Hindu Nationalism Research Articles

Religious Nationalism: Narendra Modi’s 2019 Election Victory Speech

The ideology of nationalism is permeating and ascending across societies, eventually manifesting materially in several nations across the world. In this essay, I analyze the religious manifestation of nationalism within the context of India’s Hindu nationalism. I argue that Modi, in his 2019 election victory speech, constructs a grand narrative of Hindu nationalistic unification by positioning himself as a Hindu sanyasi (ascetic) and by alluding to Hindu mythologies. First, I present the historical context of India’s Hindu nationalism (Hindutva). Second, I explicate the formation of an ideological discourse through Kenneth Burke’s focus on identification and the constitutive rhetoric of calling into being the second and third persona. Third, I critique the ideological formations of Modi’s speech for its grand narrative of Hindu nationalistic unification. Fourth, I conclude within a broader context of national collective imaginings and the ideological formations of nationalistic rhetoric.

Locked in echoes: unveiling the dynamics of social media echo chambers and Hindu radicalization targeting Muslim youth in Delhi

The concept of a social media echo chamber is when someone is exposed to biased and personal media that ignores diverse viewpoints and opposing viewpoints. There are many underlying causes for the radicalization of Hindu youth in Delhi, and the problem is complex. An in-depth examination of Hindu nationalism, a political ideology that promotes the creation of a Hindu Rashtra predominantly focused on the supremacy of the upper caste, especially Brahmin principles, is imperative within the realm of development studies. The repercussions of the radicalization of Hindu youth in Delhi are particularly significant as a result of the aggressive actions against Muslims that have resulted from this ideology, which have induced a climate of dread and disquiet. Extremist organizations use echo chambers as a propaganda tool to indoctrinate youth. These virtual worlds reinforce pre-existing convictions by providing information that supports their ideology. This research investigates the subtleties of social media echo chambers to evaluate the radicalization of Hindus and its repercussions on the experiences of Muslim youth in Delhi. The goal of this study is to pinpoint the underlying mechanisms by which social media echo chambers facilitate the radicalization of Hindus and the targeting of Muslim youth.

‘Life itself is kinship’: Care and disgust in more-than-human worlds

Shaunak Sen’s powerful documentary All That Breathes (2022) tells the story of two brothers Nadeem Shehzad and Mohamed Saud, and their assistant Salik, who have devoted their lives to saving black kites that have been dropping from the skies of Delhi in alarming numbers for over a decade. They work tirelessly in the makeshift hospital in their cramped basement, taking care of these regal creatures. This article argues that Sen’s documentary provides an example of planetary care via the portrayal of the wildlife rescue work done by the brothers. It analyzes the film’s depiction of entangled interspecies relations via a triangulation of the brothers, the kites and the material environment, arguing that the brothers’ enactment of a sense of obligation, care and commitment contrasts starkly with the abject conditions in which they live and work. In proposing a profound ethic of multispecies care, I argue that the film also subtly critiques India’s right-wing Hindu majoritarianism and the state-endorsed violence against Muslims, which provides the film’s backdrop. It does so by engaging with a discourse of disgust that is often invoked against the Muslim by majoritarian groups in India when calls are made to rid the imagined Hindu nation space of the Muslim Other. Furthermore, the tender moments of care become themselves moments for the production of an aesthetics of disgust. By intermingling depictions of care with representations of disgust, the film critiques the national politics of alterity and exclusion while urgently calling for interrelational webs of care. However, I argue that despite Sen’s attempts to humanize the Muslim Other for a majoritarian audience, the film ultimately remains somewhat circumscribed within a liberal sensibility, thereby missing the opportunity for an even more nuanced representation of human–animal entanglements and an intimate understanding of the Muslim Other.

The Use of Religion Online by Indian Political Entities During the 2024 Lok Sabha Election: Religiopolitical Propaganda on Social Media?

