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This paper describes how Kolis—who are an OBC—and Adivasis in Gujarat negotiate and are constituted by militant Hinduism. Once the anchor of a secular political coalition, the political personhood of Kolis has shifted since 2014. The television complex and temple-building activities of Hindu chauvinism create a context in which identification with Brahmanical Hinduism, a vegetarian normativity, and distancing from Muslims transpires. However, the Hindutva-identifying subjectivity is fractured. Adivasi self-making resists temple cultures and caste Hinduism and asserts non-vegetarianism. Some Kolis' affective relationalities with Bhakti saints and critiques of temple-going suggest that oppositional potentialities to Brahmanical Hinduism are always present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid 1990s, the western Indian state of Gujarat has been continuously led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Right-wing Hindu nationalist political party. The BJP has aggressively pursued Right-wing religious ideologies, while, on the economic front, it has taken on board neoliberal policies. The outcome of this mix came to be referred to as the 'Gujarat model of development', as the state delivered impressive figures in the economy, although at the cost of human development indices. The article shows that the intensified adoption of Hindutva and neoliberalism has resulted in unequal development across regions, sectors of the economy and industries, as well as across the axes of class, caste and religion. As unequal development is inherent in both the ideologies of neoliberalism and Hindutva, each of them further exacerbates societal inequalities across multiple spheres without addressing these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the misattribution of Bismil Azimabadi's ghazal, 'Sarfaroshī kī Tamannā', to Ram Prasad 'Bismil' in contemporary India is the work of two poetry anthologies—Krāntī Gītāñjalī [Revolutionary Poetry] (1930) and Krāntī Gītāñjallī Athvā Dūsrā Bhāg [Revolutionary Poetry or the Second Part] (1930), which palimpsested Azimabadi's poem onto Prasad's martyrdom to erase Azimabadi's authorship. I argue, first, that Krāntī Gītāñjalī by Hulas Verma 'Premi' edits Azimabadi's poem to align it with the Congress and the violent martyrdom of the Hindustan Republican Army. Second, looking at the poem's original context, I argue that it is about the non-cooperation. Third, I argue that Krāntī Gītāñjalī Athvā Dūsrā Bhāg, edited by Lakshman Pathik, muddies the distinction between Prasad and Azimabadi to make it about Hindu nationalism, an idea reproduced in postcolonial India by Madanlal Verma. In conclusion, I suggest that recuperating the poem's politics may help us rethink Hindu-Muslim relations today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2014, the BJP has become increasingly dominant in Uttar Pradesh, India, a state where, as recently as 2012, its vote share had slumped to 15 percent. This paper examines, through ethnographic field research with party workers and others, the reasons for the turnaround in the party's fortunes. A large part of the answer lies in the increasing strength of BJP party organisation, modelled on an RSS template, as well as the increasing coordination between the RSS and the BJP, with RSS personnel frequently seconded to the BJP. This intense closeness between the RSS and the BJP is a new post-2014 feature, something that did not characterise earlier periods of the BJP in power. A second key factor, building on the BJP's increased organisational capacity, and one long advocated by the RSS, is the mobilisation of state welfare benefits by the party and the concerted effort to convert welfare recipients, coming from all communities, into supporters. A third key factor, at which the BJP is increasingly adept and where RSS organisational skills provide a significant advantage, is the micromanagement of caste dynamics and religious polarisation as and when required to gain and maintain a political advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the interface of indigenous faiths with the twin forces of Hindu religious nationalism and Christianity, and the eventual institutionalisation of the former in Arunachal Pradesh, a federal state on India's north-eastern frontier. To substantiate, the paper focuses on nyedar namlos, the newly introduced community prayer halls for Donyi-Polo, the indigenous faith of the Nyishi tribe. The paper argues that nyedar namlos need to be contextualised against the changing socio-political history of the state and its transformation from a socio-political periphery and colonial frontier to an active site of state-making and nation-building, as well as a military frontier, all of which shape the discourse on religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do people leave the world's largest far-right organisation? In this article, we analyse six autobiographical defection accounts of ex-members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the apex organisation of the Indian Hindu nationalist movement. Compiled here for the first time, an analysis of these accounts reveals that even the most disciplined and ideologically coherent far-right organisations suffer from internal organisational messiness and attrition. These accounts challenge the unique mythology that surrounds the RSS and gesture towards the methodological possibilities of discarding the ideology-driven analyses of the far right in favour of material analyses of the lives of far-right organisational members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did the Muslims of Assam become outsiders in Assam? This essay attempts to answer this question by probing the colonial and post-colonial history of categorising people that has located Muslims outside the category of 'Assamese'. The political effort to make the Assamese into a homogenous Hindu group undoes the xanmiholi or blended humanity of Assam. By focusing on two Muslim communities—the Goriyas or Assamese Muslims and the Miyas or Muslims of East Bengali origin—this essay explores the project of making Muslims outsiders in Assam. Finally, the essay examines the inclusion of the transplanted