Hindutva Politics Research Articles

Slow Violence and theGas Peeditin Neoliberal India

AbstractThis article analyzes the ways in which slow violence and neoliberalism intertwine in the production of social and environmental destruction, evident in the lingering devastation from the 1984 Union Carbide catastrophe in Bhopal, India. Children are born with congenital abnormalities; women are plagued with reproductive health problems; and dangerous chemicals left in the abandoned factory continue to contaminate soil and groundwater. Yet Bhopal is remembered almost exclusively for the spectacle of its immediate aftermath. Drawing on 60 interviews with Bhopal victims and activists, field observations, archives, and official and independent reports, this paper examines how the neoliberal turn in Indian governance plays a role in the creation of slow violence. The paper advances our understanding of socioenvironmental destruction by tying slow violence to a temporal change in countries' governance in the Global South. The paper underscores the significance of considering political economic dynamics in the perpetration of slow violence. It also emphasizes how the neoliberal turn, now anchored in right-wing Hindutva politics in India, further constrains the possibilities for counter-measures that would address slow violence. The paper offers significant implications for analyzing the political economy of socioenvironmental and health disparities in the wake of corporate malfeasance.

TRANSFORMATION OF INDIAN NATIONALISM AND ‘OTHERIZATION’ OF MUSLIMS IN INDIA

India has altered its military stratagem under the Modi government from nuclear deterrence to offensive defence. The constant use of offensive defence in the milieu of deliberate political aggression against Pakistan and victimization of the Muslim community in India is making Indian military doctrine a hostage of hyper-nationalistic politics of Hindutva. Since its rise to power, the BJP government has conflated anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan approaches. Pakistan remains a crucial factor in its domestic, diplomatic, and foreign policy rhetoric. The internal discord and surge of violence against the Muslim population, as evident by 2020-riots in north-eastern New Delhi, are indicative of vigorous reforming of the national identity of India dominated by Hindutva ideology. Therefore, this paper addresses Hindu nationalism, which arose as a political ideology and caused an insecure environment for Indian Muslims while becoming precarious for Pakistan. It infers that Hindu nationalism, along with its assimilation approach towards minorities, is gradually asserting exclusionary conception of a state where cultural and political centrality of Hindutva has become a core theme.
 
 Bibliography Entry
 Shahzad, Aisha, Sadia Mahmood Falki, and Asma Sana Bilal. 2021. "Transformation of Indian Nationalism and ‘Otherization’ of Muslims in India." Margalla Papers 25 (1): 48-58.

The politics of Hindutva in India

India’s Bharatiya Janata Party, once on the political margins because of its hardline nationalist views emphasising Hindu superiority, has held a majority in parliament since 2014. Prime Minister Narendra Modi fanned ethnic divisions during a re-election campaign in 2019 and is now finding ways to implement a political programme to satisfy populists in his party while improving India’s economic prospects and continuing the ‘multi-alignment’ foreign policy followed by his predecessors.

Old Delhi's Spectacular Lav-Kush Ramlila: Three Pivotal Scenes in Translation

Lav-Kush Ramlila, staged at the Red Fort, has gained popularity in recent years amongst other similar dramatic re-enactments of the epic saga. Its attractiveness, owing to its casting, includes film and television personalities from entertainment industries across India. While the festivities of many Indian celebrations allow modern audiences to bear witness to an amalgam of ritual, religion, and histrionics, the Ramayan maintains a prime position in shaping the national narrative. What helps sustain its position in the Indian psyche is accessibility to the story of Ram. This article draws attention to the language of the Lav-Kush Ramlila, specifically through translations of three pivotal scenes: Ram's Exile, Lakshman Cuts Off Shurpnakha's Nose, and Hanuman Fetches Sanjivani, as derived from its live performance in 2016 and 2018. The translations are accompanied with summaries and supporting commentaries to further illuminate the performance, its sub-text, and cultural references, as well as an introduction that locates purposeful connections between the performance and Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan which continues to serve public memory, collective sentiment, and Hindutva politics.