The intersection of politics and religion in India has gained significant scholarly attention, particularly since the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) rise to power in 2014. The increasing impact of social media on Indian politics has intensified this concern. However, it is yet to be fully explored how social media was used for religiopolitical purposes during the Indian election in 2024. We computationally analyzed 3082 Facebook posts using BERTopic, word embedding, and cluster analysis to understand how politicians, political candidates, political organizations, and political parties intertwined religion and politics during the 2024 Lok Sabha election. We identified the presence of religiopolitical propaganda, primarily aimed at reviving and recreating Hindu nationalist history and targeting religious minorities, mainly Muslims. The major topics of the posts included ideological legacy, political landscape, party and leadership, celebrations, crime and justice, local politics and governance, politicized demographic trends, public engagements, spiritual and philosophical themes, and the misrepresented reservation issue. The interconnectedness of these issues suggests that the BJP and its allies concentrated on religious matters, from Hindu–Muslim debates to reservations for Muslims and the inauguration of Hindu temples. Data from non-political entities, such as influencers, as well as cross-platform analysis from Twitter and YouTube, can extend and enrich these insights.

PRODUCING THE GHATS OF BANARAS AS WORLD‐CLASS SPACES: The mobilization of Nishad boatmen

AbstractThe mobilization of boatmen of the Nishad community on the riverfront of Varanasi, also known as Banaras, against the introduction of a cruise service between September 2018 and the initial months of 2019 reveals the confluence of forces such as Hindu nationalism and the neoliberal pursuit of a world‐class aesthetic, which articulate themselves in the urban developments in Banaras. These include the smart cities mission at the level of the city, which has a cruise service among its constituent world‐class practices, and the protest at the ghat (the riverfront steps that lead to the Ganga river) by the Nishads—the community of fishermen and boatmen in Varanasi, India—at a community level. Meanwhile, at the national and global level, the Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government has been trying to transform and showcase the city of Banaras as a world‐class city with a Hindu nationalist flavour since 2014. The article shows how different dimensions of Henri Lefebvre's dialectic of the production of space undergo changes through state interventions that are seemingly limited to one dimension, that of conceived space or representation of space.

India’s Post-Independence Strategic Culture: A Case Study of India’s Cooperation With the United States and Russia in Military Modernization

Despite some controversy regarding its usefulness, strategic culture has become a widely accepted phrase in the sense of a ‘shaping framework’ for strategic behaviour. Due to its relevance in attaining a goal, the strategic has become a multidisciplinary term that can be construed in a variety of ways. In the case of India, strategic culture explains why the country has taken a very different approach to national security and foreign policy than other countries in similar situations. Postcolonial India, unlike China or Pakistan, did not seek alliances with strong countries to strengthen its national security, staying ‘nonaligned’ even after major wars in 1962 and 1965. After the rise of the BJP in the Indian government since 2014, although realpolitik and Hindu nationalism provide alternatives to the Nehruvian legacy that has dominated Indian strategic culture, Nehruvianism continues to dominate the country’s strategic thought. Thus, this article aims to access India’s defence cooperation with the United States and Russia, through the lens of strategic culture.

Modi the “Solar Superman”: Hindutva, Climate Change and Renewable Energy

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the recent history of Hindu nationalist engagement with climate change and renewable energy in the post-2014 era, particularly through the actions of Narendra Modi. It raises questions about the character of climate politics within Hindu nationalist leadership, the role of key cultural and political concepts like a pure and powerful nation, the influence of Bharat’s civilizational identity on the global stage and the strategic utilization of climate change to enhance the popularity and legitimacy of an authoritarian leader and his government. The analysis expands to explore the transformation in India’s climate discourse post-2014, where social movements and grassroots organizations in the climate and renewable energy sector have diminished. The shift in policies toward big industry-driven development under Modi’s leadership has radically altered the sector. This has paradoxically aligned significant civil society groups with Modi’s agenda while the RSS-BJP co-opt the traditional space of social movements.

Veer Savarkar: The Architect of Hindu Nationalism and Revolutionary Thought

Veer Savarkar: The Architect of Hindu Nationalism and Revolutionary Thought

Ancient Epics in the Television Age: Mass Media, Identity, and the Rise of Hindu Nationalism in India

Ancient Epics in the Television Age: Mass Media, Identity, and the Rise of Hindu Nationalism in India

The Demolition of Babri Masjid and The Post-modernist Challenge to History: A Lacanian Answer

