At an election rally in Rajasthan on 22 April 2024, India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, called for people not to vote for the chief opposition party, known as the Congress, claiming that they would distribute the nation’s wealth amongst “infiltrators” – the ones “who have too many children.” These defamatory idioms have been repeatedly invoked over the years to stoke anti-Muslim hate and magnify unfounded demographic anxieties against the country’s Muslim population. They insinuate the Muslim community’s’ lack of belonging while accusing them of stalling India’s development trajectory through their ‘reckless reproduction’.
As ballots are cast in India’s mammoth national elections, with almost 1 billion eligible voters, the categories of both ‘gender’ and ‘development’ are circulating within electoral politics in specific and dangerous ways, shoring up the power, privilege and legitimacy of the Hindu Right and majority, while advancing the attack on Muslims in particular.
During what is celebrated as the “biggest festival of democracy,” it is critical to reflect on the implications of these exhortations for those marginalised along axes of religion, gender, class and caste, both historically and now.
Women-led development in ‘No Country for Women’
A central motif of Modi’s 2024 election campaign is what his party, the BJP, has termed ‘women-led’ development. Triumphant declarations of Modi-powered ‘Nari Shakti’ (women power) in rallies, the BJP 2024 manifesto, and international platforms like the G20 represent what Lewin calls ‘discourse capture’, or the co-option and manipulation of progressive discourses to serve right-wing agendas.
Despite the government’s systematic efforts to suppress the collection and dissemination of data – including data on sexual violence — on how ‘development’ has materially unfolded over their decade-long reign, the BJP’s track record on a range of crucial women’s issues sits in grim contrast to its rhetoric.
The manifesto celebrates how the BJP has ‘empowered Muslim women by protecting them from the barbaric practice of ‘Triple Talaq’, while in 2022, the BJP government approved the release of 11 men sentenced to life in prison for a notorious gangrape of Bilkis Bano in 2002 .
When Olympic medal-winning athletes Sakshi Malik and Vinesh Phogat accused the Wrestling Federation of India Chief (and six-term BJP parliamentarian) Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh of sexual harassment sparking months of protests, they were met first with a stony silence. This was followed by arrests and intimidation overseen by the purveyor of ‘Nari Shakti’. Similarly, striking anganwadi workers, victims of hate crimes, those mired in maternal healthcare debt traps, and countless victims of sexual violence have found little comfort in Modi’s India.
The horrific Unnao and rape and murder cases, all of which directly involved BJP members as either implicated and convicted, involved in perverting the course of justice, or publicly supporting the accused, serve as chilling testament to the party and the government’s active hand in the brutalisation of women This is especially true when they fall foul of the image of the normative (Hindu, Savarna) woman.
The sexual politics of security and threat
Modi’s most recent invocation of ‘Muslim threat’ at the Rajasthan rally relied on the gendered ideal of Hindu kinship, warning mothers and sisters that even their mangalsutras (a necklace mostly worn by Hindu women to signify marriage) won’t be spared from Muslim pilferage if the Congress is voted into power. This reiteration of the Muslim Menace builds on a long history of violent, orientalist portrayals of Muslims as so barbaric that they will snatch even the gold chains that are symbols of the ritual of marriage for Hindu women. This framing cements Muslim presence itself as a source of threat to the wealth of the Hindu family and community, to the pure, innocent, and vulnerable caste-Hindu women, and to their sacred rituals and symbols.
Such references to women’s honour and sanctity of the Hindu family are by no means unprecedented. In December 2019, during a debate on the Citizenship Amendment Act (enacted in 2024) the Home Minister asked the members of the house to consider bahu beti ki izzat (the honour of the daughters-in-law and daughters) of expressly non-Muslim minority communities, imperilled by violent Muslim masculinities in neighbouring Muslim-majority nations.
The gendered discourses of innocence and purity associated with the normative Hindu women are also entangled with the framing of the nation, Bharat Mata (Mother India), a metonym for the vulnerable (caste) Hindu woman in need of protection from the dangerous ‘other’, the hyper-sexualised Muslim man. This violable, feminised nation and its ‘honour’ are secured through the constant dehumanisation and dispossession of the Muslim population, reflected in the masculinist-nationalistic pride and “bulldozer politics” as properties of Muslims deemed to have indulged in anti-national activities are arbitrarily demolished.
Within this figuration, a threat to Hindu sexual sovereignty and purity is read as a threat to the nation itself, and sexual panics become national security panics. The patriarchal state then positions itself as saviour of both (caste-Hindu) woman and nation from the ever-present threat of the Muslim man, rewarding public displays of hatred for and violence against Muslims.
The BJP inventions of Love Jihad (the alleged Muslim-orchestrated conspiracy to woo, marry and convert innocent Hindu women, having them bear Muslim children and destroy the Hindu family system from within), alongside other strategies and Modi’s recent invocation of the mangalsutra (necklace) lay bare the expressly sexual underpinnings of Hindu majoritarianism in Modi’s India. The sexual politics Hindu nationalism are thus firmly anchored in opposition to the menacing Muslim ‘infiltrator’, whose presence and gaze serve as perpetual threats to the Hindu woman and nation, and against whom violence is then not simply justified, but national duty.
(Hindu) Nationalism without a nation
As Modi’s Islamophobic dog whistles crescendo into clarion calls for the production and protection of a Hindu nation, it is important that we recognise that the present moment does not constitute a fundamental break from an otherwise historically harmonious, secular nationalism. At the very inception of the post-colonial nation-state, the gendered/sexual construction of India in the image of ‘Bharat Mata’ was animated by a brutal and brutalising religious nationalism, culminating in two partitioned political entities over which much blood has been spilt.
In the decades since, partisan/communal politics has by no means been the unique preserve of the BJP, with the long-ruling Congress party displaying their own breed of Muslim persecution and abandonment. The Congress’ public displays of Hindu fidelity, symbolism and political language over the years have continually advanced Hindu nationalism, “choreographing conspicuously Hindu-inflected campaign strategies and photo opportunities”, tactics often labelled soft Hindutva. Beyond electoral parties and politics, a unique brand of ‘secular Islamophobia’ has also taken root within more ‘progressive’ circles who claim investments in more ‘secular nationalisms’.
Violent exclusion, then, is not a recent aberration, but an originary, foundational basis of India and its attended nationalism(s). As Kashmiri and Dalit scholars have long cautioned, the problem then is not so much that Hindu nationalism or any nationalist paradigm is not made accessible or available to India’s various ‘others’, but that nationalism is, was and always will be a tool of Brahminical domination and occupation. The ‘imagined community’ of India is necessarily and inevitably predicated on gendered, sexualised, racialised/religious, caste-inflected constructions of belonging and threat, crystallized in the image of the feminised, vulnerable ‘Bharat Mata’ and her various assailants, infiltrators and predators.
In the past decade, the Modi government has reserved some of its greatest derision for the elements they name ‘anti-national’, a charge that is worryingly unifying in the contempt it invites from citizens across the political spectrum. Perhaps, then, drowning out the din of this carnivalesque ‘festival of democracy’, this is a moment for sober reflection on the violent histories and continuities of the very category of ‘nation’ through which recognition, community and sanctuary are so often imagined and sought, including within dominant paradigms of gender and development.
