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Questo contributo riguarda l'ascesa del nazionalismo religioso hindutva, ovvero della reinterpretazione dell'identità religiosa indù in termini etnocentrici, e del suo effetto sulla società indiana. A questo fine, ricostruisce in breve i tratti caratteristici dell'ideologia hindutva, cioè la forma di nazionalismo religioso che si rifà all'induismo, mostrando come si tratti di un'interpretazione parziale e riduttiva dell'autentica ricchezza di tale tradizione induista. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sundarbans as a region is shared between Bangladesh (60%) and India (40%) and forms an intriguing geography to understand not only the consequences of macro‐political landmarks such as the partition, it is an arable field to explore the intersections of people, history, and politics‐ with a particular recognition of the constructions, constitutions, and manifestations of shifting, undefined, cultural and physical borders. This paper contends that Hindu nationalism in the Indian Sundarbans borderlands emerges as a result of what Sigmund Freud called ‘narcissism of minor differences’ between the Bengalis across borders and it makes for a distinct kind of nationalism that unfavourably impacts the Muslim Bengalis in the region. I situate that the ongoing aggressive Hindu nationalism in India's Bengal is a classic case of narcissism of minor differences and understanding its nuances can illuminate the multiple ways in which variant forms of nationalism are highly appropriated and propagated. Secondly, the study addresses how the liminal borderlands are fertile fields for such type of nationalism. Lastly, in order to further problematise the actors and the activism around nationalism, I study the work of Hindu nationalist women who volunteer with the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti to map and appraise the gendered aspect of this discourse. The Bengali Hindu Samiti women dedicate much of their nationalist activism in emphasising on both territorial and cultural borders and target Bengali Muslims who have migrated from Bangladesh and with whom they share deep civilisational and cultural sameness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India is increasingly described as an 'ethnic democracy', 'populist majoritarian autocracy' or 'ethnocracy': a form of rule supported by an electoral majority rooted in ethnic affiliation, with limited and eroding checks and balances that would protect minorities. Over the past decade, constitutional arrangements shifted, 'dog-whistle' laws were passed and legal institutions starved of resources. In studying these developments, we want to ground generic studies of populist/majoritarian/autocratic law by unpacking the specific Indian version of it: how does Hindutva as a political ideology and the current dispensation as political agents conceive of the rule of law, its purpose and function? Which rules do they want the law to follow? We combine papers that trace Hindutva's own ideological commitments with those tracking material changes in legislation or jurisprudence and map out their differential consequences for India's minorities, culminating in a wider reflection on the rule(s) of law under autocratic circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant scholarship on anti-Christian violence in India is scant and predominantly focuses on physical violence. To address this gap, this article explores Freedom of Religion laws (also referred to as anti-conversion laws) as an example of structural violence faced by India's Christians. Thus far, scholars have studied these as a constitutional violation that denies a Christian's freedom of religion. Using Johan Galtung's violence framework, this article seeks to recast these laws as a form of structural violence against Christians. In doing so, it will show how Hindutva's anxieties about the demographic and political 'Christian threat' have become embedded into the law. Through an exploration of the southern state of Karnataka, where the Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion was passed in 2022, this article seeks to show how this structural violence interacts and reinforces forms of direct and cultural violence, creating a system of anti-Christian violence designed to maintain India's 'Hindu majority'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the important aspect of India's democratic decline, the ascendance of the Hindu majoritarian state, and its relationship with the law. It argues that the law is central to the Hindu majoritarian project but often in obscurely informal ways. India's majoritarian state seeks to radically reconfigure the law in Indian social life by making the rule of law inapplicable to its minorities. Through a series of examples drawn from the everyday socio-legal life in contemporary India, the article shows how arbitrary and extralegal state violence is endorsed, affirmed, and acquiesced on grounds of serving ethnonationalist values and interests. It theoretically develops the novel interpretive framework of 'the irregular' to capture the practices of the ethnicization of the law, ethnonationalist legitimisation of extra-legality through intense political mobilisation, and the production of subordinated minority citizenship without the formal incorporation of graded citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the fate of the rule of law in India that is transitioning to an ethnocracy? Drawing on a 'thin' conception of the rule of law, this