Court'ing Hindu Nationalism: Law and the rise of modern Hindutva (original) (raw)

Against the Witness: Hindu Nationalism and the Law in India

In the aftermath of anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat, India, in 2002, NGOs and activists encouraged survivors to testify against Hindu perpetrators in court. Through an ethnographic analysis of a criminal trial in the lower courts of Ahmedabad, I show how state officials and perpetrators used legal procedures to transform Muslim survivors into unreliable witnesses in the courtroom. These formal and informal techniques to destabilize Muslim witnesses are best understood not as byproducts of the law’s failure to address mass violence, but as a legal performance of Hindu supremacy. Procedural and positivistic approaches to the rule of law failed to address the law as a performance embedded in the context of Hindu nationalism in Gujarat. Not only do such trials discredit witnesses of mass violence, but they also give a legal form to the subordinate status of religious minorities within a majoritarian political regime.

‘Belief' in Law and Hindu Majoritarianism: The Rise of the Hindu Nation

Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India Angana P. Chatterji, Thomas Blom Hansen and Christophe Jaffrelot (eds), 2019

This chapter focuses on how the politics of ‘belief’ is the central thread that stiches together the relationship between secularism, equality and religion in law and pivotal to crafting the Hindu Right’s project of constructing the Indian nation as a Hindu Rashtra (nation). The analysis of Indian secularism has been subject to rigorous scrutiny. However, there remains an underlying conviction that secularism is an inherently neutral liberal concept that has been threatened and manipulated primarily by the rise and politics of the Hindu Right the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian Peoples Party) (BJP) since the early 1990s). I argue that religion is integral to the understanding of secularism in India (and offers insights relevant to other liberal democratic states). I illustrate this point by analysing how religion (of the minority community) is invariably set up in opposition to gender equality in both legal advocacy as well as the advocacy of the Hindu Right. This oppositional framing obscures the majoritarian underpinnings and normative scaffolding of the right to gender equality as well as how the Hindu Right is using gender equality to position itself as a saviour of Muslim women from what it claims is the discriminatory and subordinating treatment by Muslim men. I specifically discuss the majoritarian underpinnings of gender equality in relation to the Indian Supreme Court’s 2017 decision on triple talaq as well as its interventions on what has been described as the ‘love jihad’ (love revolution) cases, involving the conversion of Hindu women to Islam and their subsequent marriage to Muslim men. I further illustrate my argument by analysing the role of religion in the constitutional discourse of secularism in India and how this has been used as a technique to establish and reinforce Hindu majoritarianism and transform the very identity of the Indian nation-state. I discuss a series of decisions by the Indian Supreme Court to illustrate how the higher judiciary has endorsed the Hindu Right’s majoritarian and homogenizing understanding of religion that serves this primary objective of establishing the nation’s identity as Hindu.

Secularism's Last Sigh?: The Hindu Right, the Courts, and India's Struggle for Democracy

2008

The struggle to secure the constitutional and political protection of secularism in India has been long and difficult. Recently, the Hindu Right- a nationalist and right wing political movement devoted to creating a Hindu State- has hijacked the dominant understanding of secularism as the equal respect of all religions in order to promote its vision of Hindutva and its agenda of establishing a Hindu State. Its' emphasis on the formal equal-treatment of all religions operates as an unmodified majoritarianism whereby the dominant Hindu community becomes the norm against which all others are to be judged- threatening the rights of minority religious communities. In Manohar Joshi v. Nitin Bbaurao Patil and eleven other cases (collectively known as the "Hindurva" cases), the Supreme Court of India delivered a mixed message to the cause of secularism. In this Article, we examine two deeply problematic aspects of the Supreme Court's judgment: (1) its conclusion that hindu...

Rewriting India: The Construction of the ‘Hindutva’ Citizen in the Indian state

Third World Alternatives to International Law Review, 2020

The paper sheds light on India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) insidious use of legitimate state power through administrative regulation, constitutionalism, citizenship determination, adoption of international law and neoliberal economic policies, to further its ‘Hindutva’ ideology. This reflection focuses on two aspects. First, we show how, by implementing the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) along with other national documentation regimes, the government is using facially neutral administrative regulations to construct the ‘documented’ Indian citizen. This ‘citizen’ is made to fit with Hindutva ideals by disenfranchising Muslims and threatening the de facto and de jure citizenship of nondominant caste Hindus and other groups that challenge the ideology. While these state actions may seem distinct, they resemble traditional colonial practices that the BJP is skilfully adopting to advance its discriminatory political ends. Second, we show that, with the CAA, the BJP is perversely using the humanitarian principles of refugee law to construct neighbouring Muslim states as savage, and whose victims have to be protected by the Hindutva state. Thus, India is replicating the practices of liberal, democratic states of the Global North that continue to use logics of coloniality, exceptionalism and racism to maintain systemic inequities and embed oppressions.

