TY  - JOUR
AU  - Banaji, Shakuntala
JF  - Javnost-The Public
TI  - Vigilante Publics: Orientalism, Modernity and Hindutva Fascism in India
VL  - 25
IS  - 4
PY  - 2018
SN  - 1854-8377
PB  - EURICOM
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2018.1463349
N2  - 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.
U1  - Print ISSN: 1318-3222
ER  -