article argues that the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act responds to the emergence of a political ideal that constructs the Hindu ethnos as central to the Indian nation. Drawing on a variety of sources that include pronouncements by leaders of the RSS, the ideological fount of India's ruling BJP, analysis of right-wing periodicals that function as a conveyor belt of social ideas, and the provisions of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), this article highlights the core themes that motivate the will of the Hindu ethnos in respect of the contentious legislation: (i) the persecution of the Hindu minorities in India's Muslim-majority neighbours; (ii) the discrimination faced by Dalits in particular and (iii) the establishment of India as a Hindu Zion. In the first section, I elaborate the concept of 'ethnocracy'. The second section reflects on the fate of the rule of law in an ethnocratic India by analysing the social justifications for the introduction of the contentious CAA. In the third section, I situate these dynamics within India's broader transition to an ethnocracy, the political ideals that shape this transition, and the shared social norms that emerge from this transition, which feeds back to the rule of law in an ethnocracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "love jihad" conspiracy theory in India purports that Muslim men are deceptively seducing or kidnapping non-Muslim women in large numbers to convert and marry them. State laws in India have moved to control conversions—resulting in legislation as disinformation—and sparked violent attacks against Muslims. We identify this as the third wave of state-level anti-conversion laws in India and study how the conspiracy theory is embedded into the text of the law and its relation to the current period of Hindu nationalist ascendancy. Combining narrative analysis of the 2021 Gujarat amendment and interrogating the everyday experiences of interfaith couples who face administrative, police, and vigilante violence we analyze the infrastructure and frameworks of Hindu nationalist ideological dominance in India today. Our study questions the presumptions that underlie the characterization of India as a "democracy" considering the current political, ideological, and legal configurations in the country under the BJP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The search for an origin of the nation is destined to remain structured by an aporia that signals the productive irresolution of signification. In a sense, presence is always to arrive in the future, to be made anew. In post-colonial India the Muslim other embodies the ghostly trace of an undecidable figure that characterizes the aporia at the heart of the claim of Hindutva nationalism to a universal purchase on Mother India. The Muslim other then, as the ghost of the undecidable, becomes a metaphor for the fundamental fracture or split in the Hindutva nationalist imaginary, a specter which cannot be resolved and which indeed founds the very (im)possibility of the Hindutva Indian nation itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This manuscript examines the experiences of Muslims in India with hate on digital platforms. Extant research on Islamophobia on digital platforms offers analyses of the various discourses circulating on digital platforms. This manuscript builds on that research to document the experiences of online hate among Muslims in India based on a survey of 1,056 Muslims conducted by Qualtrics, a panelbased survey company, between November 2021 and December 2021. The findings point to the intersections between white supremacist and Hindutva Alt-Right messages on digital platforms, delineating the fascist threads that form the convergent infrastructures of digital hate. Moreover, they document the extensive exposure of Muslims in India to Islamophobic hate on digital platforms, raising critical questions about their health and wellbeing. The paper wraps up with policy recommendations regarding strategies for addressing online Islamophobic hate on digital platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on radicalization are rapidly increasing. The main topics examined are the problems related to the definition of radicalization and the reasons that lead to the radicalization of individuals/groups. The most discussed of the subjects studied is the process of radical ideas turning into violent extremism. In this study, the concept of cultural violence, which was developed by Galtung to understand the root causes of direct violence, is used. Cultural violence will be examined for its effects on radicalization. The main claim of the study is that cultural violence radicalizes individuals within communities because it causes stigma and marginalization among communities. The Indian example will be considered to test the main claim of the study. As followers of the Hindutva ideology, which emerged a century ago in India, came to power in the last ten years, violence and discrimination against Muslims have increased. Under the influence of Hindutva ideology, both Hindu youth and Muslim youth are pushed to extremes, and acts of violence against Muslims, who have been culturally excluded, stigmatized and marginalized for years, occur physically. However, it is not possible to explain the radicalization of Muslim and Hindu youth by only considering the cases of physical violence. To understand the radicalizing effects among communities, it is necessary to look at the process that develops before the