Right-Wing Populism and Vigilante Violence in Asia

Abstract

Right-wing populism is threatening pluralist underpinnings of diverse democracies around the world by staking claims of privilege for dominant ethnic groups and undermining minority rights. Existing scholarship has evaluated these threats in terms of the majoritarian vision peddled by charismatic politicians seeking electoral victory and the enactment of discriminatory policies through the dismantling of institutional constraints by those already in power. This article looks beyond these macro consequences of right-wing populism and examines vigilante violence as the mechanism through which these movements articulate and enforce their vision at the grassroots level. It compares the experience of India and Indonesia to evaluate factors that have enabled right-wing populists to deploy vigilantism for dismantling democratic protections against majoritarianism. I argue that the intrinsic properties of vigilantism as an efficient and transformative form of violence make it a valuable tool for right-wing populists. However, its use for political ends in two of the world's largest democracies is enabled by three factors. First, because pluralist constitutions make it difficult to curtail minority rights through top-down legislation in India and Indonesia, vigilantism has become an appealing extra-legal strategy for undermining these rights from the bottom up. Second, widespread social legitimacy associated with everyday forms of vigilantism allows right-wing populists to scale up local templates of violence for national goals. Third, similar pathologies of state-building in both countries enable right-wing vigilantes to act with impunity. I conclude by arguing that while vigilantism has long been thought of as a way in which disempowered citizens cope with dissatisfactory provision of order by the state, right-wing populists are transforming vigilante violence into means for engineering social dominance.

‘Willing’ ethnic-nationalists, diffusion, and resentment in India: A micro-foundational account

“…Mobilization is an act of bringing forth focused coordination through campaigns; organization is intrinsic to the concept. Building upon recent writing on 'everyday communalism' (Pai and Kumar 2018), we suggest that many local Hindu organizations, such as the Hindu Yuva Vahini, compete for the definition of the Hindu nation, in the process ratcheting up Hindu-centric voices and ideas at the grassroots level and through 'every day vigilantism' (Jaffrey 2021). The RSS has always focused on cultural mobilizational campaigns targeted at many 'social' issues, in keeping with its cultural face, while the BJP is focused on the political side.…”

“… 8 Human Rights Watch recorded 254 incidents of mob violence between 2009 and 2018, with 90 per cent of them taking place after 2014 (Jaffrey 2021, 232).…”

“… 19 In a similar vein, Jaffrey (2021, 1) refers to ‘everyday forms of vigilantism’. Varshney (2002) also refers to ‘every day forms of civic engagement’, which, according to his argument, are less consequential than civic associations.…”

Hindu nationalist statecraft, dog-whistle legislation, and the vigilante state in contemporary India

“…How can we conceptualise and understand the relationship between the power that is asserted through extra-legal violence on the one hand, and the power that is exercised through law-making on the other? One way of answering this question is to argue, as Sana Jaffrey (2021) has in her recent work on vigilantism in India and Indonesia, that right-wing populists use vigilante violence to both regulate social behaviour in accordance with majoritarian cultural codes, and to lobby the state to either enforce existing laws more strictly or introduce new legislation that extends state regulation into previously ungoverned domains. While this is a compelling perspective, it arguably posits too neat a distinction between a private domain of extra-legal violence and a public domain of state power, in which the former acts upon the latter to advance its ideology.…”

Love Jihad and the Governance of Gender and Intimacy in Hindu Nationalist Statecraft

“…Chauhan was speaking to journalist Aman Sethi in early 2015, a little more than six months after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Narendra Modi swept to national power for the first time after a monumental victory in the 2014 general election, and some two years before Yogi Adityanath would take power as BJP Chief Minister in Uttar Pradesh. His fierce dedication to a vigilantism that primarily targeted young people suspected of being involved in interfaith (Hindu-Muslim) relationships was, at this point in time, the primary manifestation of Hindu nationalist activism against the spectre of love jihad, and this activism, in turn, was very much an integral part of the more general rise of Hindutva vigilantism during the first term of Modi as Prime Minister (see Jaffrey 2021).…”