Violent Majorities 2.2: Subir Sinha on Hindutva as Long-Distance Ethnonationalism
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to Recall This Book, where we assemble scholars and writers from different disciplines to make sense of contemporary issues, problems, and events.

Usually, Recall this book is hosted by Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz, but today the podcast has two guest hosts. I'm Ajanta Subramanian, an anthropologist who works on caste and democracy in India and the United States. And joining me is Lori Allen, also an anthropologist, who works on liberalism and international law in Palestine and Israel.

This is the second episode of a three-part series on long-distance nationalisms. Today's episode is on Hindu nationalism in India, Britain, and the US.

And the third and final episode will be a conversation between the two of us and John Plotz, in which we reflect on the two cases comparatively. And sorry, I should have said that the first episode, which we've already recorded with Peter Baynard, is on Zionism in Israel and the United States.

Our guest today is Professor Subir Sinha, who's a reader in the theory and politics of development and director of the South Asia Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He's also a member of a commission of inquiry that is looking into the causes of the unrest among Hindus and Muslims in Leicester, a northern British city, in 2022.

Thank you for joining us, Sabir. So happy to have you here. Thanks very much, Lori and Ajanta, for inviting me to your show. All right. So as I said, we want to focus this conversation on the transnational dimensions of Hindu nationalism, but we thought we'd start by giving listeners a little bit about the Indian context. So, Sabir, can you...

Can you situate the current moment in a longer history of efforts to consolidate Hindu supremacy in India? The rise of Modi as, you know, initially as a kind of a rumor, you know, there's a Modi in Gujarat, he will be the

great leader of Hindutva and things like that, which I think given what happened in Gujarat, which was a massive massacre of Muslims following the burning of a train in which there were people returning after performing car-saver or voluntary service at the site at which the Babri Masjid was destroyed. So you can see the fusions.

between Modi's rise and the sedimentation of the effects of the destruction of the Babri Masjid. And then maybe two or three other things which are probably more global in scope, but that is how India reacted to them. Things that were unleashed worldwide after 9-11,

and particularly the firm identification that already existed within India, but now on a global plane between Muslims and terrorism. So now Hindu fundamentalists and people voting for the BJP could say, we are not the only ones linking Muslims to terrorism. The whole world is doing that. So kind of a global mirror in which the new kind of Hindutva found a lot of validation.

The large scale global crisis of capitalism in the 2007, 8, 9 period, which basically gave the impression of a crisis that could not be managed by capitalism.

the powers that held the state at that point, and effectively creating the crisis of the narrative of crisis against which a strong great leader, you know, can be seen to emerge, not only as a possibility, but as a necessity. And finally, the rise really of

New technologies of communication, which were very much in the nascent stages in any of the early iterations of the BJP coming anywhere close to power.

But, I mean, among that, obviously, connectivity, smartphone, a kind of an app culture, a meme culture, you know. Then, you know, leading on from that, you're probably aware that India has among the world's largest, maybe it is second largest ownership of mobile, of smartphones. If you look at platform after platform, like Twitter or like Facebook, you know, so all of these things have among their largest market shares in India. Right.

And you also had in the sort of, you know, the rise of the so-called neo-middle classes. This is a term Modi himself used to use quite a lot as a sort of an interpolation for those who would effectively become his supporters, who were middle classes as a result of the liberalization of the economy from the 1990s onwards, private sector oriented,

You know, people who actually invested a little bit in the stock market. So very different from the previous middle class that was very much focused around the public sector. So when you say questions, when you ask me questions such as what kind of local reconfiguration of social groups happened and so on and so forth.

You know, these were some of the new social groups. And, you know, we also from that point onwards have had an economy that is 93 percent in the so-called informal sector. There's a large, restless migrant population, you know, quite precarious that has been moving around the country as well.

So I think this is the kind of background to a lot of the questions that you raised. And one really important element of that has been that whatever was the consolidated political constituency of each political formation,

before 2014. 2014 and later saw a kind of a disintegration of those consolidated constituencies and a reassembling of them as the kind of new core of the support for Modi. So while you've just sort of started to give us an idea of what may be cracks in the system, we're interested to explore more the consolidation of the system abroad.

