Testifying to Violence

Abstract

In the past two decades, the decline of the Congress Party and the rise of Hindu nationalism in India indicate an emergent political order. The rapid liberalization of India’s economy coupled with the growth of religious nationalism marks a distinct conjuncture posing challenges to the hitherto reigning ideologies of the developmental state. Hindu nationalism has been a political project of remaking the nation in the latest phase of the globalization of capital, attributing the failures of the developmental project to secularism, with the latter understood as a neocolonial hangover. To overcome it, Hindu nationalists have mobilized a rhetoric of strong but exclusivist nationalism while harnessing the partial, shifting forms of affiliation made available through globalizing markets and media (Rajagopal 2001). Hindu nationalists have rejected the tenets of constitutional secularism upon which the Indian constitution is based, insisting instead that India is a Hindu rashtra, a Hindu nation. Ironically, however, the ascendancy of a revitalized cultural nationalism has exacerbated the fragmentation of the polity along caste and regional lines, making it harder for Hindu nationalists to realize their aims.³

“It was”—that is the name of the will’s gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has been done, he [the will] is an angry spectator of all that is past. The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time’s covetousness, that is the will’s loneliest melancholy, […] Thus the will, the liberator, took to hurting; and on all who can suffer he wreaks revenge for his inability to go backwards. This, indeed this alone, is what revenge is—the will’s ill will against time and its “it was.”

—Nietzsche 1976, 251–52

Prem se kaho hum insaan hain [Say it with love, we are human beings]. Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain [Say it with pride, we are Hindus]²

I would like to thank Ravi Rajendra for helping track down important citations for this paper