On the fateful day of December 6, 1992, a mob of Hindu nationalists demolished the Babri Masjid, leading to riots and violence against Muslims all over India. This event culminated after rigorous propaganda by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and R.S.S (both fascist organization). The movement gathered so much heat that India was entirely encompassed by the myth of Rama. The main reason behind this movement was to reclaim the site of Babri Masjid as the birthplace of Rama. In this article, without referring to the legitimacy of their claim, I have tried to read this movement against the background of the advent of postmodernism and its challenge to History. In this article, I tried to do this through Lacanian psychoanalysis. Here, I have used Lacanian real in order to understand the postmodern condition. I have taken the postmodern condition here as reaching the limit of phallogocentric language. For me, the postmodern condition is a crisis of the phallic signifier. From this perspective, I have encountered the absence of metanarratives. I wanted to show that even if the basic facts of History are obliterated through the advent of post-truth and conspiracy theories, there is still reason for History to be alive; still, there is reason for us to be optimistic about if we take the lessons of psychoanalysis seriously. I wanted to show here how present Historians are trying to battle this challenge by referring to crude positivistic empiricism as fundamentally useless, and by accepting the narrative nature of History, we can transform History into a radical discipline and open its windows to the various theoretical innovations that are taking in other disciplines.

Translating India to India: Travelling translations, Patanjali Ayurveda, and the visual language of spiritual consumerism

AbstractThis paper addresses the geography of translation by exploring the language of ‘spiritual consumerism’ in India. Drawing on examples from the Indian company Patanjali's ‘saffron capitalism’, we trace the politically, culturally, and religiously charged nature of ‘travelling translation’ and ‘self‐translation’. Our focus is on commercial language that has journeyed and returned ‘back home’, validating notions of Indian uniqueness in the context of globalisation and the rise of Hindu nationalism. This overarching theme is developed by way of three other arguments. First, we show the utility of bringing recent developments in translation studies to bear on geographical debates on globalisation and glocalisation. Second, we offer an expanded view of translation. With their many colours, fonts, and other devices, the Hindi and English texts found on Patanjali's products offer a complex and lively ‘visual language’. Our discussion shows that an understanding of the placing and patterning of this visual language sheds light on the complex character of ‘spiritual consumerism’. Third, in contrast to the emphasis on transgression, novelty, and resistance associated with earlier work on postcolonial translation, we draw out the splicing of nationalism, capitalism, and cosmopolitanism, and illustrate how Patanjali is creating and packaging a language of Hindu/Indian/global branding.

In the Service of the Hindu Nation: Online Disinformation Campaigns by Far-Right Women Political Influencers in India

In the last few years, with the rise of social media, India has witnessed systematic disinformation campaigns attacking Muslim minority communities. Women influencers connected to Hindu nationalism play a crucial role in these campaigns online. This article examines the role of Hindu-Right women as political influencers. I examine the different engagement techniques deployed by these right-wing political influencers to spread disinformation-assisted hate speech online. I argue that the different engagement techniques these influencers deploy are a form of aspirational labour that advances their position within the broader Hindu nationalism project. I develop the concept of virtuous intimacy to explore how women influencers play an important role, especially in drawing women into the fold of Hindutva on the claims of shared experience.

Ideological Convergence or Political Overtures: Hindu Nationalists’ Engagement with Ambedkar

The dominant political discourse in India situates Ambedkar in opposition to the ideology of Hindutva. Ambedkar criticised Hindu religious texts on the ground of sanctioning graded inequality in the Hindu social order. This further gets traction with demands of Ambedkar to treat depressed classes as non-Hindus or protestant Hindus. The twenty-one commandants read out at the time of his conversion also denounced key Hindu gods and goddesses. All this goes against the basic tenets of Hindutva ideology. Therefore, any overtures by Hindutva protagonists in favour of Ambedkar are interpreted as attempts to appropriate him for electoral reasons. This article counters this narrative and argues that there are several political and ideological issues on which both Ambedkar and Hindu nationalists converge. The author has used the discourse analysis method to identify those issues that bring Ambedkar close to Hindu nationalists.

Kaam: Youth, religiosity, and the cultural production of work in a North Indian Madrasa

Drawing from year-long ethnographic fieldwork in a North Indian Madrasa, this paper looks at how young Madrasa students are navigating socio-economic precarity in their everyday lives. I primarily focus on young people’s navigation of neoliberal and Hindu Nationalist discourses surrounding work and employment. In doing so, I draw on the recent turn in critical work geographies by de-emphasising a wage-centric approach to studying practices of work. At the same time, I show how work is locally constructed and mobilised in relation to a variety of social and cultural resources by focusing on young people’s articulation of work through the Hindustani word kaam.

