05 – Locating Hate in the Ordinary: Violence, Power and Majoritarianism in South Asia

October 2, 2025

8:30 am

H03

This panel explores everyday manifestations of hate against religious minorities in South Asia; we are especially interested in how hate interacts with and/or affirms majoritarian politics. We seek to understand: how hate can be conceptualised and theorised in relation to power and majoritarian politics, analyse the relation between hate and violence and make sense of what it conveys to/about the politics of the day. We also ask if manifestations of hate result in or cause changes to social relations and legal regulations in an increasingly ideologically polarised society. These manifestations are observable in multiple sites: streets, court rooms, police stations, social media platforms or in the microcosms of family relations. Different displays of hate may be seen through physical performative acts (like lynchings) or verbal speech acts which needn't necessarily make explicit the intention of hateful sentiments. In everyday life, this hate can be seen through casual marginalisation like blasé derogatory comments against minorities, both online and offline, contributing to the normalisation of hate. We will thus delve into questions concerning the varying interactions between hate, violence, power and majoritarian politics. What do different intensities of hate-violence which are so prevalent in the everyday lives of religious minorities tell us about societal realities and politics? How do we understand its normalisation in the current context of South Asian politics? What does this tell us about the relations motivated by power or otherwise between institutions, like police and courts and minorities in the region? And how does this power (im)balance then translate into everyday ‘banal’ hate?

Convenors

Pearl Pandya
Surya Ghildiyal

Presentations

Whatsapp University’ phenomenon: from reels to real

Vigiano Maria Giulia - University of Rome - Unitelma Sapienza, University of Rome - Unitelma Sapienza, Rome, Italy

The Construction of Hate: The Political Landscape of Narrative and Infrastructure

ULLAH ZAFAR - The University of Edinburgh, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Media Narratives and Public Discourses: ‘Hate’and Exclusion of Ahmadiyyas in South India

Thoppil Babu Hafeesha - Radboud Social Cultural Research, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

The Iconoclasm of the Iconoclast – On Ambedkar, Visuality & Violence

Singh Aatika - Stanford University, Stanford University, CA, United States

Writings on Hate Speech and Violence: Fiction, Memoir, Non-fiction

Nair Neeti - University of Virginia, Virginia, Charlottesville, United States

Public Intimacies: Hindu Nationalist Rhetoric and The Circulatory Politics of Hate

Mukherjee Mahima - Department of History, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

The Language of Violence: Politics of Hate and Identity in the ‘Hindu’ Nation

Malhotra Lakshita - The Color of Grey Cells, NA, New Delhi, India

Silence, self-censorship and compromise as ordinary violence: An ethnographic portrait of a Muslim businessmen in the Hindu pilgrim economy

Vera Lazzaretti - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL) Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia, IN2PAST, Lisboa, Portugal