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On Gandhi Jayanti: Deception and the Hindutva way of life


Gandhi's experiments with truth offer a powerful register for resistance to the communicative resources of deception that form the essential infrastructures of Hindutva. 

As Gandhi invites us to critically interrogate our own relationship with non-violence, peace, service, relationship with the community, and resistance to colonization, he offers anchors for life as practice, lived through struggles for truth. 

These anchors of life as practice, realized through struggles for truth stand in resistance to the deceptions that shape the cognitive, affective, and material resources of Hindutva. 

Consider the deception played by Hindutva propagandists in mobilizing violence targeting Gandhi, resulting in his murder, in the ongoing vilification of Gandhi within private spaces while simultaneously upholding Gandhi as an Indian cultural icon in its public messages to the world.


As a fascist ideology, Hindutva thrives on the production and circulation of lies, continually at work to vilify India's Muslim minorities. 

This deception, communicating contradictory and conflicting messages internally and externally, actively producing misinformation, and mobilizing violence on the basis of the misinformation, lies at the crux of the organizing of hate as a technique for rule. 

Deception forms the everyday habits of Hindutva, drawing from the Brahminical hierarchy that gives it its conceptual formation. Brahminism as the underlying feature of Hindutva mobilizes the practices of deception.

From the active production of disinformation in the form of conspiracy theories to practices based on lies in everyday life, the communicative infrastructure of Hindutva thrives on deception.

Dominant approaches to countering the disinformation and hate propagated by Hindutva turn to fact-checking, correcting the misinformation with accurate information. The assumption underlying these approaches suggests that correcting the misinformation would change the belief of the recipient of the message. 

In contrast, theorizing the concept of deception as an everyday practice of Hindutva suggests that deception makes up the cognitive and affective infrastructure of Hindutva. At the crux of Hindutva is its immorality as a conceptual register. Techniques of deception thus are entirely necessary and intrinsic to Hindutva's survival and reproduction. 

The theorizing of deception as an everyday practice of Hindutva therefore outlines the role of the pedagogy of truth as the basis for countering Hindutva. 

Such a pedagogy of truth would turn to everyday practices of life, living, and community engagement as the anchors for re-organizing the toxic hate that holds up and perpetuates Hindutva.

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