Global Hindutva: Communicative Strategies and Resistance

Communication forms the infrastructure of Hindutva, constituting its ideology based on ongoing processes of creating the “other.” As a nationalist project, Hindutva draws its pedagogy from far-right fascist movements, constructing India as a Hindu nation based on a monolithic Hindu race and a homogeneous Hindu culture. The production and circulation of disinformation shape the hate-based politics of Hindutva, with the movement securing its hegemony through the deployment of extremist violence. The global network power of Hindutva draws on its capacity to continually produce the other while simultaneously appealing to Western multiculturalism by projecting the image of Hinduism as the religion of unity and harmony. Equivocation, the communicative practice of using ambiguous language to hide the truth, is one of the core strategies of Hindutva, speaking a language of hate to an internal audience while making claims of peace and democracy to an external audience in Western democracies. Equivocation enables Hindutva’s diaspora proponents to uphold and perpetuate the political economy of Hindutva that is directly tied to terror and violence while simultaneously performing the narrative of Hinduism as a religion of peace for a Western audience. The networked structure of global Hindutva draws on funding, volunteer resources, material infrastructures, and symbolic flows of disinformation and hate across the diaspora, interconnected in an ecosystem with the Hindutva machinery in India. Resistance to Hindutva disrupts these communicative infrastructures through witnessing, co-creation of voice infrastructures, and expelling discursive gaps.