I

The present collection of chapters explores an Indian political formation of critical importance from the vantage point of its gender ideology and practices, as well as with respect to the role of its women votaries in militant movements and organizations. Far too often, commentators either overlook these aspects of Hindutva politics or simply brand them as patriarchal and conservative. We, however, believe that we have to go much further than that in order to seize upon the distinctive elements of Hindutva's gender. Our larger purpose is to deepen and broaden our understanding of Hindutva as a political and cultural force of immense significance by employing a gendered prism. I will, therefore, try to explain some of the crucial aspects of Hindutva history in order to provide a general perspective to the chapters.

When we first planned the present volume in 2018, we were yet to grasp the full extent of Hindutva's intentions and power. The results of the 2019 national election have disabused us of several false hopes. It is now abundantly clear that no political or electoral alternative exists at this moment which can obstruct, or even challenge, the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP’s) triumphal progress at the national level. The party has won two successive elections, considerably enlarging its vote and seat shares in 2019. Since then, relentless state repression has assumed massive proportions. Strangely, the world has not paid adequate attention to how rapidly its largest democracy is shifting its goalposts.

The tradition of Hindu majoritarianism, which is embedded in Islamophobia, goes back to the late nineteenth century. This includes Hindu historical romances about supposedly fanatical Muslim conquerors, about heroic resistance by Hindu kings. The stories nested a strong gender ideology, too, with their highly coloured legends of mass self-immolations by Hindu queens to escape capture and dishonour at the hands of Muslim invaders. A tenacious popular imaginary sprang from this: the Muslim invades not just a kingdom but the royal Hindu female body as well. The images still resonate today, stronger than ever.

From the early twentieth century, Hindu extremists systematically expanded the stereotype to cover Indian Muslims in general. All – they said – are quintessentially invaders, no matter how many centuries the community has spent in the country.

Introduction

Traditionally, the RNF sector consisted of an assortment of rural households dependent on a variety of service sector livelihoods comprising artisans, barbers, petty food processors and vendors, craftsmen, milkmen, potters, tinkers, tailors and carpenters. They depended on the custom of the vast farming population whose demands they tried to cater to. However, given low productivity and low rural incomes, the demand for the services of these non-farm groups was low and unstable (mirroring unstable farm incomes), making their livelihoods quite precarious. This was the state of RNF in the 1960s and 1970s, before the advent of the GR.

The more recent development history of East and Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia suggests that rural industry and commerce expand in parallel with agricultural production, as linkages between the two deepen (Ranis and Stewart 1993; Yusuf and Kumar 1996; Bhattacharya 1996). Typically, RNF is viewed as having two distinct components: (a) a high labour productivity segment and (b) a low productivity segment. The former is associated with higher incomes, while the latter operates more as a residual. In the process of rural development, RNF is expected to gradually lose its residual character, giving way to more productive, better-paying activities.

In the context of poverty alleviation, it has been noted that non-farm earnings led to an absolute improvement in incomes of the poor, suggesting that a dynamic RNF sector will have a strong anti-poverty impact (Lanjouw and Lanjouw 1999; Lanjouw 1999; B. Sen 1996; Haggblade and Hazell 1989; Haggblade, Hazell and Brown 1989). In the context of the Indian literature, Lanjouw (2007) and Haggblade, Hazell and Reardon (2010) have argued that the impact is not automatic and in fact appears to be muted with a tendency to bypass the extreme poor. Experience from Bangladesh, however, paints a much more positive picture (Pitt and Khandker 1998; Khandker 2005; Khandker, Khalily and Samad 2016a).

Over a 20-year period (1991–92 to 2010–11), moderate poverty headcount declined from 78 per cent to 27.5 per cent, while extreme poverty declined from 64.8 per cent to 14 per cent.