Muslim Politics in Assam: The Case of AIUDF

All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) was formed in 2005 as Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF). It represents Muslim politics in contemporary Assam. In the 2006 and 2011 Assam Assembly elections (AAE), AIUDF showed continuous success, though it could not gain substantially in the communally polarized 2016 Assembly elections. With this backdrop, the present article is an attempt to understand contemporary Muslim politics in Assam through AIUDF. It argues that AIUDF was an attempt by a group of Muslim leaders in Assam, mainly from Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind (Jamiat), to share power in the name of Muslims and the party was made relevant in Assam politics by Congress through its soft Hindutva politics. It also argues that increasing dominance of AIUDF in Assam elections created ground for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to grow and to form government in 2016.

‘Court’ing Hindu nationalism: law and the rise of modern Hindutva

ABSTRACTThis paper demonstrates the role of the Courts in lending currency to the politics of Hindutva in the 1990s. It focuses on some of the significant and connected cases of the Ayodhya dispute and the infamous Hindutva judgments to illustrate how the court legitimised, perhaps inadvertently, a jingoistic and intolerant ideology as an acceptable political strategy. The rise and electoral successes of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) post-emergency accompanied the party's reliance on the judicial instruments to make its Hindu nationalist ideology palatable to a larger audience and the ‘secular’ citizen. Contrary to the stance of Hindu nationalist organisations against codification of Hindu law and any state interference in matters of religion at the time of independence, in the 1990s the movement relied significantly on judicial instruments for its own legitimacy and for expanding the domain of religion by seeking the patronage of ‘law’. The Court, in what came to be known as the Hindutva judgments, attempted to separate ‘Hindutva’ from ‘Hinduism’, thereby aiding the launch of a new dawn of Hindutva which could then become synonymous with democracy and development. Most significantly, it also opened the doors for electoral promises to be routed through the courts.

Hindutva politics and South Asian cinema – media in the age of Modi

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Reading double: Queer girls and Hindutva politics in The World Before Her

Abstract This article examines the representation of Prachi, one of the chief subjects of the Indo-Canadian documentary The World Before Her, as a queer girl who finds the space to articulate her non-heteronormativity in a right-wing Hindu training camp for girls, the Durga Vahini. While made in 2012, this Canadian documentary, written and directed by Indo-Canadian film-maker Nisha Pahuja, was released in India in 2014, soon after Narendra Modi’s election, and was criticized by some as being a form of Hindutva propaganda. Drawing on the work of Antke Engel, Nikita Dhawan, Maria do Mar Castro Varela, Akhil Katyal and Kara Keeling, this article looks at the film-maker’s role in shaping the narrative and moments of linguistic, translational and affective excess to argue that queer politics, especially in postcolonial states, is not merely subversive but is also complicit in reinforcing hegemonic ideologies.

From ‘fire-brand’ to ‘water-brand’: The caste politics of Uma Bharati

ABSTRACTThis paper uses a case study of Uma Bharati, a woman political leader, to argue that despite appropriating multiple-axis thinking to mask casteism inherent in their ideology, Hindutva politics essentially lays bare its brahmanical allegiance and lineage, with its larger agenda to redefine India as a Hindu rashtra or nation. Bharati, a 'fiery sanyasin’ (female ascetic) of Other Backward Classes (OBC) background, had been awarded a portfolio to clean the 'polluted' Ganga river in the Narendra Modi cabinet in 2014. This paper points out the significance of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in granting this responsibility to a 'radical' who had strategically deployed her caste identity to gain power in Hindutva politics. Bharati had gone against the party to demand caste-based quotas in women's reservation in parliament, and succeeded in rupturing the monolithic identity of upper-caste womanhood in the BJP. While this resulted in the patriarchal upper-caste leadership of the party expelling the 'indisciplined' Bharati on more than one occasion, they have not been able to ignore her. Instead they have 'domesticated' the politically ambitious lower-caste Bharati by conferring her with ministerial power, and compelling her to change focus from the controversial issue of caste to that of cleaning the Ganga, which is a symbol of national and Hindu religious interest.