tea-tribe communities as a possible resolution to the Muslim situation in Assam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Partition of 1947 remains an important reference point for Hindu nationalist political discourse in India, defining its relationship with Pakistan and Muslims in South Asia. This article investigates the use of the label 'India's daughters' by the BJP-led NDA government (2014–15), a term originally used to describe Hindu and Sikh women retrieved from Pakistan in 1947. It offers an example of the emotional power wielded by Partition metaphors and demonstrates the BJP's attempts to insert itself into the emotional history of Partition by transforming the meanings of its terms. The case of Uzma Ahmad's retrieval from Pakistan acts as a case in point, illustrating the BJP's increasing attempts to harness Partition semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay addresses canonisation accounts of the medieval Muslim saint Hazrat Sharafuddin Hyderabadi. According to a contemporary text, a Hindu deity was believed to have been jettisoned from the saint's dargah, causing communal unrest in the Deccan. How can a Muslim saint be enshrined through offence in a Hindu environment, and how does this create a discourse of both rifts and bridges between Hinduism and Islam in contemporary India? The analysis traces the interdependence between the Muslim and Hindu communities and suggests a more nuanced reading than positions advanced in the current political climate and in recent legislation, which consider them to be irreconcilable socio-religious systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysing Indian protagonists' strategies at the 15th World Vegetarian Congress in India in 1957, this article argues that they brought together Hindu nationalism and internationalism. By constructing non-violence and vegetarianism as a national heritage, they characterised India as a moral superpower above the divisions of the Cold War and endowed it with a global civilising mission. On the other hand, they tried to win international support to influence the politics of the Indian government, opposing parts of the Five-Year Plans and Nehru's politics of secularism. Moreover, by insisting on India as a vegetarian country, they erased Islam from Indian history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the modern transformations of the temple of the goddess, Kāmākhyā, and her most important festival, Ambuvācī Melā, in Assam. Since at least the eighth century, Kāmākhyā has been revered as one of the most important 'seats of power' or centres of the goddess that dot the landscape of South Asia. However, during the last century, this temple and its festivals have undergone a series of profound transformations—first, in the context of Hindu nationalism and attempts to imagine a unified sacred landscape of 'Mother India', and second, in the context of spiritual tourism and efforts to develop the Northeast region as a new economic powerhouse for the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the roots of a Hindu nationalist economic agenda. Beginning with a critical overview of Deendayal Upadhyaya's economic manifesto, Integral Humanism (1965), it delineates the eclectic set of ideas drawn together by this early Hindu nationalist leader to formulate an alternative ethical and economic agenda from either centralised planning or its liberal critics. The paper then gauges the influence of Integral Humanism on two successive Hindu nationalist political parties. The analysis shows more discernable influence on the economic position of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (1951-77) than on its successor, the Bharatiya Janata Party (from 1980). The conclusion offers some observations as to why this is the case, and outlines prospects for the economic future of India under a Hindu nationalist government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and the Indian Mujahideen (IM) through the lens of social movement theory. By locating these movements in a larger historical and socio-political configuration, the paper documents the national and international political opportunities that fostered SIMI and IM's emergence and radicalisation, including the rise of Hindu extremism, socially institutionalised discrimination and international Islamist revival. Further, the paper investigates the emergence of a seemingly new collective identity and the resources it mobilised. Finally, it investigates the frames employed in justifying calls for violence by deconstructing and contextualising the groups’ Islamic cultural repertoires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including Indian traditions of life writing, religious conversion, and role of Buddhist nuns.

This 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines some aspects of Hindutva and Zionism, taking a comparative approach that underlines the ubiquity—i.e. the comparability—of fascisms in the articulation of modernity. It focuses on the imaginary of race, place and peoplehood in each ideology, the roles of majorities and minorities in the formulation of national well-being, and possible exit strategies from violently exclusivist statecraft. It explores, also, an intellectual prehistory in which Indian nationalists cultivated a fascination with Jews and Zionism as part of their understanding of a race constituted by historical damage and the imperative of repair. It argues, first, that the comparative study of fascisms is not only valid, but necessary to the politics of democracy. Second, it argues that because Indian fascism is less racialised than the Israeli version, it is more open to contestation and mitigation by the deployment of alternative imaginaries of ethnicity and nationhood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the Hindu nationalism in Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and politics in India. Topics discussed include the leadership of India Prime Minister Narendra Modi of BJP party, dramatic consequences of the BJP's decision that Narendra Modi would be its candidate for the position of prime minister in September 2013, and the the rise of Modi as political leader that will promote national economic development in the country.

