No Room for Dissent: Domesticating WhatsApp, Digital Private Spaces, and Lived Democracy in India

Abstract

WhatsApp and digital private spaces are transforming the quality of lived democracy in India today. Bringing together STS, geographies of democracy, digital and political anthropology, and feminist approaches to the home, this paper makes visible how the Silicon Valley imaginary of the “digital living room” is domesticated in India. Drawing on digital ethnographic research in urban north India we show how WhatsApp is being used by the Hindu right to digitise new party‐political intimacies. This has implications for how people at the margins of Hindu nationalist politics dwell in the “digital living room”. Framed as a home like space, we problematise Facebook’s “spatiotechnical” utopia by making visible how kinship and (domestic) politics are newly entangled in digital private spaces. Finally, we document how WhatsApp is deployed as a technology of discipline to determine modes of appropriate sociality and reconfigure spaces of digital‐physical inclusion/exclusion in the making of India’s “ethnic democracy”.

Intimate technologies: Towards a feminist perspective on geographies of technoscience

“…They explore how socio-spatial imaginaries of the ‘digital living room’ promoted by Facebook and WhatsApp encourage political messaging in closed groups framed as ‘homelike’ spaces. Their empirical study on extended family WhatsApp groups in India reveals that ‘new entanglements of family and politics in the “digital living room” served to reinforce existing power hierarchies between genders and generations’ (Williams et al, 2022: 318) and highlights how these digital spaces were used by India’s ruling party to shape political intimacies.…”

“…As Robyn Longhurst (2013) shows in her study on maternal practices involving Skype, digital technologies that support maintaining intimate relationships stretch the horizons of home: ‘the dwelling places of bodies are no longer just rooms in homes where mothers, and children’s flesh and emotions rub up against each other on a daily basis but screens across which voices and, even more importantly, images are shared’ (Longhurst, 2013: 664). More recent shifts from political public to private space are documented by Williams et al (2022). They explore how socio-spatial imaginaries of the ‘digital living room’ promoted by Facebook and WhatsApp encourage political messaging in closed groups framed as ‘homelike’ spaces.…”

Carceral domesticities and the geopolitics of Love Jihad

“…With the electoral success of Hindu Nationalism, geopolitical anxieties attached to inter-religious marriage have intensified. Moral panics in contemporary India circulate through messaging platforms like WhatsApp, domesticating a far-right discourse, and translating it into the intimate spaces of everyday life (Williams et al., 2022). ‘Home’ that is, becomes a site at which borders materialise, through affective orientations that accrue in everyday practices of social reproduction.…”

Mobility Privilege and COVID-19: Determinants of a Spatially Differentiated Experience in the Lockdown-ed Delhi Region

“…Interestingly, before its ban, the TikTok platform gained some degree of popularity among lower-caste women (Subramanian 2021). WhatsApp remains extremely popular in the country, particularly for familial groups that connect several generations (Williams et al 2022). This underlines the possible scope for diversifying the representativity of the data by including other social media sources.…”