outbreak of physical violence, that is, in Galtung's words, the basis of cultural violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay briefly discusses accounts of violence in India before reviewing three recent books that examine the place of violence in Indian political thought. All three books provide insights into the minds of some of the thinkers who have shaped modern India. While two of the authors focus on Mahatma Gandhi and V. D. Savarkar, respectively, the third is more wide-ranging in focus. All three books are important contributions to the study of violence in India, but also a reminder that India's founding figures remain the objects of contestation and appropriation by political parties and movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent trend has confounded observers of India's political system. Dalits—a population that has historically been deprived of vital resources and socially ostracized by upper-caste Hindus—have increasingly given their vote to the Hindu nationalist movement led by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). Why have some members of India's most marginalized caste come to support a party that has preserved caste hierarchies and catered to the socially dominant sections of society? This article explores this question through the case of Kerala, where Dalit support for the BJP is additionally perplexing given the state's history of left-led governments that have implemented far-reaching redistributive reforms that greatly benefited Dalits. Nevertheless, in recent years the Hindu nationalists have made significant inroads among Kerala's Dalit population. Drawing on two hundred interviews and eight months of ethnography, this article identifies two major factors driving Dalits' defection to the BJP. The first is linked to the communist parties' (CPs') agricultural land redistribution program which, despite being the most ambitious of its kind in modern India, excluded the majority of Dalits and reinscribed caste hierarchies. The second factor is the cultural discrimination Dalits face while working in the CPs, including being grossly underrepresented in the party leadership. The BJP exploits these grievances by providing representation to Dalit cadres who are embedded in strategic majority-Dalit neighborhoods. These cadres win popular support through welfare brokering and also by constructing a new narrative that portrays the CPs as casteist and the BJP as a more socially just alternative for Kerala's Dalits. This article makes sense of these findings by drawing on Nancy Fraser's concept of bivalent oppression to advance a novel Gramscian theory of "bivalent hegemony." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few years, India has witnessed cataclysmic incidents of intermittent violence under the banner of Hindutva. Hindutva is a political ideology which works on extremist agenda to establish a homogenized cultural hegemony by focussing on exclusivist interests of Hindu majoritarian. It advocates revisionist attitude towards Hindu mythical figures by projecting them as prototypes of hypermasculinity to coax common Hindus with pseudo-patriotism. This article discusses on how Hindutva uses the principle of masculinity as its conceptual framework and its ramification on the socio-cultural fabric of India. It also deliberates on the fundamental essence of bhakti tradition, which largely contests Hindutva on ideological plane. Furthermore, it demonstrates the significance of bhakti literature in the present social context by alluding to the rich repository of saint poets whose verses critique Hindutva with a message of humanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of Hindu nationalist ideologies in public universities in India has partly been accredited to the growing prominence of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP). The ABVP is the student organization of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and operates on college campuses. For most observers, ABVP's influence is linked to the dominance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), RSS' political organ. But in the Western Maharashtrian city of Pune, a region that has had an ABVP presence for several generations, the unit explicitly denies all associations with the BJP. In this article, I explore the historical and strategic logics behind this denial. I argue that the ABVP's strategy in Pune is part of a longer and understudied history of an anti-political discourse that emerged in universities over the course of a century. By appealing to apolitical student interests, the ABVP is further contributing to universities becoming key sites for the production of Hindu nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This viewpoint delves into the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) determined efforts to transform itself into a prominent political force in Tamil Nadu, a state dominated by Dravidian parties for over half a century. Despite the formidable stronghold of regional parties, the BJP has strategically undertaken a series of measures to position itself as a credible alternative. As a Hindu nationalist party, it has navigated the complex political landscape by adopting innovative strategies. This viewpoint examines the BJP's journey, highlighting its nuanced steps to gain a foothold in a historically challenging environment. By scrutinising these measures, the viewpoint sheds light on the party's evolution, emphasising its determination to emerge as a viable option amidst the enduring