Introduction
The Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party) (BJP) is the political wing of the Hindu nationalist movement—which also includes the grass-roots organizations, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Association) (RSS) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) (VHP). Its ideology of ‘Hindutva’ is based on the idea that Indian nationhood should be defined by a particular conception of Hinduism and Hindu culture, with Muslims and other minorities assimilated within this majoritarian national identity. During its 2014 election campaign, however, the BJP and its prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, garnered praise from commentators for not resorting to nationalist sloganeering and instead focusing the campaign on promises of economic growth and development. Ashutosh Varshney argued, for instance, that ‘[a]nti-Muslim rhetoric has been missing in Modi's campaign. Instead, he has concentrated on governance and development’.Footnote 1 Varshney suggested that ‘Modi's move away from strict Hindu nationalism is consistent with the political science research of the last several decades, which has argued that no leftwing or rightwing party can come to power in Delhi without moving towards the centre’.Footnote 2 Varshney here was alluding to institutional theories of moderation, according to which democratic electoral politics has a moderating effect on political parties and their ideologies.Footnote 3 Yet, just two years after the election, Varshney had concluded that ‘India's cultural transformation is the fundamental project of BJP politics today’.Footnote 4 This suggests that the case of the BJP in India actually reveals the shortcomings of institutional theories of moderation. Specifically, as Ruparelia and Jaffrelot have shown, while theories of moderation suggest that political parties will moderate their ideologies when they become a part of a plural party system, the BJP has vacillated between periods of apparent moderation and periods of polarization, and has sought to reshape institutions and public discourse ‘by pushing the center of gravity to the right’.Footnote 5 This suggests that no fundamental ideological transformation has occurred as an outcome of participation in electoral politics.
In this article, I further this argument by specifically considering the claim that the BJP's embrace of markets and economic liberalization is an indication of the theory of moderation at work in a globalized world. Baldev Raj Nayar has argued, for instance, that ‘the centrist tendency generated by India's political system is the principal explanation for the change in the BJP's moderate economic policy. In an era of economic globalisation, the acceptance of economic liberalisation is a manifestation of the centrist tendency in Indian politics’.Footnote 6 I argue, however, that the BJP's turn to markets has not occurred at the expense of its majoritarian ideology, but in conjunction with it. Moreover, I argue that this has long been a feature of Hindu nationalism in that, while the movement has routinely embraced dominant economic ideas, in doing so, it has sought to reframe these ideas within Hindu nationalist idioms and for the benefit of its support base. This policy flexibility has been possible because of the ideological vagueness of Hindu nationalism when it comes to economic and social policy, and it was made necessary by the desire of Hindu nationalist political parties to broaden their support base and capture state power.
To make these arguments, I analyse Hindu nationalist ideas about the appropriate relationship between the state, society, and markets in two distinct periods. In the first section of the article, which focuses on the period between 1947 and the late 1990s, I argue that, though Hindu nationalist discourse placed great emphasis on the primacy of ‘society’ over the individual and the state, the state was still significant as the protector of society against markets and as a tool for societal transformation. This view of the state was akin to that of the dominant political party of that period, the Indian National Congress, although it was distinguished by its emphasis on ‘Hindu’ society and the protection of groups key to the Hindu nationalist support base. In the second section, I argue that, since the 1990s, among the Indian bureaucracy and political elites, including in the BJP, there has been a gradual shift away from an emphasis on the state and toward a focus on the market as a tool for societal transformation. This shift was the product of a particular domestic political and socio-economic context, but it also follows a shift in what Iqtidar terms the ‘global political imagination’, as reflected in the ubiquitousness of markets as a mobilizer of political projects in elite and popular political discourse globally.Footnote 7 Subsequently, there emerged a divergence within the Hindu nationalist movement between the BJP and RSS in relation to economic and social policy, with the latter maintaining an emphasis on the state as a protector of particular groups in society that form its support base. The policies of the current BJP-led coalition government has deepened this divide between the BJP and the RSS. In a departure from previous Hindu nationalist strategies, the BJP has sought to consolidate its support base and stimulate economic growth and job creation through a set of policies that aim to bolster the corporate sector and recreate the middle and neo-middle classes as ‘market citizens’, such that they view themselves as entrepreneurs and consumers and come to see the market, rather than the state, as the major provider of public services and social transformation.
The promotion of market citizenship is hardly unique to the BJP. The notion of market citizenship has been used previously to describe policy changes in Europe and North America following the erosion of the welfare state and social citizenship and the turn to neoliberalism. In the 1980s, responsibility for social provisioning was increasingly shifted to private civil society organizations and local authorities with a focus on the technocratic management of policy for market-based economic inclusion, choice and efficiency rather than contestational representative political practice or the establishment of a political and constitutional consensus.Footnote 8 However, the BJP's market citizen is distinctive because it is not the self-regulating autonomous individual found in many accounts of neoliberalism. In these accounts, as Gooptu summarizes: ‘The active enterprising citizen does not make claims on the state and is a self-regulated, self-governed, and self-disciplined individual, prepared to take responsibility for his or her own well-being and for managing risks and vulnerabilities arising from socio-economic or political sources.’Footnote 9 As I argue in the second part of the article, in the Hindu nationalist conception of market citizenship, the individual is an entrepreneurial consumer who is regulated in his/her behaviour by the cultural framework of Hindu majoritarianism and is driven by a desire to strengthen the Hindu nation. This is, therefore, a distinctive variant that I term ‘virtuous market citizenship’.
The intermingling of cultural nationalism and neoliberalism in the BJP's virtuous market citizenship is an Indian manifestation of a growing global trend, although the compatibility of cultural nationalism and neoliberalism has long been observed.Footnote 10 Stuart Hall, for instance, highlighted the role of English nationalism and ‘moral panics’ around race and law and order in deflecting social anxieties and building consent for neoliberalization in Britain in the 1980s.Footnote 11 As neoliberalization has spread globally, a range of public and private actors have simultaneously engaged with cultural nationalism and neoliberal practices, while in the process transforming both. In Pakistan, Iqtidar has argued that, since the late 1990s, the mobilization strategies of the major political Islamist party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, have been increasingly focused on engaging with ‘society’ in the framework of the market rather than the state by, for instance, offering assistance for micro-enterprises and skills training.Footnote 12 Widger has shown that, in Sri Lanka, the private sector's philanthrocapitalism is reflecting and shaping dominant Sinhala Buddhist nationalist narratives.Footnote 13 Atia has argued that Egyptian faith-based development organizations have linked Islamic charity to forms of self-help such as financial investment and entrepreneurship to produce a ‘pious neoliberalism’.Footnote 14 Akçali and Korkut's work on Hungary and Turkey demonstrates that the ruling parties, the Hungarian Civic Union (Fidesz) and Justice and Development Party (AKP), have promoted their respective conservative Christian and Islamist politics through urban development projects that entail gentrification and privatization in a bid for global competitiveness.Footnote 15 The case of Turkey has particular resonance with the Indian case, since, as Kaya has shown, the AKP's social provisioning and economic policies have concurrently emphasized economic liberalization, markets, self-sufficiency, faith-based welfare organizations, and Islamic values.Footnote 16 In the Indian context, while others, like Gopalakrishnan and Desai, have noted the affinities between Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism, the specific configurations of state–society–market relations that processes of neoliberalization are producing have not been fully explored.Footnote 17 Moreover, as I note in the concluding section of the article, virtuous market citizenship, and neoliberalization, in general, remains contested both within the Hindu nationalist movement and in Indian society more generally. The BJP's characterization of political opposition as ‘anti-national’ is an attempt to marginalize dissent and better meld together neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism.