And, you know, we've really seen the rise of official Hindutva and associated Hindu right organizations in the US, in the UK, really making its presence felt. And we saw that in recent elections, in elections.

the US, we see how Trump is appointing Indian Americans right and left to very important positions like director of the FBI. We've seen how the sort of Hindutva has spread beyond the nation space of India itself. And I'm wondering, we were wondering if you could talk a little bit about when and how that has taken hold.

abroad and if you could say something about the kind of the ecosystem of organizations and characters that are really building Hindutva and the Hindu right, especially in the UK and the US.

So what are the sort of connections between these formations? So obviously with the UK and the US, there is a long history, but also let's not forget that Canada, Australia, New Zealand are all new battleground states as far as the kind of contestation for who speaks on behalf of the Indian diaspora is concerned. When we were in our graduate student days in the early 1990s in Chicago, we could see that in the sort of immediately post Babri Masjid period,

Hindutva's presence in taking control of temples in the greater Chicago area was already, you know, underway. I remember that we were picketing a meeting of RSS people outside of Chicago in a suburb. And we were told that among other people, in fact, that was the first time I had heard of the man, that there was a rising star of the BJP called Mr. Narendra Modi. So these were...

You know, experiences and outreach. That was the 90s, yeah? That was in the early 1990s. 1993-94, which was actually a very freezing winter's day as well. Like a minus 20 or 30 with the wind chill. And, you know, there were people inside who had come to collect money for, you know, the construction of the Ram Temple and things like that. So, you know, these were...

quite crude kinds of situations, right? Where you've got the middle to some of the upper echelons of the BJP coming to American suburbia. And you know how these things work in someone's drawing room and people bring out their cash or their checks or whatever the medium of the transaction was.

And if you consider that, you know, sort of 30 odd years later, that whole thing has become so slick and so sophisticated. So, for example, some of this is written about in Edward Anderson's book on Hindutva and the Diaspora.

where he kind of tracks a little bit of this in terms of the US sang and the UK sang. But I thought also, you know, you've got a very different demographic in the US and in the UK in terms of the profile of the Indian diaspora and within that of Hindus.

So in the UK, you know, you've got a large number of Gujaratis who have come in from East Africa. So they have not had any direct experience of living within India. We've done a survey recently for another project where we found that only 42% of Hindus in the UK identified as being supporters of Hindutva and being supporters of Modi. Okay, so this also is not untrue for many Gujaratis.

So here in the UK, you do have a long history of sang organizations. If you look at the background of the Hindu Swamsevak Sang, the kind of international affiliate of the RSS, I think you will find that they have had a presence in the UK for about 50 to 55 years from the late 1960s onwards.

So, you know, they've been there for a while. They have cultivated, you know, a few members of parliament from both sides of the aisle. So some left-wing Corbynites like Barry Gardiner is as much, you know, committed to Hindutva politics and he's a supporter of Hindutva politics in the UK as, let us say, a right-wing Tory like Bob Blackman, who is the member of parliament from Harrow.

And both of them will, you know, invite people that one might think of as hate preachers or they might help with their visas. They might lobby for, as happened just now, Sadiq Khan appointed the Vishwa Hindu Parishad as in charge of Diwali festivities hosted by the mayor of London.

Oh my God. Wow. About 10 to 15 odd years ago, when the Dalit organizations became quite important and active in the UK, and they wanted to pass the anti-caste discrimination bill in parliament, Hindutva, and historically, you know, you've seen that Hindutva has been often written up as a response to the

self-assertion of Dalits and of otherwise suppressed castes. Other lower castes as well. Yeah, that's right. So that was another sort of rallying cry. But the third element is that if you look at what has happened since Modi came to power in Gujarat and after, for a lot of people who have grown up in Gujarat, let us say, someone who was born in, let's say, 2002 and therefore is now 22, 23 years of age,

Their entire common sense is Hindutva. They grew up, you know, with sort of lionizing Modi. I've had checkout clerks at a local Tesco telling me very proudly that she was from Gujarat, which is Modi's land. And as an Indian, I must be so happy. So there's a kind of an innocent element to this degree of fanatic loyalty to Modi, which is entirely divorced from

the violence which has been the vehicle to power, you know, for both him and for the kind of politics. Yeah. And ultimately the social media thing comes in massively in terms of linking the mothership to the satellite. We actually wanted to ask you about social media. Yeah. So you got...