influence of Dravidian politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do India and Pakistan always quarrel over terrorism? The prevailing arguments more often implicate intriguing South Asian geopolitics surrounding the unresolved Kashmir dispute or pathological partition of British India in 1947 to explain this puzzle. Surprisingly, why and how the two countries verbalise terrorism has hardly been investigated in a comparative framework as a potential underpinning of this historical syndrome. This void has deprived South Asia's existing literature and public and policy debates of an understanding of the underlying determinants of the terrorism discourse. Namely, how has the discourse originated, what are its distinct metaphysics, and how it has shaped and normalised discursive practices at significant moments in the history of these two countries, and with what consequences? This article responds to these broader questions. It argues that among other vital underpinnings, the Indo-Pakistan terrorism discourse, with its origins in colonialism, functions to institute and enable rival practices of exclusionary politics, doublespeak and propaganda. More importantly, it nurtures self-fulfilling concepts of statehood deriving from a constructed "real" reality characterising an imagined geopolitical pathology that, in turn, perpetuates Indo-Pakistan imperialism. In addressing this argument, the paper makes multiple original contributions, including identifying research avenues and indicating various intersecting causes of friction that afford reconciliation possibilities to the stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyze the Islamophobic politics at the heart of citizenship denial in the context of India's CAA-NRC legislation in December 2019 by the Indian Parliament under the leadership of the BJP. The politics of citizenship denial in India thus emerges in appearance as a legal tussle between the Muslim minority citizenship rights and Hindu nationalism in India. However, the biopolitical fracture of the Indian nation-state makes the legal ideal of citizenship further complicated for Muslim minority citizens in India. Tracing the logic of the paradoxical position of Muslim citizenship discourse in India by following its contradictory existence in law, state, and nationalism, this article reveals the limitations of appeal to citizenship, and the necessity need for the question questioning of the biopolitical fracture, wherein the distinction between citizen and non-citizen translates into those with rights and without rights. This article further proposes that rather than sticking to the idealism of citizenship, a critical analysis of Islamophobia and its political correlates must attend to the negative position of the Muslim subject in with respect to the biopolitical fracture at the core of Indian nationalism and the modern nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the digital era, communities with common interests interacting on social media often lead to varying mobilizations. Augmented with an imagined sense of community (nation), these interactions fuel ultra-nationalist sentiments. This leads to the production of communal violence that targets minorities. The increase in anti-Muslim reportage done by mainstream media in recent years has also legitimized the systemic othering of Muslims. Calls for violence and genocide against Muslims have now become the new normal in India. In this light, social media's rise signifies a tectonic shift resulting in the creation of a majoritarian digital Hindu identity that facilitates the state's goal of institutionalized hate. In this article, we try to evaluate how the democratization of social media platforms functions as a tool for political mobilization and how, when exploited by digital hate-driven communities, this results in violence against minorities. Through a comprehensive analysis of such digital assemblies in the Indian context, we seek to acknowledge this culture of hate that is taking digital India by storm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radikalleşme ile ilgili çalışmalar hızla artmaktadır. Tartışılan konuların başında, radikalleşmenin tanımı ile ilgili sorunlar ve bireylerin/grupların radikalleşmesine yol açan nedenler bulunmaktadır. Çalışılan konuların en çok dikkat çektiği husus ise radikal fikirlerin şiddet içeren eylemlere dönüşme sürecidir. Bu çalışmada Johan Galtung tarafından şiddetin kökeninde yer alan nedenleri anlamaya yönelik geliştirilmiş olan kültürel şiddet kavramının radikalleşmeye etkisi incelenecektir. Çalışmanın temel iddiası, kültürel şiddetin topluluklar arasında damgalama ve ötekileştirmeye yol açması nedeniyle topluluklar içerisinde yer alan bireyleri radikalleştirdiğidir. Bu iddiayı test etmek maksadıyla Hindistan örneği ele alınacaktır. Hindistan’da yüzyıl önce ortaya çıkmış olan Hindutva ideolojisinin son on yılda iktidar olmasıyla Müslümanlara yönelik şiddet ve ayrımcılık artmıştır. Hindutva ideolojisinin etkisiyle hem Hindu gençleri hem de Müslüman gençler aşırı uçlara itilmekte ve yıllarca kültürel olarak dışlanan, damgalanan ve ötekileştirilen Müslümanlara yönelik şiddet eylemleri fiziksel bir şekilde ortaya çıkmaktadır. Ancak yalnızca ortaya çıkan fiziksel şiddet vakalarını ele alarak Müslüman ve Hindu gençlerin radikalleşmelerini açıklamak mümkün değildir. Topluluklar arasındaki radikalleştirici etkileri anlayabilmek için fiziksel şiddetin patlak vermesinden önce gelişen sürece yani Galtung’un deyimiyle kültürel şiddetin temeline bakmak gerekmektedir.