It was not only human lives that were annihilated during the days of political violence unleashed in the northeastern localities of India's capital New Delhi in late February of 2020. Words, too, were/are being massacred in (mis)characterizing that violence. Analytically, at stake is this fundamental issue: without correct naming, we can understand neither the violence nor its past or future. It is not mere verbal gymnastics; naming is critical to the diagnosis of the problem as also to its prevention. Indeed on naming rests, in many ways, life as well as death. To safeguard the chastity of language, and my own ethical integrity, I will, therefore, not call the violence in Delhi a riot, as it was widely called then as well as subsequently. Let me name it what it truly is: a pogrom.

This essay anthropologically explores the crucial subject of the politics of naming over longue durée. In so doing, it puts forward an original argument (see later) that seldom has much of social science literature made, definitely not in the ways enunciated, executed, and demonstrated here. This argument is derived from as well as extends my larger monographic work on political violence (Ahmad forthcoming). Given the space limit and specific aims of this essay in the present volume, it is not feasible to lay bare full detail of my claim here. In part, this is also because the regnant doxa my argument is positioned against is not limited to a specific field of inquiry, discipline, or a set of authors. My contention instead pertains to the very ubiquitous nationalist epistemology to which almost every discipline, field, or most authors pledge their affiliation, albeit not identically (Ahmad 2011). This nationalist epistemology as a knowledge/power matrix with Hindu Orientalism as its lynchpin is, moreover, international. Academic knowledge in ‘post-colonial’ India is heavily indebted to and informed by what I call Hindu Orientalism, a set of practices and repertoires, which draws on, updates, and recasts historical European Orientalism (especially its branch of Indology) to organize intellectual production, circulation, and dissemination under the overarching banner of nationalism (Ahmad 2021a). Theoretically, nationalism is thus not an antithesis of Orientalism (Breckenridge and van der Veer 1993).

Introduction

On 28 September 2018, the Supreme Court (SC) of India struck down the prohibition of women of menstruating ages in the forest-shrine of Sabarimala in Kerala as gender discrimination and a variant of untouchability (Indian Express 2018a). Subsequently, brahmin and kshatriya temple authorities, the sudra community organization known as the Nair Service Society (NSS) and the Sangh Parivar organizations organized protests against the judgment. However, much before the SC verdict even as the matter was in court, in 2016, a group of Malayali women had already created a high-decibel campaign on social media called #ReadyToWait (RTW), which announced their determination to preserve the custom at Sabarimala that disallowed women of menstruating ages as pilgrims (IndiaFacts 2016). Their campaign proved so successful that this prohibition of women of menstruating ages in Sabarimala began to stand for Hinduism in general; soon, the denial of the former was perceived as tantamount to the rejection of the latter. The campaign grew even more powerful in the days following the verdict and was important in bringing many educated and upper- or middle-class women with no direct exposure to Hindutva ideology closer to politics focused on ‘Hindu interests’. The confrontation between the Kerala government led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) and the forces of caste privilege and Hindutva in Kerala deeply polarized civil society; the confrontation was marked by several incidents of violence (Roopesh 2018).

Through this examination of the RTW discourse, I hope to address the relative absence of Malayali women in the burgeoning literature on women in conservative Hindutva formations. There are a few studies on the growing public religiosity and piety of Hindu women in Kerala (Jennet 1999; Warrier 2005; Sreedhar 2016; Thomas 2018; Dempsey 2001). But for the most, Malayali women are viewed within the frame of social development in social science and historical literature in twentieth-century Kerala. In the debate about the achievement of remarkable social development in Kerala despite the state's poor economic growth in the twentieth century (commonly referred to as the ‘Kerala Model’ debate; R. Jeffrey 2003), women figured mainly as positive, rational, domestic agents of change who benefited unequivocally from the social transformation of the twentieth century.

