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Introduction Among the most disingenuous and carefully orchestrated playbook strategies of the Hindutva fascist movement in India, of which the current Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is part and parcel, is the manner in which it pursues its Islamophobic agenda. Arguably, there are few other spaces where Islamophobia is as dangerously manifest as it is in India today (Bazian et al. 2019 : 3–10). This is not just because of the frequency of Islamophic attacks – a daily occurrence now – or the depth
impinge on sexed bodies’. I, however, use the concept more loosely to analyse a particular right-wing run programme (and not a policy), Ved Garbh Vihar (VGV), which overly endorses neo-eugenic ideals, through Ayurvedic procedures (non-biomedical) and disciplining of the body, aimed at the larger nationalistic project of expressing Hindutva 1 identity. Hence, identity and nationalism are crucial aspects reproduced through the birth of seemingly prodigious babies! I argue that, historically
brotherhood to the world afflicted by sorrow. 2 Ambedkar, however, is depoliticised and peripheral in the praxis of the RSS. Caste is not frequently mentioned as a great ethical past, and discrimination on its basis is increasingly recognised as a problem to be dealt with. As Ambedkarite and Mandal movements revolve around the repertoire of caste as structural inequality, I argue that Hindutva constructs
. The BJP had championed this ‘Hindutva’ agenda in the 2014 election, but in 2019 it became much more emphatic. As Modi claimed at the official launch of the election campaign in March 2019, ‘Our vision is of a new India that will be in tune with its glorious past … India's 1.3 billion people have already made up their minds’ (Al Jazeera News, 2019 ). Narratives of an imagined past were effectively mobilised to anchor the passions that permeated politics leading up to and during the 2019 election. This chapter surveys how and why the Hindutva
Emotions matter to politics. Despite their importance, emotions tend to be neglected in the study of such routine aspects of politics as elections. Whereas emotions have certainly been studied in the context of spectacular political moments, this volume attends to the passions generated by elections, which have all too often been dismissed as a relatively banal dimension of politics. The volume delves into the passions evoked by India’s 2019 general election, widely billed as a ‘battle for India’s soul’. It explores the processes of social, economic and cultural change within which the election was embedded. Contributions from economists, sociologists, geographers, anthropologists and political scientists shed light on a significant political moment in India.
have remained the key attraction for competitive populism as part of the politics of secularism among secular as well as non-secular parties such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena (SS). The rise of Hindutva politics and its growing pan-Indian shape has offered a new context to look at the emerging patterns of Muslim politics in India. 5 India experienced a tectonic shift towards the right ideologically in the 2014 parliamentary election (Hasan, 2018 ; Rehman
with the more virulent strand of Hindutva politics. Thus, for instance, during the 2014 election campaign one frequently encountered Photoshopped images of the skyline in Guangzhou, China being circulated as evidence of ‘development’ in urban Gujarat under Modi. Similarly, cherry-picked statistics were used to make tall claims about the supposed virtues of the ‘Gujarat model of development’. However, in addition to this elaborate propaganda machinery erected for the explicit purpose of campaigning, BJP's campaign in 2014 was also bolstered by a
a preliminary contribution towards that end. The passionate politics of Hindu nationalist welfarism While the importance of Narendra Modi's persona and the BJP's organisational and financial prowess to the electoral outcomes cannot be ignored, the emotions that diffused through supporters need better understanding. Such emotions are shaped by the manner in which the BJP blended nationalism with Hindutva and welfarism over the past five years under Modi's watch. Modi's resounding victory is an endorsement
. 3 The RSS was founded by K. B. Hedgewar based on the ideas of V. D. Savarkar's book Hindutva (Curran Jr., 1950 ). Savarkar spoke of the common cultural identity of Hindus, where ‘Hindus’ were followers of religions that originated within India – such as Vedic Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. This imagination of India translating to official policy can, arguably, already be seen through the example of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The act expedites the granting of Indian citizenship to undocumented migrants and refugees of
produces cracks and fissures in dominant embodiments. Hindu women as victims The motif of ‘love jihad’, while asserting Hindu male prowess, and marking the spectre of illegibility as Muslim, acquires its emotional bonding through imaging ‘victimised’ Hindu woman. Interestingly, the Syro-Malabar Church in Kerala was among the early proponents of the idea that a ‘love jihad’ was being waged: the idea has subsequently been appropriated and amplified by Hindutva supporters. Scholars have explored ‘changing configurations of power’ in