The tech savvy professional Sangh woman

The emergence of the Sangh in post-liberalization India rides on the participation of tech-savvy men and women, empowered yuppies in tech centers, Internet-empowered corporate executives with MBAs, and now-arrived NRIs in US, UK, Singapore etc. who see the Sangh as a tool for returning their lost dignity.

The Sangh is the ride to the market, Indian ishtyle. These are the Sanghi net warriors. The trolls that inundate the Internet. The Twitterati feeding cycles of Sanghi propaganda. The likes of Shilpi Tiwari. Tech savvy. Sanghi minded. And full of hatred for the "other."

Particularly salient in these groups is the presence of the tech-savvy, professional Sangh woman.

The Sangh woman is convent educated, professionally trained, tech-empowered, and consumer savvy.

She had heard of feminism and enfranchisement and is vocal about gender rights. She has found her joy ride to the tech centers of Noida and Bangalore. Or perhaps a ride to Silicon Valley.

The tech savvy Sanghi woman might be working at an Infosys. Or a Meryll Lynch. Or Google.

She is emancipated. The face of an empowered India. Empowered with technology. Empowered to participate in the New Nation.

For the Sangh woman, hatred for Muslims offers an easy narrative of alignment. The narrative is one of the Muslim "other" that is threat to "Mother India." Hatred for dalits is another easy narrative. For her, Dalits represent a class of opportunity-seekers who use reservation quotas to move ahead in life, reducing the opportunities for her Brahminical brethren.

Technology is a tool for actualizing individual identity. So the Sanghi woman turns the other way when her Sanghi brothers attack women.

The Sanghi woman does not find the RSS attack on women's rights a problem as long as her own rights are protected.

Emancipation for her is individualized in the Nike Label. She can "Just do it." She can achieve whatever she wants to achieve.

The gender question for her then is not one of solidarity, but one of individualist progress. In this individual success narrative, gender can be performed as a successful career trajectory, disengaged from broader questions of gender, inequality, and patriarchy of Indian society.

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University. Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute ...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...

Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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