Will the BJP pursue its Hindutva ideology while in power or will it now gradually become a ‘centrist’ party? Responding to this question, the present paper argues that the possibility that it would transform into a centrist party is rather dim for four reasons: 1) the mixing of Hindutva identity with the development agenda during the national election campaign in 2014; 2) the mild and covert pursuit of Hindutva by both party and government; 3) the dynamic, but deep-rooted relationship between Hindutva and the BJP; and 4) most importantly, the slow and imperceptible shifting of the middle ground of public opinion in India in favour of majoritarian (and therefore pro-Hindutva) sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the academic study of the history and cultures, languages, and literature or indology in India after Hindutva Right. It analyzes the publicity and response on the Indology and Religion in South Asia (RISA) electronic forums over the appointment of Professor Y.S. Rao to the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) and banning of Wendy Doniger's book "The Hindus: An Alternative History." It also discusses the Hindutva Right and the impact of furthering its agenda.

In this article, I seek to examine some key mechanisms underlying the dichotomisation between Hindus and Muslims in Hindu nationalist history writing. Two arguments are central to this study. One is that the strict dichotomisation between Hindus and Muslims presupposes homogeneous categories. This is particularly clear if one examines how Hindu nationalist intellectuals made sense of ambiguities, of individuals and cultural traditions that did not fit directly into the categories, ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’. Moreover, I discuss the role of the so-called hidden ‘Others’. I argue that these hidden ‘Others’ represent, in the form of alternative principles of grouping, the largest obstacle to the Hindu nationalist construction of a Hindu–Muslim dichotomy, both at the political level and within the field of history writing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gujarat has been profoundly marked by its location at the centre of traditional trade networks which, I have argued elsewhere, has strengthened the position of its merchant communities relative to other parts of India. Here I propose that merchant religion, with its stress on purity, has displaced folk Shaktism as well as Brahminic ritual among Gujarat's wider population, to form the core of a modern Gujarati Hinduism, which includes Hindutva. This development, I hold, has been imbricated in the spread of bourgeois culture, making for a particular religious colouring of modernity in Gujarat, and contrasting with the ‘secularism’ which—perhaps exaggeratedly—has been held to characterise Occidental modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the participation and initiation of communities once classified as criminal tribes in the violence in Gujarat in 2002. Given that their descendants continue to suffer politically and economically in post-colonial India, it is necessary to examine the role of the marginalised and subordinate communities in the making of Hindutva in the twenty-first century. Building upon debates on violence in post-colonial societies, the paper examines the historical contexts for why victims often become killers in genocide. More specifically, it provides an analysis of one specific community of poor, low-caste peasants, the Dharalas, who participated in the violence against Muslims in Gujarat. The paper also examines the limits of historical methodology for the writing of histories of violence from ‘below’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Political fixers are intermediaries who use political contacts and knowledge of official procedures to facilitate the interaction between citizens and state institutions. Fixers have become a prominent feature of India's democracy as facilitators of clientelistic exchanges between voters and politicians. Through a discussion of the functioning of political fixers in Gujarat's main city, Ahmedabad, this article argues that changes in voting behaviour can be explained by looking at (changes in) the way political fixers provide access to state resources. I argue that Hindu nationalist organisations managed to gain popularity among backward castes in Gujarat because of the dependence of these communities on political fixers. As the networks of older political fixers collapsed, Hindu nationalist organisations could win a local following by offering political fixers from backward castes new channels to access state resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Commentators contemplating the hold of Hindutva in Gujarat swing between anxiously wondering whether it shows where the rest of the country is headed and complacent insistence that it is exceptional. Against the background of a wider understanding of the main drivers of Hindutva, and the pattern of its differential advance in the States and regions of India, this paper argues that the hold of Hindutva in Gujarat can be explained by a combination of three factors: aspects of its inherited caste and class structure; the levels and patterns of capitalist development; and the patterns of social polarisation their combination has produced. Given the historic fragmentation of its upper castes, Gujarat's specificity in providing exceptionally fertile ground for the growth and stabilisation of Hindutva can be attributed to the fast pace of its capitalist development and consequently fast economic advance of its middle castes and their social and political assimilation into the formerly Savarna ruling bloc through Hindutva. Given that the differences of inherited social structure and culture are differences of degree and not quality, and that capitalist and neo-liberal development is not questioned, indeed is zealously pursued everywhere in India, and given that social polarisation is considered an acceptable cost of development, Gujarat could well be the image of India's future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author focuses on the governance under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government and the outcomes of the 2004 General Election in India. He discusses the support gained by BJP from its propagation of Hindutva as a nationalist cause. He points several sectors which lacked proper governance by NDA and led to its defeat including communal violence and the lack of economic benefits to the poor.

A resurgence in Hindu nationalism in India is accompanying a burgeoning interest in Indian spiritual values in global aspirational and management literature. This article traces the shift in understandings of the economic valency of Indian spiritual values outlining the popular relation of Hindu values to economic growth and management and leadership discourse and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]