Introduction

The popular narrative of industrialization of Bangladesh is focused almost solely on RMG. While RMG is certainly the jewel in the industrial crown, there are many other smaller sectors that have sprouted up in the country, many responding to growing domestic demand emanating from a newly emerging middle class. Some of these non-RMG manufactures are also being exported, and while their shares to total exports are small, taken all together, they play a significant role in the economy in terms of employment and value addition. The real significance of all these numerous, small-scale activities, however, is not how much they account for in terms of shares of GDP but whether and what potential these hold for future growth and expansion. This is important because for over 20 years Bangladeshi policymakers have been searching for signs of an additional one or two sectors that could impart further impetus to export growth and diversification. The growing industrial strength reflected in a number of sectoral and sub-sectoral activities could well mark a turning point for Bangladesh's industrial fortunes. Most importantly, it demonstrates that the country has acquired considerable skills and capacities to undertake a large variety of manufacturing and processing activities, and under the right circumstances (that is, incentives and policy support, including protection), it could expand quickly. In other words, this is proof of capability. What is needed now is for Bangladesh to leverage this experience to chart out new areas of dynamic comparative advantage. A precondition for this to happen would be a change in the mindset of policymakers to look beyond RMG and consider other potential sectors for privileged policy incentives.

These ‘other sectors’ are a combination of mostly new manufacturing areas along with a few traditional ones that are attempting to resurface once again, using new technology and fresh branding approaches. Among the latter, jute and especially leather goods are often touted as having great potential. However, the promise of rehabilitating them has been elusive, although the leather sector has seen a degree of new investments and use of improved technology, including effluent treatment plants to reduce environmental pollution.

This book examines economic reform in the Punjab in the period 1900–47 in an attempt to historicize theories of institutional change and community development. Existing scholarship on colonial Punjab is preoccupied with either the rise of nationalist politics and the political transition to independence from the British, or the role of the military. The economic history of the region is meanwhile focused on large-scale changes such as the establishment of the canal colonies.

This book advances the economic history of the region by conducting an analysis of microeconomic reform in the province, thus providing an alternative way of studying the colonial impact on the Punjab. A close examination of programmes of rural reconstruction in colonial Punjab reveals stark parallels with more contemporary prescriptions of development economics. At the same time, a study of the trajectory of legislative change sheds light on the institutional legacies of colonial rule. The book situates the legal changes and microeconomic reforms in the political context to reveal the assumptions, ideological commitments, and underlying motives of the official and political actors involved. A study of the private papers and publications of the relevant officials, including Malcolm Darling and Frank Brayne, personalizes this account and humanizes a discourse on institutions, which otherwise might remain vague. The book also engages deeply with the theoretical scholarship on development and rural uplift that emerges in this period and develops an intellectual genealogy that links colonialism to development studies. It questions the ahistorical nature of development studies and the continued valorization of the ‘community’ despite a lack of supportive evidence. The book argues that one reason for the perpetuity and continued popularity of ideas of community development and institutional malaise is that both absolve the status quo from blame.

Overview

The conditions at the time of its birth in 1971 could not have been less auspicious for Bangladesh. The country was overwhelmingly agricultural and rural at the time with much of agriculture dominated by just one crop, namely rice, which was grown in the vast flood plains under risky, rain-fed conditions. The other important crop was jute – the main foreign exchange earner for the country. As it happened, floods and poor successive rice harvests combined with a much-weakened administration which, along with depleted food reserves, empty coffers and an infrastructure in tatters, ushered in famine in 1974 that not only took a heavy toll in terms of human lives but also succeeded in branding Bangladesh as a poor, famine-prone and crisis-prone country that would heavily need to depend on foreign aid for a very long time – an abiding image that is only now beginning to be shed.

The infrastructure, rudimentary to begin with, was in shambles with bridges blown up, roads in poor shape and even the country's ports at Chittagong and Mongla rendered inoperative – both experiencing massive damage and destruction. The Chittagong Port suffered the greatest damage from the operations of Bengali Naval Commandos during the 1971 war who used limpet mines to blow up ships anchored in Chittagong. This disrupted shipping while at the same time sending a stark message to the enemy. It was a Russian naval contingent under Rear Admiral Sergey Pavlovich Zuenko who took up the challenge of clearing the port of all obstacles, including innumerable mines and sunken ships, to make it ready for normal operations – a process that was declared complete on 30 June 1974. It took less time to clear out the Mongla Port, which too suffered heavy damage during the war, mainly from aerial bombing.

