The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism

The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism PDF

Author: Achin Vanaik

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2017-05-16

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1786630745

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The definitive analysis of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India and the challenges for the radical Left With the Hindu nationalist BJP now replacing the Congress as the only national political force, the communalization of the Indian polity has qualitatively advanced since the earlier edition of this book in 1997. This edition has been substantially reworked and updated with several new chapters added. Hindutva’s rise necessitates a more critical take on mainstream secular claims, ironically reinforced by liberal–left sections discovering special virtues in India’s ‘distinctive’ secularism. The careful evaluation of the ongoing debate on ‘Indian fascism’ has resonances for the broader debate about how best to assess the dangers of the far right’s rise in other liberal democracies. A study follows of how Hindutva forces are pursuing their project of establishing a Hindu Rashtra and how to thwart them through a wider transformative struggle targeting capitalism itself.

Modi's India

Modi's India PDF

Author: Christophe Jaffrelot

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-04-11

Total Pages: 656

ISBN-13: 0691247900

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A riveting account of how a popularly elected leader has steered the world's largest democracy toward authoritarianism and intolerance Over the past two decades, thanks to Narendra Modi, Hindu nationalism has been coupled with a form of national-populism that has ensured its success at the polls, first in Gujarat and then in India at large. Modi managed to seduce a substantial number of citizens by promising them development and polarizing the electorate along ethno-religious lines. Both facets of this national-populism found expression in a highly personalized political style as Modi related directly to the voters through all kinds of channels of communication in order to saturate the public space. Drawing on original interviews conducted across India, Christophe Jaffrelot shows how Modi's government has moved India toward a new form of democracy, an ethnic democracy that equates the majoritarian community with the nation and relegates Muslims and Christians to second-class citizens who are harassed by vigilante groups. He discusses how the promotion of Hindu nationalism has resulted in attacks against secularists, intellectuals, universities, and NGOs. Jaffrelot explains how the political system of India has acquired authoritarian features for other reasons, too. Eager to govern not only in New Delhi, but also in the states, the government has centralized power at the expense of federalism and undermined institutions that were part of the checks and balances, including India's Supreme Court. Modi's India is a sobering account of how a once-vibrant democracy can go wrong when a government backed by popular consent suppresses dissent while growing increasingly intolerant of ethnic and religious minorities.

Twilight Prisoners

Twilight Prisoners PDF

Author: Siddhartha Deb

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2024-01-16

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1804292176

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An incisive, lyrically written, and deeply-reported account of India's descent into authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism Here is an absorbing and disturbing account of India's transformation into a religious fundamentalist, brutally unequal dystopia, from a novelist described by Pankaj Mishra as “one of the most distinctive writers to have emerged from South Asia in the last two decades.” Originally from a remote town in the northeastern hills of India, Siddhartha Deb crisscrosses the country to explain the rise of Hindu authoritarianism and the fall of Indian democracy. With a journalist's commitment to on-the-ground reportage and a literary writer's sensitivity, Deb describes how prime minister Narendra Modi and his party–a formation explicitly beholden to European fascists–has deftly exploited modern technologies, the media, and market forces to launch a relentless campaign on minorities, women, dissenters, and the poor. Deb narrates Modi's emergence from an obscure paramilitary volunteer to world leader, but he also includes portraits of resistance exemplified by figures like Arundhati Roy, the assassinated journalist Gauri Lankesh, and the group of political prisoners known as the BK 16. This important collection of essays is an unforgettable portrait of the country as it prepares for crucial national elections in 2024.

Majoritarian State

Majoritarian State PDF

Author: Angana P. Chatterji

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2019-08

Total Pages: 551

ISBN-13: 0190078170

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Majoritarian State traces the ascendance of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India. Led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP administration has established an ethno-religious and populist style of rule since 2014. Its agenda is also pursued beyond the formal branches of government, as the new dispensation portrays conventional social hierarchies as intrinsic to Indian culture while condoning communal and caste- and gender-based violence. The contributors explore how Hindutva ideology has permeated the state apparatus and formal institutions, and how Hindutva activists exert control over civil society via vigilante groups, cultural policing and violence. Groups and regions portrayed as 'enemies' of the Indian state are the losers in a new order promoting the interests of the urban middle class and business elites. As this majoritarian ideology pervades the media and public discourse, it also affects the judiciary, universities and cultural institutions, increasingly captured by Hindu nationalists. Dissent and difference silenced and debate increasingly sidelined as the press is muzzled or intimidated in the courts. Internationally, the BJP government has emphasised hard power and a fast- expanding security state. This collection of essays offers rich empirical analysis and documentation to investigate the causes and consequences of the illiberal turn taken by the world's largest democracy.

