Suchergebnisse

Die Erstürmung und der Abriß der Moschee in Ayodhya im Dezember 1992 durch fanatisierte Hindus sowie die anschließende Errichtung eines provisorischen Rama-Tempels an dieser Stelle erschienen als ein Fanal: Steht Indien vor einer Wende vom "multikulturellen" Staat, von einer funktionierenden säkularen Demokratie zu einem fundamentalistischen Hindustaat, der Muslims wie Christen ausgrenzt? Dazu zu passen scheinen die Wahlerfolge, die die hindunationalistische Bharatiya Janata Partei in den letzten zehn Jahren erringen konnte. Wie ist der Erfolg des Hindunationalismus zu erklären, welches sind seine sozialen Trägergruppen, welche Organisationen instrumentalisieren hier Religion für den Machterwerb? Vor allen Dingen aber: Kann eine solche Bewegung in Indien auf Dauer Erfolg haben? Ist nicht vielmehr der Hinduismus viel zu vielfältig, als daß er zu einer geschlossenen politischen Kraft mit Aussicht auf die Machtübernahme geformt werden könnte? Bislang jedenfalls hat die indische Demokratie sich unter ungünstigsten Voraussetzungen als erstaunlich stabil erwiesen.

The promise of 'Digital India' has, on the one hand, supplied a new vocabulary of political participation, and, on the other hand, consolidated techniques of statist control. Taking off from here, this article examines the constituency of the Hindutva discourse online, and how the performativity of Hindutva reconfigures the digital public sphere. It seeks to understand: How do the ideologues of Hindutva territorialize certain online spaces? How does the Internet equip them with new imaginations and vocabulary of political partisanship? How does this provoke the political Other—the counterpublics—against which their identity is recast and amplified? These three questions constitute the central problematic of the article.

This paper examines the Hindu‐Muslim conflict in India within the context of nationalist party politics in the sub‐continent. This paper analyzes the environment within which the Hindu nationalist message was and is currently being formulated; the organizational structure of the movement; and the symbols and strategies that have helped to popularize the message on Hindutva in recent years. The paper concludes with an analysis of the popular response to Hindutva and the problems facing the BJP and Us parent organizations in carrying out the program toward a revolutionized Hindu rashtra. The aim is to provide an understanding of the historical and political forces at work in the recent anti‐Muslim violence in India.

This paper explores the interconnections of Hindutva fascist repertoires in India and quasi-orientalist discourses. History and common sense are re-written through audiovisual communications to appeal to one section of a dangerously split Indian public and a neoliberal-touristic sensibility elsewhere. Enlightenment rhetorics of progress, democracy and technological development are apparently embodied by WhatsApp groups, electronic voting machines and laws to protect cows. Voting—as a marker of democratic citizenship—becomes a masquerade protecting a resurgent far right Hindutva (Hindu fascist) regime under the aegis of Narendra Modi and the BJP. Caste Hinduism's association of cows with deities, and the proscription on meat-eating in certain versions of religious practice, are used as pretexts for unimaginable violence against Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and working class/lower caste Hindus. Violence against those who dissent is rationalised as patriotic. Hindutva's banal and spectacular audiovisual discourse overwhelms public communication. Its consequences are a form of vigilante citizenship that is marked on the bodies of dead victims and of vigilante publics ready to be mobilised either in ethno-cultural violence or its defence and disavowal. Meanwhile, attracted to India as an enormous market, Western governments and corporations have colluded with the Hindutva regime's self-promotion as a bastion of development.

This article explores Muslim political attitudes in contemporary India. It contextualizes the political responses of Muslim communities in the backdrop of two crucial legal-constitutional changes introduced by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government: the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution and the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019. These changes, I suggest, stem from the official doctrine of New India and its operative mechanism, Hindutva constitutionalism. Analysing the nature of Muslim participation in the anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) protests and Muslim electoral responses in two subsequent elections (Delhi Assembly Election, 2020 and the Bihar Assembly Election, 2020), I argue that political engagement of Muslims could be interpreted as an ever-evolving discourse, which not merely responds to Hindutva politics but also asserts its relative autonomy.

This article deals with the recent issues of rising mob lynchings, atrocities on Dalits, Adivasis and religious minorities across the state. This study asserts that the Hindutva ideology itself is violence provoking one and the Sangh Parivar has started implementing its ideas into practice now. By committing these atrocious acts by the Hindutva mobs and the BJP governments holding the constitutional position and encouraging the mobs to commit the crimes reflects the same—to send a clear message to the religious minorities to live as second class citizens or else leave the country nothing less or nothing more. And nobody is going to escape this larger than life-size ambition of the RSS that India should be a Great Hindu Nation again like the ancient times.

Analyzes the Hindu-Muslim conflict in light of nationalist politics in India; examines the cultural nationalist movement (Hindutva), and popular response to forming a "Rashtra" or Hindu nation. Covers the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) organizations.