You have this essay on the role of social media in advancing the Hindutva project. And there's some really interesting points that you make in that. And one that I wanted you to kind of elaborate on is you say populism today dissolves to an extent the line between politics from above and below. Yes. Right. So.

Are you distinguishing today's populism, which is so dependent on social media, from previous variants? So how exactly does populism both blur the line between elite and subaltern politics and simultaneously rely on the distinction between the people and the elite, which is such a standard element of populist strategy? And if you can also speak to the

the kind of transnational reach of social media and the power of that in, you know, kind of forging a sort of diasporic identification with both Modi in particular and the Hindutva project more broadly.

So, you know, I mean, populism, in my view, is a very contradictory politics. And in fact, it is necessarily contradictory. There is a popular desire for fascism. We can't just say that it is the all things popular are obviously not progressive. But in the period after, let's say, 2005 or 2006, you see that in country after country,

a kind of an inversion, a contradictory use of democracy. For example, the use of electoral democracy to narrow the full possibilities of democracy. So you use democracy in the narrow sense to kill off its possibilities in the broader sense. And that's powerful because you are effectively saying, you know, as Modi and the Hindutva people say quite often,

we were democratically elected. So the idea of always having to have a degree of popular ratification of the kind of authoritarian rule that we have seen in the last 10 or 12 years is the template for the new kind of populist politics. When you're talking about this ratification process and how electoral democracy works,

serves as a kind of alibi, right? As a sort of legitimating instrument. And it's combined in the subcontinent, it's combined very much with vigilantism, right? With spectacular violence. So there's a sort of combination of electoral democracy and spectacular violence that work hand in hand. But neither of these ingredients are necessarily present in the diaspora, right?

The overseas friends of the BJP, which exist in many, many countries and are an official. Well, I think they are not officially linked to the BJP because that would have been illegal. But they obviously take their agenda and work that agenda into diaspora spaces and things like that. And you also have the BJP itself has.

people in charge of overseas relations. And in fact, two of them were here just before the British election, where they went to different constituencies that have large Indian populations and were part of the canvassing process and things like that. We now have a bit of the vigilante thing because a lot of migrants who are relatively recent and therefore have spent a lot of time in India while this has become normalized,

seem to think that this is okay. So for example, in a city in the UK, let's say you're taking out a Ganesh procession to install him for the beginning of the Ganesh Puja period, you would obviously have to take permission from the police. But they would not take permission from the police and be out on the road. That would cause some kind of confrontation with the police. And then social media will, you know, create the story of Hindu violence

uh pride be hurt by you know excessive policing and of course people uh use that to get ahead in local politics let's say for the councilors election and things like that but now you also have the student inflow from india so if you remember the controversies at the lse and at cambridge where you had two people with strong hindutva backgrounds from hariana and from coastal karnataka

and came to Cambridge, to Oxford and to the LSE, contested for elections at the Students' Union, did not win and were barred from contesting because of practices that were banned by two universities.

then were picked up by Indian fake news sites like Op India and things like that. And basically went back to launch their political careers in Haryana and in Karnataka. So you come from a Hindutva background, you create a controversy on a British university campus or in a town. You then go back with this as a part of your new CV, if you want, you know, LLB plus created a fuss.

and then that becomes the basis for you to you know become one of these kinds of people so it's some kind of round robin of offense and pride that yeah I mean just as there is a floating element to the diaspora of there is an element of the of Hindutva coming into these places and also transforming to some extent in these places so

Hindutva's connection with the British far right go back to at least 15 odd years, including with Tommy Robinson.

