India's legacy in the anticolonial struggle inspires movements for sovereignty and against colonialism across global spaces.
The anticolonial struggle that shaped India's consciousness in the twentieth century marked the nation as a global leader with a powerful story to tell.
Solidarity and inspiration
India's story of resistance to colonialism inspired anticolonial struggles across the Global South. From across Asia to Africa to Latin America to the very seats of colonialism.
The newly liberated nation emerged on the global landscape as a leader in how to do democracy. Developing a constitutional framework that engaged dialogically with the British constitutional structure and the cultural registers of pluralism reflecting its cultural diversity, India captured the global imagination, offering a powerful lesson on democracy by anchoring it in grassroots radical participation.
The story of Indian democracy powerfully challenged the West-centrism of democratic theory rooted in modernization.
The ideologically charged assumption that one needs capitalist growth to build democracy was fundamentally challenged by the masses of Indians that participated in living and growing a thriving democracy. This model of grassroots democracy created spaces for working through the entrenched and persistent problems of caste, challenges of poverty and inequality, and the communal riots that marked the violence of partition crafted by the British as they were leaving India.
Justice and democracy
India's embodied commitments to secularism and democracy shaped the narrative that the newly liberated postcolonial state crafted on the global stage.
Its model of anticolonialism that ranged from armed struggle to the Gandhian struggle anchored in non-violence and non-cooperation inspired marginalized communities and their struggles across global spaces. Its leadership with the non-aligned movement created a register for peace, sovereignty, and decolonization across nations of the Global South.
India's steadfast commitment to social justice was powerfully evident in the solidarity it expressed with anticolonial movements across Global South spaces, offering ideological and material solidarity.
From Vietnam and Cuba to Palestine and South Africa, India stood resolute on the global stage as a beacon of justice.
Neoliberalism and Hindutva
The large-scale neoliberal reforms that were launched by Congress in the late 1980s along with the accommodationist strategy of the Congress that empowered Hindutva organizations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) to proliferate in order to weaken the unions and collectivization movements paved the way for the ascendance of Hindutva, the far-right ideology modeled after the Nazi ideology.
Neoliberalism and its pursuit for spaces for privatization through authoritarian techniques of control created the affective infrastructure for Hindutva to proliferate. It carefully destroyed the architectures of community and collective that stood in resistance to the large-scale reforms.
A moral community constructed around the ideals of socialism and secularism was replaced at its foundation with the pursuit for capital, self-actualization, and growth. Individualized narratives around success and getting ahead replaced narratives around care and justice.
As new brands flushed the markets and malls started proliferating across urban spaces, questions of poverty, inequality, and welfare became uncool.
Those asking questions of justice were projected as burdens, or worse, as enemies of the state, with the Congress closely collaborating with corporate interests and the petty bourgeoisie to target, incarcerate, and kill union organizers and activists organizing around social justice.
A mosque and Hindutva's digital networks
The rapid destruction of the infrastructures around social justice and the pathologization of social justice movements laid the pathway for the proliferation of Hindutva's political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The BJP rode to power through the narrative of grievance around the Babri Masjid, as sixteenth century mosque, constructing the mosque as sitting on the birthplace of Lord Ram.
Although the narrative is not borne out by empirical evidence, it formed a critical register in the hate campaign othering Muslims and portraying Muslims as invaders. The demolition of the temple, led by RSS and VHP kar sevaks, formed the propaganda infrastructure leading to Hindutva's mainstreaming.
This process of mainstreaming of Hindutva was catalyzed and consolidated through digital platforms, with the technologically savvy diaspora community playing a critical role in setting up the online networked infrastructure of Hindutva. This networked infrastructure facilitated the flow of ideas, symbols, people, and materials. The global diaspora, negotiating racism in the Western spaces they migrated to, saw Hindutva as a source for asserting cultural identity, turning to Hindutva's construction of pride to assert itself.
The networked infrastructures of digital technologies worked alongside the rapidly privatizing media spaces to mainstream the twin narratives of the "Hindu in danger" and "Hindu cultural pride."