Towards a Hindu Rashtra: Hindutva, religion, and nationalism in India

Religion, State and Society, 2021

This contribution, in answer to the question posed in this collection 'right-wing nationalism, populism, and religion: what are the connections and why?', attempts to account for the development of Hindu nationalism in India as articulated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Hindu nationalism represents a fusion of conservative right-wing nationalism and religion, which has proved highly successful at the ballot box. It aims at the establishment of a Hindu Rashtra or state. Central to Hindu nationalism is the idea of Hindutva, which interpellates all Indians as belonging to a Hindu civilisation based on a common pan-Indian Hindu national identity. Muslims occupy the position of a 'constitutive outside' enabling the construction of a Hindu Rashtra; they remain 'enemies' to be either excluded or assimilated to a Hindu national culture. Consequently, they remain targets of government legislation. This will be illustrated with reference to the recent abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir, the building of a temple to the Hindu God Ram in Ayodhya, the Citizen Amendment Act, and the government of India's responses to COVID-19. India under Modi, it concludes, is on the way to becoming a Hindu Rashtra.

Unsavoury Hindutva Politics In India

International journal of Research and Analytical Reviews (IJRAR)Review, 2023

India is one of the biggest democratic countries in the world in terms of population, geography and multi-party system in governance. The secular nature of the country keeps united all the citizens of India irrespective of their religious differences. The sovereignty of this country rests in its republic with a constitution that binds all as Indians. But in the resent past after the Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, the secular fabric of India is being distorted. The age old Congress party that stood for secularism is made redundant when the right wing political party (BJP) started asserting its hegemony with its political philosophy of Hindutva. The majority of Indian population though consists of Hindus, the Hindutva ideology is disdained and remains unsavoury. This research article deals with the essence of Hinduism and how the distorted image of Hinduism is projected by Hindutva forces to create a make-believe situation where the secular nature of India is targeted to form one nation, one culture and one people. The unsavoury Hindutva politics indeed undermines democracy and secularism in India.

HINDUTVA: THE SHAPING OF A NEW “HINDU” IDENTITY

Southeastern Political Review, 1998

This paper examines the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India within the context of nationalist par@ politics in the sub-continent. This paper analyzes the environment within which the Hindu nationalist message was and is currently being formulated; the organizational structure of the movement; and the symbols and strategies that have helped to popularize the message on Hindutva in recent years. The paper concludes with an analysis of the popular response to Hindutva and the problems facing the BJP and its parent organizations in cartying out the program toward a revolutionized Hindu rashtra. The aim is to provide an understanding of the historical and political forces at work in the recent anti-Muslim violence in India.

DEVIL’S ADVOCACY: SABOTAGING HINDUTVA

Convergence to Praxis, Once in a Blue Moon Academia, 2022

2022. License: CC by 4.0; In the course of confronting members of the Hindutvavadins’ ruling party in India, we have faced a great problem while conversing with the members of the Sangh Parivar. We were confused with a paradox: The Hindutvavadins do not know what Hindutva is. What are the distinctive features of the Hindutva as preached by the sangh parivar? This question has haunted us as there are many contradictory features within the exonym (the naming of other community by another other) The ruling party is trying to impose a phantasmic Hindutvavada as a legally codified ruling ideology for governing the nation state of India. It is needless to say that India is nothing more than a geo-political entity with variations or diversities. To legalize all these heterogeneities under one umbrella of “Hindutva” is a difficult task to pursue. Especially, in terms of the legal codification of Hindutva, i.e., it is a cherished (as indoctrinated by Hindutvavadins) yet impossible uniformity when it comes to the decision-making of the lawmakers. This book is an attempt to provide the counter-cultural tool to evolve an art of resistance against the all-pervading Saffron Fascism by exposing its inner contradictions across different modules such as caste, gender, food habits, regionalism, property distribution etc.

Hindu Zion: The Politics of Constitutional Accommodation

Mark Tushnet and Dimitry Kochenov (eds), Research Handbook on the Politics of Constitutional Law (Edward Elgar), 2023

Over the last decade, majoritarian violence and religious divisiveness have been common in India. A central facet of such violence and divisiveness is justification through law, including the law of citizenship. In this paper, we show that contrary to scholarship on the death of the Indian constitution, such legislative acts have been enabled by the Indian constitution. During the process of drafting the constitution, undivided India was partitioned into India and Pakistan, and communal nationalism bled into the drafting process. Post-Partition divisiveness was accommodated by the Constituent Assembly by deferral of provisions on citizenship to ordinary law, and insertion of provisions that reflected the position of the religious right, namely the prohibition of cow slaughter within the seemingly innocuous Directive Principles of State Policy. These elements were mobilized by the religious right over time. Specifically, we show that the current Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has used citizenship law to discursively reterritorialise India into a Hindu state via constructions of the Indian citizen. We argue that the current political climate has been constitutionally accommodated; this is why despite there being no recent constitutional change, the process of creating a Hindu state is being achieved through law. A key tool in this process is citizenship law, and the accompanying political discourse on Indian citizenship.