(Un)Modifying India: Nationalism, Sexual Violence and the Politics of Hindutva

The postcolonial Indian state has since its inception used sexual violence to keep resurgent rebellions in check within its formal territory, and has for long provided the means of the production of sexual violence to dominant sections of society. In this essay I suggest that with the rise of the Hindu right to political power at key levels of states and the centre over the last three decades, a new social and political dynamic has been unleashed. Sexual violence has come to constitute public and private lives in unprecedented ways that include a radical realignment of public and private spheres as well as the production of a rejuvenated masculinist state and society seeking to resignify tradition and modernity within the framework of Hindutva or Hindu supremacy. While this force signals a political defeat for liberal and secular feminism at some level, it also opens up new opportunities to reimagine the vocabularies of freedom and rights against the new political order.

From Gandhi to Gurus: The Rise of the ‘Guru-Sphere’

ABSTRACTThis article compares the public sphere of gurus (‘guru-sphere’) in contemporary Gujarat and that of Gandhi historically as important sites of political contestation. It argues that despite their common use of religious idioms to convey political ideas, Gandhi and the gurus authorise radically different political projects with divergent conceptions of the Hindu subject and Indian polity. The discursive activities of the guru-sphere have helped forge a dominant consensus that endorses Hindutva politics. Operating within a democratic civil society and borrowing from Gandhian idioms, gurus have actively challenged key constitutional values derived from the Gandhian public sphere. The study reveals the paradoxical tendency of Gujarat's public sphere to produce hegemonic monologues over pluralistic dialogues, not in the absence of, but through the institutional mechanisms of, deliberative democracy.

The Rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party in West Bengal

The impressive performance of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections in West Bengal is seen as a turning point in state politics—a saffron surge and the red retreat. While trying to understand and explain the rise of the BJP, this article analyzes Hindutva politics in West Bengal in a historical perspective, highlighting the ideological and organizational legacies of the Hindu Mahasabha, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and the Sangh Parivar. Hindutva’s political ambition always remained frustrated as the objective ideological and political milieu in a hostile Communist bastion had never been congenial to its brand of politics. Yet, the BJP continued to struggle for its existence, adopted pragmatic political strategies at the local and regional level, entered into smart political alliance with the Trinamool Congress at a crucial time, grabbed the opportunity to expand its base rapidly when the Left lost its credibility and political control and, finally, when Mamata started messing up with her support base. Buoyed by the BJP’s rise in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Hindutva forces have unleashed an ambitious and aggressive campaign to wrest West Bengal from Mamata’s Trinamool Congress in the 2016 assembly elections; thus, West Bengal is likely to witness a fierce political battle in the coming days!

Governmentality and guru-led movements in India

The concept of governmentality has a textual and philosophical basis as well as being concerned with what might be called the practices of government. This article discusses and develops the governmentality argument with respect to the guru-led movements. It outlines the basics of Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, its analytical frame, the fact that governmentality moves beyond only the practices of the state and its nuances in a neoliberal frame of reference, drawing on Zygmunt Bauman and others. It then discusses the governmentality of guru-led movements through: (1) the political acts and powers of the gurus; (2) the supplementary and complementary efforts to aid the state by the guru-led movements; (3) instances of resistance and taking on the state, and (4) the flipside of governmentality, which manifests as hegemony, Hindutva politics and Hindu nationalism. Through the governmentality argument, aspects of the surveillance, discipline, control, interactivity and competition of the guru-led movements emerge. What is discussed is a post-disciplinary model of governance which devolves power downwards from crumbling state institutions to new agencies of control, in this case, the gurus and their institutions. This devolution, however, is not without its tensions and the article also argues that guru governmentality betrays traces of hybridity and non-linearity.

