Suchergebnisse

This ethnographic account chronicles the journey of one of the largest anti-government protests since India's independence. It examines the pivotal role of students—initially activists and then first-time participants—in crystallizing challenges to the ruling dispensation, not only by opposing it directly, but through subverting its way of claiming representation. More specifically, it is the strategic reuse of the pervasive anti-institutional and anti-elite discourse at the top—while replacing its majoritarianism with inclusiveness—that enabled protesters to disembody the populist modality of the current Indian Prime Minister. Protesters' short-lived success was achieved through an enactment of the popular, embodied in a diffused fashion by faceless, peaceful and feminized protesting masses. The popular successfully appropriated the claim to be the people through invoking a 'derivative' nationalist repertoire in part shared by the government, emptying its anti-minorities subtext through appropriating floating signifiers of patriotic belonging such as the Indian constitution, the flag and the anthem. By engaging on how relatively small communities of politicized students used the campus ecology and its neighbouring spaces as territorial and ideational nodal points for the mobilization of less politicized cohorts, the article underlines their significance in the political articulation of dissent in contemporary Indian democracy.

AbstractThrough engaging with everyday practices among student activists in contemporary Indian campus politics, this ethnographic study examines the breadcrumb trail between the left and self-fashioning. It focuses on a performative modality of political representation in Indian democracy by tracing the formation of biographical reconfigurations that implement subject-oriented techniques. The article charts their relevance in producing political legitimacy. It engages with the way in which personal reconfigurations are mobilized to recruit and appeal to both subaltern and privileged communities, thus generating universalistic representative claims and political efficacy.The study discusses self-presentations among leading left activists who are members of five contending Marxist student organizations that are active in Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University campus. It shows that reconfigurations are a hallmark of practices of social 'downlift' which echo the notion ofdeclassifying, a concept developed by philosopher Jacques Rancière. While embracing secularism and the legacy of political martyrs, the analysis illustrates how self-fashioning attempts to erase signs and habits attached to economic and social privileges through subverting and engaging creatively with sacrificial and ascetic tropes. Conversely, such practices find themselves critically questioned by activists at the bottom of the social ladder who aspire to social upliftment, including members of lower castes and impoverished Muslim communities. I find that the biographical effects of left activism are both long-lasting and renegotiable, shaping campus lives and subsequent professional careers. While such reconfigurations are not inspired by world renouncers of the Hindu mendicant tradition, these practices of the self might exemplify the historical cross-fertilization between long-standing cultural idioms and the Indian Marxist praxis.

This thesis focuses on everyday contemporary campus politics in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. My central argument is that institutional territories of new social and ideological experimentation, such as this elite and predominantly social sciences and humanities campus, create the conditions for the reproduction of alternative political cultures, pertaining to the historical formation of such institutions. Current scholarship tends to discuss political choices of educated Indian youth in a context of caste, class, community and gender cleavages, as a result of parental upbringing or as a creative interpretation of phenomena such as liberalisation. The original contribution to knowledge of this work is to show that specific campus-based cultures need to be considered as distinct factors of politicisation, in particular when they are the training ground for under-represented political traditions. Through engaging critically with one's social standings in light of contending left ideologies, young people in the JNU campus exhibit political activities and preferences that gradually distinguish them both from other youth and older generations. Consequently, features of political life are not only influenced by biographical components, but are renegotiated in light of selective political socialisation, carried on by one generation of activist to the next. Exposure to the Marxist-dominated activist culture of JNU fosters student politicisation and contributes to the widening of a political divide between conformist and heretic youth. The study is based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in JNU premises. Results obtained are complemented by a textual analysis of pamphlet discourses written by student organisations and a survey of political attitudes on campus. These contribute to the debates on student politics and the political participation of the educated youth in India. ; Ce travail ethnographique examine les pratiques de présentation de soi de la gauche indienne via une étude de ...

Minimal understandings of populism focus on measuring explicit stances of antielitism and people centrism. What remains poorly understood is the way less overt forms of populist rhetoric enable leaders to emulate the language of common citizens to achieve electoral success. This article suggests that the study of the populist discourse also requires taking into account their implicit occurrences, that is, those conveying connect, closeness, commonness, and similarity with ordinary people. Expressed through performances of "layman likeness," they enable populist politicians to dissociate from traditional ruling elites while enabling people leaders' identifications. Using a novel 261‐million‐word dataset of Indian political discourses—including the speeches of 11 Prime Ministers—to proxy such identifications, we argue that populist leaders rely on a mimesis of the common people. Three core mimetic speech items are quantified: intimacy, disintermediation, and simplicity. We use a replicable corpus‐contextual multiword collocation technique to populate lexicons of pretested psychometric profiles as well as a threefold validation method. The analysis finds that current Prime Minister Narendra Modi communicates mimetic identification around his persona, indexing the linguistic markers of his stylistic, ideological, and institutional populist politics. We indicate that our context‐aware method could also be of use to study the cross‐regional variability of mimetic populism.