Educational Equity in Schools in India: Perils & Possibilities

Abstract India is one of the most diverse nation-states in the world. After gaining independence from Britain in 1947, it adopted a constitution that was based on pluralism, secularism, and egalitarianism. This constitutional vision guided the national education policies until very recently. The current moment in all areas of public policy is being defined by the ruling party's agenda of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism. In education, the hallmarks of this move have been a rewriting of history to glorify a mythohistoric version of the Hindu past and a call to engage with ancient Indian knowledge systems and traditions. Unfortunately, Hindu nationalism is creating growing rifts between the majority Hindu population and other groups, including Muslims, Christians, and Dalits (formerly known as “untouchables” or “outcastes”). The aim of this essay is to understand what is happening in Indian education and to consider ways to return to an engagement with the constitutional principles of pluralism, secularism, and egalitarianism.

The Rising Tide of Hindu Nationalism: Threats and Opportunities for Peace

Observers of Indian politics have noted rising acts of violence against Muslims in an atmosphere of increasing Hindu nationalism during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tenure. Hinduism, however, like all religions, also contains many resources for peace. Looking to both theory and practice, this piece examines how we can theorize Hinduism and religion in general as a source of protection for peace and human rights. It also looks for peaceful practices that may be of use in the contemporary climate of violence. I conclude that we can only get to peace through the acknowledgement of religious motivations within politics and a renewed commitment to the truth.

Hindu Nationalism emerging from narcissism of minor differences in Indo‐Bangladesh borderlands: A gendered narration

Hindu Nationalism emerging from narcissism of minor differences in Indo‐Bangladesh borderlands: A gendered narration

India’s infrastructure build-up, abrogation of Article 370 and assertive stance regarding Aksai China: China’s motivations for intrusions in May 2020

ABSTRACT This article argues that China intruded at multiple points along the LAC in May 2020 due to the construction of border infrastructure especially the Darbuk-Shyokh (DS)-Daulat Beg Oldi (DBO) road in conjunction with India’s Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah’s statement regarding restoration of Aksai Chin and Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) into India after the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019. China perceives that the rapid pace of border infrastructure development by India especially the construction of the DS-DBO road mitigates its military/tactical advantage along the LAC. However, the road has been under construction for more than a decade. Similarly, India’s claims on Aksai Chin and PoK have remained unchanged even after Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister. What raised anxieties and insecurities in China was abrogation of Article 370 and Amit Shah’s statements because Beijing believes India has become more assertive, aggressive and risk prone under Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party governments led by Modi. Beijing considered that the border infrastructure build-up by India especially the DS-DBO road would allow India to threaten Aksai Chin as per Shah’s statement. This prompted China to intrude along the LAC to mitigate India’s threat and Beijing’s anxieties/insecurities pertaining to Aksai Chin.

Delving deeper into OpIndia.com’s representation of Hindus and Muslims

The paper examines 54,580 articles published from 12 December 2014 to 15 May 2023 on the right-wing news and current affairs website www.opindia.com through a corpus-assisted discourse-historical approach in three stages. First, it looks at the entire dataset using corpus-based keyword analysis to gauge the relative prominence of four node words Hindu(s) and Muslim(s) in OpIndia’s content. Second, it analyses a down-sampled set of 696 articles and identifies 42 prominent themes shaping the discourse surrounding the nodes. Finally, examining a set of 36 articles further down-sampled and analysing the discursive strategies through the discourse-historical approach demonstrates that OpIndia perpetuates a perniciously polarising discourse demonising Muslims. Also, it reaffirms that the formative rift on which the discourse thrives is – the Hindu nationalist versus secular imaginations of the nation.

‘Everything is fine in India’: crafting emotional proximity among the Indian diasporas

ABSTRACT The relationship between states and the diaspora represents an important transformation from the focus on state, territoriality, and sovereignty, especially due to the rise of populist regimes and the instruments used by them. Diaspora becomes one of the instruments to not only exercise influence in international politics but also gain domestic legitimacy for political projects, transnationalising politics and populism. This paper elucidates the ways in which the current Indian government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has made efforts to craft proximity with the Indian diaspora in the USA, UK and Australia. We specifically focus on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech at the Howdy, Modi! rally in 2019 in Houston Texas to illustrate the crafting of emotional proximity to the homeland, through a discourse focusing on aspirational pride. We place these populist narratives within the framework of an aspirational state, that is built on the politics of vishwas or trust, rather than empirical reality. By looking at how proponents of Hindu nationalism, shape the Indian diaspora’s emotional linkages to the homeland, the study illuminates the complex ways in which transnational emotional proximity is constructed across borders.