In late February and early March 2002, the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat descended into a pogrom. Hindu activists were returning from the temple town of Ayodhya, a popular pilgrimage site outside the state, in an overcrowded train. They had gone there to support the building of a Hindu temple to Lord Ram on the site of a former Muslim mosque, which had been destroyed by activists ten years earlier. The train stopped briefly in Godhra. After an altercation between Muslim station vendors and Hindu activists, stones were thrown onto the train, which stopped again outside the station. Then two coaches of the train caught fire. Many passengers were killed. In the days and weeks following the incident, the Muslim community of Gujarat became the target of a state-wide pogrom. In cities like Ahmedabad, Muslims faced economic boycotts, attacks on their residential neighbourhoods, destruction of their property, and the indifference or complicity of the police in these acts. Hundreds of Muslim shrines and mosques were attacked, burnt, and razed to the ground. Mass rape, arson, and deadly violent attacks by large, organized crowds and gangs armed with swords took place in front of a gaping, knowing, and partly approving or even participating public.

This event is commonly referred to as the ‘Gujarat riots’. The passage from pogrom to riot constitutes an act of reduction that does two things at once. It integrates a particular event into a series of preceding events, eliminating its specificity. Furthermore, the term ‘riot’ complicates the assertion of culpability because it invokes two equal communities mutually attacking one another. Pogroms, by contrast, are organized events following a planned objective characterized by a psychological mobilization that far exceeds the immediate group of actors in a riot. There is no concept in Gujarati that can be assimilated semantically to the term pogrom, though there are many words that allow for the rendering of riot (Ghassem-Fachandi 2012, 60).

When the state had barely begun recovering in May, Uma Bharati, the then Union Minister for Youth and Sports, responded to a query by a journalist why the ‘riots’ had been so exceptional.

When I entered the dusty ‘record room’ of the Calcutta Improvement Trust3 for the first time in 2011—exactly a century since its inception—and began to discover Calcutta in the early-twentieth-century planning documents, land acquisition records, and files of property disputes, these two quoted texts gave me a perspective: a study of the city is a study of the social production of ‘motion’.

In mechanics, motion refers to the phenomenon by which matter changes position over time. It marks displacement and distance, change and acceleration of objects along the coordinates of time and space. In a historical materialist enquiry—on the other hand—motion stands for ‘impersonal’ forces operating within a mode of production in a given time and space that enact social change, movements of bodies, capital, migration, and displacement.

People's relationship with motion is marked by differential access based on class, caste, gender, ethnicity, race, and generational hierarchies. Therefore, a critique of motion must track its politics in generating ‘mobile subjectivities’ and differential mobilities. More importantly, it ought to identify how one social group's access to motion may actively exclude or disable that of others. In my story, the ‘modern’ urban street is a central actor and a key mediator between such mobilities and materialities.

The quote by Engels that opens this book situates the modern avenue-style urban streets in the context of the capitalist mode of production that consolidated itself in space during the second half of the nineteenth century after many decades of urban insurrections in Europe and in the colonial world.

Following the 2014 general election that brought Modi to power, enormous attention was paid by many commentators and analysts to the appeal of Modi to a young and restless electorate, particularly young men aspiring to jobs and recognition in a rapidly growing economy. It is true that the spectacular election campaign in 2014 moved the crucial few per cent of the vote in key states in north and central India that allowed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) its unprecedented win of seats in Lok Sabha (Chibber 2014). Many of these gains, especially in Uttar Pradesh, were consolidated in 2019. It is also true that the BJP has been able to establish itself in new arenas, such as throughout the Northeast (Longkumer 2019).

However, the bulk of the electoral support for the BJP in both these election cycles came from regions and social milieus where the party and other organizations affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had already established a firm standing since the early 1990s. When we consider the characteristics of ‘new’ Hindutva, the main analytical challenge is to understand how the key tenets of Hindutva seem to have been consolidated into a form of everyday common sense and widespread sentiment, and how this has allowed the BJP to reproduce and further extend its support throughout the towns, cities, and villages of northern, central, and western India for more than three decades. Here, I will explore how the ideological frames of Hindutva have been coarticulated with other social processes and identity formations that mark everyday social life in much of northern and western India.

