Making India Hindu and Male

Abstract

Speaking in the discourse of a culture and tradition in which the notion of the ‘national’ is equal to ‘hindu’, articulated to jargons of authenticity, foreignness and ‘sons of the soil’ criteria of citizenship, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its base community of the hindu right in India hope to hegemonize the Indian political terrain. This article revisits Marx’s and Gramsci’s notions and critiques of civil society, ideology and hegemony to analyse the cultural politics of the hindu right, which through an aggressive masculinity and organized violence attempts to erase muslims from the national space.