Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Planting and circulating disinformation is one of the key strategies of the far right.  Disinformation propels hate, often through the juxtaposition of information.  Juxtaposition in the context of disinformation places two pieces of information side-by-side, creating a frame that seeds doubt, manufactures ulterior motivations that seemingly drive the target of the hate, and places a label on the target.  In the attacks launched by Hindutva on me, my scholarship, and the work of CARE, I have witnessed closely the ways in which juxtaposition is deployed to create false frames, which are key ingredients in the mobilization of hate. Globally, we witness the deployment of juxtaposition by Hindutva trolls to target academics , activists , communities , and other dissenting voices .  The violence of Hindutva both online and offline, both in India and in the Indian diaspora, draws upon the strategic creation of frames that cast the targeted person as "anti-Hindu" " Hinduphobic

From fieldwork I woke up the morning of Mahalaya 2022 with a WhatsApp message, playing the video of sunrise on a sea beach, new age music in the background, and a couple performing salutation to the Sun god সূর্য নমস্কার (“Surjo nomoshkar”), their poses stretched to perfection. The message that went with the video invited the recipient of the video to open their Mahalaya mornings with “Surjo nomoshkar” (spelled as “Surya namaskar” in Hindi text in the video).   A casual glimpse into the video interrupted my much-anticipated Mahalaya morning, replete with the anticipation of waking up to the sound of Birendra Krishna Bhadra’s “Rupang dehi” playing in the background.   It took me a few minutes to rework myself into the Mahalaya mood as I turned to waking up the children so they can join in the experience of listening to the age-old Mahalaya performance, (Mahishashur Mardini).   Now you might ask, what does receiving a WhatsApp invitation to a sun salutation have to do with interrupted

Solidarity with Hong Kong protestors event organized by CARE, with colleagues and activists One of the profound lessons in carrying out justice-based scholarship is the role of a wider collective.  My public scholarship and the public scholarship of CARE would be just about impossible without the embodied support and nourishment offered by an entire infrastructure of care.  This infrastructure holds us in joy, kindness, and security, comforting us amidst the targeted attacks, and nourishing us with strength and courage.  To articulate claims for justice and to raise questions that challenge the status quo requires academics and our wider networks to turn within and beyond to find courage.  In my journey with struggles to raise claims at the "margins of the margins," the courage I draw upon is rooted in the wider collective.  It emerges from the many friendships with activists who embody courage in their questioning of structures, who offer insights into strategies for sustena

  As a social scientist studying the effects of oppressive practices on the health and wellbeing of communities at the margins, I am struck by the ways in which power organizes to silence our scholarship. Voices of communities at the margins articulating their experiences of health, situating these experiences of health in relationship to the organizing of oppressive structures, and organizing to resist these structures threaten both economic and political power.  Power, therefore, resorts to a wide array of strategies to silence scholarship.  It does so through a wide array of communicative strategies that include fabricating lies, planting erroneous artifacts as evidence, deploying communicative inversions, and weaponizing offline-online networks to carry out attacks on academics. In the context of the authoritarian regime, power is threatened when voices of households negotiating poverty or voices of migrant workers foreground the exploitative conditions of work and livelihood. The

One of the powerful transformations brought on by almost four decades of relentless pursuit of neoliberalism, followed by the ascendance of fascist politics across India as a form of late neoliberal governmentality is the rearrangement of desires in intimate spaces. From households to familial contexts to broader extended arrangements, affective registers have been reshaped by the relentless pursuit of more and more.  The ever-expanding spheres of individualized desires rendered as natural have organized the self around the relentless pursuit of greater consumer comfort.  This pursuit of consumer comfort is simultaneously reworked to extract from relationships the returns that optimize pleasure.  Simultaneously, the construction of dissatisfaction as the way of life forms the basis for the desire for the market. Relationships are thus defined by their use value in offering the greatest pleasure at the least effort. There is an underlying ideology of efficiency that shapes how relations

Reflecting on my baba in gratitude. As a young boy, I would look at my baba in wonder. My baba, ever-so-brave, prepared to place his body on the line for the various struggles of the Left that spoke to him in his youth. My ma would tell me the story behind my name, an alias baba took up in doing resistance work. In the years of the emergency in the 1970s, this resistance work placed his body, and the bodies of many union organisers in the line of risk. The risk of losing a job. The risk of being incarcerated. The risk of being made to disappear. In those years, the party would place the trust him to place his body in the struggle, to offer safety to party leaders, to offer safety to landless peasants laying their rightful claims on land they had been denied across generations, to offer safety to comrades needing a passage amidst right-wing repression. As a long-term union worker and party worker, my baba spent so much of his life in working-class struggles, in the organizing of landles

Courtesy: Getty Images A Washington Post story published on June 2, titled "Google’s plan to talk about caste bias led to ‘division and rancor’," documents the resistance put up by employees at Google identifying themselves as Hindu protesting the platforming of a pedagogy-based lecture by the dalit rights activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan.   What is powerful about the story is the complicity of the infrastructure of Google in de-platforming the event and in targeting the organizer of the event at Google, Tanuja Gupta, who worked as a senior manager at Google News.  The disinformation campaign organized by Hindu employees targeting Soundararajan called her “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu” in emails to the company’s leaders. I am very familiar with these tropes, rooted in disinformation, that are increasingly being deployed by Hindutva adherents to target critics of Hindutva.  Over the course of the past year, in response to my scholarship on Hindutva and the support of CARE, t