The state as protector
Selective state intervention
V. D. Savarkar, M. S. Golwalkar, and Deendayal Upadhyaya were key figures in the development of Hindu nationalism as a distinctive ideological and political project from the 1920s. As an ideology, however, Hindu nationalism has been preoccupied with issues of Hindu identity rather than social and economic transformation. The seminal text of Hindu nationalism, Hindutva, which was written in 1923 by Savarkar, a nationalist who became a leader of the Hindu Mahasabha (Hindu Grand Assembly) political party, was focused on defining a racial Hindu identity, demarcating a vulnerable Hindu majority from a threatening Muslim majority, and promoting Hindu cohesion and violent opposition to threats as the path to ‘greatness’. It provided little elucidation, however, about the content of Hindu nationalist political, economic, and social ideas. While some of Savarkar's speeches in the 1930s and 1940s have slightly more focus on economic and social issues, his positions are vaguely derived from his majoritarian ideology of Hindutva and more substantially shaped by the context of anti-colonial nationalism, the parameters of which were shaped by the Congress, the desire to present the Hindu Mahasabha as a political rival, and the interests of its supporters. In 1939, for instance, he argued in a speech that India's circumstances meant that ‘the only school of economics which will suit our requirements in the immediate future is the school of Nationalistic economy’.Footnote 18 This entailed large-scale national industrialization and the provision of a ‘comfortable life’ for peasants and labourers, since these groups would provide recruits for the national army, which in turn would secure India's ‘wealth and health’. It also required protection against foreign competition and the subordination of the interests of both capital and labour to the ‘requirement of the Nation as a whole’. This meant that, though private property ‘must in general be held inviolate’, the nationalization of industries, collectivization of agriculture, and the use of force against labour unrest were all possibilities.Footnote 19
In general, there is little in the content of these pronouncements that is distinctively different to ideas being promoted within the Congress at the time. State intervention, wealth redistribution, economic protectionism, self-reliance, and industrialization were all themes that were part of the construction of a nationalist political economy that began to emerge in the late 1870s in the work of intellectuals like Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahadev Govind Ranade, and Gopal Krishna Gokhale. These figures, who went on to become leading figures in the Congress, were critics of both the colonial economy and/or classical political economy and several were deeply influenced by Frederich List's national developmentalism.Footnote 20 Significantly, however, in expressing these ideas in terms of organicist and militant nationalism—through, for instance, intolerance for dissent and the emphasis on a strong army—Savarkar appropriated these mainstream nationalist ideas to serve his Hindu nationalist identity politics: a strategy that would continue to characterize Hindu nationalist economic and social policies.
Bhatt has argued that it was M. S. Golwalkar, the leader of the RSS from 1940 to his death in 1973, who more comprehensively linked ‘Savarkar's conceptions of Hindutva, Hindu nation and Hindu war with . . . a political sociology of the nation state, democracy, rights, citizenship and minorities’, while Upadhyaya ‘developed many of Savarkar's and Golwalkar's ideas into a simplistic corporatist social and political philosophy’.Footnote 21 The RSS, which was established in 1925, styled itself as a ‘non-political’ organization committed to social and cultural reform. Thus, the RSS's domain of action was to be the ‘Hindu nation’, which was deemed by Golwalkar to be ‘cultural’. The state, which was deemed to be ‘political’, was shaped by, and subordinate to, the nation.Footnote 22 In his book Bunch of Thoughts, which was published in 1966, Golwalkar laid out the role of the state in this way:
The State should be above partial interests and should regulate all activities according to dharma. The State is not a class agent of the upper class, according to Indian shastras or political and social science. Nor it is an exploiting agency. It is an agent of morality or dharma. It precludes socialism in the sense of adding economic to political power. The State is not a trader or manufacturer but is entitled to regulate all vocations.Footnote 23
Golwalkar rejected capitalism as ‘tyranny’, but also sought to differentiate his view of the state as an ‘agent of morality’ from the Congress government by rejecting the idea of a ‘welfare state’ and the ‘contract theory’ for presuming an ‘inherent conflict between the individual and society’:
Today our Government, calling itself a ‘Welfare State’, is trying to centralise all power and authority and secure undivided control of education, medical aid, social reforms, production, distribution and many other spheres of life. If the state were thus to dominate the whole range of human activity, the individual will exist only as a slave bereft of all initiative . . . . The state could do good to society only so long as it remained as the upholder of dharma—the higher law of the good life—and not as an end in itself.Footnote 24
Despite Golwalkar's opposition to the RSS becoming a political actor, he agreed to the involvement of RSS members in the activities of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (Indian People's Association)—a political party that was formed in 1951 to fill the vacuum created by the decline of Savarkar's Hindu Mahasabha in the 1940s. Deendayal Upadhyaya was a member of the RSS and became general secretary of the Jana Sangh. His philosophy of ‘integral humanism’ was influential in the RSS and the Jana Sangh from 1965, and it remains the guiding philosophy of the BJP. An important difference between Golwalkar's and Upadhyaya's strands of Hindu nationalist ideology was that, while the former's Hindu nationalism took expression in explicitly racialist language that emphasized the protection of the ‘Hindu soul’ and singled out Muslims, Christians, and Communists as threats to the nation, Upadhyaya and the Jana Sangh's nationalism is expressed through the softer language of ‘Bharatiya’ (Indian) culture. Upadhyaya also tried to universalize notions derived from Hindu metaphysics, like Dharma and Integralism, by trying to delink them from religion.Footnote 25 This reflected the Jana Sangh's desire to play a role in competitive politics and gain a broader support base than that provided by the RSS. The RSS was founded and predominantly supported by upper-caste, middle-class Hindus from non-metropolitan urban centres whose status was threatened by non-Brahmin political mobilization in western and northern India in the 1920s.Footnote 26 Moreover, the assassination of Gandhi, by an RSS supporter, consolidated its reputation as an extremist organization.
