Abstract:Governments and majoritarian political formations often present police violence as nationalist media spectacles, which marginalize the rights of the accused and normalize the discourse of majoritarian nationalism. In this study, we explore the public discourse of how the State and political actors repeatedly labeled a college-going student Ishrat Jahan, who died in a stage-managed police killing in India in 2004, as a terrorist. We draw from Derrida’s ethics of unconditional hospitality to show that while poli… Show more
“…As Douglas (1966 [2002]) argues, “the pollution [becomes] a doubly wicked object of reprobation, first because he crossed the line and second because he endangered others” (as cited in Varman et al, 2021: 648). This is reminiscent of the politics of fear and violence that Jagannathan et al (2022) and Prasad (2020) highlight in their studies of state brutality against Muslims in contemporary India.…”
Extant research on dirty work—occupations involving physical, social or moral taint, which affect worker identities—has been read primarily through the lens of social identity theory (SIT). There are two notable shortcomings that emerge as a consequent of dirty work being too heavily reliant upon the precepts of SIT, which we seek to remedy in this article: (1) the overemphasis on the symbolic to the detriment of the material, which has led to false optimism regarding the ability for subjects doing dirty work to exercise agency in constructing their own sense of selves and, (2) the failure to substantively account for the role of identity differences, which suggests that empirical research on the phenomenon is devoid of proper historical and cultural contextualization. Drawing on a qualitive study on low-caste toilet cleaners in Pakistan, our findings were largely incongruous with the scholarly conceptualization of dirty work that has been propagated to date. We explicate the embedded role of power and context in dirty work, which are not adequately considered using SIT alone. Repudiating the overly romanticized version of the concept, we argue that SIT’s account of the concept ought to be complemented by social construction theory going forward.
“…As Douglas (1966 [2002]) argues, “the pollution [becomes] a doubly wicked object of reprobation, first because he crossed the line and second because he endangered others” (as cited in Varman et al, 2021: 648). This is reminiscent of the politics of fear and violence that Jagannathan et al (2022) and Prasad (2020) highlight in their studies of state brutality against Muslims in contemporary India.…”
Extant research on dirty work—occupations involving physical, social or moral taint, which affect worker identities—has been read primarily through the lens of social identity theory (SIT). There are two notable shortcomings that emerge as a consequent of dirty work being too heavily reliant upon the precepts of SIT, which we seek to remedy in this article: (1) the overemphasis on the symbolic to the detriment of the material, which has led to false optimism regarding the ability for subjects doing dirty work to exercise agency in constructing their own sense of selves and, (2) the failure to substantively account for the role of identity differences, which suggests that empirical research on the phenomenon is devoid of proper historical and cultural contextualization. Drawing on a qualitive study on low-caste toilet cleaners in Pakistan, our findings were largely incongruous with the scholarly conceptualization of dirty work that has been propagated to date. We explicate the embedded role of power and context in dirty work, which are not adequately considered using SIT alone. Repudiating the overly romanticized version of the concept, we argue that SIT’s account of the concept ought to be complemented by social construction theory going forward.
“…Researchers have shown that Indian security forces "identify with structures of majoritarian nationalism to enact violence. " 32 The 2019 ruling by India's Supreme Court in favor of Hindu nationalists who destroyed the 16 th century Babri Mosque in 1992 is the culmination of BJP's effort to chip away at the rights of Muslims in the judiciary, and thus reaffirming their status as second-class citizens in a supposedly secular democratic country. 33 This rising animosity and violence towards Muslims by the Hindu majority population reached a zenith over six bloody days in New Delhi during February 23-29, 2020, when more than 50 Muslims were murdered after a BJP leader gave a speech urging supporters to attack anti-CAA protesters.…”
While communal violence has been an ongoing and unfortunate reality for post-colonial and post-partition India, there’s no sidestepping the fact that attacks and hate crime incidences against the country’s Muslim minority by members of the Hindu majority have occurred in greater frequency and ferocity in the years since Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), came to power in 2014 –on the back of a Hindu nationalist agenda, one in which anti-Muslim animus and discrimination features in mainstream political discourse and government policy. These realities have brought Muslims to the brink of genocide in India and Kashmir.
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