The State of the Union-India Edition: Hindu Majoritarianism and the 2024 Indian Elections

Over the last decade, Indian politics has been dominated by an authoritarian, Hindu nationalist government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and their leader, Narendra Modi. Together, the BJP and Modi have sought to establish India as a significant player on the global stage whose strength derives from an overtly politicized Hindu identity and display of Hindu cultural power. To this end, the Modi government has utilized hard power initiatives, such as a confrontational approach with China and Pakistan and aggressive performative assertions of Indian civilizational might. Soft power initiatives involve promoting the BJP's idea of India in Western cultural and academic forums and employing a global network of Hindu cultural organizations to present a more palatable face of the government and Modi himself. Since 2018, V-Dem, a Swedish group that collects disaggregated data on the varieties of democratic government in a yearly report, has reported on democratic backsliding in India (V-Dem, 2024 Democracy Report). They have labelled India as an "electoral autocracy" in every report they have issued since 2018 (V-Dem, 2024 Democracy Report). In a recent Pew survey of twenty-four democratic countries, India stood out with 67% of participants favoring military rule and 72% expressing support for autocracy. These data suggest that democracy as a form of government and democratic values, do not resonate with much of the Indian populace (Pew report on democracies, 2024). Moreover, this dovetails with data in which Indians, particularly Hindus, have expressed support for a Hindu-centric government, rather than a secular one (Pew Survey of Nationalism and Politics in India, 2021). Unsurprisingly then, the 2024 Indian election is shaping up to be a battle of national narratives. On one end is Modi, who will contest the national elections for the third time. First elected to the post in 2014, Modi has effectively consolidated his power over the past decade and has increased the influence of his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), across most of the country. Modi’s appeal to his supporters is grounded in many factors but the most forceful among these is his unabashed endorsement of Hindu nationalism - the idea that India is at its core, a Hindu nation. In this way, Hindu nationalism positions members of other religious communities, particularly Muslims and Christians as outsiders who threaten the ideological unity of the nation. Modi’s tenure as Prime Minister has been defined by policies and initiatives that aim to bring India back to its supposed Hindu roots. These range from altering school syllabi to reflect the “true” history of a Hindu India, changing the names of “Islamic” towns and cities, to landmark decisions like the forceful occupation and integration of Kashmir into the Indian Nation State and the construction of a Ram temple on the site of a destroyed 16th century mosque in Ayodhya. Indeed, the construction of the Ram temple marked the beginning of Modi’s 2024 electoral campaign, bolstering his image as the leader who “brought Ram back to India after five hundred years.” The challenge to Modi and the BJP’s Hindu nationalist narrative comes from the Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), a political bloc made up of several parties, including India’s oldest political formation - the Congress Party. A relatively new coalition that only took shape in 2023, INDIA has focused their attention on highlighting the ways in which Modi and the BJP instrumentalize religion in order to distract their voters from “real issues” that affect all Indian citizens. By claiming to cater to the issues of “the Indian people” - a seemingly essential population that lies beneath the superimposed divisions of identity, INDIA has tried to raise questions about caste, class, and gender inequality in the country. However, most commentators have already sounded the death knell for INDIA, claiming that their criticism of Modi’s religious politics are coming a bit too late, especially for those Indians who are more than eager to realize the Hindu India that has promised to them over and over again. While the above discussion barely scratches the surface of the Indian political terrain in 2024, it gestures to the ways in which religion, particularly Hinduism, is being invoked and discussed by various political actors in India today. The members of this panel chart various aspects of this discourse - How does Hindu nationalism, itself a modern formation, make recourse to discourses about tradition? How does Hindu nationalism interact with other modern ideologies and technologies? How does a nationalist discourse depend on the endorsement of transnational networks of power? This roundtable will have 7 participants varying in rank, region, gender, and scholarly focus with 6 panelists and a presider. This is also an interdisciplinary panel that has scholars who work in religion, media, and politics. Panelist 1 explores how the Ramjanmabhoomi movement has functioned as a shadow political movement working in concert with the BJP. Panelist 2 will discuss how narratives of Hinduphobia impact diaspora perceptions of Indian elections and candidates. Panelist 3 will discuss uses of secularism in political rhetoric. Panelist 4 will consider how Hindu(tva) organizations in the US use Indian electoral politics strategically to promote their political and cultural positions domestically. Panelist 5 will consider how the India government's foreign policy initiatives and promotion of such policies within social media and internet spaces are invested in presenting the BJP vision of India to the west but are really intended for a receptive domestic audience. Panelist 6 will discuss the complicated relationship Hindu nationalism has to different queer identities in order to offer a refined understanding of how the BJP uses queer issues in its articulation of Hinduism as uniquely tolerant, particularly in electoral politics. The roundtable hopes their discussion will elucidate how the rhetoric of democracy, democratic values, and freedom are often used to defend autocratic policy positions. Together, the panelists will provide a wide-ranging analysis of Hindu nationalism that will be pertinent for broader ongoing discourses about religion, politics, and contemporary ethnonationalist regimes.