I shall explore such processes of coarticulation by looking at the long history of Hindu nationalist mobilization and consolidation in Aurangabad, Maharashtra, a city known in the prose of the Indian police as ‘riot prone’ and a hotbed of Hindu communal activism since the 1980s when Shiv Sena made it its first major stronghold outside of Mumbai.

While Aurangabad may be unique with regard to its history of communal violence, it exhibits many of the same features as other growing cities in the Deccan region and western India. Aurangabad has trebled its population (estimated to be 2.1 million in 2018) in the past thirty years, just like Hyderabad (> 10 million), Bhopal (2.7 million), Nagpur (2.9 million), and Indore (3.1 million).

Despite the Odds

The odds against Bangladesh were heavily stacked as the country faced war, devastation, floods, famine and severe political instability beginning in 1971 and continuing off and on for at least two decades before reaching a semblance of stability. In addition, the country faced a huge burden of poverty, malnutrition and hunger but was bereft of resources with which to tackle these. Despite such grave handicaps, the country registered sharp progress across a large number of fronts, recording improvements in health and education, nutrition and poverty, women's empowerment, water sanitation and food production. It was able to begin the process of export-led industrialization as in other parts of Asia, shedding its aid dependence and ‘basket case’ image, growing steadily at around 5 per cent in the 1990s and over 6 per cent from the early 2000s. This sustained, stable macroeconomic performance, the rapid pace of industrialization and a growing indication of economic diversification suggests that Bangladesh has spread its wings to join the ‘flying geese’ flock of Asia as its latest member behind Vietnam, having in the meantime achieved ‘club convergence’ in its immediate South Asian vicinity.

Food and Population

The GR had already transformed the agriculture of countries like Mexico, Philippines and Punjab (in India and Pakistan). Initially, the GR was focused on wheat but the success of the Philippines, which experienced large rice productivity increases, held out promise for impoverished rice-growing areas in South Asia.

However, for the GR to succeed, preconditions were required, including irrigation and transport infrastructure, rural roads, and complementary inputs like chemical fertilizers and seeds needed to be made available and accessible to farmers. Here, the public sector backed by donors and suitable policy reforms was able to rise to the challenge, despite the widespread reports of poor governance.

This, along with fertility declines, constituted Bangladesh's main achievement of the 1980s and 1990s – one that was central to its development journey.

The impact of the GR was immense: on rural wages, on food prices and consumption, and on poverty, and the government budget and BOP – the last resulting from a much-reduced need to make large food imports.

The story of Bangladesh is an extraordinary tale of struggle against immense odds. It is the story of a nation state that broke into the world stage dramatically after an armed struggle against what became viewed as an occupation army attempting to remain in power through massive repression and large-scale killings that sent over 10 million people into India to seek shelter and refuge. Before these events, Bangladesh was an unremarkable part of Pakistan (East Pakistan) whose main value for the ruling elite was its jute exports that enabled the country to earn valuable foreign exchange – much of which was appropriated for investment in West Pakistan, especially in the emerging industrial sector there. Bangladesh was overwhelmingly rural and agricultural with a high population density and massive illiteracy, malnutrition and poverty. This is where it was stuck: as the rural backwaters located in the biggest delta in the world periodically visited by violent storms and floods, and debilitating epidemics. This state of affairs continued, largely unchanged over 24 years since gaining independence from Britain in 1947, until the country broke away from West Pakistan and became Bangladesh in 1971.

While the economy remained stagnant as part of Pakistan, the same cannot be said of its politics. A nascent but vocal middle class emerged, consisting of students, teachers, lawyers, journalists and government officers. This group was strengthened by an emerging industrial working class – all largely drawn from the ranks of the peasantry, including surplus peasants. This served to challenge the traditional political power structure, which was dominated by feudal elements under the banner of the Muslim League – the party that was instrumental in the creation of Pakistan (Jalal 1994; Naqvi 1986). This newly emerged middle class became the logical political base of the Awami League (AL) formed from a breakaway group of the Muslim League. The AL adopted a distinctly more democratic, secular and ‘progressive’ stance compared to the Muslim League and quickly drew a large following from the new, aspiring middle classes.