In fact, a number of very prominent Hindutva handles abroad and in India were hoping to welcome Tommy Robinson to India in November. But of course, he got arrested so that that was not going to happen. But they platform him all the time on Times Now television or India Today television or in Op India and its YouTube channels. You can see that that is the case.

Thank you.

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I was wondering to what extent does far, you know, far right supporters who play a role on social media, are they trying to exact a kind of vigilante violence through their trolling and commenting and kind of whipping up this emotional storm on behalf of

a Hindutva sort of alliance and an allyship. Can we think of it in those terms at all? We can think of it partly in those terms, but yes, go on. I'm also wondering about, you know, this quick resort to hurt.

Right? Like Hindus being hurt, you know, religious sentiments being wounded. Do you think it plays differently when the, when that is yoked to a minority standing in the diaspora versus yoked to a kind of majority, you know, majority population in quotes in the, in India? So does the sort of mobilization of religious sentiments

work differently in the two contexts? And how much does the kind of

does religious minority standing in the diaspora feed into this kind of mobilization of sentiment differently than it does? In a short piece I wrote for Seminar magazine, I used our mutual friend Diane Nelson's evocative phrase, fingers in the wound. And basically, because as you say, you know, there, you know, there's a lot of hurting and wounding and

kind of picking away at the scabs to let the blood flow out again. You know, those kinds of elements are very strong elements of Hindutva. And I think they're a very strong element of contemporary authoritarian populist politics elsewhere. So, for example, a lot of Modi speeches will go, do not forget what they did in 1800 and whatever. So there has to be a constant...

politics of hurting and then again of feeling hurt so I'm hurt that on my Thursday fast day you sell chicken or something like that okay so people are also so the idea of who is hurt and why and who's hurt more and who's being provoked

has become far too sort of common and sort of constant thing. And maybe that ties to, Laurie, your questions on social media, because I thought between the diaspora and sort of, you know, India as a physical space, the relationship is number one of like, if you want to call it simultaneity. So, for example,

the same piece of information that someone sitting in India might get on their WhatsApp group is exactly the same that comes to me here sitting in London or you sitting over there in the US and things like that. So the idea of...

If you think about some of our more classical and canonical writings on nationalism, such as Benedict Anderson and things like that, the print capitalism has given way to app capitalism as the new form.

sort of skeleton, the new kind of structure around which to imagine a transnational community. And obviously this has made it simultaneous. So you can have the consecration of the Ram temple going physically over there in Ayodhya. And of course, we can watch it on many Indian channels in the US or in the UK on our satellite channels.

you know, dish subscription service. But of course, we can also watch it on our phones in public transport or sitting in a park or other kinds of things. So it sort of makes that thing possible. And maybe the second connected to that is the idea of assembly, which is that it is possible to be both globally dispersed and to assemble as a collectivity around these kinds of events. So to the extent that the idea of

Participation in this kind of an assembly takes forward and consolidates the constituency of Hindutva. That's quite important. And then, you know, those videos of extreme violence, including of killings and mob lynching, you have to sort of think of it as, again,

you know, not just vicarious, but that you are participating in that event in a particular way. So it's that is the whole purpose of being able to put on a four minute clip of a long and lingering torture. You know, someone is being killed. And it was initially very shocking when the first ones of these things came out in the 2015, 2016 period. I think it was Pellew Khan who was lynched in that particular episode.

But it's just far too common. Any far-flung, no-name town, you can just see that sort of thing. Songs become quite important. So Kunal Purohits book on H-pop, the hate music that has come out of Hindutva, you can see that quite easily. People listening to that in the diaspora and things like that. So I would say that the connection that social media makes between diaspora and... At the same time, when the thing kicked off in Leicester...

So the first information I got was from a school WhatsApp group. And this was a school I left at the age of 12.

