Hindu nationalism, diaspora politics and nation-building in India

Abstract

This article proceeds from a critical reading of the role of religion for nation-building in India. In particular, the authors discuss how the Indian notion of secularism relies upon a number of religious legacies manifest in a Gandhian notion of what constitutes religious and political communities. Proceeding from this general picture, the authors examine how Hindu nationalists have used such legacies to enforce exclusionary practices by establishing certain hegemonic structures of rigid religious boundaries and practices with the aim of maintaining antagonistic movements within the Hindu fold. This, the authors argue, has been the case both among Hindu nationalists in India and among the widespread diaspora in Europe, Canada and the United States. Here, the authors critically evaluate a number of attempts to challenge these hegemonic structures in terms of secular and religious forces as well in terms of legalistic understandings of citizenship rights. It is argued that religion can and has played a positive role in Indian nation-building, but that Hindu nationalism has continuously reproduced exclusionary practices against other religious communities and worked against any forms of assimilatory processes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catarina Kinnvall

Catarina Kinnvall is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lund University, Sweden. She is the author of a number of books and articles. Her publications include The Political Psychology of Globalization: Muslims in the West (with Paul Nesbitt-Larking, Oxford University Press, 2010) and Globalization and Religious Nationalism in India: The Search for Ontological Security (Routledge, 2006)

Ted Svensson

Ted Svensson recently obtained his doctorate at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. Since September 2009, Ted has been lecturing in the Department of Political Science at Lund University, Sweden. His recent publications revolve around the manner in which the idea and practice of the War on Terror has unfolded in the Indian context