Gods in the Time of Democracy

Gods in the Time of Democracy PDF

Author: Kajri Jain

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2021-01-08

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1478012889

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In 2018 India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated the world's tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India's economic reforms of the 1990s. In Gods in the Time of Democracy Kajri Jain examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India, mobilizing the concept of emergence toward a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora and interviews with sculptors, patrons, and visitors, Jain masterfully describes how public icons materialize the intersections between new image technologies, neospiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, Jain demonstrates how these new aesthetic forms entail a simultaneously religious and political retooling of the “infrastructures of the sensible.”

Hindu Nationalism

Hindu Nationalism PDF

Author: Chetan Bhatt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1000181049

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The rise of authoritarian Hindu mass movements and political formations in India since the early 1980s raises fundamental questions about the resurgence of chauvinistic ethnic, religious and nationalist movements in the late modern period. This book examines the history and ideologies of Hindu nationalism and Hindutva from the end of the last century to the present, and critically evaluates the social and political philosophies and writings of its main thinkers.Hindu nationalism is based on the claim that it is an indigenous product of the primordial and authentic ethnic and religious traditions of India. The book argues instead that these claims are based on relatively recent ideas, frequently related to western influences during the colonial period. These influences include eighteenth and nineteenth century European Romantic and Enlightenment rationalist ideas preoccupied with archaic primordialism, evolution, organicism, vitalism and race. As well as considering the ideological impact of National Socialism and Fascism on Hindu nationalism in the 1930s, the book also looks at how Aryanism continues to be promoted in unexpected forms in contemporary India. Using a wide range of historical and contemporary sources, the author considers the consequences of Hindu nationalist resurgence in the light of contemporary debates about minorities, secular citizenship, ethics and modernity.

Cultural Backlash and the Rise of Populism

Cultural Backlash and the Rise of Populism PDF

Author: Pippa Norris

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-02-14

Total Pages: 555

ISBN-13: 1108426077

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A new theoretical analysis of the rise of Donald Trump, Marine le Pen, Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, Silvio Berlusconi, and Viktor Orbán.

Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World

Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World PDF

Author: Ian Scoones

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-29

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 1000442063

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The rise of authoritarian, nationalist forms of populism and the implications for rural actors and settings is one of the most crucial foci for critical agrarian studies today, with many consequences for political action. Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World reflects on the rural origins and consequences of the emergence of authoritarian and populist leaders across the world, as well as on the rise of multi-class mobilisation and resistance, alongside wider counter-movements and alternative practices, which together confront authoritarianism and nationalist populism. The book includes 20 chapters written by contributors to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), a global network of academics and activists committed to both reflective analysis and political engagement. Debates about ‘populism’, ‘nationalism’, ‘authoritarianism’ and more have exploded recently, but relatively little of this has focused on the rural dimensions. Yet, wherever one looks, the rural aspects are key – not just in electoral calculus, but in understanding underlying drivers of authoritarianism and populism, and potential counter-movements to these. Whether because of land grabs, voracious extractivism, infrastructural neglect or lack of services, rural peoples’ disillusionment with the status quo has had deeply troubling consequences and occasionally hopeful ones, as the chapters in this book show. The chapters in this book were originally published in The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Emergency Chronicles

Emergency Chronicles PDF

Author: Gyan Prakash

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-03-26

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 0691186723

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The gripping story of an explosive turning point in the history of modern India On the night of June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India, suspending constitutional rights and rounding up her political opponents in midnight raids across the country. In the twenty-one harrowing months that followed, her regime unleashed a brutal campaign of coercion and intimidation, arresting and torturing people by the tens of thousands, razing slums, and imposing compulsory sterilization on the poor. Emergency Chronicles provides the first comprehensive account of this understudied episode in India’s modern history. Gyan Prakash strips away the comfortable myth that the Emergency was an isolated event brought on solely by Gandhi’s desire to cling to power, arguing that it was as much the product of Indian democracy’s troubled relationship with popular politics. Drawing on archival records, private papers and letters, published sources, film and literary materials, and interviews with victims and perpetrators, Prakash traces the Emergency’s origins to the moment of India’s independence in 1947, revealing how the unfulfilled promise of democratic transformation upset the fine balance between state power and civil rights. He vividly depicts the unfolding of a political crisis that culminated in widespread popular unrest, which Gandhi sought to crush by paradoxically using the law to suspend lawful rights. Her failure to preserve the existing political order had lasting and unforeseen repercussions, opening the door for caste politics and Hindu nationalism. Placing the Emergency within the broader global history of democracy, this gripping book offers invaluable lessons for us today as the world once again confronts the dangers of rising authoritarianism and populist nationalism.

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