So this was not even my high school. And effectively it said, come on, Hindus of the UK, we are doing it here in India. It's your turn to show what we are made of, you know, in UK or, you know, in Brampton or wherever in Canada and things like that. So the idea that the assertive Hindu is someone who is open to taking violent action against Muslims is

is obviously one of the main uniting elements of Hindutva transnationally, meaning from the nation and then across other nations. But in places like the US and the UK,

it's really mediated or translated into different terms these days about Hindu phobia, right? And people claiming being victimized by Hindu phobia. And rather than it necessarily being expressed in these kind of street battles, although we do want to talk about some incidents in the UK where that did happen, it seems like there's a different

manifestation of victimhood or discourse of victimhood in the diaspora don't you think?

Yes, very much so. And, you know, if you think in terms of, well, one thing is that you're not properly a minority abroad if there is the phobia named after you. So you've got to be anti-Semitic or, you know, Islamophobia. You know, now there is, I think, a big push for Hindu phobia to be recognized by universities and national governments or regional governments as a form of discrimination.

In the U.S. context, the Hindu phobia trope

really sort of feeds off of that sort of anti-Semitism trope, right? And there's kind of clear alliances being forged between the Hindu right and the Zionist sort of right. Do you think that that's happening to the same degree, you know, like these long distance ethno-nationalisms feeding off of each other, do you think that's happening to the same degree in the UK? Yeah.

It is happening, but not at all in the same degree. And I think that fact that in the US, the sort of politics around anti-Semitism is far more advanced. And it becomes easier for Hindutva to mimic it and to use it as a vehicle, given the close connections between the radical Zionists and Hindutva people over there.

This is not to say that there isn't a strong Zionist presence within British politics, but it does not articulate itself in that kind of way at all. And I wonder if some of the close connections between Hindutva and the British white power far right is basically because that is the more powerful.

far-right, identitarian politics. So I think in some ways this is weaker in the UK as compared to the US. I mean, I think the US also, there's a kind of triangulation. It's not that the white far-right is out of the picture, right? I mean, Laurie mentioned

Kash Patel and Vivek Ramaswamy and all of these folks who are now very much part of the Trump coalition, right? And at the same time, making common cause with Zionists, right? So there's a kind of mutually reinforcing thing happening across all the nations. And I think that makes Hindus, Hindutva people in the US in a way more confident regarding the politics that they're following and some kind of share of state power that

They have enjoyed and seem to be in line to enjoy even more. Here it's very much within the mainstream. You obviously have a large number, well not a large number, but a number of British members of parliament and mayors of cities and things like that who are of South Asian origin.

But also periodically, there are members of the House of Lords who are Hindu and some of whom who have just been stripped of their lordship or other titles have had close relations with Hindutva. But I think British politics are so different from American politics. And even the way in which elections are conducted and have kind of a nurturing effect on Hindutva, that I don't think works in the same kind of way. Yeah.

But we are still seeing this kind of turn to claims of Hindufobia in this country, in the UK. And I think it's important to point out how they're used, those claims to Hindufobia are being used

to essentially silence criticism of India and the Hindu far-right that's in charge in India in a way that is indeed parallel to how claims to anti-Semitism, false claims to anti-Semitism are used by Zionists in the UK and the US in a similar fashion to

to basically silence any kind of criticism of Israel, right? So it's interesting to see these parallel claims to hurt sentiment being effective silencers of political discourse to the exclusion of any critical analysis of actual power. No, I fully agree with you on that. And in fact, if you look at one recent episode where Hindu phobia came in,

I mean, it is at one level also a vehicle for radical groups to become powerful within the Hindu community, so to speak. Right. So in other words, how many temples do you control? What do you control within temples? Who comes to your temples from India to give speeches?

do you host members of the BJP ministers and the like? And of course, you know, if you did that and you are from a small town in the Midlands or something, that will appear quite nice to a number of people saying so and so seems to know leaders of the BJP and things like that. But if you look at the recent one where Starmer on Diwali served meat and alcohol at a Diwali party within a number 10 party,

Yeah. And then right away, one of the more far right of the Hindu organizations came out and saying this was Hindu phobia. And then within about 10 days, Starmer apologizes for having done this. Same organization gets a number of brownie points for having got an apology from the prime minister. They also had set up something called the Hindu platform for democracy, where they advise Hindus in different constituencies on who they should vote for.