This article analyses the ways in which new audiovisual technologies may organise and challenge patterns of seeing for purposes of political mobilisation and ideological indoctrination. The context is that of the Hindu Right, with particular reference to the Ayodhya controversy. Focusing on God manifests Himself, a video produced by Jain Studios in New Delhi (1989/1990), the complex question of representation is discussed with reference to two key principles that inform the audiovisual rhetoric of Hindu nationalism. First, the video demonstrates that the Hindutva politics of representation is based on the technique of 'intervisuality', whereby meaning emerges from the dynamic interplay of aesthetic and symbolic spaces and social practices. Second, Hindutva rhetoric relies on the use of 'wish-images', through which imaginary 'think-spaces' are opened that enable its ideologues to generate ideas of a crisis-ridden imagined community of Hindu nationals against the backdrop of a Golden Age and a utopian future. This includes the stereotypical fixation of the 'Muslim Other'. The article investigates the role of popular culture and religio-political practices as well as stylistic aspects of docu-drama, montage and special effects.

Hindutva persigue, mediante la agitación entre hindúes, controlar los resortes del poder e imponer la uniformidad cultural. En parte esta preponderancia de Hindutva se debe al fracaso del "centro-izquierda" para consolidarse como fuerza política en las décadas de 1970 y 1980. A lo largo de este tiempo los gobiernos de turno se proclamaban laicos, pero se inhibían de acometer políticas en ese sentido para no perder apoyo entre los musulmanes, lo que ha permitido que el extremismo hindú capitalizara la oposición. En estos momentos el panorama ha cambiado de forma drástica. ¿Puede una sociedad multirreligiosa y multicultural desarrollarse en un estado en descomposición? ¿El subcontinente se está asimilando al modelo europeo de la nación-estado étnica, apoyada en una religión y una cultura exclusivas? En otras palabras ¿es esto una consecuencia de la Partición? ; Hindutva movement is now actively seeking to capture instruments of state power and trying to impose its cultural hegemony by mobilizing Hindus. In post-Independent India, the Hindutva movement has reached such proportions because the much desired 'left-of-centre' consolidation failed to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s. Over these decades, the governments of the day claimed that India was a secular country but in actual practice, because of the fear of losing Muslim votes, they constantly postponed the implementation of a secular agenda thereby opening the space for the Hindutva forces to rush in. Now the political terrain has changed drastically. Is the belief that a multi-religious and culturally diverse society can wield itself into a nation and democratic polity coming apart? Is the sub-continent returning to the European model of building ethnic nation-states underpinned by the cultural codes of a mono-culture or single religion? In a line, could this be attributed to the 'long shadow' of the Partition of India?

Abstract
Policy hybrids, which combine marketizing and liberalizing reforms with social welfare programmes and state support to boost domestic production, are fast becoming the norm globally. How are neo-liberal and national-developmentalist agendas reconciled as governing practices, and what are their national and international outcomes and implications? This article focuses on the understudied case of India, arguing that a paternalist political rationality, which melds paternalist logics in neo-liberalism and the government's Hindutva civilizationalist politics, underpins its flagship economic policy, the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan (Self-reliant India Mission). This policy, through production-linked incentives, aims to boost Indian manufacturing. India has benefited from a global push to diversify supply chains and forge new geopolitical partnerships, such as the Quad, to undermine China's manufacturing dominance and geopolitical assertiveness. Yet, its current approach consolidates the dominance of large firms, producing an elitist political economy, and does not address structural weaknesses through public investment in areas like research and education. This has implications for India's development, global trade and geopolitics. These arguments are made by identifying the paternalist logics in the theories and practices of neo-liberalism, and in Hindutva civilizationalist politics; assessing the aims of the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan as elaborated by government officials; and evaluating the early outcomes of production-linked incentive schemes.

AbstractCommunal violence wracked the state of Gujarat and the city of Ahmedabad once again in 2002, leaving some 2,000 people dead. Because the ruling BJP party had proclaimed Gujarat the 'Laboratory of Hindutva', analysts throughout India saw the violence as BJP policy and debated its possible spillover effects elsewhere. This paper finds that in a period already marked by stressful economic and cultural change and attended by political uncertainty, some BJP leaders gambled that an attack on Gujarat's Muslims, and on the rule of law in general, would attract followers and voters. Their gamble proved correct at least in the short run. This paper examines the cultural, social, geographical and educational restructuring that is occurring, through legal and illegal struggles, and the impact of the violence upon these processes. It examines the declining status of Muslims as a result of continuous propaganda against them. It analyzes the degree to which the state was damaged as a result of the decision for violence and asks about the degree to which leaders do, or do not, wish to 'put it behind them', and suggests that Ahmedabad's problems are widely shared in both the developing and developed worlds.