In addition, there was the need to resettle and rehabilitate 10 million refugees who were now returning from camps in India where they had taken shelter during the hostilities, placing a huge administrative and fiscal burden on the country. There were shortages all around – for construction material, essential raw materials, clothes, food and medicine.

The traditional image of Bangladesh as a woefully poor, overpopulated nation plagued by food shortages, natural disasters, massive malnutrition, illiteracy and under-employment has finally receded into the background. The country has now begun to attract attention from the world for its economic performance and potential business opportunities rather than for its poverty and misery. The growth rate for 2018–19 was a record 8.15 per cent. This came down to an estimated 5.24 per cent in 2019–20 as against earlier projections by the government of 8.19 per cent – purportedly due to economic shutdown in the wake of COVID-19. If the official figures are proven correct, the growth rate achieved in 2018–19 is the highest on record for the country and one of the highest in the world.

In terms of per capita income, Bangladesh became a lower-middle-income country in 2015 and is on track to graduate out of the least developed country (LDC) status by 2024, after all three indicators for crossing the initial threshold were met in 2018 – the only LDC in Asia–Pacific to have done so (Murshid 2019). Per capita income in 2019 was USD 1856, and the country has set ambitious targets to become an upper-middle-income country and a developed country by 2031 and 2041. That the country can dream to become a high-income country by 2041 itself speaks volumes about its confidence and ‘can-do’ mindset – a far cry from the hand-to-mouth existence of the early years when foreign aid was the only way to make ends meet.

Growth

In general, the growth rate has steadily climbed, displaying quite a lot of variability in the 1970s, with a great deal of year-to-year fluctuation. The instability is clear from Figure 1.1, where we see that it persisted into 1981–82 before entering into a long, unbroken period of stable growth. Growth in the 1980s was low, hovering around the 3.5–4.0 per cent mark but gradually crawling up to reach just over 5 per cent on average during 1995–2000. By 2005, another 0.5 percentage point was added, with the trend continuing to top 6 and then 7 per cent in 2005 and 2015. Bangladesh's growth performance appears remarkably stable, especially after 2003 – a feature that is also borne out in comparison with that of neighbouring countries.

Rice is the staple food of the more than 165 million people of Bangladesh, with rice production continuing to dominate the country's agriculture. The share of agriculture in national GDP has been steadily declining over the years. In 2018–19 its contribution to GDP was 13.7 per cent, with crops accounting for slightly over 7 per cent and rice production dominating crop production (Government of Bangladesh 2020: 287). Rice accounts for two-thirds of calories, half of the protein intake and a similar share of the household budget of rural Bangladeshis. In terms of production, it accounts for almost 80 per cent of the cropped area (World Bank 2013). Thus, rice is crucial to Bangladesh's food security, with self-sufficiency in rice having been a major policy goal of the government for the last five decades.

Today, Bangladesh is self-sufficient on average, even managing to produce a surplus from time to time, a feat underscored by the fact that the population of the country more than doubled since 1972. Total rice production increased at a rate of about 3 per cent per year over the period 1972–73 to 2007–08, of which boro rice (the dominant rice crop) registered the highest growth of over 6.0 per cent per year. This was possible because of the GR technology of the 1970s and 1980s combined with market reforms and structural adjustments of the 1990s, and attention to the availability, quality and distribution of key inputs like diesel, fertilizers and seeds in more recent years (N. Ahmed et al. 2007; R. Ahmed et al. 2000).

This is a far cry from the early years when the Bangladesh economy was overwhelmingly rural and agricultural, with 90 per cent of the population living in rural areas and only 10 per cent in the towns, concentrated mainly in Dhaka and Chittagong. Agriculture's share of GDP was 60 per cent, and rice was the main crop grown in subsistence mode under traditional, rain-fed conditions. Jute was the main cash crop and the main foreign exchange earner accounting for 90 per cent of commodity exports. Industry was skeletal, mainly in the public domain, and run so badly that it was a constant drain on meagre public resources instead of making a contribution to the exchequer.