And people like myself, though I'm hardly the most targeted person, often find ourselves written about in social media as being Hindu phobic. And so as being Hindu phobic. And so as director being Hindu phobic and things like that. So

I don't know if that goes down too well. And that is why I feel that the percentage of 42% beyond which, which is roughly equal to the percentage of votes that they get in an election back in India, that seems to be a kind of a

And, you know, I don't know if Bengali Hindus will be happy to be lumped together with Gujarati Hindus and, you know, Bengali Hindus eat meat and drink alcohol on Diwali. They're not the ones who are not going to, you know, they don't have a very strong vegetarian culture, so to speak. Yeah.

So you don't see the kind of silencing and surveilling effects of Hindutva on your campus, for example? It's not? No, not yet. I think there were efforts to replicate what has happened in the US over here. And that has not happened so far. And as a personal anecdote, at a British Council meeting, I was sitting right next to someone from the RSS who had come from India.

And when he heard I was from SOAS, he said, look, I mean, we've tried to start a branch on your campus. Can you help us? Because we have just not found enough people. We started one in 2017, but we are required to have at least three members. And somehow that sort of dropped off and they've not been able to form another branch.

you know, kind of unit there. And what we also find is that wherever there are strong Dalit students' organizations, there are much weaker Hindutva organizations. And so as historically has had a very strong, I mean, I would say for the last six odd years, has had a continuous presence of quite radical Dalit students. Is the relative weakness of Hindutva in the UK to do with just the caste and class differences

class and religious composition of the UK South Asian diaspora versus the US diaspora, which I mean, the US diaspora, it is far more affluent. It's far more upper caste. So how much do you think that makes for the kind of relative strength or weakness of Hindutva in the two contexts?

Well, I mean, in addition to the caste and class and regional and religious, you know, kind of heterogeneity that you spoke of, I think something that is very important in the Indian diaspora in the UK is the generational element, which is that, you know, apart from historic...

you know, migration from the 18th century, et cetera, onwards. The kinds of people who came to work in the car factories in Coventry in 1950s and 1960s. I mean, you know, they've had two or three or four generations of their families develop here now in Coventry.

Places like Coventry in sort of working class neighborhoods where they probably also grew up together with people from the Caribbean or Africa or white working classes and things like that. The Corner Shop as an institution all across the UK, including in working class and Afro-Caribbean and other kinds of neighborhoods.

So with affluence comes the desire to separate from the rest of society into suburbia or into gated communities. And when you don't have that kind of affluence, you live with other people within your class position in relatively mixed kinds of communities. And of course, there must have been a degree of urban planning involved.

with particularly with respect to placing public housing units in affluent areas as well. So you have some degree of mixture. And I think one of the major reasons drivers really of Hindutva radicalization has been the affluence over the last two, three decades in such a way that parts of cities,

certain suburbs of large cities, etc., have become very particularly Hindu or Gujarati or Punjabi and Sikh and things like that. So I would sort of see the link between affluence and Hindutva in that sort of way. And therefore, I don't want to say that the US and the UK thing is completely different. Maybe there are moves, you know, in the direction of where the US is now. But the

multi-generational presence of working class Indians here. The continued sort of inflow of working class Indians, for example, if you were in London, at least in my part of London, almost all construction is now done by Punjabi construction crews like Garival Construction or Lalaji Construction and stuff like that as a kind of replacement for Brexit Labour. So

There isn't, I don't think, a possibility in which the majority of the Indian diaspora in the UK will become high-tech, upper-class, suburban, etc., with a lot of life circulating around temples. And I think that is a quite different one here. Yeah.

But so that's an interesting point, Subiya, because it kind of goes contrary to something I think Edward Anderson said in his book, which is that across the UK, it's especially in places where austerity has, you know, devoided councils of support for regular people. This is a point also made in a really interesting article in The Guardian about what happened in Leicester in 2022.

So they're making the point that it's when people are in material need that the sang sort of comes in and swoops in and offers support. And that's where Hindutva can take hold. Do you see that at all?

