Enterprise Hindutva and social media in urban India

Abstract

This paper delineates 'enterprise Hindutva' as a mediatized form of Hindu nationalism shaped largely by the affordances of social media and the cultural practices surrounding them in urban India. Enterprise Hindutva is argumentative, experientially voluntary and capable of working with contradictions. It inhabits the ideological project envisioned as a range rather than a point of convergence. Enterprise Hindutva suggests that it is through the very bickering on social media and repetition of simplified summaries of key ideological principles that Hindutva finds its latest mediatic conditions for renewal.

The ‘saffronisation’ of India and contemporary political ideology

“…It is a company that specialises in commercial production of cow urine , able to exploit the fault lines of its competitor, the National Indian Congress, sustained through the promotion of Hindutva politics , overall, its organisational strength is unmatchable . This echoes what Udupa (2018, p. 453) describes as ‘enterprise Hindutva’, that is ‘a mediatized form of Hindu nationalism shaped largely by the affordances of social media and the cultural practices surrounding them in urban India’. Such a conceptualisation of Modi and his party can be seen to have the effect of transforming the perceived saffronisation of the nation from an invasion of conservative ideologues to the neo‐liberalisation of new and resurgent India .…”

“…This includes negatively depicting dynastic rule under the previous ruling party, the Indian National Congress; warning of reversion to traditional roots of Hindutva that were carried through the RSS to achieve cultural hegemony; or even to cast doubt through subtle humour about whether holy men and saints would head a spiritual department, alluding to the co-option of state by religion. While these examples of code-mixing may seem ordinary, however, the 'more plausible subversion/transgression interpretations of these switches … [occur] once they are read within the broader political context in which these texts begin to appear, vis., within a particular political (Hindutva) ideology that actively contests the former structures of secular social and political relations' (Bhatt, 2008, p. 181 religious, commercial and cultural expressions of identity (Udupa, 2018).…”

“…Thus, while English represents language of law, state and education, Hindi remains the lingua franca dominant across Indian pop culture, accessed across class, caste and religion. The intertextual use of popular movie dialogues in Hindi, again, seem to reinforce the populist nature of Modi's discourse, whereby Hindutva takes its discursive form across carefully managed intersections of political, religious, commercial and cultural expressions of identity (Udupa, 2018).…”

Reclaiming the sublime

“…3 It meant that people were at the mercy of officers assessing their right to citizenship, often with a bias against minorities-a phenomenon that is further compounded by an unsympathetic mainstream media (see A. Rajagopal 2001;Udupa 2015Udupa , 2018.…”

Active, aggressive, but to little avail: characterizing bot activity during the 2020 Singaporean elections

“…For instance, studies in non-Western societies present unique challenges in a discipline where many tools are often biased toward English and the activities of Euro-American users, thereby requiring flexible, cross-cultural methodological pipelines (Cha et al. 2020 ; Uyheng and Carley 2020a ), and accounting for broader cultural practices and the local political setting (Tapsell 2020a ; Udupa 2018 ).…”