The following timeline is meant to be indicative and does not claim to capture every event of significance in India since 2014. The focus is on events that pertain (either directly or indirectly) to the actions of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)–led central government and the political climate it has cultivated since winning the Lok Sabha elections in 2014.

The events mentioned in this timeline are drawn from media reports published in various English-language newspapers and online news outlets including (but not limited to) The Hindu, Indian Express, Times of India, BBC, NDTV, Outlook India, Caravan, The Wire, Scroll.in, and Live Law. I have also relied on reports prepared by organizations such as the Working People's Charter, Hate Crime Watch, People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), and PRS Legislative Research and an edited volume titled Dismantling India: A 4 Year Report (Dayal, Dabiru, and Hashmi 2018), among others, for information on legislation passed by the central government, Supreme Court verdicts, and human rights and civil liberties investigations between 2014 and 2020.

7 September 2013: Communal violence breaks out in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts of Uttar Pradesh (UP) after a year-long campaign by BJP leaders and local units accusing Muslim youth of engaging in ‘love jihad’, that is, marrying young Hindu women with the sole intention of converting them to Islam. The campaign succeeds in polarizing the local community, pitting Jats against Muslims. There are officially sixty-two deaths (of which forty-two are Muslims), and the violence displaces thousands of Muslims to refugee camps. Several incidents of sexual violence (and rape) against Muslim women are also reported.

16 May 2014: The sixteenth Lok Sabha election results are declared and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is victorious. The NDA wins a total of 336 out of the 543 contested seats in India's lower house (Lok Sabha). Narendra Modi of the BJP is sworn in as the fifteenth prime minister of India on 26 May 2014. The BJP's campaign rhetoric focuses on the promise of achhe din (good days) and a corruption- (and Congress-) free India – crucially though, the BJP benefits from the polarization of local communities in the aftermath of the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013 that helped to consolidate the Hindu vote across north and central India.

At the same time that Bangladesh was struggling with the GR, a silent process of migration was already afoot – a beginning which would eventually gather steam and take off. In 1976, only 6,000 workers left for the Middle East for work but by 1981 this rose to around 56,000. Other countries in Asia, including Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Thailand and Philippines, were able to respond more quickly to the dramatic opening up of labour markets in the oil-rich Middle East following the lifting of the oil embargo in 1973 and a surge in the petrodollar economies of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. Thus, the number of Indians sent out in 1976 was around 4,000 but this figure grew to over 275,000 in 1981. In the case of Pakistan, the figure for 1976 was less than 42,000, which went up to over 168,000 in 1981 (Arnold and Shah 1986).

The slower initial response rate from Bangladesh may have been due to labour market preferences or more likely due to the poor institutional arrangements and high migration costs in Bangladesh compared to competing countries. Bangladesh in the mid-1970s was a country that was still struggling with the aftermath of war and famine. Migration rates, nevertheless, picked up quickly but spiked in 1991–95 and 2006–10, the latter including the global financial crisis period. In fact, only during 2011–15 we observe a 12 per cent drop in outmigration, which appears to be related to the 8 per cent decline in remittance growth in the subsequent period (Table 5.1).

Migrant remittances continue to play a big role in a number of Asian countries including Bangladesh, helping to strengthen the BOP and shore up foreign exchange reserves while also having an impact on rural households in terms of income, consumption, savings and investment. A related impact of remittances, historically, has been its timing – gaining ascendance at a time when donor fatigue was setting in, putting aid-dependent countries like Bangladesh at considerable risk (Rodríguez 2020). For example, for Bangladesh, remittance earnings comprised 40 per cent of exports and 5.7 per cent of GDP in 2018. In fact, the comparative figures for a number of countries like Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Philippines are higher (Table 5.2).