I do see that. And I think it is city specific at one level. So, you know, there are cities which are already quite segregated, Leicester being one of them. You could be in an entirely Hindu area or an entirely Muslim area and things like that. And the kind of, you know, public housing is a big issue. And partly for the fact that, you know, among two new groups of people in cities like Leicester, you have Somali.

And you have Bangladeshi. And then you have a new inflow of people from rural Gujarat into the agro processing kind of work and things like that. So there is contestation over limited public housing. And the other point is actually slightly more tangential in my view, which is that cities used to have funds for social cohesion. So, you know, when there's a new migrant family,

that comes in, you know, they might be introduced into English language classes, I don't know, civics lessons and things like that. And when austerity took hold and these funds entirely dried up, the temples became the surrogates for social services in a large way. And in terms of a shrinking stock of public housing, people who were

community leaders, therefore also quite often temple management committee leaders, therefore not always, but sometimes also connected to Hindutva organizations, they gained power vis-a-vis

they gain power as a result of what kind of services they could offer. So, I mean, it's not at all uncommon to hear in certain cities that so-and-so was a very good member of parliament and they looked after us really well. But now that they are no longer a member of parliament, we turn to our community leaders for help in many of these things. So it does give them... It's a socializing of care, right?

Very much so. And, you know, I mean, imagine that you've come in as a new migrant from, let's say, Gujarat, and you have very poor knowledge of English. And the person employing you in their agro processing unit...

also happens to be on a temple committee or something of that sort. So they can sort out a lot of things for you. But obviously, you know, they require from you a kind of overt and public show of their kind of being your backer or something like that in a local election or something. And that I think, I mean, maybe this is also a difference between the UK and the US that

I think the sort of orientation of migrants around places of worship and the role of community in that sense, of community institutions in providing a sense of security, solidarity, etc. I mean, my sense is that that coincided with

the 1960s wave of migration into the United States, right? So that sort of social infrastructure, right, that was very much around religiosity, et cetera, that consolidated much earlier in the United States. And maybe in the U.K.,

The presence of other institutions, you know, labor institutions, you know, Working men's clubs and things like that. Working men's clubs, right? These other sort of more institutions that were socially heterogeneous, that that kind of mitigated the consolidation of these sort of more particularistic identities, right?

Would you say that's the case? And then perhaps now with greater austerity and the kind of clawing back of some of these public services, you're having that turn to a more kind of particularistic politics. Yeah. And that's sort of, you know, having had some meetings by invitation with some members of parliament and things like that in the last one year or two.

We find that they have zero clue of Hindutva. So they say we know about radicalized Muslim youth. We know of radicalized white youths.

We know about Khalistani youth who might have some sort of preference for Khalistan. But we always thought Hinduism was the language of religion of peace and love. So can you explain to us what is Hindutva and why is it a dangerous politics? This has happened on three occasions in the last one year, I would say. And there seems to be

You know, the deputy prime minister has been photographed with people who belong to the Hindu far right here, people who on social media give certificates on who is Hindu phobic or a good Hindu or a bad Hindu and a fake Hindu, etc., etc.,

So there's a very strange and strong sort of cluelessness. And I really wonder if the 1960s identification of Hinduism with hippie culture, you know, produced a kind of a misrecognition of the underbelly of that particular subculture and of,

the violent potentialities that were always there. This point about general social cluelessness about the dangers of Hindutva might be a kind of nice place for us to end because I'm wondering if you see in that cluelessness a kind of possible crack in the potential hegemony of Hindutva in the UK and the US. That is...

if more people knew what was being kind of smuggled in with the far-right Hindu organizations, might this be a place of...

Yeah, of fighting back. And you also mentioned Dalit organizations, student organizations. So can you talk real briefly, perhaps, about what you see as options for putting the brakes on this movement, especially in the diaspora? Yeah.