Nonetheless, like Golwalkar, Upadhyaya critiqued capitalism, because it valorized materialism; he refuted the idea of a social contract because it placed the individual before society; and he dismissed the notion of the welfare state because it gave the state too much power.Footnote 27 Instead, he argued for a conception of society as a holistic social organism and the state as a protector of the national ‘soul’ through the upholding of dharma, which he translated as ‘the law’.Footnote 28 Upadhyaya, like Golwalkar, rejected the idea of an all-powerful state on the basis that this leads to ‘a decline of Dharma’ and the corruption of society, but nonetheless argued that the state was responsible for providing core public goods:
Any economic system must provide for the minimum basic necessities of human life to everyone. Food, clothing and shelter constitute, broadly speaking these basic necessities. Similarly, the society must enable the individual to carry out his obligations to the society by properly educating him. Lastly, in the event of an individual falling a prey to any disease, society must arrange for his treatment and maintenance. If a government provides these minimum requirements, then only it is a rule of Dharma. Otherwise, it is a rule of Adharma.Footnote 29
For both Golwalkar and Upadhyaya, therefore, the state was to work for the protection and unity of society by regulating markets and providing basic social services like health and education. This was an agenda akin to that of the Congress government but, in line with Hindu nationalist ideology, ‘society’ was equated with the (Hindu) nation.Footnote 30
Hence, for instance, the RSS established trade unions in the 1950s in order to establish welfare initiatives, counter the influence of Communist trade unions, and undermine the threat of class struggle, which it feared would divide Hindu society.Footnote 31 The role of trade unions for the RSS was to bind workers and employers together in a family-like unit in which disputes would be resolved within a framework of values for the good of the nation/society.Footnote 32 Moreover, to take advantage of the growing disaffection among groups like middle-class land-owning peasants and private-sector-employed middle classes with the Nehruvian state's policy reforms in the 1950s that threatened their interests, the Jana Sangh began to oppose various Congress policies. Against the Congress's focus on urban industrialization, cooperative farming and the favouring of large- over small-scale industry, the Jana Sangh emphasized the need for a state-run defence sector and heavy industries (because these sectors were vital for national defence) alongside private-sector-led production of consumer goods, greater investment in rural infrastructure and agricultural production, and land reforms that challenged the power of big land-owners.Footnote 33 In promoting these issues, it sought to project itself as a party of small industry and commerce, peasants, and low-ranking professionals and bureaucrats in non-metropolitan cities and rural towns. As the Jana Sangh's president, Syama Prasad Mukherjee, noted in 1951, in this vision, the state's role was to ‘fully encourage private enterprise subject to two conditions, namely, prevention of undue profiteering and of formation of groups or cartels wielding large-scale economic power’.Footnote 34 This would involve significant state intervention, since ‘[o]nly through a rational process of adjustments and by controlling the means of exploitation can class warfare be avoided’. In addition, ‘the adoption of practical schemes under State auspices for the development of small and medium industries’ was also required and, in agriculture, state intervention to abolish certain types of big landlordism and provide protection for peasant proprietors was necessary.Footnote 35 The Jana Sangh also accepted the Congress government's interventionist food policies, which included a Public Distribution System (PDS) to sell subsidized food grain to consumers and provide minimum support prices for farmers.Footnote 36
Yet, Graham has argued that the Jana Sangh's emphasis on social and economic issues in the 1950s was overwhelmed by its continued promotion of key Hindu nationalist issues such as making Hindi the national language and removing Jammu and Kashmir's special status in the Indian constitution.Footnote 37 This limited its appeal to other parties and beyond northern India, where these issues had little resonance. This was a consequence of the death of the non-RSS Jana Sangh leader, Syama Prasad Mukherjee, in 1953, which shifted the balance of power within the party toward the RSS and Upadhyaya. Mukherjee, a former member of the Congress, had sought to change the Jana Sangh's policies to appeal to former Congress supporters, like himself, who favoured a more liberal market economy and/or were Hindu traditionalists who opposed Nehru's interventionist economic policies and emphasis on secularism. Subsequently, the Jana Sangh ‘would become more defensive, more provincial and more responsive to the attitudes of the lower middle classes of the northern towns and cities’.Footnote 38
Integral humanism and Gandhian socialism
In the 1970s, however, following significant changes in the national political context, social and economic issues were pushed to the forefront of the Jana Sangh's agenda. In the 1966–67 elections, the Congress fared poorly in state-level elections and saw its 200-seat majority in the Lower House of the Indian parliament fall to 50 seats. These results heralded the end of the Congress's hegemony in Indian politics and reflected growing dissatisfaction with its urban, heavy-industry focus and its limited impact on poverty alleviation. The Jana Sangh had begun considering forming alliances with other parties and placing more emphasis on socio-economic issues in the mid-1960s as the only realistic path to winning greater electoral support.Footnote 39 In seeking possible electoral partners, it became necessary to articulate the party's core principles on economic and social policy, which Upadhyaya did in the following way:
The Jana Sangh is non-socialist so far as it does not subscribe to the totalitarian concept of socialism but it definitely stands for social justice, reduction of inequalities, changing of the status quo in most matters. By non-socialism it does not mean capitalism of laissez faire variety.Footnote 40
The two principles that underpinned Upadhyaya's economic policy, self-reliance or swadeshi and decentralization, were derived from non-Hindu nationalist traditions of socio-economic thought associated with Gandhi and the intellectuals mentioned above. In Gandhi's thought, these concepts were to promote moral, political, and economic empowerment for local communities and, in the Nehruvian state's democratic socialist agenda, swadeshi and decentralization were mobilized to further democracy through local-level political institutions and import-substituting industrialization. In Upadhyaya's writings, however, they were to facilitate the strengthening of the nation/society through the protection of small-scale landholders and businesses.Footnote 41 Upadhyaya and other Jana Sangh leaders, like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who became the party president after the former's death in 1968, also urged the party to embrace the tide of populism introduced by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in a bid to stem the Congress's waning support, to present itself as the defender of the ‘common man’.Footnote 42 Echoing Indira Gandhi's slogan of Garibi Hatao (abolish poverty), the Jana Sangh proclaimed a ‘national war on poverty’ in 1971, with support for measures such as the implementation of land reforms and cheap credit for cultivators, which would serve its target group of small farmers.Footnote 43
As the Congress's power diminished, the Jana Sangh became a member of coalition governments in several north Indian states including Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. It also joined the ‘people's movement’ started by Jayaprakash Narayan to oppose the Congress government and Indira Gandhi's growing authoritarianism. The JP movement, as it was known, promoted a Gandhian vision of a democratic, decentralized political system of autonomous local governments. This vision was adopted by the Janata Party—a coalition that included the Jana Sangh, when it formed the first non-Congress government in 1977. Aspects of Narayan's ‘Gandhian socialist’ ideology, such as its emphasis on social reform, resonated with Upadhyaya's integral humanism. Narayan's advocacy of collectivist farms, village and cottage industries, and wealth redistribution, however, diverged from the Jana Sangh's focus on state intervention on behalf of small industries and farmers and its belief that village and cottage industries should be ‘rationalized’ if unproductive.Footnote 44 Nonetheless, drawing from Narayan, the Jana Sangh's leader, Vajpayee, proclaimed ‘Gandhian socialism’ to be one of the key commitments of the Jana Sangh's successor, the BJP.
