrated campaign, were able to convince a wider audience that these violations could only be avenged by the demolition of the Babri mosque (while also unofficially and inadvertently targeting Muslim women's bodies for sexual violation). Finally, this analysis should have wider implications for understanding the place of space, gender, sexuality, and sexual violation, in religio‐political and ethnic conflicts elsewhere.

“Indigenous” Nature Connection? A Response to Kurth, Narvaez, Kohn, and Bae (2020)