Nationalism in Asia and Africa is generally understood as a modern secular movement for independence. However, this idea is contestable. Analysing nationalism in India and the Sudan, this paper argues that nationalist movements there actually had their origins in Islamic religious resistance against the British colonial rule preceding the development of secular nationalism. Depending on political development following the colonial advancement, the secular elite‐led nationalism also largely fostered religious communal nationalism in India and the Sudan. This substantiates the argument that religion never ceased to play the most central role in the nationalist movements in India and the Sudan. Following an inter‐continental approach to study nationalism, this article explores exclusively the connection between religion and the first ever generic nationalist movements in the context of colonialism in India and the Sudan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractRenewables in India are presented as modern technologies ensuring a pathway towards sustainable development and unlimited growth. But this story entails problematic land politics and the reconfiguration of space for resource frontiers’ expansion, local state formation, and ethno-religious authoritarian agendas: for the past 20 years, Kutch district of Gujarat state in Western India has experienced several waves of land liberalisation and industrialisation programmes, including wind power projects, but its proximity with Pakistan and the presence of Muslim pastoral populations on both sides of the border have also fostered Hindu nationalist movements since 1947. The development of wind energy projects in Western India follows traditional patterns of a regime of dispossession: a set of “inscription devices” assemble and disassemble land in a discursive, bureaucratic, and violent way and affix an official stamp of legality on damaging mechanisms of dispossession within a state-specific regime. But as wind projects move to borderland territories, their associated regime of dispossession aligns with long-term exclusive ethno-religious conceptions of space as Hindu. The unfolding land politics endorses the Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral strategy to capture the remaining constituencies and co-opt minority leaders, while agents enforcing wind’s regime of dispossession see an opportunity to assert upper-caste Hindu supremacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmaavat, a Bollywood period drama, engendered a variety of conversations about identity, history, etc. in India. This article examines the ways in which the reception of the film performatively produced a genre of history in the Indian public sphere. Such performative productions of history as a genre runs counter to the prevalent notion of history as pre-given with concrete referents and past incidents. The allegation of "distortion" (of "history") is mobilized as a psychoanalytic resource to demonstrate this point. In the process, I note how the existing approaches to Hindu nationalism are inadequate in their critical clarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the two waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in India in 2020–2021. It disaggregates the different narratives constructed by the Hindu right-wing in online circles. It shows that by instrumentalizing the interactive and multimodal features of social media, the Hindu Right amplified the notion of Muslims as contaminants in the first wave of the breakout, accusing them of weakening the otherwise sacred, virus-resistant Indian nation. During the second wave, the Hindu Right downplayed the role of the Kumbh Mela, a major Hindu pilgrimage and festival, as a super-spreader event. Criticisms of the Hindu festival was deemed a foreign conspiracy aimed at harming India's body politic. The article argues that the Hindu Right capitalized on the COVID-19 crisis to promote religified and somatisized ideals of a 'muscular Hindu India' weakened by the Muslim Other from within. This narrative heightened the schism between Hindus and Muslims in India, with long-lasting effects that outlive the pandemic itself. Finally, the article problematizes the notion that digital technologies and virtual spaces necessarily overcome physical barriers and divisions, arguing instead that in the case of the right-wing Hindu Twittersphere, social media congealed intra-communal solidarities and inter-communal antagonisms online echoing divisions in the non-digital, offline world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains how Modi's government aligned its offensive military actions (targeting Pakistan) in the wake of the Pulwama incident with the ruling party's ideological stance of right-wing populism. The net outcome of this adroit strategy saw the BJP bolster its electoral strength amidst its initially dwindling electoral position in 2019. The author draws inspiration from literature that connects right-wing populism and Hindu nationalism in relation to the shifting political dynamics in India. The core hypothesis of the study posits that Modi's aggressive military response during the Pulwama/Balakot crisis significantly influenced voter perceptions and contributed to the BJP's electoral success in 2019. The ensuing analysis probes the publicly reported instances wherein strategic use of national security rhetoric and military achievements was made to galvanise nationalist sentiments. This study highlights the broader implications of right-wing populism and Hindu nationalism on India's political and societal dynamics, raising concerns about the possibility of employment of military instrument for political advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article examines the challenges faced by the Muslim community in India, particularly in relation to Hindu nationalism. It discusses a meeting held in 1964 where Muslim leaders gathered to address the injustices and violence against Muslims in India. The article also explores the erasure of Muslim history and identity in the modern reconfiguration of Delhi. It argues against framing the Muslim experience solely in terms of Hindutva and emphasizes the need to examine the narratives and meanings produced by the dominant discourse. The article raises questions about the use of the term "Indian Muslims" and the historicity of India and Hindu identities. It discusses the disciplining of Muslimness in anti-Hindutva rhetoric and the challenges faced by Muslim activists in India. The article highlights the Solidarity Youth Movement's public event, which aimed to question the constitutional validity of anti-terrorism legislation and shed light on human rights violations against the Muslim community. It also explores the concept of Critical Muslim Studies, which seeks to counter Eurocentric frames and empower Muslims to tell their own stories. The articles in this special issue challenge discourses on Hindu nationalism and invite further theoretical interventions to reorient Muslimness. [Extracted from the article]