The BJP was established by Vajpayee and other Jana Sangh and RSS leaders, like Lal Krishna Advani, who had been involved in the Janata Party, which collapsed in 1980 following Indira Gandhi's re-election. These leaders, particularly Vajpayee, had become convinced that a Hindu nationalist party could be a viable opposition to the Congress but only by abandoning the Jana Sangh and its fringe reputation and portraying the BJP as a successor to the Janata Party. To this end, the leadership recruited several new high-profile members without Hindu nationalist backgrounds, like Shanti Bhushan, the former law minister in the Janata government. Vajpayee's agenda for the BJP focused on social and economic policy rather than issues of Hindu identity. Indeed, Jaffrelot notes that the BJP's constitution did not contain a single reference to the term ‘Hindu’. This did not mean an abandonment of Hindu nationalism, however, but a subtler deployment of Hindu nationalist themes.Footnote 45 Hence, integral humanism was instituted as the party's philosophy and ‘Gandhian socialism’ was listed as one of its manifestations.Footnote 46 Vajpayee's social and economic agenda was aimed at highlighting the shortcomings of the Congress government's rural development initiatives and presenting the BJP as a force against corruption. Moreover, he advocated winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of rural communities through the establishment of a grass-roots presence and welfare activities.Footnote 47 This agenda was formed in a national context in which the Congress was beginning to dilute its socialist pretensions in favour of a pro-business policy that included corporate tax cuts, wage freezes, the loosening of industrial licencing to boost production and increase exports, and the automatic approval of import licences, particularly for export-oriented engineering industries. Some of these reforms were quietly introduced in the mid-1970s during the Emergency by Indira Gandhi and consolidated upon her return to power in 1980, and by her successor, Rajiv Gandhi, following her assassination in 1984.Footnote 48 In response, the BJP adopted an oppositional stance, criticizing the accumulation of debt, the neglect of agriculture, peasants and small-scale industry, and the entry of multinational corporations into the Indian market.Footnote 49
Swadeshi liberalization
The BJP's poor performance in the 1984 general election resulted in a reappraisal of its focus on economic and social issues and an effort by the RSS to assert greater influence over the BJP. While the party's critique of the Congress's economic and social policies continued, from the mid-1980s, this was supplemented by a reversion to core issues of Hindu nationalist identity. This proved extremely effective in both expanding the BJP's membership and electoral support as the Congress government introduced pro-market economic reforms in the 1990s. One prong of this strategy rested on praising the government's deregulation of the economy and supporting foreign investment in the capital goods and technology sectors. But, due in part to strong pressure from the RSS, the BJP maintained the need for ongoing state protection for consumer industries and agriculture. Hence, the BJP's 1992 Economic Policy Statement favoured small-scale industries because of their contribution to employment and export earnings. The BJP also launched campaigns against the government's cuts to fertilizer subsidies for farmers, its importation of wheat, and India's indebtedness to the International Monetary Fund—from which India had to borrow money when faced with a balance of payments shortfall in 1991.Footnote 50 In the BJP's 1993 election campaign, this was framed as a delinking of ‘internal liberalization’ and globalization, with the former needing to precede the latter.Footnote 51 At the same time, 1992 marked the culmination of the Ayodhya campaign—a mobilization movement that was initiated in 1984 and led by L. K. Advani, the VHP, and the RSS to ‘reclaim’ the Babri mosque, in the town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, which Hindu nationalists alleged had been built on top of a Hindu temple by the Moghul ruler, Babur. In December 1992, the mosque was torn down—an event that led to anti-Muslim riots across north India.
The Ayodhya campaign gained support in a context of rapid economic and social change, which produced newly empowered as well as dissatisfied groups. Key participants in the Ayodhya violence were disaffected lower-middle-class youth of high or intermediate caste backgrounds who were fearful of the introduction of affirmative action ‘reservation’ policies in public-sector jobs and educational institutions by a new national coalition government headed the Janata Dal party in 1990, which favoured groups collectively known in India as the ‘Other Backward Classes’ (OBCs).Footnote 52 The BJP had opposed caste-based reservation policies and instead advocated that economic criteria be used because, as stated in its 1991 election manifesto, ‘[r]eservation policy should be used as an instrument of social justice and promoting social harmony as well’.Footnote 53 Other key groups that became both supporters and members of the BJP in the 1990s were the middle classes empowered by the Congress's economic reforms in the 1980s, but increasingly dissatisfied with Congress rule. These middle classes, which included a number of ex-military personnel and administrative officers, tended to reject caste-based reservations and were receptive to the BJP's criticisms of the Congress's inefficiency and corruption, particularly after the ‘Bofors’ scandal, which implicated high-ranking Congress politicians, including Rajiv Gandhi, in allegations of illegal kickbacks from arms sales to India by the Swedish weapons manufacturer, Bofors.Footnote 54
The strategy of ‘swadeshi’ liberalization was, however, fraught with tensions given that the BJP's new middle-class support base and the older Hindu nationalist lower-middle-class base had distinct conceptions of state–society–market relations. While the former tended to be enthusiastic supporters of foreign investment and external economic liberalization, the latter were active in the 1990s in mobilizing against attempts by governments to restrain labour and open the Indian economy to foreign investment and competition.Footnote 55 In the 1990s, these two support bases were unified by Hindu nationalist discourses promising stability, order, and discipline with an identifiable, threatening ‘Other’ in religious minority groups, particularly Muslims. However, the tensions that were papered over by these discourses came to the fore when BJP-led coalition governments were elected to power in 1998, and again in 2014. In the remainder of this article, I analyse the shift from the idea of the state as protector to the notion of the state as a facilitator during these periods, and detail the resistance the BJP has faced.