I think both the strength and the weakness of Hindutva in India and globally or transnationally is its fusion with Modi and the BJP. So as long as people feel that there is a Hinduism that is not fully incorporated within Hindutva or that they have forms of Hinduism that they themselves live, which is in some way in conflict with Hindutva,

you already have a starting point as a given starting point for a politic that is alternative and things like that. A second one is, you know, as you see Hindus for Human Rights and similar organizations and their branches here in the UK and things like that. And that's OK as far as I'm concerned, which is to, you know, kind of publicly say that you're Hindu and that you're not the same kind, in fact, opposed to the kind of Hinduism and things like that. So that's the second one.

A third one, unfortunately, has been switched off, which is that, you know, people on the left and liberals, they think of economic in the last instance. But we've had dire economic situations in India now going back for a decade. And that last instance just seems to be forever postponed. So I don't see that there is going to be in the short run.

a generalized rejection of Hindutva based on its economic policy incompetence, which is quite phenomenal. The Indian public and the Indian courts have been extremely malleable in terms of accommodating all kinds of unspeakable cruelty and denials of justice, with a fair amount of support from the electorate as well.

In the diaspora, I think that those two are engines of the growth of Hindutva that do not find the same degree of traction.

Because obviously, this is not a place in which you could commit the unspeakable violence that you can in, let's say, Uttar Pradesh or Uttarakhand or something like that. So it lacks those, some of the critical glue that ties together people within the Hindutva project within India. In India, not so much mob rule, but like rule by mob is very much a part of the BJP's kind

kind of statecraft, if you want to call it that. That kind of rule by mob is just not possible in a scenario like the UK or in the US. Not for Hindutva. It could be possible for

You know, people who supported the January 6th uprising in the US or uprising, I call it, but you know, the insurrection, I believe is the other word floating. So some of the critical conditions of possibility are just not affordable to Hindutva in some of the lands that it finds itself in. Yeah.

Which I think has to do in part with demography, in part with the relationship between a minority population and the state, right? So those are kind of inbuilt limits. And the structure of the state itself and representation within state institutions and so forth. So, Subir, this podcast is called Recall This Book. Yes. And one of the things that we do at the end of these conversations is ask our guests to...

recommend a book to our listeners? Just a book, okay. Well, I'll recommend a popular book. It's written by one of our ex-students, Kunal Purohit. And there are other books I would have thought also, but this is a like fun slash chilling book. And it is called H-Pop. And it is about hate music.

What's it called now? Let's just, H-Pop, The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars. And I'm recommending this book for the following reason. You might be aware of the work of someone called Richard Manuel, who wrote a book called Cassette Culture in North India in the late 1980s, early 1990s, I think, maybe 1992. And he kind of looked at the proliferation via...

cassette culture, people on long distance buses on which speeches are blaring and things like that. And we are now in a similar moment, but in a technologically very different one where you could basically record a completely genocidal song and you can go to any studio in a small town, get out in an hour, have three songs recorded entirely, you know, kind of drum machines and things like that, fully electronic.

And it can go viral. And in fact, the more violent it is, the higher are the chances that it will go more viral. These are songs that get played outside of mosques just before riots start off. People involved in mob lynching might be playing these songs. And right after this, during the swearing in of the new Maharashtra government, Kunal Purohit noted that H-pop stars were singing songs in front of the BJP's top echelons.

So how songs like this work to radicalize you and to mobilize you and to bring you into an assembly of like-minded people and kind of create consent for the kind of unspeakable horrors and so on that we were talking about. I think it's a very readable and chilling and readable book. Yeah.

Thanks for that. Add that to the top of our list of chilling reading that captures this moment of the world. Yes, very sad, but true. Yeah. Thank you so much. This was great. This was good fun. And send me a link so I can send it to my students. Absolutely. Yes.

Recall this book is the creation of John Plotz and Elizabeth Ferry. Sound editing is by Kamiya Bagla and music comes from a song by Eric Chaslow and Barbara Cassidy. We gratefully acknowledge support from Brandeis University and its Mandel Center for the Humanities. We always want to hear from you with your comments, criticisms, or suggestions for future episodes. Finally, if you enjoyed today's show, please forward it to five people or write a review and rate us wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. ♪