Hindutva's colonization of digital spaces
The digital infrastructure of Hindutva has multiplied exponentially over the past decade, shaping the consolidation of absolute power in the hands of Hindutva. Hindutva extremism has colonized digital spaces, producing disinformation and hate 24X7.
Concocted narratives around Muslim invaders, Christian conversion, gender empowerment, and Dalit empowerment are pushed out 24X7, rendered viral on digital platforms.
From Muslims eating beef, to Muslims seducing Hindu women, to Muslims stealing land, Hindutva propaganda online thrives on the dehumanization of India's Muslim minorities. Explicit calls to kill, murder, carry out violence are everyday features of the online Hindutva space. This online infrastructure of hate feeds offline violence, and in turn, magnifies it digitally. From lynchings to murders of Muslims suspected of love jihad to attacks on mosques, Hindutva violence offline powerfully reflects the complete take over by the digital infrastructure of hate. A recurring loop of othering and violence from offline to online and to mainstream media platforms and back shapes a violent communicative infrastructure, devoid of reason. Critical here is the complete colonization of mainstream media infrastructures in circulating the propaganda.
This digital networked structure of Hindutva, reflected in the Information Technology (IT) cell of the BJP alongside Hindutva influencers in India and across the global diaspora, has fundamentally shaped Hindutva's colonization of the narrative around India. Who is an India and who isn't; Who is a Hindu and who isn't, these questions are continually thrown out by the digital infrastructure. Hindutva's construction of India as a Hindu nation continually marks dissenting voices and minority communities as anti-national, threatening to ship the anti-nationals to Pakistan.
The secularism that formed India's core and punctuated its global narrative has been communicatively inverted, turned into its opposite, as antithetical to the idea of India. The social justice that defined India's global narrative has been inverted, replaced with misogynist narratives that seek acceptance from oppressors.
India's long history of support for anticolonial struggles such as the Palestinian struggle is replaced by a masochistic narrative aspiring to whiteness, seeking recognition and acceptance from Israel and the United States.
The historic affective affinities for struggles of the marginalized in the wider public are replaced by sycophantic digital narratives cheering the genocide of entire peoples, the murder of children, and the bombing of resisting populations. Amidst an unfolding genocide that has all the features of colonial violence, you witness a hate-filled Islamophobic digital infrastructure celebrating with glee the death of Palestinians. Indians, under Hindutva's colonization of digital spaces, have inverted our moral position to one cheering on the oppressor.
Loser culture
The communicative processes of othering that makes up the digital spaces of Hindutva fundamentally mainstreams a loser culture, replete with anti-women misogyny, anti-Muslim slurs, rape threats and threats to kill Muslim minorities. It reflects a broader offline culture that seeks pleasure from the extreme marginalization of Muslims. Hindutva's loser culture derives its pleasure from sexualized violence rooted in hate.
The recent episode of large-scale rape threats online directed at Pakistani women from Hindutva accounts is part of Hindutva's loser culture, immoral at its core.
Obscene slangs in Hindi, the dominant language of Hindutva, are combined with extreme forms of misogyny directed at minorities and dissenting voices, disproportionately targeting women.
The more grotesque and explicit the threats to rape, graphically depicting various forms of extreme violent acts, the more the sense of power Hindutva losers feel online.
The large-scale takeover of this loser culture online translates into a broader narrative that sees India through this lens.
Hindutva has achieved what it set out to do.
It has colonized the narrative of India in the digital ecosystem. However, instead of projecting the image of India as a superpower worthy of respect, this loser online culture has massively weakened India's global image, as a cheap powerless bully.
As the world's largest democracy with a young population that promises to be the largest globally, India holds great promise. To realize this promise, India has to tackle the loser culture that has seeded itself into its structures through the seductive narratives of hate, othering, and powering down on those who are marginalized.
Unless challenged at a scale that matches Hindutva's colonizing efforts, Hindutva threatens to destroy all that is beautiful about India, including how India is perceived globally.