The state as facilitator
From calibrated globalization to liberalization to inclusive development
In the 1990s, the Congress's dominance in Indian politics decisively ended, with the rise of regional parties in national politics and the emergence of coalition governments at the national level. In the 1996 and 1998 elections, the BJP formed alliances with regional and caste-based parties to form short-lived, unstable coalition governments. In 1999, it managed to assemble and lead a more unified coalition called the National Democratic Alliance, which served until 2004, when it was defeated by a Congress-led United Progressive Alliance. An examination of the BJP's election manifestos, policy documents, and speeches of its leaders shows a progressive shift in the BJP's discourse on the state and its role. For instance, the BJP's 1996, 1998, and 1999 election manifestos reveal state interventionist and welfarist themes. The 1996 manifesto, for instance, pledged that, as a part of its commitment to ‘Harmony and Equality through Integral Humanism’, the party would ‘help all socially and economically weak and backward sections of society, through special welfare and other schemes, to reach their full potential’.Footnote 56 In a reversal of its previous stance, this included a new commitment to continue the caste-based reservation policy—a policy shift brought about by the BJP's need to attract votes from the 40 per cent of the Indian population who would benefit from this policy, alongside its older pledge to introduce reservations based on economic criteria.Footnote 57 The 1998 manifesto reiterated the party's commitment to ‘swadeshi’, which is described as ‘economic nationalism’. This entailed full liberalization of the domestic market with ‘calibrated globalization’ on the basis that the ‘all-West model of the reforms generates only jobless growth’.Footnote 58 The BJP also retained its emphasis on small-scale industry and pledged to continue to provide input subsidies for farmers and to expand existing social welfare schemes for the rural and urban poor.Footnote 59 On the role of the state, the manifesto argued:
There is a great misconception about the role of the Government in a liberalized regime. There is an impression that the Government retreats leaving the hidden hand of the market to manage the economy. Governments all over continue to actively manage and protect their economies, national industry and employment. The paradox is that, the greater the liberalization, the more demanding is the involvement of the Government to protect national industry and employment.Footnote 60
Hence, a business–state alliance was required: ‘The Government and Indian industry need to evolve a consensus on the time span required to enable our industries to adjust to the exacting demands of international competition.’Footnote 61
By 2004, however, both swadeshi and calibrated globalization were noticeably absent from the BJP's election manifesto. The manifesto lauded global markets, competitiveness, the knowledge economy, public–private partnerships, Special Economic Zones, and India's software exports. Its discussion of social policy focused on the creation of targeted schemes and basic services. These changes reflected the BJP's policies while in office. Contrary to its prior commitments, during this period, the BJP lifted quantitative restrictions on the importation of many goods including consumer and agricultural products, it opened sectors such as insurance to foreign capital, and introduced new foreign investment targets.Footnote 62 Moreover, BJP Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's speeches on social policy from the early 2000s revealed significant shifts in the BJP's approach to state–society–market relations. Pledges to protect small industry against global competition were replaced with the demand that ‘governmental and semi-governmental agencies need to do much more to act as facilitators, so as to make our Small and Medium Enterprises more competitive’.Footnote 63 This ‘facilitator’ role involved ‘support on fiscal, credit and infrastructure aspects, technology and quality improvement, marketing assistance and streamlining rules and regulations’.Footnote 64 Even the heavily protected textile sector, the domain of small-scale industries that were a key Hindu nationalist constituency, was denied special treatment. From 1998 to 2000, the Textile Ministry mobilized to convince the sector and the public of the need to lift protections in preparation for the World Trade Organization (WTO)’s abolishment of the Multifibre Agreement in 2005, which would liberalize the trade in textiles. India was bound to comply with this agreement as a member of the WTO. As the government's 1999 Sathyam Committee Report on rejuvenating the textile industry put it: ‘To start with, the governmental presence in it must diminish. Even of what will remain we must also wear a developmental, facilitation look.’Footnote 65
Whereas the informal sector received almost no attention in the BJP's 1998 manifesto, by 2003, Vajpayee was touting the government's major challenge to be ‘how to evolve a holistic and effective strategy to transform the informal sector into the main driver of income-enhancing and life-fulfilling opportunities for employment, self-employment and entrepreneurship’.Footnote 66 In 1998, the BJP had argued that it was ‘only through full employment—not just any kind of employment, but gainful and productive employment—that rapid and sustainable development is possible’ and it pledged the establishment of various government-aided urban and rural employment programmes.Footnote 67 By 2003, however, Vajpayee was arguing that ‘Today neither the government sector nor the organized industry can generate significant number of employment opportunities’.Footnote 68
These shifts in the BJP's policies and discourse were consistent with changes in the global political imagination as exemplified in the policy discourses of the World Bank. As Cammack has argued, since the 1990s, the World Bank has emphasized the role of the state as being one of ‘complementing’ markets by putting in place policies that equip and then compel workers to sell their labour.Footnote 69 This was to be done through, among other things, the targeting of welfare measures to exclude the ‘non-poor’ and by providing a regulatory environment conducive to labour market ‘flexibility’, international trade, and domestic enterprise. Such pro-market policies, and the political imagination that underpinned them, had gained many adherents in the Indian political and bureaucratic elite in the 1990s and 2000s, including in the Congress, which, for instance, introduced targeting into the formerly universal food-welfare programme, the PDS, in the 1990s.Footnote 70 The BJP introduced further targeting by establishing the Antyodaya Anna Yojana—a food-subsidy scheme for the poorest families living below the poverty line, which was named after Upadhyaya's concept of antyodaya (upliftment of the lowest).Footnote 71
Yet, the BJP, whose upbeat campaign was framed by the slogan ‘India shining’, lost the 2004 election to a Congress Party that campaigned on a platform of ‘economic growth for all, particularly for the poor, the vulnerable and the backward’ and that promised ‘freedom from hunger and unemployment’ with promises of a national rural employment guarantee programme.Footnote 72 In taking this approach, the Congress was influenced by its traditional social democratic ideology, its core support base among the poor, and lobbying by Congress-led state governments faced with drought conditions.Footnote 73 This shift was also consistent with changes in international policy discourses toward the ‘post-Washington consensus’, which, following the often disastrous results of the World Bank's macroeconomic recommendations, aimed to mitigate the negative consequences of pro-market policies through measures such as minimal safety nets.
Electoral defeat prompted a rethinking of the BJP's strategy. The post-election Tasks Ahead discussion paper set its first recommendation as ‘restoring the primacy of ideology and idealism’, noting:
We have repeatedly observed that when karyakartas and functionaries are not guided by any lofty ideals, when they are not emotionally inspired by a larger goal, they tend to fall prey to lower-level objectives and considerations, which are alien to our tradition and even harmful to our movement. This is the principal reason why our country's polity is being infected with negative trends such as the rise of caste identities, self-centred behaviour, indiscipline, lack of mutual trust leading to weakening of the team spirit and camaraderie, and pursuit of power for its own sake.Footnote 74
The implication here that ideology had been absent during the BJP's time in power is not particularly sustainable. The reactions of the national BJP leadership to the anti-Muslim violence in the BJP-ruled state of Gujarat in 2002 is a case in point. This violence came in the wake of a fire on a train carrying Hindu nationalist workers that was alleged to have been started by Muslims, though several investigations have concluded that the fire was accidental. The BJP government in Gujarat and the chief minister, Narendra Modi, were accused of complicity in the violence by both failing to act and helping to orchestrate certain incidents. Vajpayee's statements in the wake of this violence, far from being free of ideology, blamed Muslims for instigating the violence and lent support to Modi and his government's handling of the riots.Footnote 75 The key point flagged by the discussion paper, however, was a failure to properly integrate the twin themes of ‘development’ and ‘Hindutva’ in a sustained way: ‘The BJP's vision has two focal points: Nationalism (Rashtravaad) and Development (Vikas). We believe that both are a precondition for realizing our dream of a Resurgent India.’Footnote 76 Hence, ‘integral humanism’, which was omitted from the 2004 manifesto, was restored in the discussion paper as the guiding vision of the BJP, which is said to remain ‘committed to India's integrated and accelerated development, based on a swadeshi concept, and by harnessing all the resources, opportunities and new ideas engendered by the changes in the Indian and global economy’.Footnote 77 The discussion paper went on to recommend reorienting the BJP's social identity such that it is no longer seen as a party for and of the middle class and instead:
as a party that is ‘Gramonmukh’ (Pro-Village) and ‘Gareebonmukh’ (Pro-Poor). Our Party should strongly associate itself with the new jagruti and chetana (self-awareness and assertiveness) among the under-privileged and under-empowered sections of our society. We should be in the forefront to espouse their legitimate aspirations and expectations, keeping in mind the overall needs of samajik samarasata and samanvay (social harmony and balance).Footnote 78
The discussion paper repeatedly emphasized the need to establish an ‘emotional attachment’ between the party and those ‘belonging to the poor, weaker and downtrodden sections of society’ through an emphasis on ‘social justice and social harmony’.Footnote 79
The 2009 election manifesto, however, offered little more than a copy of the Congress's platform of ‘inclusive development’ with the promise of ‘aggressive policies and targeted programs’ for poverty reduction, and better implementation of the Congress's flagship National Food Security Act. It was only in 2014, after losing two consecutive elections, that the BJP searched for a new and distinctive direction, ultimately choosing to abandon the older national leadership for a younger, regional leader, Modi, who lacked a strong base in the RSS and had established the BJP's dominance in Gujarat precisely through the type of melding of ‘development’ and Hindutva that the 2004 discussion paper identified as necessary for broadening the BJP's support. As I show below, it was under Modi that there would emerge a definitive shift to the marketizing of Hindutva with the positioning of the state as a facilitator of the creation of a middle class of consumers and entrepreneurs who are also disciplined by Hindutva values.