This article charts the different modalities of political transgression that marked an act of religious conversion and inter-faith marriage performed by a Muslim female subject in contemporary India, and the subsequent misreading of this transgression; a misreading made possible by liberal political thought's delineations of the conceptual category of "interest". Existing legal, political, academic, and popular discourses have read the prominent 2016 event of the conversion of a Hindu woman named Akhila into Islam, as either the "false consciousness" of a "vulnerable" individual whose self-interests were unintelligible to herself, or, as an unambiguous case of a "mature" woman in a "modernising" Kerala "choosing" to opt for an inter-faith marriage and to convert; a liberal idiom of choice that thereby needs to be safeguarded via Constitutional provisions. The article, even while acknowledging the political need to adhere to the latter reading/constitution of the female (Islamic) subject's sovereign desire to convert, shows some of the limitations of both these ideologically antithetical positions. It argues that the desire of Hadiya (Akhila's new name after converting to Islam) to convert remains unreadable by both the right-wing Indian judiciary, backed up by Hindutva forces, as well as the "left-liberal" feminist intelligentsia that sought to support her autonomy. In fact, both these ideologically opposed stances often legitimised each other. By examining the legal debates that took place in the Indian courts, the article shows how construing Hadiya's act of conversion solely through the legal-juridical prisms of "religious freedom" and "choice", pegged to the concept of self-interest, is vigorously insufficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is an attempt to unpack the famous "Hindutva verdict" of 1995, by specifically paying attention to the construction of culture and its relationship with Hinduism in India. The verdict opens up an avenue to think afresh about the relationship between the state and religion in the context of Hinduism, supporting me to argue that the question of (religious) authority for Hinduism is distinctly connected to secular sovereignty unlike in the case of Islam or Christianity. This in turn suggests that there is no authoritative distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva since these discourses are the products of the state's ongoing effort to define Hinduism as the context demands. The practice of the state in authorizing acts, attitudes, norms, and sensibilities that are deemed Hindu is encased in the construct of culture and its various enunciations such as legal and rhetoric. One must attend to the genealogy of culture in order to understand the nature of authority in Hinduism as well as the form of sovereignty recognized and exercised in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lot of attention has been paid within academic and journalistic literature to how India's relationship with Israel has improved under the rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Looking beyond this, the objective of this article is to assess the position of Palestine and its liberation struggle within the Global Hindu Nationalist imaginary. The study's main argument, therefore, is that the broader Palestinian liberation struggle, in its pluralism, its global scope, and its interconnectivity with various struggles over the course of its history, implicitly represents a refutation of the core ideological mechanisms that underpin the Hindu Nationalist Project, including but not limited to its othering of Muslims and other non-Hindu groups as well as its more recent embrace of neoliberal capitalism. More explicitly, the articles argues that the way Hindu Nationalists construct Indian Muslim and Palestinian subjectivities as being analogous and connected through tropes of them as invaders and terrorists – in line with broader imperialist constructions of Muslim subjectivities – is a key feature of Global Hindutva's globality. To make this argument, this article first examines the literature on the historical relationship between Hindu Nationalism and Zionist settler colonialism. After this, the article analyses the overlap between Indian state and Hindutva positions on the Palestine Question before exploring practical tensions between the Hindutva outlook and the Palestinian liberation struggle. The final section of the article explores how Global Hindutva's historic and strategic alignment against the Palestinian liberation struggle manifests in both Indian foreign and domestic policy and in Hindu Nationalist mobilisations across the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the relationship between nation-making and the emergence of Islamophobia in India. Studies on anti-Muslim violence and Islamophobia in India either tend to dismiss the concept or limit its deployment by identifying it within the actions of Hindu nationalist groups situating their rise as an exception to India's secular and multicultural trajectory. Premising on the idea that Islamophobia should be understood as the negation of Muslim political subjectivity this article argues that Hindutva is not an aberration. Rather, it is