The electoral success of the BJP in 2014 was hailed as the triumph of development over identity. The party seemingly reached beyond their traditional constituency and appealed to Dalit voters through an aspirational campaign. This tallies with arguments that electoral logic determines that the BJP will pursue a path of moderation. The past two years, however, have seen a significant increase in Dalit assertion and mobilization in opposition to the BJP. This paper takes these two trends to raise to inter-related questions: firstly, it questions the extent to which the BJP has moderated its attitudes toward Dalit citizens and secondly, it asks whether Dalit politics has indeed moved from identity to development. The paper draws on a range of secondary sources to argue that BJP moderation is delimited and that critiques of Dalit identity politics obscure both the identitarian strategies of other parties and the materiality of identity-based mobilization.
{"title":"\"Go Write on the Walls That You are the Rulers of the Nation\": Dalit Mobilization and the BJP","authors":"H. Gorringe, Suryakant Waghmore","doi":"10.18278/INPP.2.1.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18278/INPP.2.1.3","url":null,"abstract":"The electoral success of the BJP in 2014 was hailed as the triumph of development over identity. The party seemingly reached beyond their traditional constituency and appealed to Dalit voters through an aspirational campaign. This tallies with arguments that electoral logic determines that the BJP will pursue a path of moderation. The past two years, however, have seen a significant increase in Dalit assertion and mobilization in opposition to the BJP. This paper takes these two trends to raise to inter-related questions: firstly, it questions the extent to which the BJP has moderated its attitudes toward Dalit citizens and secondly, it asks whether Dalit politics has indeed moved from identity to development. The paper draws on a range of secondary sources to argue that BJP moderation is delimited and that critiques of Dalit identity politics obscure both the identitarian strategies of other parties and the materiality of identity-based mobilization.","PeriodicalId":114884,"journal":{"name":"Indian Politics and Policy","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127796735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The starting point of this article is the recognition of globally proliferating right-wing electoral successes of a specific kind that rely upon a weaving together of seemingly contradictory aspects of neoliberalism and nationalism. An important dimension of these globally occurring changes is that they reflect something more than simply the empirical instantiation of a right-wing success in any one specific context. They require us to unravel and understand the transmutations in the nature of the political and the economic in the contemporary postcolonial world. Here, I focus on the relevance of uncovering the powerful weave of nationalism, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism that lies behind such configurations of power; a governmentality I refer to as PNN (postcolonial neoliberal nationalism). An understanding of PNN requires us to challenge the a priori availability to analysis of either neoliberalism or nationalism in isolation; neoliberalism and nationalism are not only not contradictory to each other, but as projects of re-forming imaginaries, they co-constitute the ideas of “market/economy” and “nation/culture.” Further, PNN makes visible the ambivalent status of “the West,” since it is imbued with the historical legacy of colonial memory re-called into the present as a revanchist pride, and combined with the conflicting aspirational/actual consumption desires to emulate the capitalist imperial metropolitan fantasies. I use the example of India to illustrate how PNN has been enacted as a technique of governmentality by the Modi-led BJP government through the reformulation of Swadeshi and the Make in India project.
{"title":"The Political Project of Postcolonial Neoliberal Nationalism","authors":"N. Kaul","doi":"10.18278/INPP.2.1.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18278/INPP.2.1.2","url":null,"abstract":"The starting point of this article is the recognition of globally proliferating right-wing electoral successes of a specific kind that rely upon a weaving together of seemingly contradictory aspects of neoliberalism and nationalism. An important dimension of these globally occurring changes is that they reflect something more than simply the empirical instantiation of a right-wing success in any one specific context. They require us to unravel and understand the transmutations in the nature of the political and the economic in the contemporary postcolonial world. Here, I focus on the relevance of uncovering the powerful weave of nationalism, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism that lies behind such configurations of power; a governmentality I refer to as PNN (postcolonial neoliberal nationalism). An understanding of PNN requires us to challenge the a priori availability to analysis of either neoliberalism or nationalism in isolation; neoliberalism and nationalism are not only not contradictory to each other, but as projects of re-forming imaginaries, they co-constitute the ideas of “market/economy” and “nation/culture.” Further, PNN makes visible the ambivalent status of “the West,” since it is imbued with the historical legacy of colonial memory re-called into the present as a revanchist pride, and combined with the conflicting aspirational/actual consumption desires to emulate the capitalist imperial metropolitan fantasies. I use the example of India to illustrate how PNN has been enacted as a technique of governmentality by the Modi-led BJP government through the reformulation of Swadeshi and the Make in India project.","PeriodicalId":114884,"journal":{"name":"Indian Politics and Policy","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130728149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Indo-Bangladesh Relationship: \"Saath Saath\" (Together) or Too Close for Comfort?","authors":"Ali Riaz","doi":"10.18278/INPP.2.1.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18278/INPP.2.1.4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":114884,"journal":{"name":"Indian Politics and Policy","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131515859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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