Marketizing Hindutva
The BJP was able to establish its presence in Gujarat in large part because of features distinctive to that state, such as the weakness of regional political parties.Footnote 80 However, the consolidation of the BJP's support base in Gujarat in the 2000s under Modi offered lessons that could be applied to the national sphere. The BJP in Gujarat was initially able to broaden its support base from its ‘Savarna’ constituency of upper- and middle-class, upper-caste groups by incorporating the aspirational propertied middle-caste groups that had abandoned the governing Congress Party because of its support for reservations for OBCs.Footnote 81 The BJP was able to form coalition governments in the 1990s through an alliance with the middle-caste Patidar (Patel)-dominated party, the Janata Dal, and eventually absorbed its social base, which meant that, from 1995, it has been able to form majority governments.Footnote 82 Key to the expansion of its social base has been a politics of communal and social polarization and discrimination. Minorities, particularly Muslims, have repeatedly been targets of violence by Hindu nationalist activists and have had restricted access to government jobs.Footnote 83 In addition to this, the government's policies created social polarization, due to growing inequalities as wage growth was curtailed and funds were diverted away from public spending to aiding big business.Footnote 84 Subsequently, driven by what Kashwan calls the ‘compulsions of marginality’, the BJP ‘also convinced a good number of poor people to believe, even if grudgingly, that they vote for Modi if they also want to partake in the little state support that makes its way to their village’.Footnote 85
A further consolidation of the BJP's support base occurred during Modi's tenure as chief minister from 2001 to 2014, through a strong focus on the middle classes and what Modi, in his 2012 election campaign, described as the ‘neo-middle classes’. This resulted in the further marginalization of the most vulnerable groups in Gujarat—Dalits, Adivasis, and Muslims.Footnote 86 While the BJP's definition of this neo-middle class was vague, Jaffrelot has argued that they primarily consist of better-off members of OBC groups who are former peasants or artisans that have immigrated to the city or have been incorporated into a process of urbanization.Footnote 87 Most members of these groups work in the informal sector in low-paying jobs or are self-employed. While migration has eroded their caste identity, they often adopt more ritualistic, upper-caste Hindu practices to buttress their aspirations for social mobility.Footnote 88 During the release of the 2012 BJP Gujarat election manifesto, Modi identified the neo-middle classes as the product of Gujarat's development and pledged that the BJP would ‘form a committee to define this neo-middle class. We will try to give them the benefits of government schemes’.Footnote 89 As he further elaborated in a blog post:
Due to our Government's efforts, a huge number of Gujaratis across all religions and castes have now entered the middle class segment. They are the ‘neo middle class’ with aspirations, dreams and determination. They are one of the most critical drivers of the Gujarat's growth engine. We want to keep nurturing the symbiosis between these stakeholders and Gujarat. ‘Our growth for Gujarat's growth’ is what I want everyone to imbibe.Footnote 90
The strategy proved successful, for the ‘neo-middle classes’ supported the BJP in large numbers in the 2012 election.Footnote 91
The BJP, under Modi's leadership, sought to launch a similar appeal to the neo-middle classes at a national level in the 2014 election. The 2014 election manifesto defined the ‘neo-middle class’ as ‘[t]hose who have risen from the category of poor and are yet to stabilize in the middle class’. It also notes that this neo-middle class ‘needs proactive handholding’.Footnote 92 After winning the election in 2014, various policies were introduced by the Modi government that sought to do just this. The government's approach to social policy shows an effort to break with the Congress-led government's rights-based social and economic inclusion for the very poor and marginalized in favour of programmes that cater to the neo-middle classes. For instance, in contrast to the previous Congress-led government's loan waiver programme for distressed farmers, which was a part of its ‘inclusive development’ strategy, the BJP-led government launched the Pradhan Mantri (prime minister's) Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency (MUDRA) to restructure farmers’ loans and the MUDRA Bank to, as the government's press release put it, aid in the financialization of the non-corporate sector, particularly the ‘young, educated or skilled workers and entrepreneurs, including women entrepreneurs’ to ‘not only help in improving the quality of life of these entrepreneurs, but also to turn them into strong instruments of GDP growth and employment generation’.Footnote 93 Another scheme, the Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay Shramev Jayate Karyakram, aimed to ‘improve the ease of doing business’ by weakening labour regulations through, for instance, online self-reporting of compliance, on the grounds that ‘the Government must trust its citizens’.Footnote 94 Though labourers and trade unions were not involved in devising the scheme and the Communist Party of India criticized it for weakening an already weak labour-protection regime, it was touted by the government as a pro-labour scheme because it also gave labourers access to skills training, apprenticeships, and health insurance.Footnote 95
Other schemes give informal workers access to government-supported private insurance and bank services and are aimed at financial inclusion. These schemes are the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, a scheme to provide access to bank accounts; the Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana, an accident-insurance scheme; and the Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana, a health-insurance scheme. Financialization has been a key agenda for the World Bank since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 and was also an aim of the previous Congress-led government. As Carroll argues, financialization is a part of the neoliberal project of creating a world market based on ‘flexible accumulation’ and competitive social relations and, in the context of development policy, it provides a means of addressing two serious crises of late capitalism—first, a crisis of legitimacy as market reform repeatedly fails to eradicate underdevelopment and, second, a crisis of capital accumulation.Footnote 96 States with chronic underdevelopment are ‘seen as an opportunity for both accumulative and “corrective” activity in the interests of capital’ through the establishment of ‘public–private partnerships and the promotion and extension of financial services designed to foster . . . petite petite bourgeoisies (micro and small-scale businesses)’ and the ‘reform of the state towards catalysing this profit-oriented activity’.Footnote 97