a continuation of the Indian nation-making project with the Muslim placed as the other of this project. Further, the article frames India as a racial state and this argument would include identifying its systemic nature by looking at the sections of the Indian constitutions and constituent assembly debates. Thus, the Indian state will be understood not as a mere facilitator but as an embodiment of Brahminical hegemony that generates racial conflict and divisions and attempts to exclude or eliminate Muslimness through homogenizing or marginalizing processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times many indigenous Muslim groups in Assam have asserted their ethnic identities as Deshi, Goriya, Moriya by distancing themselves from the immigrant Miya Muslims. In this regard, they have received much patronage from the current BJP government. These developments have happened in the background of the consolidation of Hindutva in Assam and the consequent otherization of the Muslim community as a whole. This paper has two objectives: First, it tries to understand why a separate identity consciousness among indigenous Muslims have emerged. Secondly, it goes on to explore as to why indigenous Muslims in recent times have offered political support to the BJP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This manuscript examines the experiences of Muslims in India with hate on digital platforms. Extant research on Islamophobia on digital platforms offers analyses of the various discourses circulating on digital platforms. This manuscript builds on that research to document the experiences of online hate among Muslims in India based on a survey of 1,056 Muslims conducted by Qualtrics, a panel-based survey company, between November 2021 and December 2021. The findings point to the intersections between white supremacist and Hindutva Alt-Right messages on digital platforms, delineating the fascist threads that form the convergent infrastructures of digital hate. Moreover, they document the extensive exposure of Muslims in India to Islamophobic hate on digital platforms, raising critical questions about their health and wellbeing. The paper wraps up with policy recommendations regarding strategies for addressing online Islamophobic hate on digital platforms.

'Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain'! ('Say it with pride, we are Hindu!') has long been the chant of an ascendent and assertive Hindu nationalist chorus. This paper examines the role of pride in the context of Hindutva. I begin with an overview of Hindutva and locate the notion of pride among the earliest of its canonical texts. I then turn to the concept of pride to better understand this trait of character. After briefly recounting episodes from a history of persistent discrimination against Indian New Zealanders, I argue that the narratives of identity deployed by Hindutva ideologues aim to prop up a sense of Hindu pride and intervene in the Indian diaspora's negotiations of belonging as migrant settlers. The pride in a Hindu identity that Hindutva seeks to instil is based on a principle of othering, intertwined with which is the seeding and circulation of Islamophobia. Although this explanation is frequently given in the existing literature on Hindutva, most notably in Aotearoa/New Zealand by Mohan J. Dutta, the idea is briefly stated. This paper brings together three distinct conversations -- on Hindutva, pride and Indian New Zealanders -- to make sense of a rising adoption of this political ideology among the Indian Hindu diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the massive victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2014 parliamentary elections, India has seen an entrenchment of the politics of Hindutva, a political-cultural justification of Hindu nationalism and of Hindu hegemony within India. Society and politics in India are experiencing unprecedented transformation under the forces unleashed by Hindu nationalism. The vision that framed the Constitution and the making of the modern Indian nation-state and parliamentary democracy are under challenge. This article discusses three books that assess this trend: Thomas Blom Hansen (2021), The Law of Force: The Violent Heart of Indian Politics, Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane (2021), To Kill a Democracy: India's Passage to Despotism, and Badri Narayan (2021), Republic of Hindutva: How the Sangh Is Reshaping Indian Democracy. This article seeks to shed some light on these processes of transformation in Indian society and politics and mull the prospects for Indian democracy. These books, through taking different analytical frameworks and with varying emphases, provide invaluable insights into the social and political dynamics of contemporary India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India today exemplifies the making of an "ethnocracy," a polity in which the dominant ethnic group obtains political control and deploys the state apparatus to ethnicize territory and society. I illustrate the making of India's ethnocracy by documenting key political and policy practices of Narendra Modi's rule. I do this by offering evidence of this process by documenting: (1). the contest between the dominant Hindus and minority Muslims over territorial space and the public realm; (2). solidifying Hindutva ethno-nationalism; which builds on and consolidates; and (3). long-term political and economic stratification between Hindus and Muslims. However, the making of India's ethnocracy has not gone unchallenged. Therefore, I direct attention to the resistance mounted against India's ethnocratic turn in the institutional, political and social terrains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This self-reflective essay explores the wider implications of the BJP's inauguration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, from the perspective of a scholar of Sanskrit and classical Indian religions. What questions does it raise about our relationship with history, heritage, decolonization and the politics of memory? How can one decolonize oneself and society by reclaiming tradition and heritage, without political agendas and misinterpretations of the past? The article argues for a critical, non-passive, creative, reclamation of tradition for the formation of a truly free decolonized political consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though early research suggested that right-leaning groups were a radicalized monolith, recent shifts in research are producing far more nuanced accounts. Our article contributes to this effort by spotlighting novel discursive strategies of right-leaning groups in India that leverage decolonization rhetoric, democratic governance, and other seemingly left-leaning rationales to mobilize right-wing groups against global technology companies, especially Twitter (now X).