It was therefore only a matter of time when the disparity and inequality between the two ‘wings’ of Pakistan would become apparent, which, combined by the reluctance of the ruling military–bureaucratic–feudal elite based in the west to share power with the east, did not bode well.

In this chapter, I set out to explore certain contradictory facets of women's involvement and militancy within Hindutva. The inquiry is rooted in the city of Bhopal, presenting two case studies of women functionaries who are a part of the Hindutva sangathan (Hindu right organizational formation). A burgeoning city in central India and the capital of Madhya Pradesh, Bhopal is a major politico-cultural node of the region. It has a thriving Hindutva network, with various interlocked outfits at the ground level.

In Bhopal, Hindutva's ideological sway has been felt in a variety of ways, not just in regular electoral competition. One of the most disquieting links in this long and winding chain of events was the riot that tore through the city in December 1992, in the immediate aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, situated in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The Bhopal riot lasted for over a week and inflicted grave losses. Official sources estimated around 140 deaths, while unofficial accounts regarded the number to be much higher – at about 250 (Basu 1994: 12). Muslim residents, in particular, were hit hard, as they were largely at the receiving end of targeted attacks, led by militant Hindutva organizations and local police, often found to be acting in collaboration. The riot gave rise to hitherto unknown anxieties and vulnerabilities. In its wake, the stiffening of attitudes and hardening of socio-spatial boundaries have been keenly felt. Ironically, a city that had remained remarkably quiet for the most part in 1947 during the Partition tumult, flared up in 1992. Since then, Bhopal has come to be ‘classified as a hyper-sensitive city as far as communal disturbances are concerned’ (Dubey 2003: 3).

Hindutva had the most to gain from such post-riot communalization. It capitalized on growing polarization to further consolidate its influence and reap rich returns (Jaffrelot 1996). In repeated contests for power, the Sangh Parivar's political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), steadily improved its standing in the city. In the 2018 State Assembly elections, it gained four out of seven seats in Bhopal. Its performance had been even better in 2013, when it captured six out of seven assembly segments there. Since 1989, the Bhopal parliamentary seat has rested securely with the BJP.

Introduction

Women and gender issues have played a central role in the rise of Hindu nationalism to political power through its political party – the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party, henceforth BJP). But the BJP, as a religious nationalist political party and the political wing of the Sangh Parivar, faces a tension between its gender ideology – rooted in religion and nationalism, emphasizing the place of women in the home and the private sphere – and its need, as a political party in an established electoral democracy, to draw out the support of women as voters and half the electorate. How has the BJP resolved this tension over time as it evolved from a rising party striving for national presence to the predominant political formation in Indian politics?

To answer this question, I compare the role of women in the BJP in two critical time periods: its emergent phase in the 1980s and the early 1990s, and around the time of the 2014 election, as the party sought and achieved a return to power. I find that over this time period, the party moved from mobilizing women into street politics in the 1980s–1990s to incorporating them, in more routine and institutionalized ways, into its governance structures and electoral activities in the 2010s. Women leaders of the party shifted from being just a few women without significant family responsibilities (ascetic renunciants or widows) to being included at multiple levels of the party (national, state and local) in larger numbers who balanced family responsibilities and political work through the trope of ‘family support’. This shift in the role of women in the party reflected the greater professionalization and institutionalization of the party in the latter period, as it evolved from a party striving for power to one that was positioning itself to recapture it.

I carry out this comparison using two interrelated and gendered lenses: my research on the BJP and my fieldwork across both time periods – first in 1993–1994, for my dissertation research, and again from 2013 to 2016 as part of the field research for my forthcoming book. My primary analytical focus is on the BJP as a political party, with the understanding that the members and organizations of Hindu nationalism work hand in glove and are difficult to separate out in actual practice.

In 2002, India's premier Hindu nationalist organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), formed a new affiliate, the Muslim Rashtriya Manch (MRM, or Muslim National Forum), dedicated to the cause of Muslim outreach. Why would the RSS feel the need to form and control an affiliated organization of Indian Muslims? Who is the ideal Muslim citizen as imagined and configured by the RSS? And why would Indian Muslims want to be associated with the RSS?

This essay focuses on the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of Muslim outreach by the RSS. It draws upon my recent research/film documentation of the MRM, described ‘as an independent Muslim organization that receives guidance from the RSS’, and which was set up in 2002 by the RSS sarsanghchalak (supreme commander) K. S. Sudarshan.