This has not meant, however, a marginalization of Hindu nationalist ideology. Rather, an examination of the BJP's social and economic policies suggests an emphasis on the creation of entrepreneurial individuals who, unlike the self-regulating autonomous individual of discussions of neoliberal capitalist transformation in the West, are circumscribed within ‘culturally’ defined (Hindu nationalist) social frameworks and whose purpose is to strengthen the Hindu nation. In this state–society–market relation, the state's role is to act as a facilitator of ‘market citizenship’ in a way that promotes a Hindu majoritarian ethos and advances the Hindu nation. This is consistent with the Hindu nationalist insistence on the primacy of society over both the individual and the state. Hence, the supposedly pro-labour Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay Shramev Jayate Karyakram scheme was described by Modi as ‘a compassionate approach’ that ‘would result in the “Shram Yogi” (labourer) becoming a “Rashtra Yogi,” [nation labourer] and hence, a “Rashtra Nirmaata” (nation-builder)’.Footnote 98 The Jan Dhan Yojana scheme has been promoted to (Hindu) women by tying it to the Hindu Raksha Bandhan (bond of protection) festival, which celebrates the duty of brothers to sisters, through a new programme called the Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bandhan Yojana that encourages brothers to give their sisters gift cards of fixed deposits that can be put toward insurance schemes.Footnote 99 The Raksha Bandhan is a festival that has been long been highlighted and reinterpreted by the RSS for the purposes of nationalist mobilization. Specifically, the key ritual associated with the festival—that of sisters tying string to their brothers’ wrists to remind them of their duties—has been adapted by RSS local (all-male) branches to celebrate the brotherhood of their members by having local branch leaders tie string around the flagpole of the RSS flag while members tie string around each other's wrists.Footnote 100 The Raksha Bandhan has also been used by Hindu nationalist organizations in campaigns against Muslims. In 2014, the RSS launched a campaign in which activists tied string to the wrists of Hindu youth as they pledged to prevent religious conversions through inter-marriage. A particular concern in this campaign was protecting ‘girls’ from what they term ‘love jihad’—the idea that Muslim men prey upon Hindu women as a part of a broader war against Hindus.Footnote 101 The BJP's most recent appropriation of Raksha Bandhan brings together Hindu nationalist and neoliberal themes, such that, through financialization, the individual, the family, and the state serve the advancement of the nation. As Modi put it in his letter to women in his constituency, to whom he gifted an accident-insurance scheme for Raksha Bandhan:
I am happy that you are joining a relationship of security . . . . If we want to make India prosperous, we will have to integrate this half of our population to the decision-making process. The more the women will be empowered and the more they participate in economic activities, the country will prosper in the same measure.Footnote 102
The government's promotion of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission) and yoga as a public-health initiative are other cases in point. The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan was launched ostensibly to highlight the link between sanitation and public health and replaces the previous government's Nirmal Bharat Abihyan or Total Sanitation Campaign. Both schemes aimed to build infrastructure (namely toilets) and change social norms in relation to issues such as open defecation. These schemes were also ‘community-led’ and participatory, and placed emphasis on building toilets without addressing broader infrastructure needs related to piped water and drainage, the lack of which are the major reasons for poor sanitation in India. Swachh Bharat, however, is distinguished by its emphasis on private-sector involvement through corporate social responsibility; for its urging of voluntary efforts by individuals to keep municipalities clean; its emphasis on cleanliness as a virtue of modernity; and for its appropriation of Gandhi as a (Hindu nationalist) symbol of the programme. Gandhi's emphasis on cleanliness was a part of his critiques of revivalist strands of Hinduism during the colonial era, of the interpretation of purity and pollution as the justification for caste hierarchy, and of capitalist modernity and statism. As Alter has argued, Gandhi's writings on cleanliness as well as vegetarianism and celibacy were centred on the need for self-discipline for the purpose of deep-seated moral change rather than institutional and policy change.Footnote 103 Modi's Gandhi is shorn of his radical critiques of modernity and Hinduism and, instead, attaches the need for self-discipline to statist and modernist objectives of development for an India that is represented in the Hinduized nationalist idiom of ‘Mother India’: ‘Mahatma Gandhi dreamt of an India which was not only free but also clean and developed. Mahatma Gandhi secured freedom for Mother India. Now it is our duty to serve Mother India by keeping the country neat and clean.’Footnote 104
The government's promotion of yoga as a public-health initiative, through its successful lobbying for a World Yoga day, its appointment of a Minister for Yoga, compulsory yoga sessions for police officers, and free yoga classes for public-service employees, taps into long-standing efforts, as Alter has shown, to construct yoga as a ‘nationalist therapy’ that is ‘a way of life that denotes health in terms of the holistic integration of country and consciousness, body and society’ for the purpose of dealing with the ailments of modernity.Footnote 105 The mass-drill yoga therapy session led by Modi in Delhi on 21 June 2015 to inaugurate International Yoga Day, which he convinced the United Nations to establish, was pioneered by the Bharatiya Yog Sansthari (BYS, Indian Yoga Society), which grew out of the RSS.Footnote 106 Established in Delhi in 1967, the membership of the BYS is overwhelmingly Hindu, urban, and lower-middle- to middle-class.Footnote 107 While the government has sought to distance yoga from Hinduism, these efforts are undermined by the date choice of 21 June, which is imbued with religious significance as the day Lord Shiva became the first yogi. It is also undercut by the emphasis on BYS-style mass-drill yoga sessions and the nature of Modi's discourse on yoga, which is distinctively oriented to a vision of market citizenship whereby the social problems caused by capitalist transformation are managed through culturally inscribed self-regulation:
When practised correctly and with discipline, Yoga leads to . . . . Reduction of greed, coarseness and violence in thought and action. Enormous reduction in the cost of healthcare and social support. A dramatic reduction in conflicts and misunderstandings within families, communities, and between nations. Increased collaboration and effective teamwork in businesses and communities. Compassion towards all beings: plants, animals and humans and long-term and ecological thinking in all socio-economic planning. Increased power of innovation, technology and knowledge; deeper impact of art, music, poetry, dance to uplift the quality of life and an overall increase in the pace of human development and evolution . . . . In crafting a new self through Yoga, we create a new world.Footnote 108
Modi has also sought to consolidate his constituency in the established urban middle classes with policies favouring the corporate sector, in the name of producing economic growth, while reducing funding for the large-scale rights-based welfare programmes introduced by the previous Congress-led government. The government's Make in India strategy, for instance, is aimed at creating a 100 million jobs by 2020 and encourages foreign investment in manufacturing and the defence sector. The BJP has also reversed its stance of opposing foreign investment in the retail sector. These policies run counter to the party's earlier insistence on the protection of these sectors from foreign involvement and competition. In 2015, the BJP-led government attempted to pass legislation to dilute the previous Congress-led government's Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act to make it easier for land to be acquired from farmers for industrial projects. Again, this was counter to the Hindu nationalist movement's traditional emphasis on the protection of small farmers.
