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Hindutva victimhood, misogyny, and the legitimization of an immoral infrastructure


Figure 1: Example of a rape threat from Hindutva accounts online amidst the India-Pakistan tensions in 2025

Hindutva is an immoral ideology, constructing India as a Hindu nation modeled after Nazi Germany. 

The production of the "Other" as a threat, as an immoral communicative act, threatens Hinduism at its heart. It perfects the art of communicative inversion, turning materiality on its head, that the ideology effectively seeds across the diverse registers of private, community, and public life. To the extent I am a victim, I can carry out the most immoral transgressions without being accountable. I have been wronged, the narrative goes, so I can legitimately discard the need for moral boundaries. References to the Hindu epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, are drawn in to uphold this degeneracy.

The ethical and reflexive journey of Hinduism as a faith tradition, critically interrogating its workings to build spaces for transformation, is framed as anti-Hindu, or Hinduphobic. The production of the trope of Hinduphobia in this sense is immoral, one that plays victimhood to erase critical questions.

The immorality of Hindutva is most evident in its infrastructure of sexual violence. Consider most recently the proliferation of violent rape threats from Hindutva accounts online targeting Pakistani women.

Across different discursive registers, Hindutva men perfect the narrative of victimhood, of being wronged and hence, looking for sympathy. 

From being the "oppressed husband being harassed by his wife" to justify sexually predatory behaviors online to tweeting about raping Muslim women to actually raping Muslim women amidst riots, misogynist Hindutva men continually recirculate the tropes of victimhood. Consider the number of incidences of rapes of dalit girls and women by upper caste Hindutva men. Within the four walls of so-called civilized middle-class Hindutva supporting upper caste households, consider the incidences of rapes of women (often from the oppressed castes) engaged in domestic work.

The immorality of Hindutva in the micro percolates through the meso and the macro. The immoral culture of sexual violence, online grooming and deceptions perpetuated by Hindutva men and enacted within the micro infrastructures of households and social media relationships extend to the sexual violence threatening to rape Muslim women circulated on WhatsApp forwards. 

Note here the confluence of the narrative of being an oh-so-oppressed man because women are too empowered and the "Hindu in danger" because dalits (oppressed caste communities) and Muslims are too empowered. 

Hindutva's architecture of establishing India as a Hindu rashtra (nation) is the sort of immoral rot at the heart of Hinduism that threatens to destroy the liberatory possibilities of the faith tradition.


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