I show that the establishment of the MRM has been influenced by goals of political agenda-setting, reframing, and legitimation where the RSS–BJP foregrounds the MRM to present versions of various anti-Muslim Hindu-majoritarian projects such as the Triple Talaq Bill – Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill – the revocation of Article 370 in Kashmir, and the building of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. In recent months, the MRM has also been used to legitimize the anti-constitutional and discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and justify the arrests of young Muslim anti-CAA student activists over flimsy charges in the aftermath of the February 2020 Delhi riots.

Robert Tawney famously described the vulnerable state of the Chinese peasantry in the early twentieth century as follows: ‘There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.’ James Scott later used this description to draw an evocative account of peasant rebellion in Southeast Asia in his seminal The Moral Economy of the Peasant. Scott discussed the destruction of what he termed as the ‘moral economy’, the worldview and practices of the peasants premised on the subsistence ethic, due to colonialism. Scott's description of the Vietnamese peasantry was in contrast to Samuel Popkin's account of the Southeast Asian peasant in The Rational Peasant. Popkin stressed that peasants behaved rationally and benefited from market practices that were ushered in with colonialism. The test of time has seen Scott's scholarship remain a more convincing account of how peasant societies experience colonialism with Popkin's explanation marginalized. This may well hold for Vietnam where the pernicious effects of colonialism were more pronounced, leading to numerous peasant rebellions and famine, but for the Punjab the academic discourse remains deeply divided.

Introduction

Throughout its colonial history, Calcutta had been a Hindu majority city at the heart of a Muslim majority province. Until the mid-twentieth century, despite the bitter rivalry, the city's Hindu and Muslim populations inhabited shared spaces even in neighbourhoods that had less than 10 per cent minority population. This character of the city began to transform in the inter-war decades, culminating in a decisive territorial marginalization and ghettoization of Muslims in Calcutta in the mid-twentieth century, following the Partition of India in 1947. At ‘the stroke of midnight’ on 15 August 1947, Calcutta emerged as the Hindu-majority capital city of the Hindu-majority state of West Bengal. The Partition and the streams of Hindu-Bengali refugee migration from East Pakistan transformed Calcutta into a ‘refugee city’ in successive decades.

The chapter tracks the ways in which Hindu–Muslim relationship unfolded in the city in the post-colonial era, which, I believe, continues to anticipate a politically self-conscious and coherent articulation of Hindutva in municipal politics in recent years. In many Indian cities, Hindutva over the decades has manifested as a powerful space maker which established majoritarianism as common sense. City dwellers have learned to identify and rationalize their belonging to the city in the context of this majoritarian urban common sense. In Calcutta, the normalization of the majoritarian city presupposes a foundational violence that annulled the earlier communal distribution of space and property between the majority and minority communities and introduced a new order of things. The ‘Muslim ghetto’ is the product of both the cleansing force of the civil war of 1946 and the rationality of the market process that maintained and reproduced communal stakes in the real estate transactions of the post-colonial city in subsequent decades.

In this chapter, I closely analyse a communal civil war in 1946 and a relatively minor communal outbreak in 1950, and relate these mobilizations with growing communal segregation in Calcutta in the subsequent decades. The chapter has three sections. The first section presents a close reading of an interrogation of a police officer by a high-powered enquiry commission in 1946–47 and unravels a rather complex spatial relationship between the city's Hindus and Muslims in the pre-Independence era.

In February 1940, Sir Malcolm Darling, former Financial Commissioner of the Punjab and an expert on rural indebtedness in the province, delivered the presidential address at the first conference of the Indian Society of Agricultural Economics. Instead of a self-congratulatory speech on the many macro-level achievements of the imperial state in the Punjab (including the establishment of canal colonies, the construction of a vast railway network, and a phenomenal increase in agricultural output), Darling discussed the Punjabi peasant and the primacy that must be accorded to the individual in any sustained strategy of development:

Darling's views on the Punjab peasant emerged from over 40 years of close study of rural life in the province, including numerous tours on horseback during which he had interlocutors from all walks of life. His book The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt, first published in 1925, remains a seminal account of indebtedness, replete with statistical data and ethnography of village life.