The Modi-centric BJP 2014 election campaign: new techniques and old tactics

The 2014 election campaign of the BJP was unprecedented not only because, for the first time, a Chief Minister was the prime ministerial candidate of one of the national parties in the fray and tried to promote his state achievements in terms of development across the nation, but also because the party relied on the personality of its leader more than any other party since the Congress under Indira Gandhi. Narendra Modi broke with the BJP's collegial tradition in several ways. He marginalised party veterans, short circuited the BJP apparatus to use a parallel support structure, and resorted to new techniques of communication that saturated the public space. However, these innovations were superimposed on older themes which had sometimes not been used by the BJP itself before, but by others – like caste politics or corruption. Modi's BJP also fell back on some alliances with other parties, the old RSS network, and revisited Hindutva politics to such an extent that ‘development' was definitely not the only theme of the Modi campaign.

Civil society and democratization: a counter-case from India

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.

A river of no dissent: Narmada Movement and coercive Gujarati nativism

This article examines the Narmada Movement in Gujarat to illuminate the enduring modes of politics and collective identifications it engendered in the state. It shows how the movement engaged the instruments of democracy to forge a popular consensus around a coercive Gujarati nativism that became the touchstone of political action and helped consolidate a politics of Hindutva at the turn of the twenty-first century. It concludes by reflecting on the conundrum of democracy in Gujarat posed by this coercive nativism, namely, democracy's complicity in and vulnerability to popular support for exclusionary politics. This analysis elucidates the regional particularities of politics in Gujarat while also revealing the contradictory relationship among democracy, participatory social movements and exclusionary politics more generally.

‘Living Together in Difference’: Religious Conflict and Tolerance in Pre-Colonial India as History and Discourse

Asim Roy focuses on religious conflict and tolerance in pre-colonial India as history and discourse. The position of the Muslim communalists was essentially premised on the logic of the 'two nation theory,' which they perceived as holding true of Hindu-Muslim relations since the dawn of Indo-Muslim history. The British rulers, in turn, suspicious at first of the fanatical, aggressive and rebellious orientation of the Muslims, gradually shifted their position and broadly sought explanations in the essentially religious mores of the Indian societies, making the people of that community easy prey for religious and communal propaganda and conflict throughout history. The intrusion of such malevolent political designs into the arena of professional historical research has proved immeasurably harmful for the Indian minorities and the country as a whole. Still, Hindutva politics and propaganda have led to an engagement of sorts with medieval India.

Becoming a 'Faith Community': British Hindus, Identity, and the Politics of Representation

AbstractThis article offers an historical perspective on the process by which British Hindus have sought to become a 'faith community' in response to local civic pressures and the intensification of government rhetoric on harnessing the capacity of religious bodies in support of public policy, and also as an expression of Hindu nationalist and ecumenical interests. I review my earlier analysis of Hindus in Leeds, noting the four processes of institutionalisation, retraditionalisation, standardisation, and the production of community, and, through Hindu ephemera, consider these same processes for Hindus elsewhere in Britain in the period 1980 to 2006 in the context of the rise of identity politics and the return of religion to public prominence. Although these processes remain relevant, others have emerged, notably the public representation of 'Hinduism,' and the impact of a diasporic politics of Hindutva.

Authoring (in)Authenticity, Regulating Religious Tolerance

This article explores the politicization of `conversion' discourses in contemporary India, focusing on the rising popularity of anti-conversion legislation at the individual state level. While `Freedom of Religion' bills contend to represent the power of the Hindu nationalist cause, these pieces of legislation reflect both the political mobility of Hindutva as a symbolic discourse and the practical limits of its enforcement value within Indian law. This resurgence, however, highlights the enduring nature of questions regarding the quality of `conversion' as a `right' of individuals and communities, as well as reigniting the ongoing battle over the line between `conversion' and `propagation'. Ultimately, I argue that, while the politics of conversion continue to represent a decisive point of reference in debates over the quality and substance of religious freedom as a discernible right of Indian democracy and citizenship, the widespread negative consequences of this legislation's enforcement remain to be seen. Moreover, the role of gender in these debates cannot be ignored; indeed, the politics of gender play a decisive role in the manner in which the anti-conversion debates have unfolded. Consequently, the gulf between the unsecular nature of the legislation in theory and its questionable impact in practice indicates that the project of Indian secularism is negotiating religious intolerance rather than succumbing fully to the politics of Hindutva.

Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (review)

Nicholas B. Dirks. 2001. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.