The consolidation of marketized Hindutva, however, has proven difficult. The BJP government relented in attempting to pass its amended land-acquisition legislation following political and civil society resistance, including from Hindu nationalist groups. At the urging of the RSS, and after state-level election losses, it subsequently touted its second budget, handed down in 2016, as a ‘pro-poor’ budget. This budget restored some funding to agriculture, health, and education though the amounts were insubstantial and the focus of the budget remained not on basic public goods, but on skills development and entrepreneurship, the beneficiaries of which tend to be the better-off among the poor.Footnote 109 In another concession to poor voters, in the lead-up to the crucial Uttar Pradesh state election in 2017, the BJP unveiled the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana welfare scheme which promised free gas connections to 50 million families living below the poverty line. Though this was an old-fashioned, non-market-based welfare scheme designed to broaden the BJP's support base to include the poor, it did not constitute a complete break from Modi's marketized Hindutva. Access to the scheme depended on the possession of a unique identification number linked to a national biometric database, called Aadhaar, which was initiated by the Congress and continued by the BJP for the cause of empowering individuals and improving their access to ‘resources and markets’.Footnote 110 Likewise, several BJP regional governments have introduced old-style loan waiver (as opposed to loan refinancing and restructuring) schemes for indebted farmers, but access to these schemes too is linked to the Aadhaar database and Aadhaar-linked bank accounts.Footnote 111
Conclusion: melding authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and nationalism
This article has analysed the changing nature of Hindu nationalist ideas about the state, society, and markets. It has argued that, rather than having distinctive positions on economic and social policy, Hindu nationalist parties and groups have drawn on dominant global and national ideas while reinterpreting them in ways that serve its support base and majoritarian ethos. In the pre-independence and post-independence period until the late 1990s, the Hindu nationalist movement promoted the idea of state intervention to regulate markets and redistribute resources to benefit its support base among small traders and farmers and strengthen Hindu society. While the members of the Hindu nationalist organization, the RSS, continue to advocate for interventionist and protectionist policies, since the late 1990s, the Hindu nationalist political party, the BJP, has promoted the idea of the state as a facilitator for societal engagement with markets. In line with shifts in the global political imagination, markets are increasingly seen by Indian elites, including those in the BJP, as a provider of public goods and the source of societal transformation. What has been distinctive about the Hindu nationalist approach, however, is that, rather than idealizing a self-regulated, autonomous market citizen, the BJP's policies seek to create an entrepreneurial consumer whose behaviour is regulated by the cultural framework of Hindu majoritarianism and is aimed at advancing the Hindu nation. This suggests that, despite the BJP's recent rhetorical focus on development and governance, the party has not moderated its majoritarian ideology. Rather, the BJP aims to shift the dominant ideological centre such that majoritarianism is viewed as mainstream and legitimate.
In arguing that a marketization of Hindutva is currently taking place, the article contributes to literature on the growing melding of neoliberalism and nationalism. As in other countries, such as Turkey, where similar state-led culturally inscribed neoliberalization processes are taking place, the BJP's virtuous market citizenship is directed at consolidating its support base and its nationalist ideology while transforming the role of the state in relation to both society and markets. As the example of Turkey shows, however, these types of neoliberal projects are inherently fragile, polarizing, and authoritarian.Footnote 112 Virtuous market citizenship and the broader process of neoliberalization remain deeply contested both within the Hindu nationalist movement and in Indian society more broadly. Consequently, the BJP's promotion of neoliberal practices has simultaneously involved the repression of dissent through legal sanctions and a majoritarian discourse that labels political opposition as ‘anti-national’. For instance, in 2015, on the basis that certain non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were ‘using foreign funds for anti-national activities’, the government froze the bank accounts of organizations like Greenpeace for alleged violations of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA).Footnote 113 This followed the leaking of a report by the Intelligence Bureau which alleged that agitations by foreign-funded Indian NGOs against nuclear power plants, coal-fired power plants, uranium mining, Genetically Modified Organisms, industrial projects, hydroelectric dams, and extractive industries had negatively impacted economic growth by 2–3 per cent per annum.Footnote 114 The report mirrored the language used by Modi in 2006 when he criticized NGOs for using foreign funds to undermine the Gujarat government. This was an issue he raised again at a farmers’ rally in February 2016, when he argued that NGOs were ‘morning and evening conspiring to figure out how to finish Modi, how to remove Modi's government, how to dishonour Modi’.Footnote 115 The campaign against ‘anti-nationals’ intensified in 2016 when university students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who were affiliated with left-wing student organizations critical of Hindu nationalist politics, were charged with sedition for allegedly shouting anti-India slogans at a rally marking the execution of Afzal Guru in 2013. Guru, who was a member of a Kashmiri separatist organization, was convicted of involvement in the plot to attack the Indian parliament in 2001, although even members of the previous Congress-led government who approved his execution, like P. Chidambaram, the former home minister, have admitted that the police investigation and trial were flawed.Footnote 116
The focus on ‘anti-nationals’ seeks to suture the divisions being opened in the Hindu nationalist movement. Though the RSS leadership has generally supported the BJP's economic agenda, the BJP's pro-corporate sector policies have resulted in dissent from RSS affiliate organizations, which have objected to decisions such as increasing foreign investment in manufacturing and retail and diluting land-acquisition legislation, since these threaten their core constituencies of small traders and small farmers. The head of the RSS trade union, the Bharat Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), Vrijesh Upadhyay, for instance, argued of the BJP's push for financialization that ‘[m]easures like pension and insurance schemes would only create business for the insurance companies. How will the workers benefit? We expect the party to look at the workers’ interest now. Otherwise, they will have to face the consequences’.Footnote 117 The BJP's discourse against ‘anti-nationals’ seeks to paper over these divisions. To an extent, this has proven successful. The RSS has been vocal in promoting the ‘anti-national’ agenda, using nationalism as a euphemism for Hindutva. According to the RSS's general secretary, Bhaiyyaji Joshi, for instance: ‘The acceptance of the nationalist discourse has been gaining steadily and the resultant unease among the anti-national and anti-social forces has come to light through certain recent incidents’.Footnote 118 At the same time, however, ‘anti-national’ discourse has proven ripe for re-appropriation by RSS affiliates to further their agenda of protectionism. The BJP government's reversal of policy to allow foreign investment in the retail sector, for instance, was swiftly condemned by Dhananjay Munde, the convener of the RSS-affiliated organization, the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, as a decision that was ‘no less than anti-national’.Footnote 119