AbstractHow and where is democracy 'hacked'? Studies examining the variability of the populist discourse rely on the—often tacit—assumption that global digital platforms are used similarly from one country to the other. By examining political rhetoric on Twitter, we show that populist communication is tailored to a particular audience profile rather than a particular social media (SM). More specifically, we compare Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's tweets with his addresses on multiple mediums. We describe how Modi uses wide‐reaching media such as radio to unfold a populist narrative based on institutional disintermediation, layman's language, counselling and the staging of an intimate conversation with the masses. Modi uses more elitist and cosmopolitan SM sites in India, such as Twitter, to mitigate his populist credentials, and introduce himself as a respectable democratic leader favouring multilateral collaborations, banal nationalism and Gandhian peace‐building. The variability of his political rhetoric across seven address formats indicates that Modi is populist tactically rather than ideologically, which complicates the tenets of the dominant 'ideational' populist paradigm. To further ground our argument empirically, we venture into comparing Modi's and Trump's tweets. We suggest that due to the popularity of Twitter in the United States, it was strategically useful for the former President of the United States to act populist on the platform, while that is not the case for Modi. This tends to indicate that not enough attention is given to intermedium studies that complement comparisons between states/regions with comparisons nested within a coherent political space.

In this introductory article of the special issue we are interested in mapping the poorly charted territory of politics among generational communities in university spaces in South Asia. We question the relevance of student politics as an object of inquiry by asking whether it truly constitutes a field that is autonomous from wider organized politics. By interpreting student politics as political becoming, we indicate that everyday campus-based activism is a potent vehicle for the (re)production of contemporary South Asian polity.

Since December 2019, a new wave of the wide scale student-led opposition movement has been observed, in particular in the aftermath of the violent police storming of two Muslim-dominated, state-funded universities: Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in Uttar Pradesh and Jamia Milia Islamia (JMI) in New Delhi. In the midst of the agitation and the government's attempts to suppress the protest movement, we are investigating the relevance of select campuses as privileged sites for heading such colossal mobilization, which aim at safeguarding minority rights and challenge anti-Muslim policies. We use here primary ethnographic material collected between 17 and 31 December 2019 in New Delhi's two protest hotspots: Jamia Milia Islamia's gate number seven and the majority-Muslim neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh.

In this introductory article of the special issue we are interested in mapping the poorly charted territory of politics among generational communities in university spaces in South Asia. We question the relevance of student politics as an object of inquiry by asking whether it truly constitutes a field that is autonomous from wider organized politics. By interpreting student politics as political becoming, we indicate that everyday campus-based activism is a potent vehicle for the (re)production of contemporary South Asian polity.

Since December 2019, a new wave of the wide scale student-led opposition movement has been observed, in particular in the aftermath of the violent police storming of two Muslim-dominated, state-funded universities: Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in Uttar Pradesh and Jamia Milia Islamia (JMI) in New Delhi. In the midst of the agitation and the government's attempts to suppress the protest movement, we are investigating the relevance of select campuses as privileged sites for heading such colossal mobilization, which aim at safeguarding minority rights and challenge anti-Muslim policies. We use here primary ethnographic material collected between 17 and 31 December 2019 in New Delhi's two protest hotspots: Jamia Milia Islamia's gate number seven and the majority-Muslim neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh.

In this introductory article of the special issue we are interested in mapping the poorly charted territory of politics among generational communities in university spaces in South Asia. We question the relevance of student politics as an object of inquiry by asking whether it truly constitutes a field that is autonomous from wider organized politics. By interpreting student politics as political becoming, we indicate that everyday campus-based activism is a potent vehicle for the (re)production of contemporary South Asian polity.

Since December 2019, a new wave of the wide scale student-led opposition movement has been observed, in particular in the aftermath of the violent police storming of two Muslim-dominated, state-funded universities: Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in Uttar Pradesh and Jamia Milia Islamia (JMI) in New Delhi. In the midst of the agitation and the government's attempts to suppress the protest movement, we are investigating the relevance of select campuses as privileged sites for heading such colossal mobilization, which aim at safeguarding minority rights and challenge anti-Muslim policies. We use here primary ethnographic material collected between 17 and 31 December 2019 in New Delhi's two protest hotspots: Jamia Milia Islamia's gate number seven and the majority-Muslim neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh.

In this introductory article of the special issue we are interested in mapping the poorly charted territory of politics among generational communities in university spaces in South Asia. We question the relevance of student politics as an object of inquiry by asking whether it truly constitutes a field that is autonomous from wider organized politics. By interpreting student politics as political becoming, we indicate that everyday campus-based activism is a potent vehicle for the (re)production of contemporary South Asian polity.

Since December 2019, a new wave of the wide scale student-led opposition movement has been observed, in particular in the aftermath of the violent police storming of two Muslim-dominated, state-funded universities: Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in Uttar Pradesh and Jamia Milia Islamia (JMI) in New Delhi. In the midst of the agitation and the government's attempts to suppress the protest movement, we are investigating the relevance of select campuses as privileged sites for heading such colossal mobilization, which aim at safeguarding minority rights and challenge anti-Muslim policies. We use here primary ethnographic material collected between 17 and 31 December 2019 in New Delhi's two protest hotspots: Jamia Milia Islamia's gate number seven and the majority-Muslim neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh.