Hindu nationalism and the ‘saffronisation of the public sphere’: an interview with Christophe Jaffrelot

Anderson, Edward; Jaffrelot, Christophe

doi:10.1080/09584935.2018.1545009

Cited by 67 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The murders that Vikas was referring to were the recent mob lynchings of Muslim, Dalit, and Adivasi men, mostly in northern India, by vigilante gau-rakshaks, who, as Christophe Jaffrelot astutely observes, have formed a "parallel state structure" through which "the Hindu Rashtra (Nation) is materializing" (Anderson and Jaffrelot 2018). While Vikas carefully expressed condemnation of the lynchings, he was convinced that it was the failure of the state to enshrine Hindu emotion in law that compelled otherwise apolitical Hindus to violence (Jaffrelot 2008;cf.…”

Section: Bete Ka Prem: Filial Love Sacrifice and Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Labors of Love: On the Political Economies and Ethics of Bovine Politics in Himalayan India

Govindrajan

2021

Cult. Anthropol.

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This essay asks how conceptualizing love as work might provide a fresh perspective on love’s politics. In offering an ethnographic account of how love for Gau-Mata, the Cow-Mother of the idealized Hindu nation, fuels a right-wing Hindu nationalist politics of cow-protection in India’s central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, I suggest that the specific arrangements of labor through which affective attachments are organized critically shape the ethics and politics of love. More specifically, I depict how different kinds of situated labor produced varied kinds of love in the conjoined social worlds of right-wing gau-rakshaks (cow-protectionists) and rural women dairy farmers in Uttarakhand. For these social actors, genuine love for the cow manifested in a willingness to labor for her. Yet their understandings of what this loving labor entailed differed starkly. This article examines three distinct kinds of work—protection, service, and care-labor—that these actors variously undertook out of love for the cow. It traces how these different labors produced a varied set of relationships, affiliations, and obligations that crucially shaped the ethics and politics of love. Ultimately, I show, attending to the varied labors of love in situated social worlds reveals how love can condition a variety of often conflicting political and ethical possibilities, working simultaneously as a force of transcendence, fascist violence, and repair.

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Section: Bete Ka Prem: Filial Love Sacrifice and Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Labors of Love: On the Political Economies and Ethics of Bovine Politics in Himalayan India

Govindrajan

2021

Cult. Anthropol.

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“…The manner in which violence is subcontracted (or at least not prevented) by the ideologues who run many of the present-day governments of India is the distinctive that places India within the subtype of nationalism called fascism, and which I have qualified with the adjective ‘budding.’ As Edward Anderson and Christophe Jaffrelot have explained ( 2018 , p. 473), ‘the official face of this structure is not misbehaving, but it lets others intimidate the deviant.’ In India, sub-state level violence is normal and increasingly normalized (Chatterji et al 2019b ). The Sangh Parivar, which believes the nation is superior and more fundamental than the state, desires the state’s ‘protection’ more than its ‘action’ (Anderson and Jaffrelot 2018 , p. 476). This model suits Prime Minister Modi just fine, because he intuitively understands Nehru’s original argument: that only development could unite India’s people (Jaffrelot and Verniers 2020a ).…”

Section: Three Species Of Nationalism In the Contemporary Indo-pacificmentioning

confidence: 99%

Homogenizing nationalists, budding fascists, and truculent exceptionalists: the end of world order in the Indo-Pacific

McKinney

2021

Int Polit

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Building on Ernest Gellner’s theory of the nation-state and drawing on insights from John Lukacs and George Kennan, this article contends that the major powers of the contemporary Indo-Pacific are characterized by conflicting nationalisms. Homogenizing nationalism seeks to form China—a former multiethnic empire—into a unitary nation-state. Budding fascism endeavors to transform India—founded as a secular state—into a Hindu nation in which there is little place for the ‘other.’ And in the USA, truculent exceptionalism readily acknowledges that coexistence with China is no longer possible in the long run. All three powers have an alternative that they might embrace: toleration. But civility, in both domestic and international politics, is increasingly rare. The future of world order in the Indo-Pacific does not look bright.

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“…The ascendance of Hindutva politics, especially since the 1990’s and more so since 2014, further shapes their agency in religious ways. Since the time Modi-led BJP came to power in 2014, India has witnessed what Anderson and Jaffrelot (2018) refer to as ‘saffronization of the public sphere’, cutting across regional, class, gender and caste ties. A very aggressive tone acquired by this Hindu nationalist sentiment is now on display as the state unabashedly ridicules the idea of secularism and demonises Muslim citizens of India and is backed and normalised by many Hindu sections (Anderson & Jaffrelot, 2018; Jaffrelot, 2021).…”

Section: Agency and Citizenship As Performances: Questioning The Canonical Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since the time Modi-led BJP came to power in 2014, India has witnessed what Anderson and Jaffrelot (2018) refer to as ‘saffronization of the public sphere’, cutting across regional, class, gender and caste ties. A very aggressive tone acquired by this Hindu nationalist sentiment is now on display as the state unabashedly ridicules the idea of secularism and demonises Muslim citizens of India and is backed and normalised by many Hindu sections (Anderson & Jaffrelot, 2018; Jaffrelot, 2021). The CAA, discussed above, is a natural outcome of state practices that are openly targeting Muslims, Christian and other minorities in favour of the ‘Hindu India’ imaginary.…”

Section: Agency and Citizenship As Performances: Questioning The Canonical Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Citizenship as Politics and Performance of Religious Identity: Hindu Refugees from Sindh

Bhatia

2021

Sociological Bulletin

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Drawing from the ethnographic insights and experiences of Pakistani Hindu refugees in Rajasthan, India, this article examines their agency, politics and dilemmas. It illustrates how they actively participate in the process of their ‘becoming citizens’ by making use of the majoritarian political space and nationalist ‘Hindu India’ imagery. Their expressions of a cohesive Hindu identity, however, remain illusionary and incomplete as they do not correspond with the lived realities of fractures, antagonisms and heterogeneities within various Hindu communities. These differentiations also lay open the hierarchies within Hindu refugees and enable an analysis of citizenship as a continued, contested and differentiated process based on caste and class locations of the refugees. For the lower-caste/-class refugees, their citizenship assertions go beyond the point of acquiring legal citizenship and merges with the struggles of native Dalits. Through these variegated expressions and claims of citizenship of Hindu refugees, this article foregrounds the idea of citizenship as performative and processual, and not necessarily contingent on legal status or state’s sovereignty logic of citizen/non-citizen binary.

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Hindu nationalism and the ‘saffronisation of the public sphere’: an interview with Christophe Jaffrelot

Cited by 67 publications

References 9 publications

Labors of Love: On the Political Economies and Ethics of Bovine Politics in Himalayan India

Labors of Love: On the Political Economies and Ethics of Bovine Politics in Himalayan India

Homogenizing nationalists, budding fascists, and truculent exceptionalists: the end of world order in the Indo-Pacific

Citizenship as Politics and Performance of Religious Identity: Hindu Refugees from Sindh

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