¹ We collected and analyzed publicly accessible data from Koo—an alternative social networking platform populated with discourses of India’s ideological right. We then used critical discourse analysis to identify the discursive strategies of right-leaning users on Koo deployed to challenge the power of global technology companies – calls for data localization, veiled suppression, and paternalism and responsibility [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview of the Popular Front of India (PFI) and its response to Hindu nationalism in India. It highlights that the PFI's main focus is resistance to Hindu nationalism, rather than terrorism, despite being declared an "unlawful association" by the Indian government. The PFI aims to build a grassroots socio-political movement to defend Muslims and marginalized communities against the rise of Hindu nationalism. The article also discusses the challenges faced by Muslim political responses to Hindu nationalism, including the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the relationship between the PFI and the Social Democratic Party of India (SdPI). It concludes by emphasizing the need for countering majoritarianism through democratic institutions. The given text is a list of references and sources related to the PFI and Muslim responses to Hindu nationalism, which can be useful for library patrons conducting research on this topic. [Extracted from the article]

Since people began interacting in computer-mediated spaces, there has been a need to block or silence abusive users. In 2014, Gamergate--a purported campaign for "ethics in game journalism," which often seemed a misogynist protest against women in computer gaming-- brought the issue of online harassment to popular attention and inspired a wave of tools and techniques to mitigate online abuse. Yet, it remains a serious problem. Individuals, particularly activists and political dissidents, can face intense harassment on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), designed to silence their speech. This paper proposes a method to block likely abusers on X, using Kashmiri dissidents and Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) harassers as a case study. We first interviewed six Kashmiri dissidents who use social media for their activism to better understand their unique online experiences. Then, using a combination of text analysis and social network analysis, based on a sampling of accounts provided by the interviewees, we developed a novel filtering method. Our tests indicate that the model is 97% effective at identifying accounts that were previously blocked for harassment. This model could be useful for screening interactions on X, and preemptively filtering any it identifies as potential harassment. While it may no longer be appropriate for protecting Kashmiri users--many of whom have fled social media platforms--this model could be used in other minority communities and on other social media platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article establishes racial thinking as central to V. D. Savarkar's (1883–1966) founding theory of Hindutva. Savarkar's issue with the Muslims was not that they were irreducibly "other," a foreign race polluting Hindu "blood." Jettisoning racial and caste purity, Savarkar instead grounded Hindutva's myth of a single Hindu race in all-round biological admixture. "Miscegenation," as it was conceptualized by Nazis and white supremacists at the time, buttressed Hindutva's tremendous violence against Muslims, whose annihilation would come through gendered incorporation. Savarkar redefined the caste system as the crucible of the Hindu race, its endless proliferation testimony to a history of intermarriage expired in the present age. To reestablish the broken bonds of the Hindu race, Savarkar championed intercaste marriage. He offered the same solution to the "Muslim problem." Muslims, who had carved themselves out of the Hindu race, needed to be reclaimed through conversion coupled with (forced) marriage, sex, and reproduction with a Hindu. Yet only Muslim women could be appropriated in this way, as paternity imparted race; Muslim men would be crushed in their potentiality for sovereignty and decimated in war with the Hindus. Savarkar, this article concludes, based the Hindu body politic on kinship and a vision of gendered incorporation modeled on war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital infrastructure of Hindutva seeds, circulates and amplifies Islamophobic hate, interacting bidirectionally with brick-and-mortar violence. This paper examines the circulation of Hindutva on digital platforms (Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Telegram) around the intercommunal violence that emerged in Leicester in September 2022. Based on a digital ethnography of Twitter, interconnected digital platforms, and Hindutva media (Hindutva-related digital video channels such as Citti Media on YouTube, mainstream broadcast media such as NewsX, and text-based digital platforms such as OpIndia), the analysis theorizes the global flow of Hindutva across geographically dispersed contexts, connecting the diaspora with India, creating an uninterrupted communication infrastructure around the frame of the “Hindu in danger,” simultaneously intersecting with white supremacy in producing and amplifying Islamophobic hate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]